Dark Age Ahead

Author: Jane Jacobs Year: 2004 (Vintage paperback ed. 2005) Source type: book Raw file: raw/books/jacobs_2004-dark-age-ahead.md

Summary

Jacobs's last book is a diagnosis of cultural decline: North America (and by extension the West) shows ominous signs of sliding into a Dark Age — "a culture's dead end" — through the decay of five pillars that the culture depends on to stand firm: community and family, higher education (credentialing replacing educating), the effective practice of science and science-based technology, taxes and governmental powers directly in touch with needs and possibilities, and self-policing by the learned professions. Drawing on Pirenne's account of the post-Roman collapse, Diamond's biogeography (turned inside out: "What dooms losers?"), the GM streetcar conspiracy, the Washington Square and Toronto traffic-closing experiments, the Chicago heat wave, the 2002 Toronto-area import-replacing boom, and the Enron/Andersen accounting frauds, Jacobs argues that Dark Ages begin as fatal cultural turnings "not recognized as wrong turnings while they occur" — that cultures die through mass amnesia, in which even the memory of what was lost is lost. The book is structured as a warning, not a prophecy: the closing chapter reframes the present as the jolting passage from agrarian to postagrarian economies, and asks what patterns (Japan's assimilation, Ireland's songs, America's indigenous arts) have let cultures retain memory through radical change.

Key Claims

A Dark Age is a culture's dead end: "We in North America and Western Europe… customarily think of a Dark Age as happening once, long ago, following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But in North America we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were decisively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost" (p. 3).
Mass amnesia is the least mysterious Dark Age phenomenon — "Use it or lose it" — but the salient mystery is how a people can so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes literally lost (p. 4). Cultures live through word of mouth and example, not archives: "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" (p. 5).
The fifth horseman: "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, conventionally depicted as Famine, War, Pestilence, and Death, had already been joined by a fifth demonic horseman, Forgetfulness" (p. 8). Post-Roman Europe shows that a Dark Age is not mere subtraction — additions (feudalism, serfdom, language divergence, a new religiosity) break from the past and reinforce the loss; the period was "the most radical and thoroughgoing revolution in [Europe's] recorded history… unexamined and even largely unnoticed" while under way (p. 9).
Diamond's biogeographic science of history (via Guns, Germs and Steel) explains conqueror/victor outcomes wherever geography, demography and microorganisms govern — but "turned mushy and unreliable as soon as human decisions entered the equation." Jacobs turns the question upside down: not "What enables conquerors to win?" but "What dooms losers?" — answered by the principle: "Losers are confronted with such radical jolts in circumstances that their institutions cannot adapt adequately, become irrelevant, and are dropped" (p. 20). Human decisions change the science "from a hard science to a soft one" (p. 21).
Strong cultures fail from within: "internal rot in the form of fatal cultural turnings, not recognized as wrong turnings while they occur or soon enough afterward to be correctable. Time during which corrections can be made runs out because of mass forgetfulness" (p. 14). Cases: Mesopotamia's environmental destruction and post-1492 retreat into xenophobic isolation (the logos→mythos shift, via Karen Armstrong); China's 1433 halting of the treasure fleets and destruction of the voyage archives — "Loss of charts and records from the archives ended medieval China's interest in the outside world" (p. 19).
Fortress mentality: "Cultural xenophobia is a frequent sequel to a society's decline from cultural vigor… a shift from faith in logos, reason… to mythos, meaning conservatism that looks backward to fundamentalist beliefs" (Armstrong, quoted p. 17). A fortress mentality "not only shuts itself off from dynamic influences originating outside but also, as a side effect, ceases influencing the outside world" (p. 17).
Beneficent feedback is not guaranteed: "powerful persons and groups that find it in their interest to prevent adaptive corrections have many ways of thwarting self-organizing stabilizers — through deliberately contrived subsidies and monopolies, for example" (p. 21). "A culture is unsalvageable if stabilizing forces themselves become ruined and irrelevant" (p. 24).
The five jeopardized pillars (p. 24): community and family (inseparable); higher education; the effective practice of science and science-based technology; taxes and governmental powers directly in touch with needs and possibilities; self-policing by the learned professions. Racism, environmental destruction, crime, voter distrust, and the rich–poor gulf are diagnosed as symptoms of breakdown in these five, not the disease itself (p. 25).
Families: the nuclear family is a biological unit, the household an economic unit, and "it has been usual for households to be more adaptable and resilient than families when subjected to stresses and jolts" (p. 28) — the most rapidly expanding American household type at the millennium is prisons, and Jacobs's intuition is that households emerging to replace failing families "will probably be coercive" (p. 43).
The shelter-income disconnection: from the mid-1930s to the late 1970s a median family income covered median shelter costs; "at some point in the 1970s, the two figures — median shelter cost and median income — slipped seriously out of whack," until "Ninety percent could no longer afford to buy a 'median' house" (pp. 29–30); the gap was papered over by the housing bubble — "money growing on houses" — while food-bank families spent 67–70% of income on rent (p. 32).
Communities supply what two parents cannot: "Two parents, to say nothing of one, cannot possibly satisfy all the needs of a family-household. A community is needed as well, for raising children, and also to keep adults reasonably sane and cheerful" (p. 34). Community resources come in three categories: tangible public provisions (housing, transit, schools, parks); informal commercial and volunteer provisions; and — "probably the most important" — "speaking relationships among neighbors and acquaintances in addition to friends" (p. 35).
"Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities" (p. 37). The destruction was engineered, not chosen: General Motors' National City Lines bought and demolished electric streetcar systems in scores of cities, was convicted of restraint of trade in 1950, and "The executives were punished with $1 (yes, one dollar) fines each" (p. 40). Community loss follows the Dark-Age malady in miniature: "after it is lost, gradually even the memory of what was lost is lost" (p. 38).
Credentialing: "Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North American universities" (p. 44). The degree is "a passport to consideration for a job" (p. 45); enrollment statistics have become "an unofficial appendix to stock market performance" (p. 46); "Quantity trumps quality" (p. 49). Credentialing is "an indirect legacy of the Great Depression" (p. 51) and emerged in the late 1950s when administrators realized that economic development "depended on a population's funds of knowledge — a resource that later came to be known as human capital" (p. 61). "A vigorous culture capable of making corrective, stabilizing changes depends heavily on its educated people, and especially upon their critical capacities and depth of understanding" (p. 63).
The scientific state of mind has four stages: a fruitful question; a parsimonious hypothetical answer; testing by the real world; and the question chain — "the question chain sustains science as a coherent process, erecting continuous, coherent bodies of knowledge. Thus science itself… directs its own organization, along with providing automatic and continual self-renewal" (pp. 67–68). Disconnected segments stagnate: "Intellectually, it is poisonous, because thereafter almost everything the stagnated and warped knowledge touches is harmed by it" (p. 69).
Traffic engineering as abandoned science: the "traffic is like water" paradigm was disproven by the Washington Square road closure (Jacobs's own campaign, pp. 72–73) and by her Toronto neighborhood's street-direction test (pp. 73–74) — "Dammed traffic did not overflow into channels of less resistance; it was successfully confined to its appointed channel" (p. 74). The University College London study of sixty road closures found "an average of 20% of the traffic it carried seems to vanish. In some cases they studied, as much as 60% of the traffic vanished" (p. 75). Universities "are perpetrating a fraud upon students and upon the public when they award credentials in this supposed expertise" (p. 72). The buried misconceptions: designing for macro-destinations instead of micro-destinations, and the paradigm that "the journey matters more than the destination" (pp. 77–78).
The Chicago heat wave as method failure: the CDC's 80-researcher individual-matching study "turned up only what everybody already knew" and was "worse than useless" because it encouraged blaming the victims (p. 83); Eric Klinenberg's Snow-style comparison of two paired districts — North Lawndale (40 deaths per 100,000; commercial desert; elderly afraid to leave apartments) against South Lawndale (fewer than 4; bustling streets; storekeepers as refuge) — "summarizes much that nobody knew" (p. 83). Everything traced back to density of population and community life (p. 85).
Economists' incuriosity: the 2002 Canadian job boom (460,000 net new jobs in six months against 5,000 in the ten-times-larger U.S. economy) was unrecognized as city import replacing because "such jobs don't fit into economists' preconceptions of how economies behave" (p. 88). "Everything that happens in the world happens at some place" (p. 88).
Taxes: "Subsidiarity is the principle that government works best — most responsibly and responsively — when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses. Fiscal accountability is the principle that institutions collecting and disbursing taxes work most responsibly when they are transparent to those providing the money" (p. 103). These two principles — which revived medieval Europe's cities after Rome (Pirenne) — "have almost disappeared from the modern world" (p. 103): cities are taxed as "wards" bracketed "with asylums and taverns" in Canada's 1867 constitution (p. 115), receiving only ~6% of what their residents pay; "Standardization is the parent of stagnation" (p. 119).
Neoconservatism/reinvented government/Thatcherism: "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" — "Greed becomes culturally admired as competence, and false or unrealistic promises as cleverness" (p. 114). Toronto's infill assisted-housing program — popular, economical, innovative for twenty years — "was felled by one-size-fits-all bureaucracy… Death to innovation is death to economic and social development" (p. 110). "By such measures, a culture's social capital is systematically squandered" (p. 112).
Self-policing: the learned professions descend from ancient priesthoods; self-regulation (internal affairs, fee schedules, architects' ban on criticism — "architecture has styles, not fashions") differs from self-policing (combating fraud and crime) (pp. 125–131). Accounting's rot: "When a profession with responsibilities like that goes rotten, it is a cultural and economic nightmare" (p. 133); "The definition of madness is loss of connection with reality. By that definition, this was accounting gone mad" (pp. 133–134). Behind it: "the substitution of image for substance" — "Legions of hired liars labor to disconnect reality from all manner of images" (p. 136). Accounting's genuine puzzles: "human capital," "social capital," and "cultural capital" are "real and powerful assets, more indispensable for wealth creation and well-being in modern societies than traditional bankable capital — but difficult or impossible to handle in traditional accounting terms" (p. 137).
Vicious spirals: the postwar housing spiral's "tangible roots" are fifteen years of depression and war (p. 139); the three public approaches all misfired — rent control was "on balance, counterproductive"; slum clearance was "even more counterproductive" (redlining as loan famine; Pruitt-Igoe's demolition as "a spectacular symbol of slum-clearance failures"); only government-guaranteed mortgages added supply, but their standards "mandated suburban sprawl" (pp. 141–145). "How could the consequences of half a century of destructive housing policies be beneficial?" (p. 145).
Densification: "Sprawl can become less wasteful only by being used still more intensively. If that happens, suburban sprawl will turn out to have been an interim stage, a transition between land in agricultural use and land densely enough occupied to support mass transit, to form functional and inclusive communities, to reduce car dependency, and to alleviate shortages of affordable housing" (p. 147). The pressure will come from the baby-boom retirement bulge — houses "must somehow earn it instead" of passively supplying cash (p. 148); owner-driven densification (rental suites, rear-lot buildings) is preferable to developers' demolition, for the "wider ranges of uses, as well as charm" it introduces (p. 149). Frozen holdout suburbs "will be suburbs frozen in time, to be regarded in future as interesting twentieth-century museum pieces, much as frozen Victorian small towns are interesting nineteenth-century museum pieces" (p. 152).
Boulevards: versatile multiway boulevards — pedestrian walks, bicycle lanes, transit lanes, through-traffic channels — are "places to which people flock for a stroll when their day's work is done… at the heart of their communities" (p. 150). The Boulevard Book's authors "found no studies or other evidence to support the recommendations against boulevards by North American traffic engineers or the conclusions and design exercises set forth in textbooks… These were based on wholly unsupported dogma, nothing more" (p. 150) — the boulevard's virtue being "unlimited access… affording entrance and exit to adjoining grids at every corner instead of at a few choke points" (p. 219).
Zoning's three "big ideas" — "High ground coverages are bad"; "High densities… are bad"; "The mingling of commercial or other work uses with residences is bad" — are "rejections of cities and city life, devised by utopians and reformers… The tools are unsuitable except for creating sprawl" (pp. 153–154). What is needed instead is "prohibitions of destructive performances": a performance code specifying decibels, pollution measurements, sign dimensions and candlepower, building heights and unbroken frontages — because feared changes "are not actually about land uses, densities, and ground coverage but rather about dreaded side effects" (p. 154). "In cities, differing uses in close proximity tame one another" (p. 156).
Redundancy: "Perhaps the greatest folly possible for a culture is to try to pass itself on by using principles of efficiency. When a culture is rich enough and inherently complex enough to afford redundancy of nurturers, but eliminates them as an extravagance or loses their cultural services through heedlessness of what is being lost, the consequence is self-inflicted cultural genocide" (p. 160). Cultures transmit through "natural redundancies… in their communities: varied individuals who have varied ways of fitting into the culture and contributing to it… visible in a community, but invisible to the young when community becomes invisible" (pp. 159–160).
Postagrarianism: "With the emergence of agriculture, the world was never again as it had previously been… Now it is the turn of agrarianism to become a cultural loser" (p. 162). "No longer is territory a zero-sum possession of states and empires. Separations and other causes of territorial loss can be win-win events" (p. 163). "The key to postagrarian wealth is the complicated task of nurturing economic diversity, opportunity, and peace without resort to oppression" (p. 164). The shift is "so jolting that if our culture and our contemporaries' pull through more or less intact, we will all deserve posterity's gratitude" (p. 25).
Patterns of survival: Japan "assimilated Western ways into its own culture, rather than allowing its own culture to become irrelevant while it was emulating the West," maintaining living national treasures so that "neither the skills nor the cultural values and identity that they represent will be lost" (p. 172). Ireland: "during all these ordeals, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were never joined by the fifth demonic horseman, Forgetfulness. The Irish stubbornly remembered who they were and what they valued… largely through the fragile medium of song" — "Every Irish song is a song of protest" (p. 173).
Hubris and empire: "nothing succeeds like success, and it follows that nothing hangs on past its prime like past success" (p. 175). "History has repeatedly demonstrated that empires seldom seem to retain sufficient cultural self-awareness to prevent them from overreaching and overgrasping. They have neglected to recognize that the true power of a successful culture resides in its example" (p. 176).
Beneficent spirals: "each improvement and strengthening leads to other improvements and strengthenings in the culture, in turn further strengthening the initial improvement… Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole" (p. 175).
Method: "Everything is connected with everything else, not only in its consequences but also in its causes" (p. 22); "Everything that happens in the world happens at some place" (p. 88); prophecy disclaimed — "this book should not be mistaken for prophecy… Prophecy is for people too ignorant of history to be aware of that, or for charlatans" (pp. 25–26). "God is in the details," Mies said; "In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details" (p. 153).

