Dark Age Ahead
In this indispensable book, urban visionary Jane Jacobs argues that as agrarianism gives way to a technology-based future, we’re at risk of cultural collapse. Jacobs — renowned author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities — pinpoints five pillars of our culture that are in serious decay: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation, and government; and the self-regulation of the learned professions. The corrosion of these pillars, Jacobs argues, is linked to societal ills such as environmental crisis, racism, and the growing gulf between rich and poor.
But this is a hopeful book as well as a warning. Drawing on a vast frame of reference — from fifteenth-century Chinese shipbuilding to Ireland’s cultural rebirth — Jacobs suggests how the cycles of decay can be arrested and our way of life renewed. Invigorating and accessible, Dark Age Ahead is not only the crowning achievement of Jane Jacobs’ career, but one of the most important works of our time.
Highlights
Cultures take purposes for themselves, cling tenaciously to them, and exalt them into the purposes and meanings of life itself.
At the core of this intellectual phenomenon now shaping much (but not all) of Western culture is a moralistic belief that each public service or amenity should directly earn enough to support its cost. Thus each school is supposed to earn enough to support itself, through fees of some kind of profit-making arrangements such as sale to a corporation of monopolistic rights to vend soft drinks and snacks. Such arrangements are called pubic-private partnerships (PPP, or P3) and are much encouraged by neoconservatives and most boards of trade. Each artist is supposed to earn enough in his or her own lifetime to prove the art's fitness to exist. Hospitals, transit systems, and orchestras are scorned as freeloaders seeking handouts if they can't directly pay their way or, better yet, make a profit either for tax collectors or for a corporate partner. Greed becomes culturally admired as competence, and false or unrealistic promises as cleverness.
Vicious spirals have their opposites: beneficent spirals, processes in which each improvement and strengthening leads to other improvements and strengthenings in the culture, in turn further strengthening the initial improvement. Excellent education strengthens excellent teaching and research by some of those educated, activities that in their turn strengthen communities. Responsive and responsible government encourages the corrective practices exerted by democracy, which in their turn strengthen good government and responsible citizenship.