These socio-cultural and political differences are partly rooted, in turn, in the enduring experiencing of life in both places. In the low-density and underdeveloped countryside, people live in much closer proximity to nature, surrounded by forces human beings only marginally control. In that context, individuals, families, and communities tend to feel smaller, less omnipotent, more vulnerable.
In cities, by contrast, people live in a largely controlled environment, surrounded by pavement and concrete, dwarfed by large buildings constructed by human beings, immersed in massive infrastructure projects. Nighttime illumination even blocks out the stars, replacing the vault of the heavens with the rapidly moving blinking white and red lights of the airplanes that shuttle us from city to city at all hours of the day and night. It’s a largely artificial world created by people and insulated from extra-human forces that, to a remarkable extent, we’ve succeeded in mastering for the sake of human betterment.
These enduring differences in rural and urban experiences have been exacerbated by recent economic trends, as cities have become magnets for the hyper-educated winners of our civilization’s ceaseless meritocratic striving as well as immigrants longing for a better life, turning them into vibrant hubs of big business, high tech, and the services that support them. At the same time, the countryside has lost the manufacturing jobs that once served as its economic ballast, leaving only a limited number of service jobs behind, and sometimes not even those.
The city enjoys strong growth, while the countryside endures slow, grinding decline, along with the physical and spiritual maladies that accompany it.
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