As though one needed yet more reasons to raise children outside of the city
In what probably won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has taken a long, hard look at the shape and moral direction of modern urban society, it now appears that scientists are acknowledging what many people — my lovely wife included — have known all along: city life hurts the human brain:
“The city has always been an engine of intellectual life and the ‘concentration of social interactions’ is largely responsible for urban creativity and innovation. But now scientists are finding that being in an urban environment impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory and suffers from reduced self-control.
There’s more to the article, but I wanted to pause here and note something that my dad once said which still rather resonates with me today. The general moral decline of society can be roughly correlated to the transition of society from predominantly rural to a predominantly urban. In no small part, this has to do with the reduced fear of being caught. Not caught as in the sense of being interdicted in one’s moral wrongdoing by the police, but in the sense that one is less likely to be noticed for having transgressed, if one is noticed for it at all.
It really is true that in a small town, everybody dies famous. It’s just that much harder, in a rural community, to sleep around, lie, cheat, or swindle someone without the fact being discovered (which is bad enough) and made known to the general public (which is even worse). And while this reality does not serve to dissuade everyone, it does serve to give many people a bit more pause, if only because they realize there is an increased probability that their mothers will, at some point, hear every juicy detail about the act in which they are about to engage.
That fear — not necessarily of being punished, per sé, but of being found out — is powerful. In a city, however, that fear simply isn’t there, or at least is not there to the same extent. There is a tipping point which is reached, a number and concentration of people which is exceeded, after which the interest of people in each other, and in each other’s doings, diminishes. And while this is good in one sense (that of reducing the availability of fodder for gossip, a grave sin), that good only arrives at the cost of at least two key things: a sense of compassion toward others, and a sense of moral responsibility toward others.
(What I mean by that latter point, incidentally, is the sense of moral responsibility that is captured in 1 John 5 — the fact that each of us is charged with the responsibility not only to guard ourselves against moral error, but to work to protect those around us from falling into error themselves.)
Now, a part of why this is can be explained by what is noted above: the saturation of the senses, and the overstimulating nature of the urban environment, is exhausting. More than that, though, is the fact that the city is huge, and there are so many people therein — how easy it is to become lost in the crowd, and how much easier then to remove one’s moral transgressions from the spotlight of concerned neighbours and friends. The city affords us a context in which our immoralities can be kept more secret than in a small town…and the human condition, tainted by concupiscence, invariably acts on just that opportunity.
Not that the overstimulation of the city is to be dismissed out of hand:
‘The mind is a limited machine,’ says psychologist Marc Berman. ‘And we’re beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.’ Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy city street. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to redirect our attention constantly so that we aren’t distracted by irrelevant things. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to — takes energy and effort. Natural settings don’t require the same amount of cognitive effort. A study at the University of Michigan found memory performance and attention spans improved by 20 percent after people spent an hour interacting with nature. ‘It’s not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan,’ says Berman. ‘They needed to put a park there.’”
This is an especially concerning point for the Christian parent, I think, although entirely consistent with Scripture. If all creation declares God’s glory, then surely it is better to put oneself in a place that seems closer to creation at its finest and most natural; better to be surrounded by the trees, and afforded a view of the stars, than be lost amidst the concrete jungle and stale repetition of the suburb. In addition to providing a better moral context in which to raise kids, the rural environment also presents a better intellectual environment in which to raise kids, and in which the imagination of children can be fostered and grown to its fullest potential.
Speaking of families, Pope Benedict XVI — continuing his trend of saying very simple truths in very profound ways — marked the feast of the Holy Family by noting that the human family — mother, father, and children — is the foremost revelation of that which God Himself is: love.
Steynian 305 « Free Canuckistan! (January 7, 2009, 10:36 am).
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