- A little book with a big title, Dark Age Ahead, published
last year, tracked the ebbs and flows of civilisations over centuries.
It came to this chilling conclusion: "We show signs of rushing headlong
into a Dark Age." Not slipping towards a Dark Age. Rushing.
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- Dark Age Ahead (Random House, New York), was written
by Jane Jacobs. She may be almost unknown in this country but has been
famous in North America for 40 years, making her name writing about how
communities thrive or decay. "Jane is like a rock star in Canada,"
her publisher, David Ebershoff, told me. (Jacobs is American but lives
in Toronto.) Her dark age warning was directed at the United States but
she also wants the rest of the West to heed the signs. She thinks Western
culture is not as sturdy as it looks: "Writing, printing, and the
internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.
Most of the million details of a complex, living culture are transmitted
neither in writing nor pictorially. Instead, cultures live through word
and mouth and example ... [and] countless nuances that are assimilated
only through experience." AdvertisementAdvertisement
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- She singles out several pillars of culture that she believes
are "insidiously decaying":
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- Community and family: A culture of consumerism and debt
is working against long-term cultural regeneration. People are choosing
houses over families, consumption over fertility, debt over discipline.
"This bubble will burst," she says.
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- Higher education: "Credentialling, not educating,
has become the primary business of North American universities." More
and more people are being churned through corporatised credential factories.
And not just in North American universities.
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- Bad science: Huge numbers of mediocrities with flimsy
credentials are sprouting jargon in defence of outdated orthodoxies. Jacobs
is especially brutal about economists.
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- Bad taxes: "Fiscal accountability of public money
has almost disappeared from the modern world." Governments buy elections
and suffocate innovation. "False image-making has become a very big
business throughout North America and is a staple of the US government.
Legions of hired liars labour to disconnect reality from all manner of
images."
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- Jacobs sees junk culture creeping over society, and skills
being exported wholesale to low-wage countries in the name of consumerism
and corporate profit, and communalism in decline. "A culture is unsalvageable
if stabilising forces themselves become ruined and irrelevant. This is
what I fear for our own culture."
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- What makes her fears more troubling is that they are
complemented and amplified by another substantial public intellectual,
Jared Diamond, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of geography
and environmental health sciences at the University of California, Los
Angeles. His latest book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,
will be published in Australia next month by Penguin. Its thesis was summarised
in an essay published in The Best American Essays 2004, entitled The Last
Americans:
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- "One of the disturbing facts of history is that
so many civilisations collapse. Few people, however, least of all our politicians,
realise that a primary cause of collapse of those societies has been the
destruction of the environmental resources on which they depended. Fewer
still appreciate that many of those civilisations share a sharp curve of
decline. Indeed, a society's demise may begin only a decade or two after
it reaches its peak population, wealth and power ...
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- "Because peak population, wealth, resource consumption,
and waste production are accompanied by peak environmental impact - approaching
the limit at which impact outstrips resources - we can now understand why
declines of societies tend to follow swiftly on their peaks."
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- Diamond's warning appears when both the US and Australia
have never enjoyed so much material wealth yet had so much environmental
poverty. No advanced economy is as dependent on natural resources as Australia's.
On Wednesday came the news that Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth face
serious water shortages within 10 years. Research showed that without drastic
changes to Sydney's water supply and consumption, the city faces a dire
shortfall in 25 years.
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- As a non-doctrinaire geographer, Diamond is unmoved by
the ideology of consumerism: "Foremost among misconceptions is that
we must balance the environment against human needs. That reasoning is
exactly upside down...
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- "Another popular misconception is that we can trust
in technology to solve our problems ... All of our current environmental
problems are unanticipated harmful consequences of our existing technology.
There is no basis for believing that technology will miraculously stop
causing new and unanticipated problems while it is solving the problems
that it previously produced ... We think we are different. In fact, of
course, all those powerful societies of the past thought that they too
were unique, right up to the moment of their collapse."
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- In one of his case studies of catastrophic cultural hubris,
he writes: "Why did the kings and nobles not recognise and solve these
problems? A major reason was that their attention was evidently focused
on the short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting
monuments, competing with one another, and extracting enough food from
the peasants to support all those activities."
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- Sound familiar?
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- Unlike Jane Jacobs, who describes cultural amnesia and
the hollowing out of human relationships, Diamond's theme is driven by
another form of short-termism - environmental decay. He details the inverse
wealth of environmental problems in the US, including water restrictions
in southern California, Arizona and the Florida Everglades, forest fires
resulting from logging practices, farm land lost to salinisation, drought
and climate change on the Great Plains, worsening air quality in the large
population centres, problems with water quality, and inundations by exotic
invaders such as harbour-choking zebra mussels.
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- "We have already lost American chestnut trees, the
Grand Banks cod fishery, and the Monterey sardine fishery; we are in the
process of losing swordfish and tuna and Chesapeake Bay oysters and elm
trees; and we are losing topsoil."
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- Sound familiar?
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- The message in Collapse applies to the lethal combinations
of consumerist excess and environmental ignorance that has occurred across
cultures and ages. And his dissection of decline, along with the warnings
contained in Dark Age Ahead, are far from unusual among American scholars.
