Jane Jacobs' book, Dark Age Ahead, argues that the modern world, especially the western world, unwittingly stands at the brink of a new "dark age," a cultural collapse brought on by the intersecting shifts from an agrarian world into not simply an industrial one but a technology-driven, "information" society as well. As she notes in the book's opening line, it is "both a gloomy and a hopeful book." But its pessimistic notes are tempered with the wisdom of recognizing that no descent into a "dark age" is a perpetual state, and the hope that through awareness it may be possible to avoid the fall entirely.

For many, the idea of a "dark age" is restricted to the vision of medieval Europe, fractured and spent in the wake of Rome's collapse, with ancient wisdom and knowledge spiraling out of common parlance and into the hands of a few scribes and monks who managed to keep the spark of civilization alive. For Jacobs, however, the reality is different:

[I]n North America we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were decisively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost. Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past. Whatever happened to the culture whose people produced the spendid Lascaux cave paintings some seventeen thousand years ago, in what is now southwestern France? Or the culture of the builders of ambitious stone and wood henges in Western Europe before the Celts arrived with their Iron Age technology and intricately knotted art?

To Jacobs, the idea of a "dark age" is embodied by the principle "Use it or lose it"; a culture which is disregarded or discarded in such a fashion that a formerly vital culture becomes lost. And she thinks understanding how such a thing can happen (when most people are quite attached to their culture, and normally resist any overt threat to them) is of vital importance to those of us residing in North America (and perhaps, she suggests, Western Europe as well).

Dark Ages are instructive, precisely because they are extreme examples of cultural collaspe and thus more clear-cut and vivid than gradual decay. The purpose of this book is to help our culture avoid sliding into a dead end, by understanding how such a tragedy comes about, and thereby what can be done to ward it off and thus retain and further develop our living, functioning culturre, which contains so much of value, so hard won by our forebears. We need this awareness because, as I plan to explain, we show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age.

Jacobs develops her premise by identifying "five pillars" of society which she feels are being dangerously eroded as our culture continues its lurching shift from its agrarian, rural past to its industrialized present and its apparent technological, information-based future. She suggests that the principal reason certain cultures end up "losing" is that they are "confronted with such radical jolts in circumstances that their institutions cannot adapt adequately, become irrelevant, and are dropped." She believes that the current shifts in our culture represent serious culture "jolts," and the question is whether our institutions are up to the challenge. She perceives problems in the following areas:

• community and family
• higher education
• the effective practice of science and science-based technology
• taxes and governmental powers directly in touch with needs and possibilities
• self-policing the learned professions

The remainder of the book proceeds to develop her thesis. A sizeable portion of her concern, especially as concerns the erosion of community and family, relate to something she has stressed in earlier works (such as The Death and Life of Great American Cities). For Jacobs, one of the primary evils undercutting contemporary culture is the embrace of the automobile at the expense of other forms of transportation, especially public transportation. It is also at the heart of urban sprawl and the casual destruction of urban areas for the construction of highways (Jacobs recounts with considerable anger many battles over highway placement, including the near replacement of New York's SoHo district with a highway).