Dark Age Ahead
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| Author | Jane Jacobs |
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| Country | United States |
| Publisher | Random House |
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Publication date
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May 5 2004 |
| ISBN | |
Dark Age Ahead is a 2004 book by Jane Jacobs describing what she sees as the decay of five key "pillars" in "North America": community and family, higher education, science and technology, taxes and government responsiveness to citizen's needs, and self-regulation by the learned professions.
She argues that this decay threatens to create a dark age unless the trends are reversed. Jacobs characterizes a dark age as a "mass amnesia" where even the memory of what was lost is lost.
The following is a summary of Jacobs' description of the decay in each area.
Overall, Jacobs argued that the very concept of "ideology" is fundamentally flawed and detrimental to both individuals and societies, no matter what side of the political spectrum an ideology comes from. By relying on ideals, she claimed people become unable to think and evaluate problems and solutions by themselves, but simply fall back on their beliefs for "pre-fabricated answers" to any problem they encounter.
As an example, which also tied into Jacobs' views on city community life, she cited the Chicago Heat Wave, which killed hundreds of mostly elderly Chicagoans in 1995.
Jacobs, citing the two studies, argued that the federal study was unconsciously biased by the prevailing political and economic ideology (that is, neoliberalism), which promoted individualism to the point of becoming completely oblivious to community and social factors, even though, as Klinenberg found, these were the factors that ultimately caused the deaths.
Using this and other examples, Jacobs argued that modern political and economic ideologies were in effect no different from those dominant in Western civilization's past Dark Ages, such as Middle Age Roman Catholicism. In both cases, she claimed, the dominant ideology prevented and discouraged people from finding rational and scientifically verifiable explanations and solutions.
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