The Middle Ages are here again!

Torture is legal, science is heresy, magic is studied in secrecy, leaders rely on religious fanaticism, poverty sweeps the land as murderous despots hoard wealth behind walls, mysterious plagues terrify the people, inquisitors hunt dissidents, and crusades against Arabs are used to distract the masses from revolt.
That describes Europe's grim Middle Ages, but medieval scholar Eric Jager says it also describes the United States in 2006, in an era many Americans consider to be a glorious information age of technological wonders.
"The word modern was actually coined by medieval people to distinguish themselves from the ancients," Jager writes in the Los Angeles Times.
Or, as one of Jager's history students said, "Medieval people were so ignorant, they had no idea they were living in the Middle Ages."
During those long dark centuries between the Roman Empire's decline and the Renaissance, corrupt and amoral popes ruled Europeans with lies and terror. Kings were notoriously and proudly stupid.
Parish priests were whoremongers and crooks. Scientists and magicians -- they were one and the same -- practiced their arts hidden from the Christian mobs and sadistic Inquisitors.
To avoid revolt, popes and kings sent Europe's healthy young men and even children off to faraway Arab lands to plunder or die trying.
Yet it wasn't until the Renaissance era that historians realized just how pathetic things had become during the Dark Ages.
"The Renaissance stole the label of modernity for itself and invented a prior 'middle age' when classical civilization lay dormant, awaiting a glorious rebirth," Jager says. "The Enlightenment made the 'barbaric' and 'superstitious' Middle Ages seem even more obsolete."
While ignorance, poverty and fear were all most people knew in the Middle Ages, technological progress raced onward.
The inventions and advances of medieval Europe -- Gutenberg's printing press, banking, navigation, wheelbarrows, mirrors, magnets, rudders, soap, shoes and stirrups and harnesses for horses, eyeglasses, windmills, spinning wheels, and the adoption of foreign technologies such as Arabic math and astronomy and Chinese gunpowder -- made our "modern era" possible.
But the gadgets themselves couldn't make medieval Europeans any less stupid or savage. That wouldn't begin to happen until the late 13th century in Florence, where the Italian Renaissance began, and up to two centuries later in the most barbaric parts of northern Europe.
Five centuries later, Europe would again plunge into darkness as the German masses used the latest and greatest technology to murder millions of people and destroy much of what had been built.
"Like our gadgets, we ourselves are only temporarily modern, and that label will be taken from us very soon," Jager writes.
"What sort of mirror will later generations find in us? The people of the future, looking back on our violent and benighted era, may decide to call us 'medieval,' so I suggest we just go ahead and accept that the New Middle Ages have begun."