Outer Darkness

Jane Jacobs is a realistic visionary. She's like a friendly next-door neighbor who likes to chat about the problems with traffic and parking on your block, and you agree politely—until you gradually notice that she has been laying out a far-reaching, cogent critique of the entire society, complete with systemic solutions to apparently unconnected problems. That's when you realize she may be the smartest person you know.

I grew up in cities and continue to love the diversity and excitement of an urban environment—a crowded street with a good Jewish deli on one corner, a real Italian pizza parlor on the other, and a streetcar bound for downtown in the middle—so I have always appreciated Jane Jacobs and her distinctive way of creating meaning from daily particulars. Her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, explains the organic forces that give an unplanned metropolis such economic and psychological power—the web of creative relationships that makes New York much more than the sum of a thousand villages.

Another great book, though less accessible, is Systems of Survival, in which Jacobs distinguishes two cognitive modes of social organization, each with its own set of values: Guardian (epitomized by the police or the military) and Competitive (as in business or science). She posits that each is a coherent, useful mode, historically proven and appropriate in its sphere. But when the principles of the Competitive mode are applied to Guardian activities (or vice versa), values are muddled, and the results are often disastrous. For example, business practices, with their emphasis on the bottom line, do not typically value the quality of life or long-term environmental health. As a result, an MBA approach to government is bound to fail, since it does not guard what most people cherish.

Dark Age Ahead, Jacobs's latest book, has a title that seems to despair of solutions. And she does indeed lay out the worsening problems we are faced with—she calls them vicious cycles. But even now, approaching age 90, Jacobs is an optimist, and she also outlines the virtuous cycles that we could reenergize if only we would. "This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book," she says.

The gloom stems from the largely unrecognized fact that dark ages do occur (and not only after the fall of the Roman Empire), that a culture can malfunction and deteriorate to the point that it begins to lose its accumulated working knowledge, the glue that holds its way of life together. And then, as in 9th- and 10th-century Europe, cultural forgetfulness increases so severely that people no longer even know what kinds of things they do not know. Their lives are simpler, shorter, and harsher than their ancestors', because the complex web of information and human response is attenuated.

The gloom in Dark Age Ahead is also specific: there are political and cultural forces, Jacobs says, that are undermining the vitality of North American societies. She identifies

five pillars of our culture that we depend on to stand firm.… They are in process of becoming irrelevant, and so are dangerously close to the brink of lost memory and cultural uselessness. These five pillars are

• community and family (the two are so tightly connected that they cannot be considered separately)
  
• higher education
  
• the effective practice of science and science-based technology (again, so tightly connected that they cannot be considered separately)
  
• taxes and governmental powers directly in touch with needs and possibilities
  
• self-policing by the learned professions

Jacobs discusses each "pillar" in detail, explaining the dangers in our current course. For example, in a chapter titled "Dumbed-Down Taxes" she begins by describing the end of the post-Roman Dark Age, around 1100 CE, when European culture began to revive. The turning point, she says, was when early medieval cities, led by Venice, began to trade with each other and with the Middle East and Asia. And the reason it was a turning point is that the cities' policies were built on two principles, subsidiarity and fiscal accountability.

Subsidiarity is the principle that government works best—most responsibly and responsively—when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses. Fiscal accountability is the principle that institutions collecting and disbursing taxes work most responsibly when they are transparent to those providing the money.

These principles are nearly unknown in North American government today, where we suffer from what John Brewer calls fiscophobia. Jacobs, now a resident of Toronto, describes how the lack of subsidiarity drove a once-excellent public transportation system to ruin; the citizens of Toronto valued it and would have taxed themselves to maintain it, but the taxation authority was vested in Ontario and Canada, and public transportation fell victim to competing interests at those levels.

As for fiscal accountability, she tells the sad, related tales of the deterioration of the health and public school systems in Canada, and the hidden or obscured fiscal decisions that led to the deterioration. She lays much of the blame on the "moralistic belief that each public service or amenity should directly earn enough to support its cost." Dumb and dumber, to apply Competitive principles to Guardian issues. In the US, this is our destructive legacy from Reagan, carried out with increasing fervor by Bush the Younger, an MBA fiscophobe of the first order.

But what about the hope? What can we do to avoid the seemingly inevitable Dark Age? As the problems are not simple, Jacobs has no simple answers. She does say that vicious spirals can be unwound, but to do so requires first a culture that values human capital, that provides opportunity for every inhabitant to contribute to the society while achieving personal rewards. It also requires a willingness to understand the complex interrelationships of social problems and the ability to pursue long-term goals. It requires a "patient and grown-up attitude" and a society that is "self-aware."

Finally, hope for avoiding a Dark Age requires revivification of a culture's core values, those ideas and principles that have brought us successfully this far. Jacob suggests that for those of us in North America, Lincoln had the right words: "that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth."