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Dark Age Ahead Taschenbuch – Illustriert, 17. Mai 2005
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In this indispensable book, urban visionary Jane Jacobs argues that as agrarianism gives way to a technology-based future, we’re at risk of cultural collapse. Jacobs—renowned author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities—pinpoints five pillars of our culture that are in serious decay: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation, and government; and the self-regulation of the learned professions. The corrosion of these pillars, Jacobs argues, is linked to societal ills such as environmental crisis, racism, and the growing gulf between rich and poor.
But this is a hopeful book as well as a warning. Drawing on a vast frame of reference—from fifteenth-century Chinese shipbuilding to Ireland’s cultural rebirth—Jacobs suggests how the cycles of decay can be arrested and our way of life renewed. Invigorating and accessible, Dark Age Ahead is not only the crowning achievement of Jane Jacobs’ career, but one of the most important works of our time.
- Seitenzahl der Print-Ausgabe256 Seiten
- SpracheEnglisch
- HerausgeberKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Erscheinungstermin17. Mai 2005
- Abmessungen13.21 x 1.52 x 20.32 cm
- ISBN-109781400076703
- ISBN-13978-1400076703
Beliebte Titel dieses Autors
Produktbeschreibungen
Pressestimmen
"She once again has proven herself to be one of the most trenchant observers and challenging critics of American culture and character." —The Christian Science Monitor
"There's no writer more lucid than Jane Jacobs, nobody better at using wide-open eyes and clean courtly prose to decipher the changing world around us. . . . It's a tribute to Jacobs that her observations still resonate, succinct yet dead on. That's why Dark Age Ahead is a treat to read for the way it snaps our perceptions into focus." —San Francisco Chronicle
"A short, dense, terse and often lyrical book that sets the wistful against the hopeful. . . . Wonderful and essential." —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"Dark Age Ahead is witty and damning. . . . It's hard to disagree with Jane Jacobs. . . . Worth reading and thinking about." —The Washington Post Book World
"Jane Jacobs has been right about so much for so long that when she writes gloomily of a 'Dark Age Ahead,' we all better listen…. Prescient." —Austin-American Statesman
"[Jacobs is] the matchless analyst of all things urban." —The New Yorker
"A short, terse and often lyrical book that sets the wistful against the hopeful. . . . This book is a warning, artfully and profoundly dressed as a reminder. . . . Thanks to Jacobs for pointing the way." —St. Petersburg Times
"Scholarly yet accessible . . . certain to spark debate . . . [a] unique addition to the genre of social forecasting." —Library Journal
"Compact and compelling…A spellbinding account of the forgetting and misplacing of shared values, assets and skills that . . . may lead the contemporary Western world into widespread social, economic and physical disaster." —Toronto Globe and Mail
"Still right and still cranky after all these years." —Cincinnati Enquirer
"Jacobs has always championed neighborhoods. Now she has extended her ideas about community to include the culture at large…We should stick around and listen up." —Newsweek
"Jacobs is the quintessential public intellectual, entirely self-taught, omnivorous in her references, pan-historical in her outlook. . . . Dark Age Ahead is something of a retrospective of Jacobs' theories and travels, anchored in specific examples from her years of observation and activism." —The Sunday Oregonian (Portland)
"Culture critic Jane Jacobs, famous for her work on the economies of cities, has taken the idea of a tipping point toward a dramatic end." —Chicago Tribune
"A sweeping survey of a civilization—ours—on the brink of catastrophe. . . . What makes Dark Age Ahead worth a read is the way in which its author brings her famously independent and inductive mind to bear in fresh ways on familiar topics." —Berkeley Daily Planet
"A blend of advocacy and anecdote about how to protect the vitality of American cities." —The Financial Times
"Jane Jacobs is the kind of writer who produces in her readers such changed ways of looking at the world that she becomes an oracle, or final authority." —The New York Sun
Buchrückseite
But this is a hopeful book as well as a warning. Drawing on her vast frame of reference-from fifteenth-century Chinese shipbuilding to Ireland's cultural rebirth-Jacobs suggests how the cycles of decay can be arrested and our way of life renewed. Invigorating and accessible, Dark Age Ahead is not only the crowning achievement of Jane Jacobs' career, but one of the most important works of our time.
Über den Autor und weitere Mitwirkende
Jane Jacobs was the legendary author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a work that has never gone out of print and that has transformed the disciplines of urban planning and city architecture. Her other major works include The Economy of Cities, Systems of Survival, and The Nature of Economies. She died in 2006.
