Longing and Contempt

Presumably the extremely ambivalent relationship of city-dwellers and the rural population dates from the founding days of the earliest cities and follows similar patterns in more or less all cultures.

Most recently, at the height of the Covid pandemic, the escape to the country of metropolitan freelancers and academics with their families was declared a trend – it was made possible by anxiety about the deadly virus and the right to a home office. However, the boom in books and magazines celebrating country living goes back much further. It includes ideas for rustic interiors as well as tips for the rural wild herb herbarium or photo galleries of the last working horse and plough. Market research shows that it’s primarily the educated middle-classes who buy these publications. They prefer to talk here about jam-making or home-pickled gherkins, discussing this or that pattern for the heels of hand-knitted socks. Lately, however, more articles are emerging of remorseful returnees, confirming the new old abhorrence of the narrow-minded provinciality of rural life, the unwavering reactionary mentality of the native population. While the novice gardener sprayed a homemade, liquid nettle brew on his lettuce seedlings to stop the aphids, the insecticide mist from the jets of a ten-metre-wide sprayer wafted over the fence, as a neighbouring farmer killed off all the pests and insect life from his fields. In response to the offer of an informative chat, the latter reacted with contempt or the threat of violence.

Regardless of what goes on in reality, we tend to treat such experiences not as an actual case of conflict between people, but rather we exaggerate them instantly into significant examples for general or typical behaviour of one or the other population group. What we notice as model cases almost always are based on typecasts or categorizing that goes much further back. Hence, just as the post-modern rural idylls can be traced back to bucolic antiquity, many of the new anti-province commentaries also revert to stereotypes that have long defined how urban elites view the rural population. As a result, away from the communicative and cultural centres religious bigotry and political parochialism grow exuberantly. While the elected politicians in the civilized metropolitan milieu support progressive and diverse, global and ecological policies, it is the national conservative to right-wing dimwits that receive the most votes in the rural backwaters.

The cliché of the dull, retrograde farmer contrasts with the counter-cliché of unspoilt country folk living in a wholesome environment. In this scenario, the farmer is no longer a savage with no education and manners, but a kind of half-brother of the “noble savage”, with authentic dignity and an almost mythical connection to the earth and its life cycles, who could show the head-ruled townie the way out of his self-imposed alienation.

Conversely, too, attraction and abhorrence take turns. On the one hand, the city remains for everyone for whom their village seems unbearably monotonous and provincial, the legendary escape, where individual freedom can be acted out in relation to lifestyle, outlook and not least sexuality. On the other hand, from the viewpoint of those who only leave their own backyard in an emergency, the anonymity of the metropolitan crowds in the architectural maze offers space for every kind of self-indulgence, corruption and crimes.

As with all stereotypes, these attributions concern sweeping generalizations. By the same token, social science studies and election results repeatedly confirm that, in fact, people who live in the countryside have a tendency for values based on traditional, often religious foundations and are largely sceptical about socio-political experiments. Accordingly, the question arises about whether possibly everyday life experience involves fundamental differences between the town and country that imply an alternative view of the world.

Our early ancestors had a variety of reasons to develop the city as a living environment. In addition to establishing strategic defence advantages and the possibilities of effective organizational and power structures, the project of cities was also always to push Nature’s unpredictability as much as possible out of one’s own life. The vast walls that the early cities encircled themselves with not only served to ward off enemies, but they also kept outside of the human settlement every kind of harm that could invade from the wilderness, which was never really controllable. Nowadays, in the centre of a major city it would in principle be feasible to spend one’s entire life away from any kind of encounter with nature.

In contrast, people who live in the country are confronted day in and day out with the splendour of the natural world. The thousand-metre-high rock face, the colourful display of autumn leaves, the moonlight’s reflection on a lake, yet also the golden oriole, swallowtail and martagon lily still appear as incomprehensible miracles that would merit respectful awe as the only appropriate reaction. On the other hand, in her total dominance Nature puts on a show such as droughts, floods, storms, avalanches and rockfalls to demonstrate the limits of all our efforts to avert dangers and create security. 

The attractions of the city, in comparison, are all manmade. We worship our own creative power in our admiration of cathedrals, palaces, skyscrapers and television towers. The primal fear of nature only breaks out again when lightning strikes, a hurricane blows off the roofs or earthquakes cause residential tower blocks to collapse.

The city and country are also fundamentally different economically. While the urban economy aims at the greatest possible independence from natural circumstances thanks to its infinitely diversified and specialized jobs, and while all year-round engineering skill, industrial production and also administrative, banking and all kinds of services function in a more or less identical way, agriculture is still dependent on nature’s cycles. Sowing, growing and the harvest of crops, the mating season, pregnant ewes and lambing, farrowing pigs, calving are the result of the seasonal cycle.

The latent conservatism of the rural people is also quite possibly based on the experience that the continual recurrence of the same things is part of something bigger than a single life and that, ultimately, being totally dependent on benevolent skies involves greater scepticism about the political belief that people and their basic living conditions can be changed at all.

Although the urban space and its values dominate the public discourse and agriculture’s share of GDP in the EU contributes merely 1.4 per cent, its products still contribute to basic human subsistence: First and foremost, we depend on food, and much of our clothing is still made from wool, cotton, linen and leather and the raw material of timber, which grows in vast forest areas, is irreplaceable for the supply and equipment of housing.

In future, rural and urban spaces will also probably be dependent on one another without any alternative, and the differences in lifestyles and ways of thinking that result from the diversity of world experience will be selectively endured or glorified, taking turns to be mirrors and sources of contrast for each other. One way or another, the dialogue that was started centuries ago in Mesopotamia will be carried on in productive dissonance. 

(c) Christoph Peters, 2024