[ExI] Islamic culture (current) was Religions and violence

samantha sjatkins at mac.com
Mon Aug 23 20:31:02 UTC 2010


Stefano Vaj wrote:
> 2010/8/18 Mirco Romanato <painlord2k at libero.it 
> <mailto:painlord2k at libero.it>>
>
>     The Fell of the Western Roman Empire caused an upsurge of
>     population in the provinces because there no one to impose heavy
>     taxes,
>     so the people worked more and eat better.
>
>
> Really? I believe to remember that to go back to empire-time 
> agricultural productivity we had to wait until the end of the XVII 
> century. For other techs, I believe that the Renaissance was, not by 
> chance, the end of the recovery.
>
Yep.  While money and commerce flowed reasonably well the roads, common 
laws, physical and cultural infrastructure were in place for a 
relatively high level of civilization.   When Rome overshot and ran out 
of lands to pillage and became more corrupt all this infrastructure 
slowly went to ruin.  Soldiers weren't paid and deserted their post.  
With no protection delivered towns and villages didn't bother to pay any 
tribute to Rome as they got nothing in return and couldn't be punished 
in any case.  Generally the locals did not know enough to keep up the 
infrastructure by Roman design.   So it fell apart quickly.  A virulent 
anti-reason religious meme didn't help. 

- s

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20100823/b3df4ba2/attachment.html>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list