Connections

Concepts: dark-age · mass-amnesia · fortress-mentality · credentialing · scientific-state-of-mind · import-replacing · subsidiarity · fiscal-accountability · self-policing · redundancy-of-mentors · vicious-spirals · performance-codes · densification · boulevards · postagrarian-society · community-resources · attrition-of-automobiles · mixed-primary-uses · separation-of-uses · urban-sprawl · new-urbanism · missing-middle-housing · gentrification · housing · social-capital · suburbanism · memory · organized-complexity

Authors: Jane Jacobs

Debates: Spatial vs. Social Explanation — the CDC/Klinenberg heat-wave case as a demonstration that community-level (spatial) explanation beats individual-level attribution · Dwelling vs. Housing — the retrospective audit of the three postwar housing approaches

Related source notes:

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961) — the earlier book whose street-level findings this one extends to the cultural scale: the Washington Square closure reappears as evidence against the traffic-as-water paradigm; slum clearance's failures are re-audited; community and its resources become the first pillar of a civilization.
Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden (Keil 2015) — Keil's post-suburban density politics is the scholarly descendant of this book's densification thesis.
Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the practitioner's version of the same retrofit: Missing Middle legalization where Jacobs has performance codes and owner-driven densification.

Direct Quotes

"This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book." (p. 3)

"A Dark Age is a culture's dead end." (p. 3)

"Mass amnesia, striking as it is and seemingly weird, is the least mysterious of Dark Age phenomena. We all understand the harsh principle Use it or lose it." (p. 4)

"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)

"The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, conventionally depicted as Famine, War, Pestilence, and Death, had already been joined by a fifth demonic horseman, Forgetfulness." (p. 8)

"Losers are confronted with such radical jolts in circumstances that their institutions cannot adapt adequately, become irrelevant, and are dropped." (p. 20)

"A culture is unsalvageable if stabilizing forces themselves become ruined and irrelevant." (p. 24)

"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)

"Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities." (p. 37)

"The executives were punished with $1 (yes, one dollar) fines each, and the corporations with $5,000 fines each." (p. 40)

"Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North American universities." (p. 44)

"The credential is not a passport to a job, as naive graduates sometimes suppose. It is more basic and necessary: a passport to consideration for a job." (p. 45)

"Quantity trumps quality." (p. 49)

"Credentialing is an indirect legacy of the Great Depression of the 1930s." (p. 51)

"A vigorous culture capable of making corrective, stabilizing changes depends heavily on its educated people, and especially upon their critical capacities and depth of understanding." (p. 63)

