Dark Age Ahead: Last Three Chapters

Self-Policing Subverted

This chapter takes a look into self-policing efforts by professional organizations. The author slams accountants for situations like Enron. She calls the tricks and deceptive accounting mad: "this was accounting gone mad," where mad(ness) is defined as the loss of connection with reality. She points out that deceptive accounting has been happening since the mid-1980s. A consequence of that decade's frenzies of mergers and takeovers. Business schools are not blameless, though. In 2002, three of America's most prestigous universities held a seminar in Chicago for executives from the nation's largest corporations. The purpose was to offer guidance concerning accounting malpractice. You might think that the advice given was "Don't do it. Don't allow it," but you would be wrong! According to a New York Times reporter, that was present, they were told not to volunteer any information for a legal desposition or "Don't ask, don't tell." The author also discusses plausible denial, false imagery, and legitimate accounting puzzles, I won't get into them here, but I recommend searching for the book at your local library or bookstore.

Unwinding Vicious Spirals

I was kind of disappointed with this chapter. I expected a vivid depiction of what the next Dark Age will be like, but instead the author concentrated on housing problems. She traces the housing shortage problems and dilapidation back to the 1930s and 40s. Dilapdiation became a problem in part to solutions to the housing shoratge problem. Large family apartments were divided up into smaller, low rent accomodations.

By the end of WW2, affordable housing shortages had become a crisis. Public policies to address them fell into three categories:

1. court enforced rent control
2. slum clearance and subsidized housing
3. long term, low interest mortages (to encourage construction for home ownership)
   

Rent controls helped to keep profiteering landlords in check and decreased evictions. (Even though it seems to be communism or socialism to me) Rent control did not solve the core problem, lack of new or well-maintained affordable housing. Many buildings were abandoned because the owners thought that a profit could no longer be attained from the buildings, thus dilapidation. (I don't see the relevance in this. Maybe it is my small town mentality, but I just can't believe that buildings would just be abandoned) These abandoned buildings would attract crime/looting and thus slums were created.

Slum clearance is to buyout an area, "clear it out," and construct new buildings. The problem with this was that planning fads and architectural fashions of the time emphasized open spaces, thus fewer affordable dwellings were created. Another problem, was that the time between the clearing and the new construction was sometimes years. ( So, slum clearance by definition could work, but the application of it actually reduced affordable housing.)

The third approach, low interest, long term mortages, was the only policy to significantly add to the supply of affordable housing. The problem is that it didnot directly benefit the lowest income classes. (I am not so sure of that, but ok.) The author also rips this apporach for causing suburban sprawl... again we differ on our opinions of this (author: damn traffic engineers!) (LOL).

The housing market has been booming thanks to low interest / long term mortages... BUT

... the house price bubble can possibly be deliberately maintained for years to come. But in both the U.S. and Canada, vacancies rates were rising in condos and apartment and house prices and rents were falling - not enough to solve the shortage of affordable housing for the poor, but signaling that suppl and demand are slowly converging. In any case, sooner or later the bubble must burst.... and could cause the densification of surburbs.

And now the author comes back to her "whipping boy," traffic engineers and city planners. She talks about the loss of beauty and boulevards along America's Main Streets. She understands that safety is the reason for the loss, but poses the question, "how do experts, teachers, and textbooks know that trees and other boulevard features are unsafe?" Well, I have a reponse:

Lawyers. Accidents happen. Start routes require (when possible/feasible) clear zone, space for an out of control vehicle to come to a rest without seriously injuring the occupants. Trees can cause the death or serious injury of a motorist even at city speeds. Transportation aganecies have to try to enforce clear zone practices to keep lawsuits at bay. If boulevards were as common as they, apparently, once were then when an accident happens and the family of the victim sues the transportation authority pays (even when another motorist is at fault, the trans. org. will pay a large portion of the bill). This waste of taxpayer money is a larger "community killer" than the loss of the boulevard. So, blame the lawyers and this "sue happy" society. And, yes, I despise lawyers! ;)

Dark Age Patterns

Early in the development of the human race, hundreds, perhaps thousands of unequal conflicts have occured between humans, followed by countless dark ages and extinctions suffered by cultural losers. Then the human race began to adopt a new economy: agriculture and pastoralism. The old hunting and gethering cultures were destined for unprecedented crisis. Hence, foraging societies were on the defensive against more powerful agrarian societies. With the emergence of agriculture, the world was never the same. Almost everywhere, the pristine economies and their cultures went down in defeat and memory lost.