Leseprobe. Abdruck erfolgt mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Rechteinhaber. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.
The Hazard
This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book.
The subject itself is gloomy. A Dark Age is a culture's dead end. We in North America and Western Europe, enjoying the many benefits of the culture conventionally known as the West, 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. Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past. Whatever happened to the culture whose people produced the splendid Lascaux cave paintings some seventeen thousand years ago, in what is now southwestern France? Or the culture of the builders of ambitious stone and wood henges in Western Europe before the Celts arrived with their Iron Age technology and intricately knotted art?
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. A failing or conquered culture can spiral down into a long decline, as has happened in most empires after their relatively short heydays of astonishing success. But in extreme cases, failing or conquered cultures can be genuinely lost, never to emerge again as living ways of being. The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes literally lost?
This is a question that has practical importance for us here in North America, and possibly in Western Europe as well. Dark Ages are instructive, precisely because they are extreme examples of cultural collapse and thus more clear-cut and vivid than gradual decay. The purpose of this book is to help our culture avoid sliding into a dead end, by understanding how such a tragedy comes about, and thereby what can be done to ward it off and thus retain and further develop our living, functioning culture, which contains so much of value, so hard won by our forebears. We need this awareness because, as I plan to explain, we show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age.
Surely, the threat of losing all we have achieved, everything that makes us the vigorous society we are, cannot apply to us! How could it possibly happen to us? We have books, magnificent storehouses of knowledge about our culture; we have pictures, both still and moving, and oceans of other cultural information that every day wash through the Internet, the daily press, scholarly journals, the careful catalogs of museum exhibitions, the reports compiled by government bureaucracies on every subject from judicial decisions to regulations for earthquake-resistant buildings, and, of course, time capsules.
Dark Ages, surely, are pre-printing and pre-World Wide Web phenomena. Even the Roman classical world was skimpily documented in comparison with our times. With all our information, how could our culture be lost? Or even almost lost? Don't we have it as well preserved as last season's peach crop, ready to nourish our descendants if need be?
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. That is why we have cooking classes and cooking demonstrations, as well as cookbooks. That is why we have apprenticeships, internships, student tours, and on-the-job training as well as manuals and textbooks. Every culture takes pains to educate its young so that they, in their turn, can practice and transmit it completely. Educators and mentors, whether they are parents, elders, or schoolmasters, use books and videos if they have them, but they also speak, and when they are most effective, as teachers, parents, or mentors, they also serve as examples.
As recipients of culture, as well as its producers, people attend to countless nuances that are assimilated only through experience. Men, women, and children in Holland conduct themselves differently from men, women, and children in England, even though both share the culture of the West, and very differently from their counterparts in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or Singapore. Travel writers, novelists, visual artists, and photographers draw attention to subtle, everyday differences in conduct rooted in experience, including the experience of differing cultural histories, but their glosses are unavoidably sketchy, compared with the experience of living a culture, soaking it up by example and word of mouth.
Another thing: a living culture is forever changing, without losing itself as a framework and context of change. The reconstruction of a culture is not the same as its restoration. In the fifteenth century, scholars and antiquarians set about reconstructing the lost classical culture of Greece and Rome from that culture's writing and artifacts. Their work was useful and remains so to this day; Western Europeans relearned their cultural derivations from it. But Europeans also plunged, beginning in the fifteenth century, into the post-Renaissance crises of the Enlightenment. Profoundly disturbing new knowledge entered a fundamentalist and feudal framework so unprepared to receive it that some scientists were excommunicated and their findings rejected by an establishment that had managed to accept reconstructed classicism--and used it to refute newer knowledge. Copernicus's stunning proofs forced educated people to realize that the earth is not the center of the universe, as reconstructed classical culture would have it. This and other discoveries, especially in the basic sciences of chemistry and physics, pitted the creative culture of the Enlightenment against the reconstructed culture of the Renaissance, which soon stood, ironically, as a barrier to cultural development of the West--a barrier formed by canned and preserved knowledge of kinds which we erroneously may imagine can save us from future decline or forgetfulness.
Dark Ages are horrible ordeals, incomparably worse than the temporary amnesia sometimes experienced by stunned survivors of earthquakes, battles, or bombing firestorms who abandon customary routines while they search for other survivors, grieve, and grapple with their own urgent needs, and who may forget the horrors they have witnessed, or try to. But later on, life for survivors continues for the most part as before, after having been suspended for the emergency.
