Dark Age Ahead

Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs, 176 pages

For Jane Jacobs, a "dark age" is a form of cultural amnesia where the knowledge and practices that sustained a civilization are forgotten.  Much of the book is taken up with a continuation of the themes Jacobs has expounded throughout her celebrated career - the breakdown of community exacerbated by an urban planning orthodoxy that demands homogeneity and an inhuman scale.  This orthodoxy has, in her experience, become impervious to correction due to a breakdown of accountability - not only isolated from the empirical reality it seeks to manipulate, but also from self-policing mechanisms that have become increasingly reduced to face-saving.  These factors she attributes in turn to a decline in the kind of mentoring relationships which once instilled in young professionals not only the skills and knowledge needed to practice their trade, but also pride in their vocation and an accompanying sense of standards.  Those who care about their local communities, meanwhile, find themselves caught in a vice between technocratic leftists and miserly conservatives, between one-size-fits-all dictation and malign neglect, a dilemma as destructive in the Third World as it is in North American cities.

This explication of Jacobs' core ideas may rest on solid ground, but problems arise in the framing of those ideas.  Jacobs' theory, evidently borrowed from Karen Armstrong, that cultural collapse is primarily caused by xenophobia and fundamentalism, the triumph of mythos over logos, demonstrates its weaknesses in her own examples.  Chinese culture is said to have stagnated due to Confucian "fundamentalism", with the cancellation of the voyages begun by Zheng He, but the quote Jacobs provides justifies the decision purely in terms of costs against benefits, and Jacobs herself admits in an endnote that "'no one really knows' why the Chinese halted ocean voyaging."  Likewise, the explanation she provides for the stagnation of medieval Islam is the expulsion of Muslims from Spain, which by her theory would seem to indicate the beginning of Spanish decline rather than the beginnings of Muslim stagnation and the golden age of Spanish culture.  Fatally, her theory embraces the modern secularist mythos which considers mythos and logos mortal enemies - the error of which becomes glaringly apparent when she includes Renaissance humanism among her "fundamentalisms".  

Late in the book, Jacobs quotes Armstrong's description of medieval Islam, where "[t]here was no idea... of allowing the... opposing positions to build a new synthesis."  It never seems to occur to her that this is exactly the situation of the West, not only recently but for the last two centuries, dominated by a mythos masquerading as logos, and therefore incapable of seriously engaging with any opposing position.  This would explain why modernism, with its supposed "ideals of democracy, pluralism, toleration, human rights and secularism", has produced oppression, ideological warfare, and genocide on a scale unimaginable in previous eras.  Jacobs concludes that "[a]ny culture that jettisons the values that have given it competence, adaptability, and identity becomes weak and hollow," but the values of autonomy and efficiency (the only values the modern "fundamentalism" accepts) cannot support a culture - indeed, are incompatible even with one another, pulling on the one hand towards anarchy and on the other towards tyranny.

Jacobs expertly diagnoses one part of the material crisis of late modernity - the decline of the city as the center of civilization - and has interesting ideas as to how to overcome this problem.  Unfortunately, she is blind to other material aspects of the crisis, and completely unaware that it is not, at its heart, a material crisis at all.