Since the emergence of agriculture, agrarianism has dominated the world and the goals of states and empires, shaping their politics, military ambituions, institutions, organizational abilities, fears, and beliefs. Societies most successful at feeding their people from arable land, pastures, orchards, and gardens have been cultural winners and empire builders.

But that is no longer true. Now it is the turn of agrarianism to become a cultural loser. Though not everyone is not well fed, the need to eat no longer dictates that most people that most people must work directly with animal and plant production. (animal production... that is one way to put it ;) ) The change has been long and gradual, already the world displays a previously unimagineable redundancy of idled breadbaskets. For example, upstate New york was once the breadbasket of the northeastern U.S. but lost out to the midwestern and western prairies (Go SD!)

Would be empire builders have been the slowest to take in the great change and it's importance. The Germans, who initiated the twentieeth century world wars (wasn't it some serbian that started WW1 ;) ), justified the wars as driven by the need for Lebensraum, room to live.

Ingenuity, the new wealth that carries cultural dominance, has generated the industrial revolution, the scientific state of mind and its yields, the rise of democracy, the emergence of a middle class. In sum, human knowledge and skills, and opputurnities to use them effectively, have created modern, postagrarian societies.

Postagrarian states do not increase their wealth by aggrandizing territories and seizing lands and natural resources - as Japan and Germany learned after losing WW2 and subsequently prospering by other means. The key to postagrarian wealth is the complicated task of nurturing economic diversity, opporturnity, and peace without resort to oppression. Dark Ages and spirals of decline are in store for agrarian cultures that can't adapt themselves to generating wealth through human ingenuity, knowledge, and skills.

The jolts administered to unprepared agrarian entities by Western empires and thier joint organizations, such as the World Bank, the World Trade Org, and the International Monetary Fund, have already brought into being new Dark Ages in many African countries, including Cambodia and Burma. Cambodia and Burma were stable and prosperous as agrarian cultures and seemed to adapt well to French and British rule, respectively. Then they sank into post colonial horrors.

(so, a dark age does not have to encompass the entire globe.)

At a given time it is hard to tell whether forces of cultural life or death are in the ascendancy. Is suburban sprawl, with its murders of communities and wastes of land, time, and energy, a sign of decay? Or is rising interest in means of pvercoming sprawl a sign of vigor and adaptability in North American culture? Arguably, either could turn out to be true.

What would people of the future (through hindsight) advise us? "Let things grow. Don't let curently powerful governmentor commercial enterprises strangle new departures, or alternatively gobble them as soon as they show indications of being economic successes. Stop trying to cram too many eggs into too few baskets under the keeping of too few supermen (who don't actually exist except in our mythos)."
(Nice metaphors, huh? but the point is clear and I believe that a friend of mine would agree with it. Let me know if I am wrong ;) )

HOW CAN A CULTURE AVOID FALLING INTO A DARK AGE, WHEN IT APPEARS TO BE ITS DESTINY?

Japan avoided a colonial imposed dark age, when Commodore Perry showed up in 1853 demanding that trade be opened up with the west, by assimiliating western ways into their own. They took great care to cherish and nurutre their own cultural characteristics.

After all the hardships that they have faced at the hands of the English, Ireland has, by some miracle (of Irishing Up!), avoided falling into a dark age. The Irish, stubbornly (do they do anything differently?), refused to forget their identity... their culture. They kept their culture through song (and that is why iut is some of the best music!).

The pressing immediate task is for the society to be sufficiently self-aware to recognize the threat of accumulating cultural weaknesses and try to correct them to stabilize the cultural network. Vicious spirals have their (good twins) beneficent spirals - processes where each impovement lead to other imporvements and strenthening of a culture. Excellant eduacation strengthens excellent teaching and research by those educated. Responsive and responsible government encourages the corrective practices exerted by democracy, which in their turn strengthen good government and responsible citizenship.

We need to be careful, though. Societies that were great winners in the past are in special peril of failing to adapt successfully. Formerly vigourous cultures typically fall prey to arrogant self-deception. History has repeatedly demonstrated that empires seldom seem to retain sufficient cultural self awareness to prevent them from overreaching and overgrasping. They have neglected to recognize that the true power of a successful culture resides in its example.

We must be self-aware! (so buy and read the book Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs)