Country Mouse and Town Mouse

The virtue set is a tool that was originally intended to help understand virtues and vices.*

*Briefly, every virtue had a vice that is its opposite but also a vice that is a distortion of it. There is a second virtue that the vice that distorts the first virtue of the opposite of. The vice that is the opposite of the first virtue will be a distortion of the second.

Surprising me, it turns out the Virtue Set has some uses for goods and evils in general.

Let’s take the town mouse and the country mouse childhood experience for instance. The good of the country mouse childhood is the interaction with the natural world and the room to roam and the independence.  The evils that go with it are the isolation and loneliness and sometimes the lack of intellectual stimulus The good of the town mouse childhood is the packs of kids to play with and the opportunities for education and enrichment of various kinds. The evils are the greater opportunities for ugly settings and regimentation and rule following and social pressure and the lack of nature.

Probably the oldest synthesis of the two goods was the manor. Live in the country but also spend time in town, and have educated civilized people often coming to visit for long periods and bringing culture with them, amateur theatricals in the library

For a long time the American suburb was also an attempt at a synthesis.  Packs of kids roaming in the cul-de-sac and playing sandlot baseball in the vacant dirt lot.

Increasingly many new suburbs actually seem like a synthesis of the vices.  Few children, highly sterilized and controlled, empty palaces of loneliness.

As a society we are still groping for a new synthesis of the goods.  It will probably look something like a homestead suburb for big family people or like an intentional village.  Living in a compound except you don’t belong to a cult.

Our makeshift version of the synthesis is living in a small town with a big garden and using the internet and books to access culture and enrichment and taking lots of trips to the woods to meet up with gangs of cousins.