Dark Age Ahead (Paperback)

by Jane Jacobs (Author) "This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book..." (more)
Key Phrases: city import replacing, cultural winners, mass amnesia, Dark Age, United States, North America (more...)

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 an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The Washington Post
These days it's hard to argue with Jane Jacobs's title. Many people can scarcely bring themselves to look at the front page of the newspaper. Global politics appear to be little more than a numbing series of atrocities, in one place or another. The new information economy, which was to foster a worldwide community, has brought us assault-viruses that can send the economy into sudden collapse, granted governments and corporations unequalled access to our most cherished privacies, transformed our children into addicted game-playing zombies and encouraged every sort of con artist, porno purveyor and spammer to insult our intelligence and sensibilities. Long ago, television was regarded as a cultural wasteland -- but the 1950s and '60s now look like a happy golden age, when reality shows and someone named Paris Hilton were hardly a gleam in anyone's eye. In cities like Washington, urban life has largely degenerated into calculating how long it will take to travel a Beltway that is perennially at a standstill or where to park the car once you reach the Mall. Our citizens weep at the idea that they can possibly flee downtown and save their lives should a serious disaster occur. Commuter traffic grinds to a standstill here if it snows an inch, sometimes even if it rains hard.

On second thought, Jane Jacobs's title is wrong. The Dark Age isn't ahead, it's here and now. There's an even Darker Age a-coming.

Or not. Doom-sayers and pessimists are always with us, but so are activists, reformers and visionaries. Jane Jacobs -- the doyenne of urban thinkers, author of the classic Death and Life of Great American Cities -- is here to proffer her thoughts on how we might solve or avoid some of the problems that bedevil our modern lives. "The purpose of this book," she writes, "is to help our culture avoid sliding into a dead end." As she sees it, there are "five pillars" that our society depends on to stand firm and that are nonetheless being eaten up by decay. These five are: 1) "community and family," 2) "higher education," 3) "the effective practice of science and science-based technology," 4) "taxes and governmental powers directly in touch with needs and possiblities," and 5) "self-policing by the learned professions."

These might not be the pillars that other sociologists or cultural observers would focus on, but they do allow Jacobs to hammer home, yet again, her views about contemporary life. For instance, in the chapter on families, she writes, "Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities. Highways and roads obliterate the places they are supposed to serve." How did we come to rely so heavily on cars? She chronicles the 1930s campaign by General Motors to wipe out the clean, efficient street-car system upon which cities then relied. She lays into Robert Moses for the eradication of New York neighborhoods. She stresses how much suburb-dwellers feel disconnected from those around them, including their children. And she doesn't really know how to resolve this ongoing crisis. "I have no idea what kinds of households will emerge to deal with needs that families are at a loss to fill. My intuition tells me they will probably be coercive. This is already true of the most swiftly multiplying and rapidly expanding type of American households at the turn of the millennium -- prisons."

In subsequent pages, Jacobs attacks universities for having abandoned true education in favor of "credentialing," governments for being unresponsive to the actual local needs of the citizens shelling out the tax dollars, corporations and accountants for succumbing to a culture of laissez-faire criminality, "plausible denial" and image over substance. She even shows how supposedly hard-headed engineers and planners rely on theories rather than look at realities. Why, for instance, did so many old people die during a hot spell in Chicago? Investigators reported that it was because the elderly failed to heed warnings to keep cool, drink plenty of water, etc., etc. But why then did one urban area suffer so many more deaths than its neighbors?

"In North Lawndale," writes Jacobs, summarizing the research of NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg, "where the death rate was so high, elderly people were not accustomed to walking in their district because there was almost nothing for them to walk to. It was a commercial and social desert, almost devoid of stores and other gathering places. Old people were thus unacquainted with storekeepers who could welcome them into air-conditioned space. They were afraid, too, to leave their apartments, for fear they would be burglarized while they were out. For the same reason, they feared strangers who came to check on them. In crisis they were behaving as they always did in this place with no functioning community."

No functioning community. That is, finally, the gist of it. Universities treat students as raw materials on an assembly line, businessmen disdain their investors and customers (not to mention their honor), federal governments refuse to adjust for the needs of very different communities and impose "one size fits all" regulations, and all along we fail to foster the civilized standards expected by our forebears.

But what shall we do? What shall we ever do?

Dark Age Ahead is witty and damning, but it is also rambling and finally rather vague. Jacobs sometimes hopes that simply drawing her readers' attention to various problems may initiate a response to them. But her examples tend to reinforce the common view that life has grown so complex that it is often impossible to calculate the effects, whether for good or ill, of any change. In her last pages she makes a plea that we encourage and foster an abundance of those mentors and nurturers who actually create community through their jobs, hobbies and lives: "storytellers, skilled tradespeople and craftspeople, musicians, bird-watchers and other nature hobbyists, artists, adventurers, feminists, cosmopolitans, poets, volunteers and activists, chess players, domino players, moralists, life-taught and book-taught philosophers." These are the people who enrich our souls, sometimes in invisible ways, the people who pass on cultural values and memories to the young. So much of modern American life revolves around glitz and stardom, around money, status, sex appeal and power. And yet, if we pause and imagine the kind of place we would like to grow up in, the kind of place we'd like to live, doesn't it look a lot like Jacobs's vision, no matter how utopian or old-fashioned it may seem?

