"Dark Age Ahead" - Jane Jacobs & The Triumph Of Junk Culture

[hatrack]

A little book with a big title, Dark Age Ahead, published last year, tracked the ebbs and flows of civilisations over centuries. It came to this chilling conclusion: "We show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age." Not slipping towards a Dark Age. Rushing.

Dark Age Ahead (Random House, New York), was written by Jane Jacobs. She may be almost unknown in this country but has been famous in North America for 40 years, making her name writing about how communities thrive or decay. "Jane is like a rock star in Canada," her publisher, David Ebershoff, told me. (Jacobs is American but lives in Toronto.) Her dark age warning was directed at the United States but she also wants the rest of the West to heed the signs. She thinks Western culture is not as sturdy as it looks: "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 and mouth and example ... countless nuances that are assimilated only through experience."

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"Fiscal accountability of public money has almost disappeared from the modern world." Governments buy elections and suffocate innovation. "False image-making has become a very big business throughout North America and is a staple of the US government. Legions of hired liars labour to disconnect reality from all manner of images." Jacobs sees junk culture creeping over society, and skills being exported wholesale to low-wage countries in the name of consumerism and corporate profit, and communalism in decline. "A culture is unsalvageable if stabilising forces themselves become ruined and irrelevant. This is what I fear for our own culture."

What makes her fears more troubling is that they are complemented and amplified by another substantial public intellectual, Jared Diamond, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of geography and environmental health sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. His latest book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, will be published in Australia next month by Penguin. Its thesis was summarised in an essay published in The Best American Essays 2004, entitled The Last Americans: "One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilisations collapse. Few people, however, least of all our politicians, realise that a primary cause of collapse of those societies has been the destruction of the environmental resources on which they depended. Fewer still appreciate that many of those civilisations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society's demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power ..."

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http://www.smh.com.au/news/Paul-Sheehan/Why-the-West-is-riding-for-a-fall/2005/01/14/1105582711593.html?oneclick=true

[Dora]

1. Looks like a v. interesting read...

Both books look fascinating. Thanks for posting!

[McKenzie]

2. I studied her ideas at college

her seminal "Life and Death of Great American Cities" (1961!) is widely used to teach Urban Designers, Architects and related built environment professionals. I'm one of those maligned professionals LOL!

Here's a good site that covers the same type of theme, including an interview with her >>>

http://www.kunstler.com/

[Hardrada]

4. Good for her!

I always appreciated her books and quoted from her book you mentioned in my work on urban renewal. Glad she is still writing and I will seek out her latest.

[pscot]

3. a highly original mind

I read "Cities and the Wealth of Nations" about 15 years ago. It changed the way I thought about things. She's a reality based thinker.