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Sorry, felix, but I'm with kuromitsu on this one.
In a society where each and every human being is a walking nuclear weapon in his/her destructive capability, I would say that the two most important things by far are...
1) Properly raising/socializing children.
2) Law enforcement.
And sure enough, this society focuses heavily around both of these two things.
Now, what is tremendously helpful in properly raising/socializing children, and engaging in law enforcement? Social groups.
To have any meaningful degree of law enforcement, you need at least a village of shared customs, laws, and/or regulations.
And while I don't entirely agree with the old adage of "It takes a village to raise a child", I think that it's generally better to have many people involved in a child's raising than just a parent/legal guardian or two.
If you have thousands of small families scattered about the Japanese countryside, you're going to cause the following problems:
1. Alienation. People will feel alienated from non-related peers, and hence distrustful of them. This is a natural repercussion of never really mixing with non-related peers.
2. You're pretty much begging for loads of "The Hatfields vs. The McCoys" situations. That's definitely not good.
3. Everybody is essentially "home-schooled". But not all parents have the skills and aptitudes necessary to make good teachers in addition to being good parents. So many children would suffer educationally in your proposed system, with the ultimate result being that humanity would decline even further with steadily less and less practical scientific knowledge.
4. I think you overestimate the practical capabilities of most Cantus-using humans here. We're not talking about Superman X 70,000 here. For example, it's a safe assumption that Maria can't fly (why else would she bother with the whole "hop and float, hop and float" manner of movement?) I also get the impression that Cantus-using humans have limited control over the weather (that's a pretty stark Winter everybody is dealing with in the anime right now; if there were many high-level weather controllers amongst the Cantus-users I'm inclined to think this wouldn't be the case). Taking all of this into consideration, I'm not sure if every Cantus-using human could be trusted to take care of their own basic physical needs when it comes to food, shelter, and clothing. So there remains obvious benefits to these humans continuing to organize in groups that form villages and towns.
So on the whole, I think that social groups are still to humanity's benefit in the world of Shin Sekai Yori.
Now, that being said, I think having widely-spread apart villages would certainly be better than having all remaining humans living in one place together. By having a dozen or more widely-spaced apart villages, you can mitigate the effects of any lone disaster.
Ideally, I think it would be best if you had maybe 70 villages of approximately 1,000 people each, with these villages spread apart as much as possible. I grew up in a town of about 1,000 people, and that's enough for decent socialization, I think.
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