No less than six serious books about US imperial overstretch were published
last year, in addition to dozens of anti-Bush, anti-war tracts. All the
books appeared in the wake of the Iraq war and their collective message
led the critic Tony Judt, in a review of all six books for The New York
Review of Books to conclude: "With our growing income inequalities
and child poverty; our underperforming schools and disgracefully inadequate
health services ... our bellicose religiosity and our cult of guns and
executions; our cavalier unconcern for institutions, treaties, and laws
- our own and other people's, we should not be surprised that America has
ceased to be an example to the world."
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- The world is biting back. As Diamond argues: "The
cost of our homegrown environment problems adds up to a large fraction
of our gross national product, even without mentioning the cost we incur
from environmental problems overseas, such as the military operations they
inspire. Even the mildest of bad scenarios for our future includes a gradual
economic decline, as happened to the Roman and British empires. Actually
[America's] economic decline is already under way. Just check the numbers
for our national debt, yearly government budget deficit and unemployment
statistics..."
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- Social anxieties in the West have cohered around the
threat of terrorism, an anxiety fanned by the Bush Administration, but
the toll of terrorism pales into relative insignificance when compared
with the thousands of small tragedies that Western society deems acceptable
for the convenience, efficiency, freedom and glamour associated with consumerism,
above all, the motor vehicle. Australia is certainly no exception. Over
the past 50 years, while the numbers of Australians killed in wars and
terrorist attacks totalled less than 1000, more than 135,000 people were
killed on Australians roads.
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- Today, instead of responding intelligently to the dangerous
dependence on oil from the hair-trigger Middle East, consumers in the US
and Australia, with the encouragement of government, have reacted with
a historic boom in sales of four-wheel-drives and other heavyweight, fuel-guzzling
urban combat vehicles that have become symbols of this era. If ever there
was a metaphor for complacency...
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- Jane Jacobs regards the cultural addiction to the motor
vehicle as the single biggest contributor to civic decline: "Not TV
or illegal drugs, but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American
communities ... One can drive today for miles through American suburbs
and never glimpse a human being on foot in a public space, a human being
outside a car or a truck ... While people possess a community, they usually
understand that they can't afford to lose it; but after it is lost, gradually
even the memory of what was lost is lost. In miniature, this is the malady
of Dark Ages."
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- Cultural amnesia, excess consumption and environmental
decline are more dangerous than terrorism, but we are so awash with propaganda
we don't even notice. Or care. Warnings of mass migration
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- For 9000 years, the most advanced civilisation in the
world was centred around the Fertile Crescent. Almost every major innovation
adopted in Europe originated in the civilisation based on the Tigres-Euphrates
river system. Today, the fertile crescent is a sinkhole, fertile only in
creating trouble for the rest of the world. Today, most of the region goes
by the names Iraq and Iran.
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- Decline began with environmental degradation. Excessive
irrigation and land-clearing led to salinisation and desertification, a
process that has been going on for centuries. As Jared Diamond predicted
eight years ago in Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies,
for which he won the Pulitzer Prize: "Today's ephemeral wealth ...
based on the single non-renewable resource of oil, conceals the region's
long-standing fundamental poverty and difficulty feeding itself."
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- Stagnation is now accompanied by growing resentment of
the West. "Cultural xenophobia is a frequent sequel to a society's
decline from cultural vigour," writes Jane Jacobs in Dark Age Ahead
(see main story). "A fortress of fundamentalist mentality not only
shuts itself off from dynamic influences originating outside but also,
as a side effect, ceases influencing the outside world."
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- In her study of the decline of civilisations, Jacobs
found that significant population flux was a byproduct of decline. "The
collapse of Rome and the onset of its famous Dark Age coincided with a
great migration of peoples."
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- Today, the movement of people escaping economic, political
and cultural suffocation has reached a scale that creates a form of reverse-colonialism.
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- Diamond, in his new book Collapse: How Societies Choose
to Fail or Succeed, describes mass movement of people as one of the consequences
of both disruption and globalism, which includes the export of problems,
not just products, and people, what Diamond terms "unstoppable numbers
of immigrants, both legal and illegal, arriving by boat, truck, train,
plane and on foot".
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- The mass movement of people over and around sovereign
barriers has prompted yet another big thinker to give yet another big cultural
warning, this time from Samuel Huntington, the Harvard professor who became
famous for The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (1996).
He has produced a sequel, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National
Identity which portrays the United States as facing an unprecedented cultural
challenge brought on by massive immigration from Latin America.
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- "Mexican immigration is leading toward the demographic
reconquista of areas Americans took from Mexico by force in the 1830s and
1840s ... No other immigrant group in American history has asserted or
been able to assert a historical claim to American territory ... American
society and culture could eventually change into a country of two languages,
two cultures and two peoples. This will not only transform America. It
will also have deep consequences for Hispanics, who will be in America
but not of it."
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- Ten years ago, Huntington predicted social tensions in
Europe caused by the spread of Islam. Like Diamond's, his predictions have
aged well. Europe's birth rates have plunged while the birth rate of Muslims
in Europe is three times that of non-Muslims. The number of Muslims in
the European Community has doubled in 20 years to 16 million, or 3.5 per
cent of the population. By 2015, Europe's Muslim population will have doubled
again to 32 million, while the non-Muslim population remains static or
declines. By 2050, Muslims will constitute about 20 per cent of Europe's
population, and 25 per cent in France and Holland.
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- Cultural fault-lines have already emerged in Holland,
Sweden, Denmark and France, with a political backlash against rising crime
and immigration in what were once the bastions of Western liberalism.
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- Copyright © 2005 The Sydney Morning Herald.
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- http://www.smh.com.au/news/.html
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