{"product_id":"dark-age-ahead-isbn-9781400076703","title":"Dark Age Ahead","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Death and Life of Great American Cities \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Economy of Cities\u003c\/i\u003e—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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut 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, \u003ci\u003eDark Age Ahead\u003c\/i\u003e is not only the crowning achievement of Jane Jacobs’ career, but one of the most important works of our time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"She once again has proven herself to be one of the most trenchant observers and  challenging critics of American culture and character.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Christian Science Monitor\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"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 \u003ci\u003eDark Age Ahead \u003c\/i\u003eis a treat to read for the way it snaps our perceptions into focus.\" —\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"A short, dense, terse and often lyrical book that sets  the wistful against the hopeful. . . . Wonderful and essential.\" —\u003ci\u003eMilwaukee Journal  Sentinel\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eDark Age Ahead\u003c\/i\u003e is witty and damning. . . . It's hard to disagree with Jane  Jacobs. . . . Worth reading and thinking about.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"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.\" —\u003ci\u003eAustin-American Statesman\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"[Jacobs is] the matchless analyst of all things urban.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"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.\" —\u003ci\u003eSt. Petersburg Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Scholarly yet accessible . . . certain to spark  debate . . . [a] unique addition to the genre of social forecasting.\" —\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"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.\" —\u003ci\u003eToronto Globe and Mail\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Still right and still cranky after all these years.\" —\u003ci\u003eCincinnati Enquirer\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"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.\" —\u003ci\u003eNewsweek\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Jacobs is the quintessential public intellectual, entirely self-taught, omnivorous  in her references, pan-historical in her outlook. . . . \u003ci\u003eDark Age Ahead\u003c\/i\u003e is something of a  retrospective of Jacobs' theories and travels, anchored in specific examples from  her years of observation and activism.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Oregonian\u003c\/i\u003e (Portland)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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.\" —\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"A sweeping survey  of a civilization—ours—on the brink of catastrophe. . . . What makes \u003ci\u003eDark Age Ahead\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\" —\u003ci\u003eBerkeley Daily Planet\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"A blend  of advocacy and anecdote about how to protect the vitality of American cities.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe  Financial Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"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.\"  —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Sun\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJane Jacobs was the legendary author of \u003ci\u003eThe Death and Life of Great American Cities\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Economy of Cities\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eSystems of Survival\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Nature of Economies\u003c\/i\u003e. She died in 2006.\u003c\/p\u003eCHAPTER ONE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Hazard\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe 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?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMass 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?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSurely, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDark 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?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWriting, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnother 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDark 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDuring 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:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCitizenship 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWriters 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSimilar 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTheir 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs 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 had  been revolutionized, mostly by outside forces but also, to a very  minor extent, from within.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen 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 they reached Japan, nor why they  traveled there.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCultures 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDiamond 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLarge 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.Author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44866528772325,"sku":"NP9781400076703","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400076703.jpg?v=1767724492","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/dark-age-ahead-isbn-9781400076703","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}