During a Dark Age, the mass amnesia of survivors becomes permanent and profound. The previous way of life slides into an abyss of forgetfulness, almost as decisively as if it had not existed. Henri Pirenne, a great twentieth-century Belgian economic and social historian, says that the famous Dark Age which followed the collapse of the Western Roman Empire reached its nadir some six centuries later, about 1000 c.e. Here, sketched by two French historians, is the predicament of French peasantry in that year:
The peasants...are half starved. The effects of chronic malnourishment are conspicuous in the skeletons exhumed....The chafing of the teeth...indicates a grass-eating people, rickets, and an overwhelming preponderance of people who died young....Even for the minority that survived infancy, the average life span did not exceed the age of forty....Periodically the lack of food grows worse. For a year or two there will be a great famine; the chroniclers described the graphic and horrible episodes of this...
Produktinformation
- ASIN : 1400076706
- Herausgeber : Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; Reprint Edition (17. Mai 2005)
- Sprache : Englisch
- Taschenbuch : 256 Seiten
- ISBN-10 : 9781400076703
- ISBN-13 : 978-1400076703
- Abmessungen : 13.21 x 1.52 x 20.32 cm
- Amazon Bestseller-Rang: Nr. 900,387 in Bücher (Siehe Top 100 in Bücher)
- Nr. 2,940 in Anthropologie (Bücher)
- Nr. 8,625 in Fachbücher Soziologie (Bücher)
- Nr. 20,914 in Wirtschaft (Bücher)
- Kundenrezensionen:
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In this 250pp 2004 book, she looks back at past dark ages to identify the patterns that she sees emerging in North America. (She was born in the US but migrated to Canada as a 52-year old after she was arrested in 1968 for disrupting plans to "pave over" Greenwich Village. She died in Toronto.)
In her definition, a "dark age" is one in which a culture loses its past knowledge, falling into a mass amnesia in which life grows more miserable and short under the influence of quacks, fear and superstition, with each resulting failure driving people further into desperation, isolation and further self-destructive action.
The key idea is that dark ages arise internally within a culture, even as failures are blamed on outsiders, thereby creating a dynamic in which further reliance on homegrown "solutions" leads to more failures because those solutions are untested, inefficient and oversimplified.
As an economist, I would put this theory in the context of trade, i.e., the exchange of goods or services that leads each trading party better off by allowing both to benefit from the resources and experience (the comparative advantage) of the other. Such win-win exchanges clarify why a reduction in trade (towards "self-sufficiency" or autarky) is so harmful: it turns us from specialists able to benefit from our productivity into generalists who must learn skills and use resources over which we are more amateur than expert.
You should be seeing some parallels to Brexit and Trump by now, but those parallels are merely the most recent version of a long-running human desire for simple answers that end up failing, thereby increasing misery and poverty.
Jacobs discusses five pillars of culture whose decay moves people towards a dark age:
1. Community and family
2. Higher education
3. The effective practice of science and technology
4. Taxes and government powers connected to needs and possibilities, and
5. Self policing by the learned professions
In making this list, she notes that she is not listing racism, environmental destruction, wealth inequality, and so on. That's because -- and I agree -- she sees those problems as the result of failures of the deeper factors listed above.
Let us look briefly into how the weakening of each of these pillars leaves a culture vulnerable to demagoguery, civil strife and collapse.
A weakening of family and community has multiple negative impacts on individuals. First is the loss of social interactions that support tolerance, provide mutual insurance, help children mature, and protect the commons from decay. Single parent families, gated communities, and "government charity" signal such weaknesses at the same time as they provide less-than-complete replacements.
Higher education gives people skills in critical thinking and exposes them to new ideas. The biggest problems with higher education these days comes from an emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering or mathematics) degrees over other fields (especially humanities such as classics, languages, history and so on) that are not "marketable." This emphasis, combined with the need to earn money to repay student debts, leads to a narrowing and biased collective perspectives rather than skills in critical thinking or acceptance of other perspectives.
Science and technology can provide an important check on superstition and fantasy, but its effectiveness will be undermined by "know nothings" who think with their guts and reject experts ("we've had enough of experts"). All that remains are echo chambers of group thinkers who lack the ability -- and inclination -- to reconcile their views with those of others, as well as with reality.
