Alone in the crowd: human reactions to urbanization

George Simmel spoke of how the city changed its residents in his essay "Metropolis and Mental Life". The simple fact of the city, of the vast teeming swarms of people who worked differently, lived differently, played differently, and thought differently than had other humans up to that point, forced upon its residents a life of seeming paradoxes. The average resident of a city dwelt in far closer proximity to other people and saw many times more members of his species in one day than his ancestors only a generation or two removed might have seen in a lifetime, and yet the city became known as a world of profoundly impersonal relationships between people. Alienation amidst vast crowds of a million or more other individuals is a uniquely urban experience; the more people one lives with, it seems, the more there develops a mutual indifference, a "slight aversion," or even a "repulsion" toward other fellow humans (Simmel 331). That Oliver in Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist" would be chased by a mob of people upon the slightest pretext of having stolen something was well within the character of the Londonite at the time and the dynamics of social life there; but that his purported victim should then be concerned with his welfare and take it upon himself to care for the orphan was an event of such greater improbability as to be safely considered simply a handy literary plot device and not a reflection of sociological fact. For the average city dweller, the mere presence of the million odd people he lives with stretches his sense of humanity and forces him to try to preserve his sanity and his decency in the only way he knows how: by shutting out the lives and problems of all but a few people, such as family or close friends, for whom he has an especial attachment.

At times a very bleak image of the effects of the city on the urbanite is painted, as in this line by Simmel: "The self-preservation of certain types of personalities is obtained at the cost of devaluing the entire objective world, ending inevitably in dragging the personality downward into a feeling of its own valuelessness" (330). Realistically speaking, young Olivers do not survive city life through the sheer force of their own "goodness" and likeable nature; something more of an adaptation is required. To survive physically amidst the rough interplay of criminal and capitalist forces is an accomplishment, but to live with an intact sense of humanity, of concern for all the other people alone in this world together, and with a stable mental outlook is by far the greater feat.

What, then, does it really mean to live in the city? Why is there universal acknowledgement of the marked separation between the city and the country, not just in the number of people living in one area or the physical characteristics of the environment, but in the very nature of the people themselves? Because, the adaptive sociologist cries, the interplay of man and environment demands that this be so. No man is an island, and no city dweller can completely isolate himself from the mental strains of his world. Life in the city places great burdens upon traditional human beliefs and modes of thought, by its changed social roles and by the presence of people who have rejected custom in hopes of improving human life, or of getting rich, or for some other motivation that arises from the urban environment. Life in the city causes many people to reconsider whether the things that a formerly rurally-dominant society once deemed to be all that was need for success and happiness -- a nice family, a good social position, promising employment -- might somehow not be enough. In "Night Walks", Dickens spoke of a social disease called Dry Rot, or "a tendency to lurk and lounge; to be at street corners without intelligible reason; to be going anywhere when met; to be about many places rather than at any; to do nothing tangible, but to have an intention of performing a variety of intangible duties to-morrow or the day after" (130). The existentialist crisis that Dickens identified is brought on through a life surrounded by a large number of people going about what begin to seem like an awful lot of little, meaningless tasks, and is dealt with in a variety of ways by the many people who feel it: withdrawal, depression, and suicide; denial and absorption in some other work; rejection of all forms of society, leading to either a life of crime or a life of political agitation; and occasionally an increased understanding about the nature of life and man.

There is a typical argument among analysts who look at the wide gulf between the motivating drive of those who live in the city and those who live in the country: that the one is based upon rationalism and commercialism, the other upon feelings and emotional relationships. But some of these assertions, as raised for example by Simmel, seem a bit too tidy, as if the author became enamored with an explanation that accounted for some of the disparity he saw and yet failed to fully grasp the nature of the subject of his scrutiny. For though the claim is made that "instead of reacting emotionally, the metropolitan type reacts primarily in a rational manner" (326), Simmel also notes how urban humans strive desperately for some shade of individuality, giving rise to the "strangest eccentricities, to specifically metropolitan extravagances of self-distanciation, of caprice, of fastidiousness, the meaning of which is no longer to be found in the content of such activity itself but rather in its being a form of 'being different" (336). City life, it seems, did not grind from the human psyche all traces of emotional individualism after all, as would be expected if the sole or dominating factors in determining human psychology were the increased commercial and scientific nature of urbanization. It seems rather to have had the opposite effect, by channelling human nature into new ways it had heretofore left unexplored.

Some of the arguments in "Metropolis and Mental Life" appear, to us armed with nearly a hundred years of hindsight, a bit naive and simplistic. It seems almost childish to blithely state that "in an intellectualized and refined sense the citizen of the metropolis is 'free' in contrast with the trivialities and prejudices which bind the small town person" without observing that city residents are subject to their own petty quirks and irrational biases (such as those against country people) and that rural communities are not always backwaters and certainly do not have a monopoly on ignorance and prejudice (334). But it is also true that a certain way of thinking, a certain take on the world, could not have arisen without the changed environment of the city. As with all paradigm shifts, urbanization brought with it two contrasting reactions. It is true that often life with several million other human beings in fairly wretched, cramped conditions engendered the sort of apathy that in later decades on another continent would come to be called the "Genovese syndrome". If some people, however, reacted in despair to the loss of individuality, or revolted against the order of the day because of the ease with which a criminal could melt into the crowd, or simply refused to acknowledge the others who lived all around them, there were yet those individuals who began to look at the world a little differently, to consider the diverse throngs of people and wonder at all the many different ways they lived, and how they lived together, and if there were not perhaps many different ways to be human after all. The great philosophers and thinkers of the ages have preached tolerance throughout recorded history, and there have always been those who are willing to explore new ideas; but the rise of the city marked the first time that intellectual flexibility and tolerance of other ways of thought and living became survival traits.

"Man is a creature whose existence is dependent of differences," says Simmel (325) in his essay, and in the ever shifting milieu of the metropolis the city dweller was exposed to a perpetually changing environment. Even in the middle of the night, in an age where evening meant the cessation of practically all activity, the insomniac narrator for Dickens' "Night Walks" was able to find things happening and people to observe. There is always something new to observe, something new to learn, something unexpected to consider, is the lesson gleaned from city life. Indeed, the city gave birth to some of the quintessential traits that would today be ascribed to the modern person: a sense of alienation, perhaps, but also a sense of tolerance, a willingness and ability to live in an ever changing milieu and to adapt to a steady flow of new stimuli and new experiences and yet, somehow, retain that individual flair which makes each of us human.