[Springboard] Attention Nan Grow and the group on historical study and also trends and contradictions

[James Wiegel]

Nan,  Jim Wiegel here.  I was struck by your group's emphasis on research and study and looking for other resources in history from which we could learn.  Here is a contribution from me to our (possible) Reading Research Project.  See if this is a helpful resource and also a helpful way to summarize.
   
  RESOURCE:  Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities ©2004
   
  PERSON SENDING IN A SUMMARY:  James Wiegel  <jfwiegel at yahoo.com>
   
   
  THESIS AND KEY POINTS:  "Throughout the world, Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past" -- not only the Western Roman Empire, but many lost aboriginal cultures here in North America, the culture whose people produced the cave paintings of Lascaux, Stonehenge.  A dark age is a time of seeming mass amnesia where significant life giving cultural patterns stop being practiced, are forgotten and, as a result the cultural fabric unravels and people, once vibrant and focused, lose direction and vitality.  
   
  Here, in North America, as we move from agrarianism to a technology-based culture. we "show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age.".  The purpose of the book is to explain this phenomenon of a dark age and what we know of how it has occurred and to look at 5 pillars of our North American culture "that we depend on to stand firm, and discuss . . . ominous signs of their decay.  They are in process of becoming irrelevant, and so are dangerously close to the brink of lost memory and cultural uselessness.  These five jeopardized pillars are
  Ø                  community and family
  Ø                  higher education
  Ø                  the effective practice of science and science-based technology
  Ø                  taxes and governmental powers directly in touch with needs and possibilities
  Ø                  self-policing by the learned professions
   
  The author goes on . . ."It may seem surprising that I do not single out such failings as racism, profligate environmental destruction, crime, voters distrust of politicians and thus low turnouts for elections and the enlarging gulf between rich and poor along with the attrition of the middle class. . . .  I think these second five are symptoms of breakdown in the first five."
   
  Ø                  community and family:  Families rigged to fail.  The combination of idolization of the nuclear family, rising housing costs, the requirement of 2 incomes has placed enormous pressure on households which has been intensified by the destruction of functioning local communities (which provide critical support for families) in the face of the rise of the automobile culture and the corporatization of the economy.
   
  Ø                  higher education:  Credentialing vs. educating.  Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North American Universities -- the expense, today, of a college education is that a degree on one's resume is a ticket to consideration for a job, it shows a person's ability to stick with it, show up and get assignments done, all first level prerequisites to be good employees.  Cultural education beyond the job is not an important value in higher education.
   
  Ø                  the effective practice of science and science-based technology  Science abandoned.  Good science has been abandoned in favor of rapid solutions, scientists and engineers are becoming more advocates and sales people for their discoveries and expertise.
   
  Ø                  taxes and governmental powers directly in touch with needs and possibilities.  Dumbed down taxes.  Subsidiarity is the principle that government works best -- most responsibly and responsively -- when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses.  Fiscal accountability is the principle that institutions collecting and disbursing taxes work most responsibly when they are transparent to those providing the money.  Both subsidiarity and fiscal accountability of public money have almost disappeared from the modern world, replaced by complex financial arrangements and granting and regranting from larger government bodies increasingly pushing important underlying agendas.
   
  Ø                  self-policing by the learned professions:  Self-policing subverted.  Members of learned professions have traditionally been regarded by themselves and others as capable of responsibly regulating, and even policing, themselves through oversight by professional societies and associations, state boards, etc.  Examples of mutual protection, tardiness in acting, widespread use of plausible denial (making sure you can say you didn't know about it), and the substitution of image for substance abound in architecture, the law, accounting, medicine, law enforcement, education, government service.
   
  All these are, of course deeply interconnected, she explains, in the chapter "Unwinding Vicious Spirals", and can interact in either downward or upward spirals.  She ends with a chapter on ways in which cultures are passed on, and a couple of contemporary examples (Japan and Ireland) where a dark age was avoided.  Almost half the book is footnotes of various kinds, so it is well documented.
   
  SIGNIFICANCE FOR SPRINGBOARD:  3 things:  
  1.  This is one of the few books I have seen that is looking from a CULTURAL perspective -- a "dark age" as she sees it is a cultural phenomenon.
  2.  As most of us are stationed in North America, it behooves us to look to our own back yard and see what is going on there and not too quickly to move to a global view
3.  Jane suggests that her 5 are UNDERLYING realities that are causing some of the trends and contradictions we keep circling around in our work on vision and trends.  They give a push to us to look more deeply at what is going on.



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   jfwiegel at yahoo.com
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Will tomorrow be here soon?  ... of course it will.  Not once has tomorrow not been here, but what about yesterday?  Where is it now?  It will be gone to us . . . like today will be long gone ... When tomorrow comes around.             -- Dodge Chatto 1975
       
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