The Taproot of Civilization : By the end of this decade, more of the world’s population will live in cities and towns than in villages : THE VILLAGERS: Changed Values, Altered Lives. The Closing of the Urban-Rural Gap, <i> By Richard Critchfield (Anchor Books: $27.50; 471 pp.)</i>

And what, by the way, is the meaning of life?

Once the question brought people up raptly. They tugged on their chins, gazed into the night sky and scratched with quill pens in their notebooks. Today, the question is apt to be voiced mischievously to scatter a crowd at a cocktail party and clear a path to the buffet table.

“Oh no, not that meaning-of-life thing now. Geez. Bye.”

The question of the ages is not necessarily the question of our age. Is it?

We are impatient. We are overdosed. We are habituated by jingles. Our questions are simple: Buy now or wait for the sale? Guilty or innocent? Cinema or VCR? Right or left wing? Chicken or beef?

For these questions, we have answers.

But what about connecting the jumbled elements of our lives and searching for our place in the human tableau?

Richard Critchfield, part newspaperman, part vagabond and part scholar, has wandered the villages of the world for more than 30 years. By looking back into peasant cultures, Critchfield seeks meaning for own own urban society.

“The Villagers,” which follows his 1980 book, “Villages,” is a collection of five long reports from rural, agrarian cultures in Africa, Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe and India.

It is not a simple book. Neither is it satisfying as a conclusionary one.

Rather, “The Villagers” is an assemblage of riddles and contradictions, of arguments and asides, of faiths and fears, of patience and observation. It is a flabby book; it wanders in more ways than geography. But it engages us because the quest is worthy.

What can we learn from life in villages? They are the taproot of civilization. “So much that matters--family, ethics, morals--came out of villages,” writes Critchfield.

We can learn of loneliness. Maybe a quarter of the people in cities live alone. In villages, few do. If you are alone and lonely in a teeming city, this loss is great. On the other hand, religion, that contradictory binding agent of culture, cracks at the joints in the rural Punjab the same as in Rome.

What are we leaving behind as we are swept into this future we cannot control? Who can blame us for not dwelling on the big question?

By the end of this decade, Critchfield says, we will pass “a great milestone in human history”: More of the world’s people will live in cities and towns than in villages.

In “The Villagers,” we can meet a Kenyan widow whose husband is killed in a car accident. By custom, his life insurance is collected by his surviving brother. The widow breaks down, forfeits her children, but ultimately bounces back to help her people. Women are gaining their freedom everywhere. And old newspapermen still are drawn to stories of perseverance.

Critchfield is fascinated with the petty frictions and interactions of village life. In the Upper Nile, the loading of the harvest into a wagon is accomplished with colorful, ritualistic quarreling, pages full.

So what? So this: Traditional village life is woven tightly enough to restrain tempers. But tempers abound, and from them revolutions can be fomented.

Villages are no better, and never have been, than the leaders they produce and the history that guides them. The villages of Rwanda were more incomprehensibly brutal than anything the urban world has produced in a generation.

And hardly less than cities, villages of the 1990s are loosing their moorings against the tide of change. In revisiting remote places after a span of just five years, Critchfield said the villagers’ basic view of life had been forever altered. “They felt the future would no longer simply repeat the past, as it had always done, but could be radically improved.”

If only for the want of fertilizer. For the want of a helping hand. For the want of understanding.

Does Critchfield make sense of our world? No, of course not. But “The Villagers” makes the quest itself sensible.