When a respected New Urbanist like Jane Jacobs issues an ominous warning that we're headed for a new dark age - a civilizational collapse on the scale of the Roman decline - one stands up and takes notice. Is it possible that we will someday forget how to write software or manufacture semiconductors, and be reduced like the punk-rock bikers in The Road Warrior to stealing gasoline from each other because we can no longer refine it? I'm skeptical. Doomsayers usually underestimate the self-corrective feedback loops built into modern social systems. But the September 11 attacks suggest that our society may be hoist on its own technological petard, vulnerable to the very machines we are so adept at making.
In Dark Age Ahead, Jacobs worries over crises in five areas: the collapse of the family and its communities, the tendency of higher educational institutions to credential rather than educate, the prostitution of science, conservative tax-cutting that starves local governments, and the failure of professions (especially accounting) to police themselves.
These are all legitimate social and public policy issues. Of the five, the collapse of the family is the most consequential, but Jacobs writes few lines on its causes and ramifications. She also conflates this issue with trivial ones like a bad revenue-sharing formula in Toronto and the Enron scandal; together they hardly seem to presage a dark age.
In other respects, Jacobs' knowledge and analysis of the topics she covers are, as her publisher generously puts it, "idiosyncratic." The state of American community (an idea that is central to her lifelong concerns), for example, became the subject of intense debate after Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community suggested a variety of causes for changes in social relatedness, from television and ethnic diversity to the increased number of women in the paid labor force. Even the assertion that we have less community today than previously has not been empirically validated; many think it has merely shifted from face-to-face to electronically mediated forms. There's no hint of such complexities in Dark Age.
Jacobs seems strangely out of touch with important trends of the past generation, which she herself played a role in shaping. In her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (which I continue to assign to my students), Jacobs pointed out that public safety in urban neighborhoods like the North End of Boston was not a function of a heavy police presence but of "eyes on the street" - adults who enforced community norms on young people before they got to the point of committing crimes. Thus was borne the concept of social capital: the notion that social connectedness through norms and networks constitutes an invisible but critical asset. She inspired a generation of urban planners to reverse suburbanization and revitalize downtown areas, as well as the New Urbanism architectural movement, designed to strengthen community.
But in Dark Age, Jacobs speculates, for instance, about ways to increase population densities in suburbs, without seeming to be aware that this has been happening for some time with the growth of what Washington Post correspondent Joel Garreau labels "edge cities." (I live next to one: Tysons Corner, Virginia, which, together with the other suburbs of Washington, employs more people than the District of Columbia.) Too bad, because the long-term impact of her life's work is much greater than would be apparent to readers of the present volume.
Francis Fukuyama (fukuyama@jhu.edu) is a professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins and the author of State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century, due in May.
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