New Urbanism and Conformity

Speaking of the New Urbanism, the column by Canadian David Warren that Michael Scaperlanda quoted the other day with respect to the presidential election also includes some critical comments about what the author sees as the dangerous propensity to conformity fostered by urban living circumstances:

To be fair to many who hold all the conventional "Canadian consensus" views, there is seldom much malice in them. As products of our ideologized schools and universities, living all their lives deep within urban conurbations, in spiritually "gated" communities where they mix only with their own kind, they have never been exposed to contrary ideas. And they are sincerely aghast when anything that challenges their profoundly settled views is set before them. The notion that deviation must be suppressed comes as naturally to them, as the notion that anything unIslamic must be suppressed, to a Wahabi fundamentalist in Arabia.

The idea that, for instance, a man could own a gun for any other purpose than to commit violent crimes, is not easily communicated to a person who has no ability whatever to visualize life outside the confines of an urban neighbourhood.

More subtly, the dweller in an urban apartment complex cannot imagine a life in which everything he does is not bound by fussy rules and regulations, and in which any act of non-conformity (lighting a cigarette, for instance) must be greeted with hysterical alarm. In this sense, our vast modern cities, not only in Canada but everywhere, breed Pavlovian conformity to their own physical requirements, and systematically replace moral imperatives with bureaucratic ones.

Is there something to this expression of concern? Does the urban setting "breed Pavlovian conformity" to bureaucratic rules? And is the opposite true? Is there something about non-urban settings that lead people to place a greater value on freedom and being left alone to make their own choice? Might this explain in part why city dwellers tend to vote for politicians who promise more government and more regulation, while rural and, to some extent, suburban dwellers tend to vote for politicians who promise less government and less regulation? Or, less polemically (as Mr. Warren's comments do seem a little over-the-top), are there moral consequences for urban versus non-urban living, not only in the social justice sense of proper use of resources, public care for the disadvantaged, etc., but also in the development of moral sensibilities and a resistance to government-centric concepts of public interest?

Greg Sisk