In the German autumn last year, police were looking for four persons who did not come to the help of an 83-year-old man who collapsed in the vestibule of an ATM in the city of Essen. Under German law, not coming to the aid of a person who needs help is punishable with up to one year in prison. The ‘Good Samaritan Law -- Unterlassene Hilfeleistung (failure to provide assistance) is an offence in the Central European nation that is still very contrite about its troubled Second World War history.
Earlier this year, a girl was run over by a mini bus in one of the bustling Chinese towns that point to growing urbanization in the world’s fastest growing economy. She lay there unconscious, right in the middle of the road as passersby hardly looked or stopped by, let alone come to her help.
The sexual assault on an Indian woman five years ago changed the course of Indian criminal legislation and after the December 16, 2012 incident that took place in the capital late in the night, the country of 1.2 billion was never the same. Damini’s boyfriend kept pleading for help as cars whizzed by but nobody would stop even to look at her bloodied person that lay there in the buff.
Going back to the German incident, a Frankfurt court last week slapped fines ranging from $2,865 to $4,300 on two men and a woman who were found guilty of stepping over the man who collapsed in the ATM vestibule. It was another customer who had called the emergency services that carried the man to hospital. The old man later died. German society had gone into an introspection mode after the incident that triggered an uproar.
Urban societies come close to embodying the features of industrial societies where it is easy to get alienated without knowing that one has been affected. Large urban conglomerates and agglomerations are known for their ‘hard’ lives — another name for a creeping alienation that characterises city life.
French Sociologist Emile Durkheim, who had a strong German influence in his works, divided societies as being chracterised by Mechanical Solidarity and Organic Solidarity. Urban societies that appear to be united, are not really so, and possess an apparent cohesion that can be compared to the parts of a machine. Organic Solidarity, largely found in rural societies, is not alienating and represents a cohesion found among the organs of a living being.
City living has its own share of perils. Psychologists attribute hardships faced by many a new city dweller to the fact that such people have not been raised in large urban societies. Mass internal and external migration has its own causes and consequences some of which have been attributed to displacement from small towns to large cities.
