Dark Age Ahead [Paperback]

Jane Jacobs (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 17, 2005

In this indispensable book, urban visionary Jane Jacobs--renowned author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities--convincingly argues that as agrarianism gives way to a technology-based future, we stand on the brink of a new dark age, a period of cultural collapse. Jacobs 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 her 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities forever transformed the discipline of urban planning by concentrating on what actually helped cities work. Unencumbered by generations of fatuous theorizing, Jacobs proposed a model of action that has left a positive mark in neighborhoods all over the world. Her latest salvo, Dark Age Ahead, is, despite the pessimism of many of its conclusions, also positive, less a jeremiad than a firm but helpful reminder of just how much is at stake. Jacobs sees "ominous signs of decay" in five "pillars" of our culture: family, community, higher education, science and "self policing by the learned professions." Each is given a detailed treatment, with sympathetic but hard-headed real-world assessments that are often surprising and always provocative and well-expressed. Her chapter on the decline of the nuclear family completely avoids the moral hand-wringing of the kindergarten Cassandras to place the blame on an economy that has made the affordable home either an unattainable dream or a crippling debt. Her discussion of the havoc wrought by the lack of accountability seems ripped from any number of headlines, but her analysis of the larger effects sets it apart. A lifetime of unwasted experience in a number of fields has gone into this short but pungent book, and to ignore its sober warnings would be foolish indeed.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

The end of the world as we know it has inspired a lot of writing lately. With this selection, eminent architectural and city-planning scholar Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities) argues that Western civilization in general and North American society in particular are headed for a period of reconfiguration, chaos, and--perhaps most frightening--lost cultural memory: a Dark Ages for the new millennium. Jacobs examines five key load-bearing pillars of Western civilization (community and family, higher education, scientific advancement, taxation, and self-policing by learned professions) and compares their dry rot to the crumbling of earlier cultures. Getting beyond well-worn parallels between America and Rome, she also considers the respective Dark Ages of Native America and, with the help of Karen Armstrong's work on post-agrarian cultures, the Middle East. Changes in agriculture and transportation, as it turns out, are particularly important to her argument and reveal Jacobs' sound urban-studies foundation, a solid analysis of demographics that keeps this book's alarming thesis from being simply alarmist. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (May 17, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400076706
• ISBN-13: 978-1400076703
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #474,836 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #73 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Sociology > Social Theory

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

100 of 109 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Skeletal May 13, 2004

By Brian Harmon

Format:Hardcover

Jane Jacobs claims that an argument can be made that we reside on the precipice of a new dark age. She provides a very useful outline upon which such an argument could be structured. But she does not make the argument herself. It seems like Ms. Jacobs is using this book to plant the seeds of an idea that she hopes others will step up to germinate and grow. If you are at all skeptical about its premise, this book probably won't do anything for you. The arguments will seem scattered, and the examples will seem superficial at best and irrelevant at worst. But if you are at all open to the dark age notion, or think it is feasible (as I have for a number of years),then the book may be a nice aid in helping you to organize your reading and thinking to better build a case for this haunting premise. Hopefully, some of the rest of us will pick up Jacobs' notion and give it the full treatment it deserves...

38 of 39 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars "The Hazard" is here December 5, 2006

By V.H. Amavilah

Format:Hardcover

The West is living "The Hazard" of an impending "Dark Age", unable to anticipate clearly because of widespread "mass amnesia". The Dark Age is predictable from history, which shows that each major collapse of civilization was followed by a disturbing social transformation. The Dark Age Ahead (the book) agrees in part with Jared Diamond's account that Mesopotamia, for example, fell to ruins because of "environmental ignorance" (p. 15), but that was not the whole story. Part of the story is that there are cultural failings that have signaled the decline of major civilizations in the past, which offer lessons for the present and forecasts for the future.

