Jacobs addresses, among other things, the decline in representative government.
I often draw on Jane Jacobs’ work, especially
– Systems of Survival, A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics
and
– The Nature of Economies. (I was privileged to have some correspondence with Jane Jacobs regarding Economies.)
Jane Jacobs, deceased April 2006, wrote several other influential books.
She shepherded the formation of what was originally tagged “the C-5”, a coalition of the 5 (now more) largest of Canada’s cities. The C-5 was formed to assert the need for Cities to have access to tax revenues without having to beg Ottawa for funding. Some cities have larger populations to service than some provinces. In relatively short order the issue moved onto the national radar screen.
Her most recent book is Dark Age Ahead. Many thanks to Hart for picking up the following. Of particular importance is the article from the Globe and Mail.
/Sandra
=========================
On Ideas, CBC Radio 1, 9pm
(NOTE: this summary is helpful. But 2017, I cannot find the full text in the CBC Archives. I think the content is available somewhere. Suggest: internet search if you want specifically the CBC discussion.)
Friday, April 22, 2005
WARNING: DARK AGE AHEAD, Part One CD
Legendary writer Jane Jacobs describes how Dark Ages, cultures’ dead ends, happen as knowledge is lost and ideas vanish.
Jacobs warns that five social pillars are crumbling:
- family and community,
- higher education,
- science,
- representative government, and
- professional self-regulation.
With analysis by Robert Lucas (economics), Alan Jacobs (city planning), Henry Mintzberg (management), and others. Part two continues on April 29.
========================
Jane Jacobs wins Shaughnessy Cohen Prize
Canadian Press
OTTAWA — Dark Age Ahead by influential urban thinker Jane Jacobs has spent a lot of time on bestseller lists this past year, and now the book has also collected a prestigious award for political writing.
Jacobs, 88, was presented with the Shaughnessy Cohen award, worth $15,000, at a sold-out Politics and the Pen event in the nation’s capital. Jurors selected the book “for its elegance, its range, its relevance, and its insight into the contemporary world.”
“I think that one reason it’s been such a popular book is that people really know themselves that the dark age is ahead. They’re worried, and they haven’t articulated it, but they feel it,” Jacobs said in a telephone interview a few hours before the gala dinner attended by politicians, writers and members of the arts and business communities.
“And I’m really just telling them what they already are aware of. They feel helpless about it — that’s clear. That’s what the feedback says.”
The book looks at North American culture and compares it to European culture before the fall of the Roman Empire, which was followed by the Dark Ages, and finds many of the same conditions.
“I think it’s late but we don’t need to go down the drain,” said Jacobs. “But we will if we aren’t aware. It’s a cautionary book. But I don’t know if telling movers and shakers that makes any difference.”
Born and raised in the United States, she has lived in Toronto since 1968. A longtime thesis for Jacobs has been the scourge of the automobile and its impact on modern society _ suburban sprawl, and people who spend their time enclosed in cars, homes and shopping malls that all resemble each other.
She laments that when a transit system makes money in a densely populated core and is forced to expand to spread-out suburban areas that “won’t use transit and can’t use it because of the way they’re planned,” then “all you do then is milk and rob the part of the system that is workable and is supporting itself and some of the rest and you bleed it dry.”
Making the “supposed movers and shakers” aware is not the solution, she said. “It’s maybe the start of a solution,” she said. “But the right moves have to be made after that by legislators and by premiers and prime ministers. I think things have gone so far now in the case of Toronto that only making the city and its immediate hinterlands (Greater Toronto Area) a province of its own will work.”
Did she expect politicians in the crowd Wednesday evening would be receptive to such an idea?
“I don’t think that any existing politicians would be receptive to it,” Jacobs replied. “It rocks the boat.”
As for the Shaughnessy Cohen prize, Jacobs confessed to being “thrilled” about it. “I’ve been a finalist before on some prizes, but I’ve gotten used to the idea that I was always a bridesmaid on these things and never the bride,” she said.
