10th anniversary post: Dark Age Ahead (And Maybe Closer?)

 

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006)

Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead. New York: Random House, 2004, 241 pp.

Jane Jacobs wrote this "gloomy but a hopeful book" (p. 3) late in her life, and I read it ten years later. Now, ten more years later, I am reading it again. Not much seems to have changed: American society still seems poised at the fork in the road described by the passage I quoted back then:

Is suburban sprawl, with its murders of communities and wastes of land, time, and energy, a sign of decay? Or is rising interest in means of overcoming sprawl a sign of vigor and adaptability in North American culture? Arguably, either could turn out to be true. (169-170)

I was probably more inclined to the hopeful option in 2014 than I am today. As a student of American politics, I've seen so many unforced errors and so much willful delusion in the last ten years that it's hard to be very hopeful. 

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Dark Age takes its title from the name commonly given to the period of European history following the fall of the Roman Empire, but she points out the numerous cultures in human history have collapsed and "become literally lost" (4). Yes, the Middle Ages had Charlemagne and Thomas Aquinas, but 11th century French peasants were literally eating dirt and dying young.

So much had been forgotten in the forgetful centuries: the Romans' use of legumes in crop rotation to restore the soil; how to mine and smelt iron and make and transport picks for miners, and hammers and anvils for smiths... In districts where even slaves had been well clothed, most people wore filthy rags.... Citizenship gave way to serfdom; old Roman cities and towns were largely deserted and their underpopulated remnants sank into poverty and squalor; their former amenities, such as public baths and theatrical performances, became not even a memory. (7-8)

As challenges arise, feedback is ignored, and knowledge stabilizing forces is also ignored if not actively suppressed. "I have written this cautionary book in hopeful expectation that time remains for corrective actions," she concludes in the introductory chapter, and proceeds with a series of warnings about five "pillars of our culture" (24). Core problems, like racism, environmental destruction, crime, political alienation, and surging inequality, arguably flow from the decline of these pillars.

Chapter 2 on families notes "Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities" (37). Families are stressed by car-dependency--which is as strong as ever in most of the country--as well as the price of housing. Twenty years ago, when the book was published, the median housing price-to-household income ratio in the U.S. exceeded 6.0 for the first time since the 1950s. It peaked at 6.81 two years later, and then resumed climbing in 2012. It is now 7.70 (longtermtrends.net; data are from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the U.S. Census Bureau), which is scary.

Chapter 3 on higher education argues that it has become a matter of "credentialing, not educating... This is not in the interest of employers in the long run," but it provides hiring agents with a quick-and-dirty indicator of success (44-45). Remarkably, in my own career I have encountered dozens of students who come with their own thirst for knowledge, but alas, there are not enough of them to keep the college's doors open. If anything, the demographic cliff faced by colleges, along with the suspicion of independent knowledge fostered by powerful interests discussed in Chapter 4, have exacerbated the credentialing obsession. So good teachers are "despairing" (62), but more crucially, our culture loses the "critical capacities and depth of understanding" needed to make stabilizing corrections (63).

Chapter 4 on science talks about the widespread failure to study problems by observing, gathering and drawing conclusions from evidence, as opposed to fitting everything into accepted dogma. Happily for urbanists many of the examples have to do with automobile traffic. And of course, we're still arguing about climate change, with disasters crashing all around us.

Chapter 5 on taxation discusses how federalism in Canada as well as the U.S. has left cities without the autonomy to solve their own problems. In 2004 Toronto was getting slapped down by Ontario in the name of laissez-faire economics; these days the State of Iowa uses preemption against cities as blood sport for any reason at all. (We can't even prevent the sale of fireworks within the city limits.) And not just Iowa, of course, given the State of New York's last-minute veto against New York City's congestion pricing plan is still fresh in our minds. Most people, and most of the economy, lives in cities, but their residents can't negotiate the terms by which they will live together.

Chapter 6 on the failures of professional self-policing brings to mind the waste in federal anti-recession grants in 2008-10 and 2020-21. I remember commentary to the effect that President Obama was so naive to expect that corporate recipients of bailout money would use the largesse for the good of the economy rather than for the good of themselves, since of course businesses were supposed to focus on their own bottom lines rather than any public purpose. Today, nobody trusts anyone to handle artificial intelligence technology well. Of course, in politics, we've seen the repeated failures of the Republican Party to discipline or even restrain the egregious Donald Trump. (For the failures of both parties in this presidential election, see Levin 2024.)

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Jacobs concludes with some advice on how to recognize and reverse Dark Age "spirals." Unwinding, the title of chapter 7, requires clear thinking, informed self-confidence, adequate capital, and "redundancy of mentors and examples" for broad diffusion of essential skills (159). Again, urbanists will be pleased to see her use housing as an example, as she traces the roots of our current difficulty from years of underinvestment during the Depression and war through exclusionary zoning to the waste of suburban sprawl (also exclusionary). She did not live to see the 2007 housing market collapse but clearly saw it coming. She also did not live to see Peter Calthorpe evangelizing for grand boulevards, but cites The Boulevard Book by Allen B. Jacobs and co-authors (MIT Press, 2002) as possessing insight into how to achieve the "densification" we still need (149ff.).

I am slowly steeling myself to the realization that cultural conservatives will dominate American politics in the near term (cf. Draeger 2024). Jacobs's perspective on the imminence of a cultural Dark Age shows that they are not wrong to fear the imminent loss of something essential in our country. Unfortunately, their nostalgia-fueled misperception of what that is has led them to espouse reaction and social control instead of imagining a "beneficient spiral" that corrects cultural weakness. That's going to be too bad. I hope I don't have to eat dirt.