According to developmental psychologists, touch is the
first sense developed by fetuses, beginning in the first trimester of
pregnancy. Once born, the initial skin-to-skin contact is vital in the bonding
of mother and child. If someone’s finger is placed in the palm of an
infant, the automatic response of the baby is to curl their own fingers around
it to grasp it.
Babies are comforted by being held, especially
skin-to-skin, against the body of their parent. The benefits of this close
contact flow towards the parents also. Parent’s blood pressure and hormone
levels are regulated by the contact. Research shows that an adult’s oxytocin
(a.k.a. the love hormone) levels rise during contact with a baby.
As babies grow and pass through childhood,
adolescence, and into adulthood, so too does sensuality grow and develop.
In western styled cultures, if we are brought up in a
healthy environment, our expression of this sensuality develops in a healthy
manner. A healthy individual grows and
develops within a healthy “family” and particularly within a healthy society. A
healthy society remains healthy when those within it are also healthy.
Communication and a sense of bonded community are
expressions of just such a healthy society.
Cities, however, weaken such communication and bonds.
Cities are places of strangers, not of known community members.
Stanley Milgram, the American social psychologist, pointed
out in 1970 that, ‘City life, as we experience it, constitutes a continuous set
of encounters with overload, and of resulting adaptations.’1 In
citing Milgram’s research, Paul Shepard summarized the human response to these
encounters and adaptations as showing an, ‘…inbuilt, predictable
shutting-down response to high human density.’2
Milgram provides examples of these encounters, and
Shepard adds further, more psychologically damaging, examples.
Milgram describes four methods by which city-dwellers respond
and adapt to the overload resulting from high-density living.
- Bystander interventions in crises are severely diminished.
- Lack of willingness to trust and assist strangers.
- Deficiency of civil niceties.
- Retreat into anonymity.
To these, Shepard adds a shutting down of contact with
nonhuman fauna. This, he claims throughout his book, has enormous repercussions
for growing children that continue on into adulthood.
All these adaptations slowly, but surely, diminish the
sensuousness that we might have come to expect from our time in the womb.
Yet, it need not be so, Shepard claims. He cites the
example of the !Kung people who, ‘…though living in small groups in vast
savannas like to sit touching each other around their fires at night and build
their huts close together.’
Certainly, the attraction of city life and dweller may
be appealing, but in that life there is an enormous loss, most of which may not
be consciously noticed.
The strain on human interactions, child development,
and personal well-being from city living may be greater than any one of us
imagines. As our urban centres continue to grow in size, the strain may at some
stage reach breaking point, exacerbating social collapse.
Notes:
1. Stanley Milgram, The Experience of Living in
Cities, published by American Association for the Advancement of
Science, in Science, 13 March 1970.
2. Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness, University of
Georgia Press, Athens and London, 1982, p 98
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