Mass Amnesia

Definition

Mass amnesia is Jane Jacobs's name for the mechanism of cultural collapse: the loss, across a whole population, of the practices, skills and memories by which a culture lives — "a mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost" (Jacobs 2004, p. 3). Its foundation is the harsh principle use it or lose it: "Mass amnesia, striking as it is and seemingly weird, is the least mysterious of Dark Age phenomena" (p. 4). What is mysterious — "the salient mystery of Dark Ages" — is not that practices atrophy when abandoned but "how a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes literally lost" (p. 4). Jacobs's answer is that culture is not stored where we think it is: "Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture. Most of the million details of a complex, living culture are transmitted neither in writing nor pictorially. Instead, cultures live through word of mouth and example" (p. 5). Because culture "resides mainly in people's heads and in the examples people set, and is subject therefore to natural mortality," the time available for corrective action is finite even in literate, archive-keeping societies (p. 23): "As the people who had competently maintained this organizational wonder died off, so must have cultural competence to follow in their footsteps" (p. 23).

The concept has a social scale as well as a civilizational one. Community loss runs the same mechanism "in miniature": "While people possess a community, they usually understand that they can't afford to lose it; but after it is lost, gradually even the memory of what was lost is lost. In miniature, this is the malady of Dark Ages" (p. 38). The same logic secures the everyday: residents who once remarked, locking their doors, that they never used to need locks have died off, "and so even the memory of what has been lost is now almost lost" (p. 23). The recovery-side corollary is that memory is preserved by practice and by arts: the Irish survived conquest "largely through the fragile medium of song" — "The Irish stubbornly remembered who they were and what they valued" (p. 173) — and Japan maintained "living national treasures" so that "neither the skills nor the cultural values and identity that they represent will be lost" (p. 172). The diagnostic test Jacobs implies is retrievability: "When the abyss of lost memory by a people becomes too deep and too old, attempts to plumb it are futile" (p. 11) — the Ainu who can no longer conjecture their own origins mark the terminal case, while the Renaissance reconstruction of classical culture and the aboriginal retrieval of museum artifacts mark the recoverable range.

Key Thinkers

• Jane Jacobs — the concept's theorist: mass amnesia as the fifth horseman's mechanism; culture as residing in heads and examples; the retrievability limit (2004).
• Stewart Brand (not yet paged — see log) — the preservation-strategy counterpart: knowledge's physical carriers must be renewed "by generations of human beings culturally instructed to fulfill this purpose" (The Clock of the Long Now, 1999, cited in Jacobs's notes).
• Henri Pirenne (not yet paged — see log) — the historian of the post-Roman nadir whose account (c. 1000 C.E.) supplies the concept's paradigm case.

Related Concepts

• dark-age — the condition mass amnesia constitutes and deepens: "the mass amnesia of survivors becomes permanent and profound" (p. 7).
• memory — the wiki's memory concept in its phenomenological and archival registers; mass amnesia is its cultural-collapse counterpart.
• redundancy-of-mentors — the transmission infrastructure whose redundancy is amnesia's opposite: mentors and examples as the medium culture actually lives through.
• fortress-mentality — the retreat amnesia often completes: the xenophobic sealing-off that stops even external replenishment.
• community-resources — the local scale of the mechanism: "speaking relationships among neighbors" as the intangible third category whose loss is community's amnesia.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Dark Age Ahead (Jacobs 2004) — the concept's source: the definition and use-it-or-lose-it (p. 4); culture as word of mouth and example (p. 5); natural mortality of culture-bearers (p. 23); the locked-door example (p. 23); the community-loss miniature (p. 38); the Ainu limit (p. 11); the Irish songs and Japanese national treasures as counter-patterns (pp. 172–173).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Dark Age Ahead ingest; awaits the collective-memory literature (Connerton, Assmann, Nora — Nora has a page via site-of-memory) as the concept's theoretical neighbors.

Open Questions

• Jacobs's claim that archives "give a false sense of security" (p. 5) directly contests the wiki's memory and spatial-document registers, where preserved interiors and documents carry memory. Are these compatible — archives preserving information while amnesia destroys practice — or does Jacobs's argument indict the house museum and the period room as amnesia's alibis?
• Is mass amnesia voluntary, structural, or engineered? Jacobs's cases include all three (disuse among aboriginal survivors; the mortality of culture-bearers in China; the GM-organized destruction of transit memory). Which mechanism dominates, and does the answer change the preservation strategy?
• What is the unit at which the concept operates best — the practice (cod fishing, shipbuilding), the institution (transit systems, schools), or the civilization? Jacobs slides between them; the mechanism may be scale-specific.