http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue104/darkage.html

Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead

by Don Webb

I. Why this review, and why here?

Dark Age Ahead Author: Jane Jacobs Publisher: Random House Date: May, 2004 ISBN: 1400062322

Most readers of Bewildering Stories are science fiction fans, who are by nature interested in views of the future. This latest work of Jane Jacobs’ gives us that; at the same time it offers as much to readers who may be more interested in the past and present. In any event, Dark Age Ahead, like Jane Jacobs herself, commands respect and attention.

I’ve read newspaper reviews; they have all been unsatisfactory. You can try the readers’ comments on, say, Amazon.com, if you’re a glutton for punishment. There are hundreds of them, and you’ll have to wade through a mass of ignorance, stupidity and outright falsehoods before finding any useful information.

And yet how can any review do this book justice? Any discussion that ventures beyond the superficial practically begs for a summary. But the book is, like all Jane Jacobs’ works, so concisely and clearly written — even though it summarizes major points in her earlier works — that the easiest and most practical advice is just to say “read it.” I’ll do what I can to give an idea of Jane Jacobs’ general thesis and manner of thinking, but I can only touch on a few of the book’s many vital points and examples.

II. A Prophet Not Without Honor

For more than forty years, Jane Jacobs has analyzed American cities and their economies. Her work has resonated powerfully in both academic circles and among the general public. The Nobel prize for literature has been awarded for lesser achievements. But what would be her category? Urban studies? Sociology? Even if there were prizes in those categories, they would somehow fall short of the mark. Economics? That would be an embarrassing admission that all economic doctrines have been shortsighted in theory and practice. Since we don’t have a formal classification, I’ll invent one: Jane Jacobs is a social philosopher.

Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1916, Jane Jacobs has — for all practical purposes — lived through the entire “short 20th century” (1914-1989), as historians will call it. Jane Jacobs has drawn upon her experience and knowledge of it to show how societies and economies, like nature itself, function integrally.

Jane Jacobs has no academic degrees, and yet three books of hers alone would have crowned the careers of as many professors: The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), The Economy of Cities (1969), Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), none of which has gone out of print. In recent years she has described her philosophy in Systems of Survival (1993) and The Nature of Economies (2000). A lesser-known work, The Question of Separation (1980), would seem to be of interest mainly to Canadians, but its content is of a piece with all the rest.

III. What is a “dark age”?

A dark age is a culture’s dead end. It occurs not when a people loses something vital, but when a people no longer remembers that it has been lost. Sometimes a dark age comes from without, as when invasion and conquest all but obliterated the cultures of the Western Hemisphere. Sometimes it occurs from within, as with the Roman empire’s spectacular, centuries-long disintegration.

What causes a dark age?

Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs and Steel, basically asks what makes cultures successful. He concludes that the basic factors are size and density of population, technology, and specialized institutions. While giving Diamond ample credit, Jane Jacobs turns his question around: Why do even successful cultures fail? She sums it up at the beginning: “Losers are confronted with such radical jolts in circumstances that their institutions cannot adapt adequately, become irrelevant, and are dropped” (p. 20).

It seemed like a good idea at the time…

A “radical jolt” may not be perceived as one when it happens. A striking example of that is borrowed from Jared Diamond. In the early 15th century, China was foremost in the world in oceangoing trade and exploration. In 1433, the outcome of a political power struggle — the causes of which now seem utterly trivial and only historians know of — caused China’s great fleets to be recalled and its shipyards dismantled. The country turned inward, away from the world. The retreat led to a cascading economic, intellectual and technological stagnation from which China began top recover in the late 20th century. China’s many achievements thus became a historical footnote, and the world was left open to the Europeans.