Chris Smaje, with a good introductory statement in chapter 1 (between the preface, introduction, and first chapter, there are basically three good introductions):
THE TERM ‘DARK AGES’ is disreputable among contemporary historians because of its moral loading — for example, in the way that modern European thinkers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment vaunted their own rebirth, their belief they could now see things in the clear light of a reality they thought had been obscured in the ‘dark ages’ of medieval thought after the collapse of the Roman Empire.
People still unthinkingly use terms like ‘medieval’ and ‘dark ages’ as pejoratives, to the extent that two historians titled their popular history of medieval times The Bright Ages in a worthwhile but probably fruitless attempt to redress the balance. In this sense, I invoke the idea of a dark age ahead ironically. There are things we can learn today from the ruralism and political innovation of the post-Roman or postimperial Dark Ages, and there are things we can learn from the medieval moral and political thinking that preceded our modern age of self-proclaimed Enlightenment.
In times of trouble, grassroots intellectuals have been articulating localism and agrarianism at least since the fourth century BCE with the School of the Tillers during the Warring States period in ancient China. The case for going back to the land is not some uniquely modern affectation of nostalgia for a lost past we’ve definitively left behind, but a permanent counter-civilizational possibility, which is constantly being refreshed. Maybe it’s time to get over ourselves a bit, slow down, and listen to some voices from the dark circle beyond the fire of our self-absorbed ‘enlightenment.’
“To press the point,” he goes on to say, “‘dark-age’ situations where people build local land-based autonomies in the shadows of state power — deliberate autonomies, geared to keeping that power at bay — have been near-permanent historical possibility that people have often jumped at when they get the chance.”
Also:
Almost everything we think we know about ‘development’ — moving people away from making their livelihood directly from a local ecological base, and toward making it indirectly and supposedly more prosperously via the medium of money from many unknown ecologies worldwide — is built on these same assumptions. Promethean hero stories claim we can keep this ball in the air via new technologies. …
As these assumptions reach their expiry, it’s hard to overstate the scale and the urgency of the back-to-first-principles approaches that are needed.