September 2022 Print

By Michael Warren Davis

The rural family needs to regain its rightful place at the heart of the social order.

— Pope Benedict XVI

Cities are a near occasion of sin.

Maybe that wasn’t always the case. It’s possible that a man could become a saint in twelfth-century Salisbury. I don’t know; I’ve never been. But I’ve spent time (too much time) in New York and Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. That’s where souls go to die. Nobody who has done the same could possibly disagree. Those skyscrapers loom like headstones over mass graves—blank monuments to a billion victims of spiritual genocide, all nameless and unmourned.

We could go into the statistics about the higher rates of irreligion, depression, crime, drug use, and sexual deviancy found in cities. But that would be superfluous. You already know all that. You take it for granted—as well you should. It can’t tell us why, though. Here are what I believe to be the four main reasons.

1. We cannot love. Our Lord commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves. That’s difficult, even in the best of times.

In the best of times, cities were made up of large families who ran small family businesses. The husbands and fathers were independent craftsmen. Most of them lived above their shops. Everyone on the block patronized the same businesses. They attended the same parish. Their children played together. They were friends—even relatives—as well as neighbors.

Today, the opposite is true. Most city-dwellers now live miles away from their place of work. Many of them aren’t even from the same state. Their neighbors, coworkers, family, and friends are four totally distinct groups of people. In fact, few of them even meet the folks who live in the next apartment, let alone the next building. Cities are like little kingdoms in which everyone is a resident alien.

There’s a fifth group of people with whom city-dwellers interact. It’s a group I call the Crush. This is the mass of nameless, faceless individuals through which we wade on the sidewalk, in traffic, and on the subway. Many of us spend more time with the Crush than any of the others. To us, it isn’t a group of people. It’s a seething mass of flesh and plastic—an obstacle to be pushed through, the way a farmer pushes through his pigs. They do nothing for us except rob us of our time, our air, our peace of mind.

And everywhere we go in the city, we know that we are the Crush to everyone else. We, too, are merely an irritant to everyone around us. That’s why, when you catch their eye, they look away or, more likely, scowl.

How can we love them? They wouldn’t accept our love, even if we offered it to them.

2. We cannot work. Those independent craftsmen—blacksmiths, tailors, and the like—gave way to factories. Those factories, in turn, were shipped overseas. Now, what do most city-dwellers do for work? Those who are considered well-off spend their days sending emails to each other. The rest clean hotel rooms, wait tables, make coffee, etc.

Today, for every single “goods-producing” job in New York City, there are over 2,000 “service-providing” jobs.

Here we have the slow degradation from work to labor to service. In the city, no man is his own master. He isn’t skilled; he isn’t even needed. His only “talent” is to take abuse (both from his employer and his customers) as cheerfully as possible, and then get on with his work. The whole system is designed to crush his spirit, to rob him of his dignity.

No wonder our cities have become spiritual wastelands. No wonder homicide and abortion and human trafficking are rampant. How can we value the lives of our fellow human beings when our economy teaches us not to value our own?

3. We cannot be creatures. Man was made for the Garden. We belong to the land, just as surely as fish belong to the sea. We are God’s creatures, no less than the beasts and the birds. He created our habitat for us, and He didn’t see fit to include concrete or asphalt.

Our wellness—physical, mental, and spiritual—depends on our taking our proper place in the order of Creation. And yet we’ve built a new environment for ourselves: a jungle of steel and glass. Rivers of tar run all through this jungle, with mountains of filth washing up on their banks. By day, these vast groves of headstones block out the sun. By night, the stars are blotted out by a hundred million LED lights.

This isn’t good for us. It’s not how we’re supposed to live. And there’s only one way to regain our creatureliness—to locate ourselves in Creation once again: head for the hills.

4. We cannot hear God. The prophet Isaiah said, “in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.” That’s why Cardinal Robert Sarah wrote his landmark book The Power of Silence. “The modern world has multiplied the most toxic noises,” he observes, “and yet God hides Himself in silence.”

Silence is not a way to God. It’s the only way. In the first lines of the book, His Eminence declares, “There is one great question: how can man really be in the image of God? He must enter silence. When he drapes himself in silence, as God Himself dwells in a great silence, man is close to heaven, or rather, he allows God to manifest Himself in him.”

Cities are antithetical to silence. It isn’t only the car horns, the screeching trains, the banging of hammers, the roar of jackhammers, the ringing of cell phones, or the endless, pointless chatter of the Crush. As His Eminence points out, the “noise” attacks our eyes as well as our ears.

Studies have found that, on average, Americans view 10,000 advertisements every day. Most of them, of course, are on our smartphones. But in cities, they’re everywhere. They’re on billboards and taxi signs. They’re plastered on the sides of buses, and over the seats on the train. They’re on huge television screens planted around the city. They’re handed out by hawkers on every street corner. This “visual noise” is literally inescapable.

In his essay The Call of Nazareth, Fr. Vincent McNabb urged us to “shake the town-dust of neopaganism from our feet.” He knew even then that cities were a near occasion of sin. He knew that life in the city made it virtually impossible for one to have a rich interior life. His writings seemed prescient at the time; today, they’re downright prophetic.

Once, a young disciple asked Fr. McNabb, “How can I get out of London?” The old Dominican’s reply was quite simple: “Walk.” There’s no other way left to us now. Get out of the city. Whatever the price is, pay it. To stay might cost your soul.