Metropolitan Life (book) Quotes

This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer the flag of their political state, and in their neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most elementary duties of citizenship. Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them and no less remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets - living thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological. They become victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to ancestral patterns of behavior.

Owing to the conditions that currently prevail in the world of letters, it is now possible for a girl to be ruined by a book

2Do not mistake these multiple trends--the energy flows of metropolitan growth, the new taste for tea, the nascent, half-formed awareness of mass behavior--for mere historical background. The clash of microbe and man that played out on Broad Street for ten days in 1854 was itself partly a consequence of each of these trends, though the chains of cause and effect played out on different scales of experience, both temporal and spatial. You can tell the story of the Broad Street outbreak on the scale of a few human human lives, people drinking water from the a pump, getting sick and dying over a few weeks, but in telling the story that way, you limit its perspective, limits its ability to convey a fair account of what really happened. Once you get to the why, the story has to widen and tighten at the same time: to the long duree of urban development, or the microscopic tight focus of bacterial life cycles, These are causes, too.

Not long ago, after I had spoken on the subject of biblical worship at a large metropolitan church, one of the elders wrote to me to ask how I would try to get across my main points to children (fourth to sixth graders, approximately ages ten to twelve). He was referring in particular to things I had said about Romans 12:1–2. I responded by saying that kids of that age do not absorb abstract ideas very easily unless they are lived out and identified. The Christian home, or the Christian parent who obviously delights in corporate worship, in thoughtful evangelism, in self-effacing and self-sacrificing decisions within the home, in sacrificial giving for the poor and the needy and the lost—and who then explains to the child that these decisions and actions are part of gratitude and worship to the sovereign God who has loved us so much that he gave his own Son to pay the price of our sin—will have far more impact on the child’s notion of genuine worship than all the lecturing and classroom instruction in the world. Somewhere along the line it is important not only to explain that genuine worship is nothing more than loving God with heart and soul and mind and strength and loving our neighbors as ourselves, but also to show what a statement like that means in the concrete decisions of life. How utterly different will that child’s thinking be than that of the child who is reared in a home where secularism rules all week but where people go to church on Sunday to “worship” for half an hour before the sermon. “Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker; for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” (Ps 95:6–8).

So what good is to be found in today’s metropolitan areas, amidst all the alienation, the anonymity, and the lack of cohesiveness that characterize the life-style there? Along with separation and disintegration comes specialization—and therefore excellent opportunities to socialize and utilize a vast interactive system involving the many special interest groups discussed in the previous chapter. Opportunities are there for the taking: in social and academic areas, in business and career fulfillment, for personal and financial growth. Opportunities for self-actualization abound. In the years to come, there will be increasingly more chances to socialize with like-minded peers, in environments never before conceived. These opportunities, when viewed as a testing ground for the self-help program described in this book, can become the basis for tremendous interactive success, no matter what your past experience has been. Change is in the offing, both for you and the ever-changing society in which you live.