When Streetcars Ruled the Streets

Columbus, dwarfed

I love the story of China’s naval dominance early in the 15th century. It, deservedly, takes the West’s colonial and imperial past down a few pegs.

Further Reading: When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433

General Motors’ bankruptcy makes their anti-competitive and illegal dismantling of US cities’ streetcar systems all the more rankling.

I’ve read the account in Duany’s Suburban Nation and elsewhere, but had never found it as compelling as Jacobs’ brief synopsis, noting:

An electric streetcar was more economical to maintain than a bus and lasted three times as long as a bus… “Families rigged to fail” Dark Age Ahead (p39)

Despite knowing both of these stories, I had never made the connection. China jettisoned their fleet; US cities ditched the streetcar.

Question: What does this have to do with families?

Jacobs’ answer: Dependence on private automobiles has been at the expense of community and family life.

Time is limited. I recently heard P.J. O’Rourke describe cars as “motorized cupholders.” It’s where we are, where we spend our time, where we break bread “together.”

It’s not all on GM; it’s not all because of the streetcar. Jacobs promises to detail more of the forces at work in American culture.

The hazard: an annotated bibliography (part 2)

You might want to glance at yesterday’s post if you haven’t already.

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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond (1997)

So now, after a brief jaunt through historiography, we’re back to Jacobs’ sources with Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. This is a great place to start if you’re interested in this third level of historical discourse: Pulitzer prize winning, National Bestseller, Yadda, yadda, yadda…

It’s also Jacobs’ launching point for Dark Age Ahead.

Diamond’s work tries to answer a question that comes out of a personal anecdote: Why did white/Western Civilization develop so much “cargo”? In other words, what was it that gave rise to the colonial and imperial domination by the west?

We’re getting into that Braudelian geographical level of history from yesterday’s post: diffusion of innovation, technology, disease, migration, the environment, etc.

Two words: unequal contests.

It ain’t superiority and inferiority on some genetic level; that’s racist. We’re not talking about some purely social or cultural superiority (level two). It’s not about Cortez or the Siege of Fort Pitt (persons and events). Look at the armor of Cortez; look at the small pox laden blankets involved in Fort Pitt.

Two more words: geographic luck. That’s all that gave Cortez his technology and the soldiers of Fort Pitt their immunities.

Jacobs takes Diamond to task for a couple loose ends that don’t fit in this model of “geographic luck.”

1. China’s naval dominance - Their technology helped them rule the seas long before the West. But they just stopped.
2. The Fertile Crescent - Mesopotamia had and lost its geographic advantage. Any Western Civ textbook will trace much of the West’s innovation to this region. What caused the environmental ignorance that led to the abuse and destruction of one of the most productive environments?

Jacobs manages to tie these two loose ends together. She draws out Diamond’s Mesopotamian loose end through an era of cultural xenophobia that arose after the Spanish Inquisition. She finds a different source of xenophobia in China’s case. The short story: It was political.

Collapse, Jared Diamond (2004)In both cases, human decisions doomed the “losers” to their ultimate fate.

Losers are confronted with such radical jolts in circumstances that their institutions cannot adapt adequately, become irrelevant, and are dropped. “The hazard” Dark Age Ahead (p20)

Only months after Dark Age Ahead was published, Jared Diamond also addressed the role of human decisions with the release of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

I’m still trying to track down any commentary Jacobs has on Collapse or Diamond has on Dark Age Ahead. I guess that means I can save Collapse for later.