While living in Guanajuato, Mexico for several months, in early 2005 I discovered “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” which was written in 1903 by George Simmel, the German sociologist who studied the transition from rural to urban life in Germany, which was in full swing at the time. The long essay had a strong impact on me, leading me to share the following excerpts with subscribers to Wade’s Journal (emphases added) and then commented, “If all that was true in 1903, how much more true is it today?”

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Thus the metropolitan type of man … develops an organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment that would uproot him. He reacts with his head instead of his heart.

The reaction to metropolitan phenomena is shifted to that organ which is least sensitive and quite remote from the depth of the personality. Intellectuality is thus seen to preserve subjective life against the overwhelming power of metropolitan life.

Money economy and the dominance of the intellect are intrinsically connected. They share a matter-of-fact attitude in dealing with men and with things; and, in this attitude, a formal justice is often coupled with an inconsiderate hardness. The intellectually sophisticated person is indifferent to all genuine individuality, because relationships and reactions result from it that cannot be exhausted with logical operations….

All intimate emotional relations between persons are founded in their individuality, whereas in rational relations man is reckoned with like a number….

These features of intellectuality contrast with the nature of the small circle in which the inevitable knowledge of individuality inevitably produces a warmer tone of behavior, a behavior that is beyond a mere objective balancing of service and return. …

…The intellectually calculating economic egoisms of both parties need not fear any deflection because of the imponderables of personal relationships… Nobody can say whether the intellectualistic mentality first promoted the money economy or whether the latter determined the former….

… Modern mind has become more and more calculating. The calculative exactness of practical life that the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world into an arithmetic problem, to fix every part of the world by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people … with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones. …

Externally this precision has been effected by the universal diffusion of pocket watches…. If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long time. …

Punctuality, calculability, exactness are forced upon life by the complexity and extension of metropolitan existence and … must also color the contents of life and favor the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign traits and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from within, instead of receiving the general and precisely schematized form of life from without. … Sovereign types of personality, characterized by irrational impulses, are … opposed to typical city life. …and of the intellectualism of modern existence.

The same factors that have thus coalesced into the exactness and minute precision of the form of life have coalesced into a structure of the highest impersonality….

There is perhaps no psychic phenomenon that has been so unconditionally reserved to the metropolis as has the blasé attitude. The blasé attitude results first from the rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulations of the nerves. … A life in boundless pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé because it agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all.

In the same way, through the rapidity and contradictoriness of their changes, more harmless impressions force such violent responses, tearing the nerves so brutally hither and thither that their last reserves of strength are spent; and if one remains in the same milieu they have no time to gather new strength. An incapacity thus emerges to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy. This constitutes that blasé attitude which, in fact, every metropolitan child shows when compared with children of quieter and less changeable milieus.

This physiological source of the metropolitan blasé attitude is joined by another source that flows from the money economy. The essence of the blasé attitude consists in the blunting of discrimination. This does not mean that the objects are not perceived, as is the case with the half-wit, but rather that the meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial. They appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and gray tone; no one object deserves preference over any other. …

…In this phenomenon the nerves find in the refusal to react to their stimulation the last possibility of accommodating to the contents and forms of metropolitan life. The self-preservation of certain personalities is brought at the price of devaluating the whole objective world, a devaluation that in the end unavoidably drags one’s own personality down into a feeling of the same worthlessness.

[NOTE: The Free Dictionary defines “blasé” as “1. Uninterested because of frequent exposure or indulgence. 2. Unconcerned; nonchalant. 3. Very sophisticated.” For a good demonstration of the blasé attitude, see the film “The Prairie Home Companion.”]

…This mental attitude of metropolitans toward one another we may designate, from a formal point of view, as reserve. … Partly this psychological fact, partly the right to distrust that men have in the face of the touch-and-go elements of metropolitan life, necessitates our reserve. As a result of this reserve we frequently do not even know by sight those who have been our neighbors for years. And it is this reserve that in the eyes of the small-town people makes us appear to be cold and heartless. Indeed, if I do not deceive myself, the inner aspect of this outer reserve is not only indifference but, more often than we are aware, it is a slight aversion, a mutual strangeness and repulsion, which will break into hatred and fight at the moment of a closer contact, however caused.

