The Savage Blase

Reading Wordsworth's preface and Simmel's essay side-by-side provided a nice historical perspective on a rivalry that follows us to this day, that of the urban versus the rural intellect. Each side draws on it's own cliche's of how they perceive the other to operate intellectually. Simmel uses the image of a rural, passion-driven human animal, one who's intellectual landscape is intuitively driven by "feelings and emotional relationships" alone (12). Such a person does not reason, because the required faculties are located in "the upper strata of the mind," a faraway place available only to the urbanite's world of "unbroken customs" (12). Simmel is not attempting to be insulting, however. His essay swiftly evolves into a sharp criticism of the pitfalls and toxic ideologies that come with the industrial market economy and emotional alienation that thrive in large urban centers. But his urban man is not a hero, an example of some elevated state that the rural immigrant ought to gain from his transport to the city. This figure is more of a martyr, sacrificing those close personal ties of home for the omniscent logic of the urban intellectual. Of course, Wordsworth unfairly caricatures his adversary as well. For Wordsworth, the city's influences, its swift and unceasing fountain of impersonal interactions, don't give clarity to the mind, they "blunt" its "discriminating powers" (3). Where Simmel saw the rural mind as little more than an unreasoning intuition, Wordsworth saw the urban mind as a hundred-car pile up of "gross and violent stimulants" (3). Wordsworth, too, noticed the element of the blase, as Simmel later called it, but for Wordsworth this was not a noble defense against personal interaction. For Wordsworth the feeling was "savage" (3). But these broad and unbecoming portraits are helpful in looking at the emergence of the modern city. With Wordsworth we get a violent, poetic reaction to a foreign and seeming unnatural entity. With Simmel we get a reaction from the other side, an insider appreciation and nuanced understanding of the forces at work within it. Together they prompt sharp questions about how and why the modern industrial city was (and continues to, for that matter) influence they way we think and the way we interact with one another.