The twilight of civilization

In 1960, in a book that began as a Fortune magazine article called "Downtown is for People," Jane Jacobs warned of the problems cities would face in the late 20th century and offered ways of preserving the best of true urbanity. More than 40 years after publishing that prescient landmark treatise, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," she once again has proven herself to be one of the most trenchant observers and challenging critics of American culture and character.

Her latest, "Dark Age Ahead," deals not just with cities but with civilization itself. She claims she wrote it "to help our culture avoid sliding into a dead end."

In her opening sentence, Jacobs writes, "This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book," but throughout its 200 pages, I found it to be far more gloomy than hopeful. Echoing the sentiment of Walt Kelly's "Pogo," a wise old possum who was popular when the author, now 88, was young, she has found the enemy - "and it is us."

"A culture," Jacobs writes, "is unsalvageable if stabilizing forces themselves become ruined and irrelevant." She is especially troubled by the breakdown of the normative order and the loss of interdependence, and she indicates that if we don't act boldly to stem the tide, we will be heading pell-mell into a new Dark Age matching the reversals of fortune that occurred after the fall of Mesopotamia, Rome, dynastic rule in China, and many Western empires as well.

To support her argument, Jacobs highlights five "stabilizing forces" (she also calls them "pillars") in North America that have been dramatically altered - and not for the better - over the years:

• Family and community.

• Higher education.

• Science and technology.

• Governmental representation.

• Self-regulation of the learned professions.

Jacobs might have detailed a number of other serious chinks in the social structure. She admits this, noting that some readers may be surprised by the exclusion of such matters as the continuing issue of racism, the destruction of the environment, the costs of crime, voters' distrust of politicians, and the widening gap between rich and poor. But she claims that, because such issues are readily recognized, she decided to concentrate on those institutions that are "crucial to the culture and are insidiously decaying."

It is an interesting argument but hardly a convincing one. Her five stabilizing forces have plenty of defenders. We are inundated with expressions of concern about the degeneration of the traditional family, family values, and community. And increasing numbers of people have raised questions about the plight of the other "pillars."

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