… From both these typical dangers of the metropolis, indifference and indiscriminate suggestibility, antipathy protects us. A latent antipathy and the preparatory stage of practical antagonism effect the distances and aversions without which this mode of life could not at all be led. … What appears in the metropolitan style of life directly as dissociation is in reality only one of its elemental forms of socialization.

This reserve with its overtone of hidden aversion appears in turn as the form or the cloak of a more general mental phenomenon of the metropolis: it grants to the individual a kind and an amount of personal freedom which has no analogy whatsoever under other conditions. … The small-town life in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages set barriers against movement and relations of the individual toward the outside, and it set up barriers against individual independence and differentiation within the individual self. These barriers were such that under them modern man could not have breathed. Even today a metropolitan man who is placed in a small town feels a restriction similar, at least, in kind….

… That we follow the laws of our own nature — and this after all is freedom — becomes obvious and convincing to ourselves and to others only if the expressions of this nature differ from the expressions of others….

At the same time, the concentration of individuals and their struggle for customers compel the individual to specialize in a function from which he cannot be readily displaced by another. It is decisive that city life has transformed the struggle with nature for livelihood into an inter-human struggle for gain, which here is not granted by nature but by other men…. In order to find a source of income that is not yet exhausted, and to find a function that cannot readily be displaced, it is necessary to specialize in one’s services….

First, one must meet the difficulty of asserting his own personality within the dimensions of metropolitan life. …One seizes upon qualitative differentiation in order somehow to attract the attention of the social circle by playing upon its sensitivity for differences. Finally, man is tempted to adopt the most tendentious peculiarities, that is, the specifically metropolitan extravagances of mannerism, caprice, and preciousness. Now, the meaning of these extravagances does not at all lie in the contents of such behavior, but rather in its form of “being different,” of standing out in a striking manner and thereby attracting attention. For many character types, ultimately the only means of saving for themselves some modicum of self-esteem and the sense of filling a position is indirect, through the awareness of others.

In the same sense a seemingly insignificant factor is operating, the cumulative effects of which are, however, still noticeable. I refer to the brevity and scarcity of the inter-human contacts granted to the metropolitan man, as compared with social intercourse in the small town. The temptation to appear “to the point,” to appear concentrated and strikingly characteristic, lies much closer to the individual in brief metropolitan contacts than in an atmosphere in which frequent and prolonged association assures the personality of an unambiguous image of himself in the eyes of the other.

The most profound reason, however, why the metropolis conduces to the urge for the most individual personal existence — no matter whether justified and successful — appears to me to be the following: the development of modern culture is characterized by the preponderance of what one may call the “objective spirit” over the “subjective spirit.” … Indeed, at some points we notice a retrogression in the culture of the individual with reference to spirituality, delicacy, and idealism.

This discrepancy results essentially from the growing division of labor. For the division of labor demands from the individual an ever more one-sided accomplishment, and the greatest advance in a one-sided pursuit only too frequently means dearth to the personality of the individual. In any case, he can cope less and less with the overgrowth of objective culture. The individual is reduced to a negligible quantity, perhaps less in his consciousness than in his practice and in the totality of his obscure emotional states that are derived from this practice. The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life.

…The metropolis is the genuine arena of this culture that outgrows all personal life. Here in buildings and educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technology, in the formations of community life, and in the visible institutions of the state, is offered such an overwhelming fullness of crystallized and impersonalized spirit that the personality, so to speak, cannot maintain itself under its impact. On the one hand, life is made infinitely easy for the personality in that stimulations, interests, uses of time and consciousness are offered to it from all sides. They carry the person as if in a stream, and one needs hardly to swim for oneself. On the other hand, however, life is composed more and more of these impersonal contents and offerings that tend to displace the genuine personal colorations and incomparabilities. This results in the individual’s summoning the utmost in uniqueness and particularization, in order to preserve his most personal core. He has to exaggerate this personal element in order to remain audible even to himself….

The carrier of man’s values is no longer the “general human being” in every individual, but rather man’s qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability. The external and internal history of our time takes its course within the struggle and in the changing entanglements of these two ways of defining the individual’s role in the whole of society.

It is the function of the metropolis to provide the arena for this struggle and its reconciliation. For the metropolis presents the peculiar conditions which are revealed to us as the opportunities and the stimuli for the development of both these ways of allocating roles to men…. The metropolis reveals itself as one of those great historical formations in which opposing streams that enclose life unfold, as well as join one another with equal right.