The twilight of civilization

Also, there are significant interconnections among her select five, others she enumerates, and several others she doesn't mention, such as the polarization of the polity, the arrogance of power, and the dominating role of the media bombarding everyone with too many mixed messages. By including them all, her principal twilight-of-American-civilization argument would have been even more convincing.

In a spirited opening essay called "The Hazard," Jacobs whets the readers' appetites with references to great ages followed by dark ones, but then too abruptly segues into a quick consideration of modern times, and then to an outline of her thesis.

Succeeding chapters address the failures of the selected foundations. Their titles offer capsule summaries: "Families Rigged to Fail," "Credentialing Versus Educating," "Science Abandoned," "Dumbed-Down Taxes," and "Self-Policing Subverted."

The most imaginatively titled chapter, "Unwinding Vicious Spirals," makes a number of linkages between past failures and current problems. For example, she begins by discussing some of the issues that she knows best: the connection between homelessness and unaffordable housing and their roots in the Great Depression and the years of World War II. The postwar boom and the move to the suburbs left others in "pockets of dilapidation" that still pock the city-scapes, and "slum clearance" projects put people into vertical ghettos.

"Dark Age Ahead" is written in an idiosyncratic style that is pure Jacobsian: a mix of anecdote (often quite personal), analysis, hard facts, and thoughtful conjecture. (The last chapter is followed by nearly 50 pages of annotated endnotes and often quite lengthy comments that are all worth reading, too.)

Refreshingly devoid of academic jargon, Jacobs's stimulating book adds to intellectual discourse on the past and the present, and what might well be in store for us in the not-too-distant future. Its "hopeful" quality, though, remains debatable.

The last page of "Dark Age Ahead" begins with this sentence: "History has repeatedly demonstrated that empires seldom seem to retain sufficient cultural self-awareness to prevent them from overreaching and over grasping."

Despite her effort to raise the alarm in order to rouse us to reform, there's a dark sense here that our present leaders and many of our people are too arrogant, too proud, too absolutist, and too blind to the acceleration of anomie and its attendant alienation to slow the erosion of our institutions, let alone prevent the collapse of North American culture as we know it.

• Peter I. Rose is Sophia Smith professor emeritus of sociology and anthropology at Smith College. His most recent book is 'Guest Appearances and Other Travels in Time and Space' (Ohio University Press).

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