City versus countryside.

The civilization of classical Antiquity (both Greek and Roman) cannot be understood without the idea of polis, urbs or city:

To Roman citizens, the place to be was a Roman city or villa. The pagus, the uncultivated countryside, inevitably suggested discomfort and hardship. The inhabitants of the pagus —pagani, or pagans— were country bumpkins, rustic, unrealiable, threatening. Roman Christians assumed this prejudice without examing it.

(Cahill: p. 107)

Now, this is something we may be at risk of forgetting in certain societies these days. Thanks in part to the environmentalist movement, anything rural is in. Some young people's dream is to move to a small property in the countryside and live there, surrounded by a calm life and closer to nature. Even more people's idea of a better life is to live somewhere in the suburbs, away from the stress and pollution of city life, and yet close enough to benefit from it services. One way or another, the idea has been gaining ground in the last couple of decades or so.

To a great extent, the movement that proclaims the need to return to the countryside is guided by an utopian view of what life there means. Simply put, those who were born and grew in the city are so used to certain perks that they take them for granted. However, the reality still is that, in spite of all the advances experienced in the last twenty or thirty years, life in the countryside is hard, especially if one has to live from nature's own fruits. And let's not even talk about the lack of dynamism of the economy in the country, which makes it far more difficult to find a decent job. It shouldn't surprise no one, then, that a significant amount of those who fled the city to go live in the countryside are actually professionals who saved enough and can afford some decent living there. In other words, hardly the majority of the population.

In any case, I find it important to emphasize that the city, with all its problems (yes, the pollution, criminality and high density) has given us so much: laws, political institutions, democracy, universities, technology, science, places to debate, to meet, to enjoy the diversity that can only be seen in the large cities. What sort of society would we live in without our cities? What would be the effect of large sums of people fleeing to live in the countryside? Yes, something tells me that it would be akin to a return to the Dark Age, something not so different from what happened in the Mediterranean region back then.