In that connection the book identifies five factors that jeopardize pillars of the culture of the West, where West = North America + Western Europe. The five factors are: (a) the destruction of the traditional family and community; (b) the replacement of education by credentialization; (c) the dominance of technology over science; (d) the overpowering government and its opaque taxation system; and (e) the loss of self-policing attributes of culture. These factors constitute "The Hazard" society is currently facing, and are the subjects of the chapters of the book.

The superimposition of the household (economic family unit) over the nuclear family (biological family unit) has condemned many a family to failure. So "while politicians, clergy, creators of advertisement, and other worthies assert stoutly that the family is the foundation of society, the nuclear family, as an institution is currently in grave trouble" (p. 29). By blurring the difference between the nuclear family and other household units the automobile industry has done more harm to the family institution than illegal drugs.

The replacement of education with credentialization also threatens the West. Nowadays computer technology and engineering are preferred to computer science. As a result you now have skillful computer operators who do not understand the basic scientific principles behind a computer. Employers fund certification programs because they are presently good for the bottom line. Universities and colleges have bought into the credential subculture. Essentially both employers and educational institutions are destroying the scientific basis of Western culture. Truly educated people get no jobs, and "the worst side effect of unemployment is repeated rejection, with its burden of shame and failure" (p. 53).

Just as it happened in Mesopotamia, and early China, science is increasingly being abandoned for profit. The pursuit of profit is stifling the pursuit of pure science that drove early scientists. At the same time society has also abandoned two principles that are key to cultural vigor: "subsidiarity" and "accountability". The latter refers to a people's government in Abe Lincoln's sense; the latter to a transparent tax collecting system. Local government has become dysfunctional; tax revenues are either down or misused, and the production of public goods and services suffers and innovations decline. People needing public assistance are exposed to the cruelties of the Invisible Hand. Thus, "aid failure promotes instability and terrorism" (p. 124) and the dire consequences are predictable.

The subversion of self-policing professional organizations as exemplified by the Enron financial scandal is another sign of the Dark Age Ahead. It all boils down to the idea that "when efficiency becomes the sole goal of a culture, and the "redundancy of nurturers ... [is] eliminated (sic) as an extravagance, ... the vicious spirals go into action [leading surely to] self-inflicted cultural genocide" (p. 160).

The last chapter summarizes the book by describing the "patterns of the Dark Age". The hunter-gather culture was overtaken by the agricultural society. Losers in that take-over experienced a stressful cultural transformation, but soon people forgot until agriculture was "destroyed" by the industrial culture, and that one is gone too. Now human capital accumulation is the culture, but the poor cannot afford investment in the education required to build human capital, and government is either too broke or unwilling to help them. Even for those who can afford an education, education itself is no longer available, having been replaced by the credential subculture. Thus, the Dark Age is written on the wall, for "[a]ny culture that jettisons the values that have given it competence, adaptability, and identity becomes weak and hollow. A culture can avoid that hazard only by tenaciously retaining the underlying values responsible for [its] nature and success" (p. 176). Poignant!

A gloomier than hopeful book; a little below the stellar standard the author set with her previous book - The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Still the scholarship is high, and the message worth reading.

Amavilah, Author

Modeling Determinants of Income in Embedded Economies

ISBN: 1600210465

47 of 51 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars What this books is really about June 3, 2004

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

Jane Jacobs wrote "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" in 1961 stating that neighborhoods would be the pulse and soul of city life. City planners and engineers tried their best to laugh her out of town but lo and behold her wisodm of almost everything she had to say came true.

This book now focuses on the five crucial weak spots in the foundation of contemporary life in the West: taxes; community & family; higher education; science and technology; and the lack of self-policing by learned professions. She then argues that these problems lie behind more conventional trouble spots: the environment, crime, and the discrepancy between rich and poor.

My only problem with this book is that she's rather brusque in regards to shoring up her arguments with examples. The book does offer some nice insights for one to ponder on but as far as looking for examples, try turning to your own life experience.

She isn't a historian nor is this book intended to be a historical review of what one may assume as the Dark Ages of the past.

If you're concerned with America's changing culture and changing climate and can keep an open mind, this book could serve as a stepping stone.