Taxes and powers are a big topic, but their effective use contributes to our collective prosperity just as their abuse contributes to conflict and corruption. Government powers should be used with caution, not for the abuse of citizens (war on drugs or on minorities), foreigners (wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), or the other party (Congressional sabotage of presidents dating from 1994).
Professionals such as lawyers, police, doctors and bankers have all undermined their credibility and contribution by blocking attempts to improve their accountability, introduce competition where they abuse market power, and so on. The rise of "occupational licensing" has made it hard for unemployed people to get jobs cutting hair just as it's blocked the expansion of AirBnB or Uber.
I'm sure that you can add your own arguments and examples to these categories, but Jacobs's claim is that their mismanagement undermines our collective wealth, cooperation and tolerance, leaving the door open to quacks and demagogues who promise quick victories over "those guys." The Economist recently covered this story by way of Trump's campaign, but you can see similar lies by "leaders" in Russia, China, the (semi-)UK, France, Turkey, Egypt and many other countries. The upshot of lies and deception in all corners is an increase in paranoia and permissiveness towards "us versus them" policies that makes everyone worse off.
What drives this process of undermining the five pillars? Money provides an excuse to sacrifice others. Jacobs describes how the US car industry did its best to remove public transportation and pedestrians from city streets that would be freed for use as parking lots and expressways. She also identifies "credentialism" businesses that make money from selling access to jobs that used to be open. (I'd add universities that have raised their prices just as fast as "affordable loans" were issued to students.)
Then you have the "job creators" who seem to think that it's ok to pollute the environment or kill children if someone gets paid to produce that death. The US Chamber of Commerce just claimed that "EU energy prices in the US" would cost the average American household $4,800/year. This travesty of an analysis misses the obvious point that higher prices in Europe are due to taxes that can easily be recycled to families. Energy intensive US businesses, OTOH, are NOT eager to pay for their pollution, as that would force them to use waste less energy. (Don't even get me started on Wall Street's Crony Capitalism.)
Jacobs has her own (sound) logic for debunking the "cars=jobs=growth" garbage spewed by the car/oil/cement industries, but what matters here is the combination of weak communities that cannot oppose new roads, undereducated graduates who cannot think of the human impacts of cars everywhere, a lack of sound science to counter lobbyists, the distortions of lobbying to oppose taxes on harmful car/fuel use and to favor those industries, and -- finally -- the lack of consequences for lawyers and engineers paid by industry to forego their professional methods as they serve their employers' PR departments. Jacobs's point, in other words, is that the social infrastructure that has opposed exploitation of the many by the few (aka "privatize profits and socialize losses") has weakened to the point where we risk slipping into a Dark Age.*
Recall that she published this book in 2004.
Her solution, as ever, is "subsidiarity," which would often be more effective than centralization, e.g., cities controlling their budgets and policies (something that's prevented by provincial governments in Canada, Washington DC in the US, and Brussels in the EU). Greater subsidiarity makes it easier to avoid one-size-fails-all policies,** but not it is not the solution to larger issues such as international trade or climate change. Those issues cannot (and should not) be resolved at the postal code level, BUT it would surely be easier to talk about free trade if people lived in safe communities, felt protected by poverty-reducing taxes (e.g., basic income as an insurance against unemployment) and so on.
Speaking of communities, she has an interesting discussion of the housing bubble and its "inevitable collapse" due to supply outpacing demand. She predicts that collapse will create an opportunity to cut back on sprawl and "densify" cities and suburbs as people find cheaper ways to live in the existing housing stock. This analysis has turned out to be exactly right, except in the magnitude of the damage from the bubble blowing up from its Wall-Street-DC-supercharged size.***
Hopefully, this review gives you a feel of the topics under discussion -- topics that can hardly be more important in today's world. As additional notes, I will mention that the book seems to be structured into a series of essays rather than one long thesis, which can make it seem more like a series of magazine articles than a book, even if its chapters all revolve around the same topic. Further, the book has end notes that are far more interesting than normal. Jacobs was clearly a passionate thinker on these topics.
Bottom Line I give this book FIVE STARS for its timely (timeless?) examination of the forces that support and undermine our communities. The forces propelling us towards a Dark Age are already there, and we must understand them if we are to fight for our quality of life today and in the future.
--------------------------------
* The current difficulties of the no-brainer carbon tax in Washington State -- lefties oppose it because they cannot spend the tax money on their pet projects -- is a perfect example of where a good policy will be undermined by ideological greed, much to the pleasure of the oil lobby. Hello Baptist and Bootleggers!