"What is this valuable thing? It isn't a thing but a state of mind. Its aim is to get at truths about how reality works." (p. 65)

"If a body of inquiry becomes disconnected from the scientific state of mind, that unfortunate segment of knowledge is no longer scientific. It stagnates. Intellectually, it is poisonous, because thereafter almost everything the stagnated and warped knowledge touches is harmed by it." (p. 69)

"Here they are, another generation of nice, miseducated young men, about to waste their careers in a fake science that cares nothing about evidence; that doesn't ask a fruitful question in the first place and that, when unexpected evidence turns up anyhow, doesn't pursue it; a science that hasn't been building up a coherent body of knowledge that organizes its own direction by grace of the succession of questions it opens." (p. 74)

"when a road is closed, an average of 20% of the traffic it carried seems to vanish. In some cases they studied, as much as 60% of the traffic vanished." (University College London study, quoted p. 75)

"In effect, somebody told traffic engineers and road designers that the journey matters more than the destination — an inappropriate analogy about a philosophical approach to life — and they believed it." (p. 78)

"Everything that happens in the world happens at some place." (p. 88)

"Subsidiarity is the principle that government works best — most responsibly and responsively — when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses." (p. 103)

"Fiscal accountability is the principle that institutions collecting and disbursing taxes work most responsibly when they are transparent to those providing the money." (p. 103)

"Greed becomes culturally admired as competence, and false or unrealistic promises as cleverness." (p. 114)

"Death to innovation is death to economic and social development." (p. 110)

"By such measures, a culture's social capital is systematically squandered." (p. 112)

"Standardization is the parent of stagnation." (p. 119)

"When a profession with responsibilities like that goes rotten, it is a cultural and economic nightmare." (p. 133)

"The definition of madness is loss of connection with reality. By that definition, this was accounting gone mad." (pp. 133–134)

"Behind the success of plausible denial is an already long-standing North American disconnection from reality: the substitution of image for substance. All that glitters is gold." (p. 136)

"'human capital,' 'social capital,' and 'cultural capital'… represent concepts about real and powerful assets, more indispensable for wealth creation and well-being in modern societies than traditional bankable capital — but difficult or impossible to handle in traditional accounting terms." (p. 137)

"Sprawl can become less wasteful only by being used still more intensively. If that happens, suburban sprawl will turn out to have been an interim stage, a transition between land in agricultural use and land densely enough occupied to support mass transit, to form functional and inclusive communities, to reduce car dependency, and to alleviate shortages of affordable housing." (p. 147)

"A well-designed boulevard is always well provided with trees along its margins and its medians, because a major concern of serious boulevard designers is to create environments welcoming to pedestrians." (p. 150)

"the authors found no studies or other evidence to support the recommendations against boulevards by North American traffic engineers or the conclusions and design exercises set forth in textbooks for university students. These were based on wholly unsupported dogma, nothing more." (p. 150)

"'God is in the details,' as Mies van der Rohe famously said. In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details." (p. 153)

"High ground coverages are bad. High densities (numbers of people or numbers of households per acre) are bad. The mingling of commercial or other work uses with residences is bad." (p. 153)

"What are actually needed are prohibitions of destructive performances." (p. 153)

"In cities, differing uses in close proximity tame one another." (p. 156)

"Perhaps the greatest folly possible for a culture is to try to pass itself on by using principles of efficiency. When a culture is rich enough and inherently complex enough to afford redundancy of nurturers, but eliminates them as an extravagance or loses their cultural services through heedlessness of what is being lost, the consequence is self-inflicted cultural genocide." (p. 160)

"With the emergence of agriculture, the world was never again as it had previously been… Now it is the turn of agrarianism to become a cultural loser." (p. 162)

"The key to postagrarian wealth is the complicated task of nurturing economic diversity, opportunity, and peace without resort to oppression." (p. 164)

"Japan assimilated Western ways into its own culture, rather than allowing its own culture to become irrelevant while it was emulating the West." (p. 172)

"But during all these ordeals, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were never joined by the fifth demonic horseman, Forgetfulness. The Irish stubbornly remembered who they were and what they valued, and refused to lose their treasured culture. They accomplished this marvel largely through the fragile medium of song." (p. 173)

"nothing succeeds like success, and it follows that nothing hangs on past its prime like past success." (p. 175)

"They have neglected to recognize that the true power of a successful culture resides in its example." (p. 176)

"Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole." (p. 175)