In one paragraph, Jacobs is talking about the Mycenaeans; just before that the difference between the shift away from agrarian lifestyles in the west as compared with the abrupt colonial imposition of postagrarian culture. In the next she drops this gem:

At a given time it is hard to tell whether forces of cultural life or death are in the ascendancy. Is suburban sprawl, with its murders of communities and wastes of land, time, and energy, a sign of decay? Or is rising interest in means of overcoming sprawl a sign of vigor and adaptability in North American culture? Arguably, either could turn out to be true. “Dark Age Patterns” Dark Age Ahead (p169-70)

June’s over. So is Dark Age Ahead. I’m sure I’ll be turning back to it as I work through The Death and Life of Great American Cities and her other works. I hope I’m at the height of my craft at age 87. If anyone claims Jacobs peaked in 1961 at Death and Life, surely they’ve never read this great tome:

• Stern voice
• Able to knit together a complicated, but comprehensive and readable narrative on potentially divisive topics
• Wry
• Able to sow seeds of optimism in the midst of pessimistic and dire warnings
• Shorter than either Diamond’s Collapse or Guns, Germs and Steel (you might not need to read those if you’re satisfied with what you learn about his works here)
• Brilliant capstone
• Too much already proven true only 4-5 years since publication

Development, evolution, progress - they all imply a direction; they all fall into a teleological trap. We’re coming off a centuries long modernist binge where human ideas and effort would continue to advance us all, by and by.

Alternately, historians and cultural storytellers identified cycles. The world was not getting better, by and by: revolving, not evolving. Others have seen similar cycles in the decline and revitalization/gentrification of urban districts (similar to Jacobs on “unslumming and slumming”).

I’m not not enough of an intellectual historian to know how far back a mashup of these views go. You can see how they could: time on the x-axis, another variable on the y-axis. Despite dips, the overall trend is up.

Hegel put ideas on the y-axis. Marx adapted that for economies and classes. Since I’m using Schumpeter (of the “creative destruction” idea mentioned previously) you could throw him in too, though I’m not as familiar with his work to know if it fits. There are certainly models of economic growth, such as the business cycle, that others might fit on a similar chart.

Ignoring all this doodling and academic-like name dropping, there’s one question worth asking: Why must things trend up?

*

I don’t have any unified theory of how this all works based on entropy or geometry, despite the collection of ideas I’ve trumpeted above. However, thanks to my liberal arts education, these things rattle around in my head and collide. I’m reminded of Septimus Hodge from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia - another consequence of my liberal arts education.

So, what is it good for?

I get what Jacobs is saying about systems and corrective stabilization because I’ve had amazing teachers who have taught me how to approach, observe, and think about such things.

Some people think optimistically that if things get bad enough, they will get better because of the reaction of beneficent pendulums. When a culture is working wholesomely, beneficent pendulum swings—effective feedback—do occur. “The hazard,” Dark Age Ahead (p21)

If that culture is enfeebled as institutions fail (the chapters in Dark Age Ahead that I’ve been reviewing look at these institutions), Jacobs concludes, “Beneficent corrections of deterioration are not guaranteed.” (p24)

This brief episode of Americanness we’re in is not guaranteed as some “city on a hill” as Puritan John Winthrop cribbed from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

I love being generic and saying “things.” Of course there are things that trend up. Sometimes we mistake what exactly those things are. I’ve been thinking some on “creative destruction” since reading “Barack Hoover Obama” by Kevin Baker in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine. It’s a great history lesson on Hoover’s mistakes coming out of the Roaring ’20s, going into the Great Depression. According to Baker, Hoover mistook “business progressivism” as one of those things - that was the teleological trap he fell into.

Baker makes parallels between Hoover and Obama. He fears Obama may fall into a similar trap. It makes me want to go back through some of Obama’s rhetoric and find some of the instances where he sounded more like Franklin Roosevelt, audacious enough to hope that his presidency won’t end up in the same trap.

According to Jane Jacobs, there are five jeopardized pillars of our culture, perhaps past which our culture becomes unsalvagable, irrelevant, and unstable. These are:

1. community and family,
2. higher education,
3. the effective practice of science and science-based technology,
4. taxes and governmental powers directly in touch with needs and possibilities, and
5. self-policing by the learned professions

Jacobs does not expect this list to be comprehensive. These are the pillars showing “ominous signs of decay” in her eyes. Further, other cultural failings subject to 24-7 TV news punditry, think-tanking, and multiple single-issue movements fall under the umbrella of these five pillars. Think of them as symptoms or signs, such as racism, environmental destruction, crime, and income inequality.

Over the next four chapters, Jacobs steps out of the prevaling, historically foreshortened perspective. Bit by bit, there’s little radical or new. She’ll admit as much. What’s worth paying attention to is the narrative she weaves together. Stick with me throughout much of June and let’s see where she gets.