As we all know, people who live in cities tend to get more formal education than people who live in the countryside. And people who live in the countryside tend to believe in the supernatural more than people who live in cities. The usual assumption is that the causality goes like this: live in city => get education => abandon superstition. Implicit in this causal ordering is the idea that city dwellers are right in their unbelief, which is born of rationality, whereas rural people are wrong in their belief, which is born of irrationality.
But when I look at myself, I find everything backwards. I live in a city, and cannot, for the most part, bring myself to believe in the supernatural—and yet, rationally I affirm it. With my intellect, I am convinced that the supernatural is as real as the natural, but in my heart I cannot accept it. I long for it, but this longing seems fantastical, nostalgic, wishful. But it seems so not for rational reasons. As far as I can see, science has rendered no evidence against the supernatural: science is the study of the material world, so it simply cannot speak of the immaterial world, any more than the eye can smell or the ear see. And yet, when the rubber hits the road, when someone tells me they have seen a ghost, I think they're making it up. My mind wishes to believe but my gut cannot.
But when I go to visit the country, the deeper into the country I go, the farther from cities and lights and traffic and the sounds of machinery, the more plausible the supernatural seems, the more my gut begins to accept it. And then it is that my reason, frightened at the sudden possibility of what it had affirmed so abstractly and longed for so ardently, begins to assure me that there are no grounds for belief. But its assurances are quite useless, for my soul now fears and believes and watches the shadows for sudden apparitions.
The city is an environment wholly subjugated to human technology and human control. Except for vermin, no living thing persists there unless it is sanctioned by human agencies. The ground is concrete, the landscape composed of artificial structures, the air filled with mechanical sounds. Day in the city is like day anywhere, but night is not herself here. She is not night, daughter of chaos, primordial darkness, hour of witches and spirits. She is not even dark. The sky is yellow brown. The stars, which always remind us of the vastness and mystery of the world, hardly ever appear—and when they do, there are only three or four of them, looking lost and forlorn up there in the domesticated vault, criss-crossed by airplanes, outshone by helicopters. How could one believe in spirits here? How could one believe in wild things and fugitive truths?
To put the same point slightly differently: the past 200 years has seen a massive decline in belief in the supernatural. This period has also seen the rise of scientific rationalism. The standard causal inference has been that reason did away with those beliefs. This inference demands and has fostered a general view that reason is opposed to such beliefs, that they are irrational. But the opposition between these beliefs and sound reason is at best wildly overstated, so the sudden vanishing of belief demands another explanation. The past 200 years has also seen massive urbanization and domestication of the world, a phenomenon that extends well beyond cities: suburbs, small towns, even farms and forests, have become vastly less wild, vastly more controlled by human schemes. Perhaps, then, the loss of belief has been driven not by reason but by an irresistible analogy between the subjugation of nature (in the sense of plants, animals, land, water, weather) to human schemes and the subjugation of nature (in the sense of the system of the world) to human categories of knowledge.
Let me just add one other minor but I think rather telling observation in this vein: I am told that, in places like Iceland and norther Scandinavia, where cities are rare and countryside wild, but formal education levels relatively high, belief in fairies and other spirits is still fairly common.
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