Spectator’s Notes | 23 February 2008

The United Nations declared last week that, for the first time in human history, more people in the world live in the town than in the country. If true, this feels momentous, though it is not, obviously, sudden. The imagination of mankind has been shaped by rural life more than by anything else, but this has been fading for 200 years in the West, and now is fading almost everywhere. What are its effects? A crisis for the great religions, whose language of elemental truth assumes an understanding of what it is to be a good shepherd, to sow and reap, to have murrains of cattle and crops that fail. But also, one would hope, a deeper acceptance that the life of the city is what we all have to work on if society is to prosper. In a barn on the farm where I was brought up, a wooden yoke hung on a peg.