Dark Age Ahead
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Visionary thinker Jane Jacobs uses her authoritative work on urban life and economies to show us how we can protect and strengthen our culture and communities. In Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs identifies five pillars of our culture that we depend on but which are in serious decline: community and family;
… More »Visionary thinker Jane Jacobs uses her authoritative work on urban life and economies to show us how we can protect and strengthen our culture and communities. In Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs identifies five pillars of our culture that we depend on but which are in serious decline: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation and government; and self-policing by learned professions. The decay of these pillars, Jacobs contends, is behind such ills as environmental crisis, racism and the growing gulf between rich and poor; their continued degradation could lead us into a new Dark Age, a period of cultural collapse in which all that keeps a society alive and vibrant is forgotten. But this is a hopeful book as well as a warning. Jacobs draws on her vast frame of reference -- from fifteenth-century Chinese shipbuilding to zoning regulations in Brampton, Ontario -- and in highly readable, invigorating prose offers proposals that could arrest the cycles of decay and turn them into beneficent ones. Wise, worldly, full of real-life examples and accessible concepts, this book is an essential read for perilous times. From the Hardcover edition.
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Add a CommentSadly, I believe this may have been Ms. Jacobs final book before her passage. A most clever and brilliant little book (quite short) where she most adeptly and sneakily convinces one of all those pesky little situations really were criminal conspiracies after all, and there actually was collusion among those corporate giants. Recently, on yet another of NPR's propaganda shows (and that's about the only American media I occassionally listen to, but never again), they claimed all this stuff, about General Motors, Firestone, and Sun Oil (Sunococ) and a conspiracy to replace trolleys with their buses, run on their gasoline, using their tires, was all so much "conspiracy theory" nonsense (they must have mentioned their phrase, "conspiracy theory" several dozen times. [I was actually in attendance at those congressional committee hearings in 1975, when retired executives from those three corporations testified, under oath, that they did indeed conspire to do such perfidious activities!] Read Ms. Jacobs' book, please. (Although 99% perfect, she did make one error, whereby she ignores her own advice to "never assume" she unfortunately assumed that the US foreign aid program was really meant to do what its mission state claims --- if only she had read Nomi Prins' "Other People's Money" and Nicholas Shaxson's "Treasure Islands" !!!)
I reference this all the time. insightful.
A great book that just touches the surface of the problems facing society in the coming age. A must read for anyone who has ever wondered what happened to community and how we can begin to fix it, Jacobs manages to create something that is at once both thoroughly digestible and highly informative.