According to Jane Jacobs we’re on the brink of a new dark age; hence thetitle of her latest book Dark Age Ahead. Looking at the TV footage from the Gulf Coast or Iraq, it’s hard to disagree with her.

Yet interestingly Jacobs doesn’t choose the big issues like war, socialinequality and racism to back up her premise. Instead, she looks at lesssensational issues like the decline of higher education, tax policy and thegrowth of pseudo-science. Here she finds evidence of cultural decline thatmay be less dramatic but is no less insidious.

Compared with the floodedstreets of New Orleans it might seem an innocuous concern that universitieshave all but abandoned education in any meaningful sense and have gone overinstead to what Jacobs calls “credentialing” (i.e. becoming diploma mills),but in its own way this is also a devastating indicator of a society that islosing its bearings.

It is in that spirit that I want to add something to Jacobs’s list of DarkAge forebodings — the dying out of hospitality. For starters, the fact thatthere is such a thing as a “hospitality industry” tells you right away thatthere is a problem here, as if the only way to get consideration and a warmsmile these days is to pay for it. That may sound like an exaggeration, butjudging from my own experience, it isn’t much of one.

My partner and I got back recently from a summer vacation visiting familyand friends out west and we were struck by how threadbare the welcome matwas for us wherever we went. Things were so bad that I came up (onlyhalf-jokingly) with a Charter of Rights for visitors.

If someone invites youto stay with them the least they should do is:

  • Be there when you arrive.

And the least they should provide you with is:

  • A key.
  • A working toilet and enough water for basic hygiene.
  • Reasonable access to a phone.
  • Windows that open and close (screens would be nice).

Definitely to be discouraged are:

  • Cats who treat your luggage like a litter box.
  • Lovers who treat your visit like an emotional litter box.
  • Verbal abuse of children (and if possible of their parents too).

I need to say here that we were not the proverbial guests-from-hell: wedidn’t behave badly or stay longer than we said we would. On the contrary,we cooked, chipped in for groceries, cleaned up after ourselves, laughed ator admired whatever we were supposed to — all the things, in other words,that you normally do to make yourself congenial to the people who areputting you up. And as for our various hosts, these were all folks who arenear and dear to us, and who in past visits have made us feel at home.

Which is why I can’t help feeling that our problems this time weren’t simplypersonal but were tied in to some larger social trend. A clue to this is abit of worldly wisdom my mother is fond of: guests are like fish — afterthree days they start to smell. This sounds like some borscht-beltcomedian’s one-liner, but it’s indicative of how widespread the perceptionis that guests are a big burden, to be taken in very small doses.

No doubt visitors can sometimes get away with more than three days, even aweek or two, but inevitably it seems that a reek sets in. Usually it startsin the bathroom (some in-house rule you weren’t aware of that you’ve brokenabout towels or toothpaste or god knows what), then spreads to the kitchen(the dishes don’t go there, the second helping you’ve taken raises eyebrows)and soon you can smell it all over the house. You don’t get any eye contactfrom your hosts, requests you make are suddenly a huge bother, your kidshave gone from being sweethearts to headaches.

And eventually you end upcloistered in whatever room you’ve been stuck in desperately trying tofigure out how you can get yourself on a flight home tomorrow. (The coup degrace comes when you announce your early departure and all you get is an “Oh,really?” without the slightest pretence of regret.)

If hospitality is dying out, then this isn’t because people have suddenlystopped caring for each other, but rather because they can’t abide even thepeople they care for. As odd as that seems, it’s hardly an unfamiliarproblem in a world strewn with countless wrecked romances between lovers whowere crazy for each other but couldn’t stand living together.

But thismalaise now seems to have reached a whole new level, affecting even lesssignificant others who’ve only come for a visit. You get the unmistakableimpression these days that a great many people have such a hard time livingwith their problems that they have almost no emotional space left for anyoneelse.

It was not always thus. Down through the ages hospitality was a huge deal.If you read Homer, what he calls “guest-friendship” was nothing less than adefining feature of what it meant to be civilized; indeed, The Odyssey oftenreads like an object lesson in the virtues and delights of hospitality.

It was also a defining feature of community life. Here for example is partof an account of social life in early nineteenth-century New England, citedin sociologist Robert Putnam’s bestseller, Bowling Alone. “Visitors tookafternoon tea, made informal Sunday visits, attended maple sugar parties andcider tastings, stayed for extended visits, offered assistance in givingbirth, paid their respects to the family of the deceased, participated inquilting parties, and raised houses and barns.”

In other words, visiting washow these New Englanders created their communities. And they made thesevisits despite the fact that it was harder for them to get to the next townthan it is for us today to get across a continent.

Yet today (as Putnam’s book demonstrates in great detail) this sort of lifeis all but inconceivable to the vast majority of people in North America,and all the convenience of modern travel seems to have to done is to make iteasier for us to make our getaways.

What defines a dark age, according to Jacobs, isn’t just the loss of skillsor knowledge but amnesia — that a society forgets it ever knew or hadcertain important things. Like hospitality, and with it any larger sense ofcommunity.