Ben's Kumquats

KumquatHere are the notes I made about Ben in my last character guide:

• Environmental doomsday-ist, but cheerful
• Carries his own kumquats
• Published a bestseller on planetary destruction under Armbruster
• Mid-40s
• Moral absolutist

Jane Jacobs makes sure to show us just how special Ben is through his kumquat. It couldn’t be an orange or just anything you’d find at the Piggly Wiggly. He’s come to Armbruster’s prepared with his own kumquat to flavor his water.

Jacobs also establishes early that Ben’s a moral absolutist (or at least appears as such at first glance). He’s an environmentalist. Those not subscribing to his moral code are wasteful and ignorant. He’s not so sure he’s included in Kate’s two systems of esteemed behavior:

You’ve ignored a third method, one that’s not based on domination or on dog-eat-dog competition. It’s based on the common good. I’m thinking of the system that’s summed up by this principle: ‘From each according to his abilities, and to each according to his needs!’ “Why Two Syndromes?” Systems of Survival (p53)

The rest of Armbruster’s group manages to align his supporting examples with one of the two syndromes: common purse communities into the commercial syndrome and social welfare states into the guardian syndrome.

Jacobs remains every bit the economist here. The systems she establishes through Kate are based on methods of survival—norms that help us allocate goods and resources. This is the kind of thrift that is at the etymological root of “economy.”

Unfortunately, the tragedy of the commons illustrates that the common good isn’t always enough. Maximizing our own economic utility, or ability to survive, may just destroy the commons—and our ability to survive. Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is rife with examples of how this plays out for societies over centuries.

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.

The hazard: an annotated bibliography (part 1)

I don’t understand why annotated bibliographies aren’t a more popular genre. They are the intellectually upscale equivalent of the Readers Digest. It really helps one keep up during those PhD-level soirees. You might also think of it as an analog mashup.

For each chapter in Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs includes a “Notes and Comments” section where she goes a bit deeper into the sources she almost offhandedly references in her prose. I figured I’d chime on a couple of those and maybe add a couple more.

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Medieval Cities, Henri Pirenne (1925)

Medieval Cities is one Jacobs references and one I’ve added to my “to read” list. Of course, based on her other titles, she would look to this book because Pirenne identifies cities as “the engines of economic life.”

The application to Dark Age Ahead relates to his identification of the atrophy of city trade in the Mediterranean world during the Early Middle Ages. The revival through the High and Late Middle Ages into the Renaissance correlates to the revival in trade.

Jacobs calls this a “basic text for understanding how the world’s economic networks operate and how they fail.”

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The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon (published 1776-1789)

On one end of that time period, I have to tack on History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I have yet to read either Gibbon’s eight volumes or the condensed versions.

This is Enlightenment era thinking. I always struggled with historiography (the study of the study of history), but at least this falls into a Modern approach to history. Gibbon laments the loss of civic virtue in the Roman Empire. It’s own citizens became weak. The barbarians won out.

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The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Ferdinand Braudel (1949)

 I’ll put Braudel on the other end of that period because of the foundation he laid for the historical perspective that Jared Diamond among others builds on, first introduced in La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’Epoque de Philippe II -OR- The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.

Braudel works with three “levels” of time.

The longest and inescapable: geographical time. Think environmental cycles and long periods of change. Of course we think about it in contemporary discussions about climate change, but, if you can believe it, this was quite the new addition to history.

The second “level” relates to social and cultural history, which Gibbon did get into, but his predecessors did not.

Pre-Modern historians and “Coach” who taught your high school “Western Civ” focus on the third “level” of events, politics, and people. This is why you had to memorize all those dates and people. If that’s all the deeper you went with history, I feel your pain. There’s so much more. And it doesn’t require rote memorization!

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With all that groundwork, I think I’m ready to hit on Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond tomorrow. Jacobs casts the looming Dark Age Ahead in terms of the loose ends left by Diamond, so it’s worth a little focus.

Next Up: Dark Age Ahead (part 2)

Jane Jacobs’ writing style can be cutting and caustic. She has no need for sarcasm, though she does venture into the hyperbole at times (see “Introduction” The Death and Life of Great American Cities). You could say that when she does, her subject deserves it.

Jacobs is matter-of-fact. She’ll unpack a complex idea or observation, then, buried in the middle of a paragraph you can find a simple sentence, pithy little gem:

Unity, like many good things, is good only in moderation. “The Hazard,” Dark Age Ahead (p19)

In the context of not only reviewing, but expanding the argument put forth by Jared Diamond in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel about why there are winners and losers among societies and civilizations over the span of world history, she offers this pithy comment on the direction China took long before communism’s rise there.

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I must confess my excitement. Not since reading Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed have I found such a generous overlap between two small islands of my humble “expertise”: City & Regional Planning and History.

For a large portion of June, I will be diving deeper into Dark Age Ahead. This is Jacobs at her most expert, after years of observing societies, cities, economies, and processes. It’s also Jacobs with years and years spent writing. The style and tone are already remarkably different than The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

I’m interested in finding out just what kind of capstone Dark Age Ahead serves for her legacy. I wonder at just how much this trying time for our world and society might lend this book the same staying power that The Death and Life of Great American Cities holds 48 years after original publication. It could make for some interesting application this year.