“This one, I couldn’t be more pleased to have won.” The prize is given each year to a non-fiction book with literary merit that “enlarges our understanding of contemporary Canadian political and social issues.” It was established to honour Shaughnessy Cohen, an MP from Windsor, Ont., who died in 1998.
Sheila Martin, wife of Prime Minister Paul Martin, is the honorary chair of Politics and the Pen. The jury this year consisted of Senator Pat Carney, writer and professor Andrew Cohen and writer Marci McDonald.
The dinner raised more than $120,000 for the Writers’ Trust of Canada, a national charitable organization that provides support to writers.
The other nominees this year were Gwynne Dyer, J.L. Granatstein, Rex Weyler, and Jennifer Welsh.
================================
April 13, 2005
Jacobs on Trillium short list
TORONTO (CP) – Jane Jacobs, Wayson Choy and Alice Munro are among authors on the English-language short list for the annual Trillium book awards for Ontario writers.
Jacobs is on the list for her book Dark Age Ahead, Choy for All That Matters, and Munro for Runaway, organizers announced Wednesday. Also on the list are Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall for Down to This, Roo Borson for Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida, Catherine Bush for Claire’s Head, and Michael Winter for The Big Why.
. . . . The Trillium awards were established in 1987 by the Ontario government to recognize writers in the province.
=====================================
GLOBE AND MAIL ARTICLE
Dark Age Ahead
By JANE JACOBS
Thursday, May 13, 2004 Updated at 3:35 PM EST
Globe and Mail Update
Jane Jacobs is the author of several books, including the classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which redefined urban studies and economic policy, and the bestselling Systems of Survival. She lives and works in Toronto.
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 catastrophe, complacently and rather excessively conjuring up people who eat dirt and sell human skin….There is little or no metal; iron is reserved for weapons.
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; how to harvest honey from hollow-tile hives doubling as garden fences. In districts where even slaves had been well clothed, most people wore filthy rags.
Some three centuries after the Roman collapse, bubonic plague, hitherto unknown in Europe, crept in from North Africa, where it was endemic, and exploded into the first of many European bubonic plague epidemics. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, conventionally depicted as Famine, War, Pestilence, and Death, had already been joined by a fifth demonic horseman, Forgetfulness.
A Dark Age is not merely a collection of subtractions. It is not a blank; much is added to fill the vacuum. But the additions break from the past and themselves reinforce a loss of the past. In Europe, languages that derived from formerly widely understood Latin diverged and became mutually incomprehensible. Everyday customs, rituals, and decorations diverged as old ones were lost; ethnic awarenesses came to the fore, often antagonistically; the embryos of nation-states were forming.
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. Gladiatorial battles and hungry wild animals unleashed upon prisoners were forgotten, too, but here and there, in backwaters, the memory of combat between a man on foot and a bull was retained because it was practiced. Diets changed, with gruel displacing bread, and salt fish and wild fowl almost displacing domesticated meat.
Rules of inheritance and property holding changed. The composition of households changed drastically with conversion of Rome’s traditional family-sized farms to feudal estates. Methods of warfare and ostensible reasons for warfare changed as the state and its laws gave way to exactions and oppressions by warlords.
Writers disappeared, along with readers and literacy, as schooling became rare. Religion changed as Christianity, formerly an obscure cult among hundreds of obscure cults, won enough adherents to become dominant and to be accepted as the state religion by Constantine, emperor of the still intact Eastern Roman Empire, and then, also as the state religion, in territorial remnants of the vanished Western Empire. The very definitions of virtue and the meaning of life changed. In Western Christendom, sexuality became highly suspect.
In sum, during the time of mass amnesia, not only was most classical culture forgotten, and what remained coarsened; but also, Western Europe underwent the most radical and thoroughgoing revolution in its recorded history — a political, economic, social, and ideological revolution that was unexamined and even largely unnoticed, as such, while it was under way. In the last desperate years before Western Rome’s collapse, local governments had been expunged by imperial decree and were replaced by a centralized military despotism, not a workable organ for governmental judgments and reflections.
