Urban indifference is preferable to rural parochialism and bigotry

Evidence

I am an unashamed cityphile. I would prefer to live in a city, despite the dirt, than in a rural paradise or honeysuckled small town. I share the concern of many of my contemporaries over the deteriorating physical environment, over the insane population increase, over the destruction of the earth’s life support system. I share with them some of their critiques of industrial society, of technology run wild, of sprawlin.g . suburbanization. But I do not share the antiurban sentiment which is increasingly a part of these concerns and critiques. I was reared in a small town in a wilderness area and have no illusions about the inevitably idyllic and utopian character of such settlements. The small town and the rural countryside may be sites of leisure, of contentment, of peace. They can also be sites of parochialism, of bigotry, of spiritual narrowness. The city may be harsh, but it is exciting. It may be cruel, but it is tolerant. It may be indifferent, but it is a blessed indifference. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 5

Categorization

• XREF: Directly challenges the pastoral ideal the reader may hold; the ‘blessed indifference’ phrasing is the seed of the civil-inattention critique the reader is tracking across Lofland and Cole.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the moral case for urban anonymity against small-town surveillance — tolerance as the product of indifference, not virtue.