By Michael Stelzer Jocks, History Faculty
When I discuss urban living with my students, and ask them to compare city living to small-town living, they usually point out the fact that city living is more violent, cold and impersonal than village life. Now, for people growing up in Chicago, ‘small town’ has a pretty wide range of meanings. A ‘small town’ for today’s Chicagoans might be anything from a tiny rural community to a major suburb. To put things into perspective, in 1790, the largest city in the nascent United States was Philadelphia with 42,000 people. To Chicagoans today, 42,000 people is a single neighborhood, and the fact that social critics in the early Republic crowed about the immorality, the corruption, and bustle of 18th century Philly seems laughable and naïve.
The question then: Is city life really colder than small town life, or is this just a widely accepted myth? I actually think it is true, though I think the reason for this is different from what most people believe. Students usually point to the anonymity of urban living as the reason for the lack of fellow-feeling. The number of people living in a crowded area seems like the obvious reason, and throughout history, this impersonality has often been pointed out as a source of heartlessness. Add this to corruption, disease, and poverty, and perhaps it is no wonder that American politicians have often pointed to the city as the center of sin. Famously anti-urban Thomas Jefferson said “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural….”
Urban cruelty seems most obvious when fellow citizens in need are simply ignored. Everyone has heard the stories about city-dwellers paying no mind to people lying on the street, and instead, stepping over those that requires assistance. These are stories you don’t usually associate with small towns. Why is it so different in the big city?
Anonymity is important, but I think just as central is our modern obsession with time. Time is our most ‘valuable commodity’. We live in a fast-paced world, which gets faster every day. The linguist George Lakoff displayed the centrality of time to American’s thirty years ago, by studying the many metaphors we have equating time and money. Think about all the instances in which you automatically link time and money in your speech: “You wasted my time.” “How do you spend your time?” “Invest some time in me.”
A forty year old study conducted by two psychologists at Princeton University, C.D. Bateson and J.M. Darley, displays how our concern with time can affect our ethical behavior. The two psychologists invited 40 seminary students to present a lecture on the New Testament story of the ‘Good Samaritan’. The catch was the graduate students had to present this lecture on the far end of their campus. For some of these students, they were informed they had a great deal of time to get to the lecture hall (low hurry). A second group (medium hurry) were informed they had to rush to get there on time; lastly, a third group (high hurry) were told they were already late, but still had to conduct the lecture. Little did these students know, the experiment was actually to see if they would help a stranger in need.
On the way across campus, each student crossed paths with an anonymous man in physical distress. As students well versed in Judeo-Christian ethics, you may expect that they would stop and help the man. Unfortunately, you would be wrong. 63% of the students in ‘low hurry’ group helped the man; 45% in ‘medium hurry’ helped; only 10% in ‘high hurry’ helped. This was, and still is, a shocking finding. Even for intelligent, ‘morally educated’, ‘good’ people, the strain of time can cause them to be unethical.
Forty years have now passed since this experiment, and to say that our pace of life has quickened would be an understatement. We now live in a world in which speed is not just a luxury, it is an absolute necessity. Speed is virtue, and patience is a waste. In the big city, this is truer than ever, and studies now show that the bigger the city, the faster the pace of life. Unfortunately, with this quickened pace, the “Good Samaritan” seem to be an endangered species.
The Flâneur's Turtle 