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Thread: Somewhere vs Anywhere

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    Senior Member razz's Avatar
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    Somewhere vs Anywhere

    After reading an excerpt from a new book by a recent Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, i tried to understand the difference between "somewheres" and "anywheres". I think I rest between the two.
    In my search for further clarification I found this article written after the Brexit vote. Harper explains what happened in the US reflected similar thinking in 2016. It is not Democrats vs Republicans so much as two differing views of our world. Is that what is shaping policies and loyalties today around the world?

    Source: https://www.newstatesman.com/politic...xit-inevitable
    Goodhart renames the new tribes the “Anywheres” (roughly 20 to 25 per cent of the population) and the “Somewheres” (about half), with the rest in between. And it broadly works. Those who see the world from anywhere are, he points out, the ones who dominate our culture and society, doing well at school and moving to a residential university, and then into a professional career, often in London or abroad. “Such people have portable ‘achieved’ identities,” he says, “based on educational and career success which makes them . . . comfortable and confident with new places and people.”

    The rebels are those more rooted in geographical identity – the Scottish farmer, working-class Geordie, Cornish housewife – who find the rapid changes of the modern world unsettling. They are likely to be older and less well educated. “They have lost economically with the decline of well-paid jobs for people without qualifications and culturally, too, with the disappearance of a distinct working-class culture and the marginalisation of their views in the public conversation,” Goodhart writes. He argues that this distinction, emerging from a melange of social and cultural views together with life experiences, matters more than old distinctions of right and left, or social class.

    As Cicero said, “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”

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    Senior Member iris lilies's Avatar
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    Razz,

    Respectfully, I don’t see anything new in this characterization of two differing views. It is pretty much summarizing educated/coastal types versus flyover country here in the US.

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    I think a lot of pieces like this say more about the status anxieties of the people who write them than the culture they attempt to describe. What is an "achieved identity" other than a fixation on your job title, the brand name on your education and the restaurants you talk about frequenting? When these people, at least the American version, want to tell us how open-minded and confident they are, I have to wonder who they're trying to convince.

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    Senior Member razz's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by iris lilies View Post
    Razz,

    Respectfully, I don’t see anything new in this characterization of two differing views. It is pretty much summarizing educated/coastal types versus flyover country here in the US.
    OK, IL, now I understand the differing views a little better. What I could not find was how to resolve/reconcile these differing views and get a shared vision to move into the future. Has this shared future been apparent anywhere?
    As Cicero said, “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”

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    Quote Originally Posted by razz View Post
    OK, IL, now I understand the differing views a little better. What I could not find was how to resolve/reconcile these differing views and get a shared vision to move into the future. Has this shared future been apparent anywhere?
    Have we ever had one? Do we really need one? Can't we muddle along like a big bickering, somewhat eccentric family?

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    Senior Member Teacher Terry's Avatar
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    It is often rural people that see things much different than city people.

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    Quote Originally Posted by razz View Post
    Has this shared future been apparent anywhere?
    Certainly not totally. Has any president ever had unanimous popular vote? When the country had a "shared vision", or more to the point goal, (to win the second war to end all wars), was it shared by all (those in our concentration camps, those that spied for other countries, etc)?
    Wars against us, have always been the closest, where the war among ourselves the most divisive and deadly.

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