By Clive Doucet, Ottawa Citizen, May 7, 2014
Memory is a dangerous thing to have and a dangerous thing to lose. In Jane Jacobs’ last book, Dark Age Ahead, she suggested that dark ages are not triggered by an actual event or endless debates around public budgets, but by the collective loss of memory. According to Jacobs, Dark Ages are characterized by the onset of a collective amnesia. People start to forget what used to make their society successful.
The mantra in the late Roman Empire became “get on with your life.” People continued to buy villas and lead comfortable lives, but the common wealth was allowed to fester and shrivel; until one day people forgot even why public hygiene was needed. The effectiveness of memory erasure is impossible to overestimate. Fifteen hundred years ago, people began to die from water born bacterial infections that didn’t exist when public hygiene had been a value people