"A society must be self-aware. Any culture that jettisons the values that have given it competence, adaptability, and identity becomes weak and hollow." Well, it's hard to disagree with Jane Jacobs, even in a digressive, unfocused book like this one. For Dark Age Ahead is certainly worth reading and thinking about. I wish I felt it would make a difference, do some good, actually shake us out of what seems to me the dominant spirit of the age: Sauve qui peut -- Every man for himself.

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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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: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #394,886 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

83 of 91 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Skeletal, May 13, 2004

By	Brian Harmon (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dark Age Ahead (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...

34 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

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

By A Customer

This review is from: Dark Age Ahead (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.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dark days ahead, September 27, 2005

By	R. L. Haskell (Vancouver, WA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Dark Age Ahead (Hardcover)

The title is not a question mark. Though it seems much of the content of this book is conditional upon, etc etc., the outcome of the next few decades is not very bright.

Why would you read it? Well, it caught my interest because I have never formalized my understanding of the "Dark Ages". Some have said that they weren't all that dark, just not that Christian. I was curious. It seems, however, that except for a privileged few, they were rather dark, indeed. Our author, Jane Jacobs, also finds the Dark Ages in process around the world today. Most of her analysis is based upon cities and their ways. She is well known for her book titled "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."

The book is not some generic, theologically based diatribe against the de-evolution of human culture. It is an opinion, based on a lot of experience, observation and insight into the ways of modern culture.

Unfortunately, the solutions offered tend to be unlikely. They are based on a sense of community that is only found on the "Green Turtle." Some of you may know what that means. Today we seem to be able to die for our country but we want to move to the suburbs when we get back from the war. So we will probably lose this war against the deterioration of excellence. Our democratic substitute is the "best negotiable solution" and that will not be enough.

Ok, so, in the process of serving Rome, Europe served itself as well. I read somewhere that Spanish urine, yes, human, was the preferred mouthwash in Rome. Truth be known, it is probably a better mouthwash than we might think, but not really as good as they thought. It was harvested (easier than selling your blood), shipped and marketed in the center of the world. In myriads of ways Rome was the center of gravity of a huge complex that worked better for everybody than what followed, the Dark Ages.

The first chapter, "The Hazard," is a description of those dark days in Western Culture. Chapter 8 also fills us in on the Dark Ages as they might be seen today. It's worth buying the book for those chapters alone. At the end of "The Hazard" she gives us her Gospel, the 5 critical, jeopardized, pillars of a sustaining cultural profile.

They are:

Community and family
Higher education
The effective practice of science and science-based technology
Taxes and governmental powers directly in touch with needs and possibilities
The self-policing of the learned professions.
The following chapters discuss each of these pillars and how they are being corrupted by..., by what? The sin nature? The matrix meltdown? Not doing one's duty? The peculiar American self-absorption of prosperity? Well, read the book to get your own impression of the critical dynamic at the various levels of society. Of course, if you don't read the book you are part of the problem.

Just kidding. Well, maybe there is a little truth there (you are reading the review, that's a start). Simple things, small things, daily things are good indicators of where a culture is going. Why do we gain weight? It's not the binges but that little extra every day that accumulates. It's available and "you are worth it".

Our author names the automobile as the chief destroyer of family and community, both by the life-style it creates and the space needed to accommodate it. She says that a third category of community resources is actual speaking relationships with people or neighbors who are not necessarily friends. What about a real conspiracy: General Motors buys electric trolley transit systems to convert them to motor-powered bus systems? (pp 38-41)

Ever thought that your college degree was a joke? It's no joke when you go to apply for a job, is it? Ms. Jacobs' discussion of higher education as critical to a self-sustaining culture centers around the difference between education and certification. "Credentialing as opposed to educating" is how she puts it.

"Science abandoned" is the chapter dedicated to the decay in the practice of science and science-based technology. This is a great review on the politics and bureaucracy of science as it seeks to respond to the needs of culture. Yes, you will feel superior as she illustrates some of the stupid things smart people are capable of, and how serendipity and common sense often show us what we need to do (if a problem is not high-tech, perhaps the solution is not either). I remember a sitcom back in the 50's where the star of the show, a housekeeper for a wealthy family, was asked to test a disposable frying pan. She said the pan was fine but that real cooks become attached to their frying pans and would have no interest in the product. It had never occurred to marketing to ask beyond the value of disposability.

The final two pillars of self-taxation and honest experts are discussed in a similar way and are worth the read.

Her "notes and comments" makes you want to sit down with the lady and have a nice long chat.

Example:

"Acceptance and the belief by wrongdoers that "everybody does it" has become the great enemy of effective self-policing. But, fortunately, in reality, everybody does not do wrong. If everyone did, our civilization would have irretrievably collapsed."

This is a good book, and very readable. She's got a bit of attitude and that makes you feel like you should get on board in some way or other.

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