Why the massive rural/urban divide?

[12th Doctor]

This is a masively complicated debate which I don't think can be resolved with a few buzz words, or even a broad, but shallow analysis.

One question I would like to throw out there, however, that I think is central to the debate is this:  With the cities as crowded as they are, why is it that study after study shows that people in the cities tend to feel more lonely, isolated and cut off from other people than people in the less densly populated rural areas?  If we address both the root and conclusion of this question, then we might be getting somewhere.

If we look at the "social liberalness" of the cities, it would seem to fit that the reason people are more socially liberal is because they feel less connected to other people and humanity as a whole, so they simply don't care on an individual level.  On the flip side, when it comes to ghettoization and personal and racial distrust, one can clearly see that the liberal attitudes of the cities vanish.  Black against White.  Hispanic against black.  Asian against Hispanic.  Everyone against the Jews.  Even broken down further if you look at places like Boston where there is still a great deal on animosity between the Italian and Irish communities.

Now, it has been suggested that rural areas are more tollerant.  And, as Eric said, this is largely a myth.  Trust me, I grew up in one of these places.  A lot of people will put on the air of tollerance, but it is never practiced in reality.  Its acctually getting worse, too.  I can remember when I was younger, you hardly ever heard anyone use words like "n" or "Spic" around my area.  But as the population of blacks and hispanics around my area started to rise (basically, it went from 0-20 in my home town) people became far less tollerant.  There has also been a strong reaction against "black culture" seeping into the rural areas.  Basically, the more visible blacks have become, the less tollerant people in the area have become.

The next issue is Social Responsability.  Basically, the urban and rural definitions of these words are totally opposite.  Urbanites tend to veiw social responsability as taking care of people's material needs, but otherwise staying out of their business.  Rural folks believe that people should be totally self-reliant and not only be morally responsible for themselves, but also for the conduct of their family and friends.  In this sense, the cities are more liberal (in the traditional sense) and the rural areas are more conservative (once again, in the true, traditional sense).

As weak as it sounds, I think a lot of this simply has to do with the fact that there are more people.  Most people in the cities gave up on being socially responsible in the rural sense, because the cities simply got to big and neighborhoods to unmanagable for people to concerned about the foundations of their society (as Burke would term it).  Instead, they grew to rely more and more upon government enforcment of basic rules (laws) in order to keep order, such as the police and fire dept., which in turn led to reliance on other things.

Since the rural areas never expirienced this problem, they simply stuck with the way business was always done.

Sorry, I was doing a couple things at once while typing this, so if it sounds a little discombobulated....