This statement is the essence of the problem between Somewheres and Anywheres. Anywheres have the option of saying “no thanks” to the things you don’t value. Since you don’t value them, you can go to a city, be anonymous, and live a rootless Anywhere sort of life with no permanent attachments; no one will stop you or care to. But the Somewheres are clearly being told that the things they value must be taken away from them, because Anywheres don’t value them. The familiarity and security we value must be destroyed, because everything must be the same everywhere – that is, the way Anywheres want it.

Things used to work quite well when cities and rural places maintained their differences. In rural places and small towns, change occurs but it is slow and organic – not constant, shocking and ruinous. People who desire a slow and relatively unchanging way of life stay in the places where they grew up; people who want constant change and excitement grow up and resettle in a city. Both types of people are satisfied. But it seems that Anywheres cannot leave others alone until they comply. This attitude is so ingrained that they simply can’t be made to see it as a form of group bullying (which it is).

Another point I disagree with here is that Somewheres derive their identities from a place. Having a deep and loving connection with a place and wishing to preserve what one loves is not the same as deriving your identity from that place. My identity is derived from many things, of which the places I love are a part, as well as the books I’ve read, the subjects I’ve studied, the people I’ve known, the ideas I’ve entertained, and my own choices as to what becomes part of me and what I discard. The assumption that my love of a place is all that I am is simply insulting! More than ever before, we have the ability to know and learn about a world of things outside our immediate experience. Assuming that Somewheres ignorantly fail to take advantage of these opportunities is, again, insulting.

“. . . having a deep connection to place and a strong affiliation with a cohort is likely to make you more fearful, conservative and xenophobic.”

I would instead say that deep attachment and love for any place or group of people renders a threat to their survival a matter of the utmost concern. If you know a way to love a place, for instance, and feel a kind of bland indifference as to the fate of that place, if you are able to comfortably contemplate its immediate alteration beyond recognition, then I can only say that you have a vastly different definition of “love” from my own. The fearfulness, conservatism and xenophobia that you complain of, to the extent they exist at all, do so only as a result of the intense pressure placed upon people to surrender what they value most. I’m often at a loss to know how to make an Anywhere feel this same sense of threat, to enable them to understand what they are doing to people who want to live in a different way. If they were under immediate threat of having their cell phones permanently taken away, and their social media accounts removed, would they then understand how threatened people feel by having everything they have known and loved transformed or destroyed? If they had to give up travel and moving from place to place, and were required to choose a place and spend the rest of their life in it, would they then understand? I don’t know what it would take to motivate Anywheres to live their lives and let others do the same, but thus far I see no awareness of or responsibility taken for their destruction of valued ways of life that have supported and sustained human beings for millennia.

It seems to me that only people with lots of money (on a global scale) and access to resources and opportunities from many quarters could possibly be “tolerant” in the sense that modern, urban and suburban liberals are. Their world seems strange, isolated and rootless to me. They literally don’t seem to know where they stand. I wonder: how do they connect to anything or anyone? They don’t seem to know anyone; their attachments appear temporary and made for reasons of convenience and status enhancement. It’s so odd to me. That sort of behavior would get you ostracized and possibly killed around here. It’s too destructive of community life.

Finally, I’d like to say something: to me, highly liberal “anywheres” do not seem so liberal and committed to “social justice” when it actually materially affects them. Witness Silicon Valley’s complete and utter resistance (and indifference) to attempts to enforce “diversity” at executive and high programming levels. Let large numbers of cheap Indian (they’re English-speaking) lawyers emigrate to the USA and take many jobs from US born lawyers. You’d see some pushback.

Very interesting hypothesis…

It’s really a discussion that’s assumes an underlying global perspective / globalisation, which is generally only applicable for those with access to mobility (across geographic and economic terrain) – perhaps that explains the “Somewheres” tendency to be bound to place? Second, I wonder whether the hypothesis stands when the option of mobility is completely removed (at least on the scale we’ve become accustomed to in a “wealthy global society”).

Third, it seems to assume that globalisation is “good” (but not having read the work I can’t say…?). Whilst it is clearly a fact of modern life, there seems to have been limited study of “globalisations” ability to handle problems on a global scale. Some would make the argument that “Somewheres” actually have a greater skill set to deal with global problems (on a local scale) than “Anywhere’s”.

I’ve always been impacted by Ellul’s discussion of technique and it’s affect on our understanding of the natural environment, along with Wendell Berry and his observation that humans can never truly understand global concerns, but only local ones. Berry would submit that all good economies and work are necessarily carried out from a place of affection for a specific time and place.

A discussion on whether / how Ellul’s & Berry’s ideas interact with Goodhart’s hypothesis would be a very interesting study indeed. There seems to me to be an immediate conflict between the two but perhaps that would not be so with further investigation…