The Metropolis and Mental Life

Ideas

• Modern urban society values objective culture over subjective culture
  • More about mind than spirit
  • Why?
    • The money economy
      • Money economy requires mental hardness
      • Market gives urban landscape a matter-of-fact hardness, calculating, precise
      • Can’t see the whole city, must see it in the abstract
• The modern problem: Reconciling individuality with common cultural heritage
• Cities have the “highest economic division of labor,” the most perfect alignment of scheduling systems, and have substituted for fights with Nature, fights with their fellow men for monetary gain
• Effects of Metropolis
  • Urbanites adjust selves to chaotic environment
    • Intensification of stimuli results in increased awareness and intellect
    • Eventually, blase attitude results
      • Cease to react
      • Dulling of sensibility
      • Repulsion from fellow men for self-preservation
    • Whereas rural life has stable, even flow of stimuli
      • Free from pettiness and prejudices and gossipy claustrophobia of small-town life
  • Combination of blase impersonality (ignore thy neighbor) and hyper-individualism (to get noticed despite the frightful leveler of money)
    • Cf the dandy
• Overall: independence and specialization; hardness, bluntness; intellectually advanced

Quotes

• First line: “The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.”
  • Modernity as balancing individual and social
• “By being the equivalent to all the manifold things in one and the same way, money becomes the most frightful leveller.”
• “A city consists of its total effects which extend beyond its immediate confines.”
• “The essential point is that the particularity and incomparability, which ultimately every human being possesses, be somehow expressed in the working out of a way of life.”