** Her bashing of zoning codes (e.g., single family residence vs light industrial) was gratifying. She doesn't call for a Houston-style free for all, but "performance codes" that allow buildings and behaviors that do NOT contribute to heavy traffic, noise, smells, blocked skies, ugly lighting and unharmonious building shapes. The US adopted codes in 1916 that banned high density and separated commercial and residential uses. Those codes produced dead neighborhoods that required cars to access. (My Amsterdam neighborhood is full of mixed uses; I was sad to see the metal working shop shut down but the owner was retiring...)
*** Again, you can use her five factors to explain how weak communities (who needs community when you're getting rich?), etc. contributed to the housing crisis. The sad thing is that there's no sign of the Federal Reserve or Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac changing their poor underwriting policies.
Although her common sense and wisdom accumulated from a lengthy lifetime of experience and recognition of repeated and evolving patterns insulated her from sophomoric blunders, she may have been a bit naive in buying into the benign motives ascribed to those who were undermining her beloved institutions. The collapse of family and community life she attributed to housing costs outpacing personal income; denigration of the very concept of prevalent dense urban industrial settings and public transportation; inadequate, ill-conceived, and unpopular public-housing projects; and obsequious catering to private automobiles. She detected science fiction masquerading as rigorous trustworthy scientific inquiry. In fact the instruments and vocabulary of scientific progress have been deliberately distorted to cuckold as many unwitting pawns as possible into subverting and progressively reversing that very progress.
The author branded higher education as efficient specialized assembly-line diploma mills serving as the costly first step in the process of applying for employment, subsidized by progressive business interests, rather than producing learned scholars, a function it is stretched too thin to perform. In fact this is one of the institutions whose mission has been perverted into obstructing the very culture it is supposed to be transmitting. The author recognized the conflict of interest inherent in expecting arcane professional organizations to police and investigate their own members. She viewed tax policy inherited from the outmoded supremacy of agriculture as shortchanging cities by subordinating their revenue collection and appropriation to the whims of distant superior authorities. Functioning of industrialized cities was her chief interest and expertise. She lived long enough to witness banishment of industrialization from her beloved Toronto, heralding the end of the diverse cohabitation she favored.
She foresaw the eventual bursting of the US real-estate bubble similar to what had occurred in Japan. She hoped that her warnings would be taken to heart by active interested members of the decaying society and acted upon before the potential consequences came true and incrementally rooted out even the recollection of the distinctive and vigorous advanced civilization which will have been supplanted by a new dark age, during which the new overlords will inflict the grueling process of reinventing the wheel all over again.
In this short volume, Jane Jacobs articulates her fears of a coming Dark Age, choosing to focus on a few specific indicators. So this isn't an all-encompassing look at what's happening right now, buttressed with copious references & facts. It's more of a personal cri de coeur -- certainly drawing on a lifetime of study & knowledge, but ultimately speaking very much from the heart of old age, watching as the world eagerly marches closer to the edge of a cliff.
What particularly struck me was the emphasis on how easily so much can be forgotten, how a culture can wither on the vine without anyone really noticing until it's too late. As Jacobs points out, there are places in America that already live a Dark Ages existence -- there always have been -- but the number of such places is growing. People who once thought themselves secure are now sliding into the dark.
But how can so much be forgotten in the digital age? As Jacobs also points out, the digital library is an especially fragile thing, one that will deteriorate far more swiftly than an old-fashioned printed book. More than that, though, memory has begun to deteriorate at a frightening pace; supposedly educated people are ignorant of knowledge that a typical grade-schooler once knew.
In addition, the changes in society, the glorification of profit & power above all, the disregard for what we now call the 99% by the 1%, are all having a nagative effect on the fabric of life. Basic survival is becoming precarious, even as the arts & wisdom that sustain a culture are ignored & discarded. No wonder Jacobs was so concerned as she approached the end of her own life!
Again, a smaller book, but well worth reading -- recommended!
The two weak areas are, yes, the lack of positive advice - but then the book is primarily a wake-up call - and also the lack of references. For example, the case of Ireland's cultural dark age having been thwarted by the power of song and art, is an interesting one; but when she refers to Ireland now surpassing the productivity of England, one questions what the source for that information could be.
This is possibly one of the most important books around right now but should be read in conjunction with others such as 'Collapse' to get a more complete picture.