Similar phenomena are to be found in the obscure Dark Ages that bring defeated aboriginal cultures to a close. Many subtractions combine to erase a previous way of life, and everything changes as a richer past converts to a meager present and an alien future. During the conquest of North America by Europeans, an estimated twenty million aboriginals succumbed to imported diseases, warfare, and displacement from lands on which they and their hundreds of different cultures depended.
Their first response to the jolts of European invasion was to try to adapt familiar ways of life to the strange new circumstances. Some groups that had been accustomed to trading with one another, for example, forged seemingly workable trade links with the invaders. But after more conquerors crowded in, remnants of aboriginal survivors were herded into isolated reservations.
Adaptations of the old cultures became impossible and thus no longer relevant; so, piece by piece, the old cultures were shed. Some pieces were relinquished voluntarily in emulation of the conquerors, or surrendered for the sake of the invaders’ alcohol, guns, and flour; most slipped away from disuse and forgetfulness.
As in Europe after Rome’s collapse, everything changed for aboriginal survivors during the forgetful years: education of children; religions and rituals; the composition of households and societies; food; clothing; habitations; recreations; laws and recognized systems of ownership and land use; concepts of justice, dignity, shame, esteem. Languages changed, with many becoming extinct; crafts, skills–everything was gone. In sum, the lives of aboriginals have been revolutionized, mostly by outside forces but also, to a very minor extent, from within.
In the late twentieth century, as some survivors gradually became conscious of how much had been lost, they began behaving much like the scholarly pioneers of the fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance who searched for relics of classical Greek and Roman culture. Cree and Cherokee, Navajo and Haida groped for fragments of lost information by searching out old records and artifacts dispersed in their conquerors’ museums and private collections. Jeered at by an uncomprehending white public of cultural winners, they began impolitely demanding the return of ancestral articles of clothing and decoration, of musical instruments, of masks, even of the bones of their dead, in attempts to retrieve what their peoples and cultures had been like before their lives were transformed by mass amnesia and unsought revolution.
When the abyss of lost memory by a people becomes too deep and too old, attempts to plumb it are futile. The Ainu, Caucasian aborigines of Japan, have a known modern history similar in some ways to that of North American aboriginals. Centuries before the European invasion of North America, the Ainu lost their foraging territories to invading ancestors of the modern Japanese. Surviving remnants of Ainu were settled in isolated reservations, most on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, where they still live. The Ainu remain a mysterious people, to themselves as well as to others. Physical characteristics proclaim their European ancestry; they may be related to Norse peoples. But where in Europe they came from can only be conjectured. They retain no information about their locations or cultures there, nor by what route theyreached Japan, nor why they traveled there.
Cultures that triumphed in unequal contests between conquering invaders and their victims have been meticulously analyzed by a brilliant twenty-first-century historian and scientist, Jared Diamond, who has explained his analyses in a splendidly accessible book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. He writes that he began his exploration with a question put to him by a youth in New Guinea, asking why Europeans and Americans were successful and rich. The advantages that Diamond explored and the patterns he traces illuminate all instances of cultural wipeout.
Diamond argues persuasively that the difference between conquering and victim cultures is not owing to genetic discrepancies in intelligence or other inborn personal abilities among peoples, as racists persist in believing. He holds that, apart from variations in resistance to various diseases, the fates of cultures are not genetically influenced, let alone determined. But, he writes, successful invaders and conquerors have historically possessed certain crucial advantages conferred on them long ago by the luck of what he calls biogeography. The cultural ancestors of winners, he says, got head starts as outstandingly productive farmers and herders, producing ample and varied foods that could support large and dense populations.
Large and dense populations–in a word, cities–were able to support individuals and institutions engaged in activities other than direct food production. For example, such societies could support specialists in tool manufacturing, pottery making, boatbuilding, and barter, could organize and enforce legal codes, and could create priesthoods for celebrating and spreading religions, specialists for keeping accounts, and armed forces for defense and aggression.