My book is basically about the value divides in modern societies.
I focused a lot on Britain, but I think a lot of it applies to America too.
And I'm talking about not so much the kind of elite/non-elite divide—when we talk about
elites we often mean I think the top three or five percent of the population—I’m
talking about a much bigger divide between the educated and often mobile people, who
I call the “Anywheres,” who tend to value openness, autonomy, fluidity—they can surf
social change comfortably, they tend not to have strong group attachments.
They are about 20/25 percent of the population, at least in Britain, possibly similar proportions
in America.
Then on the other hand you have the “Somewheres”.
They tend to be about half the population.
So a big proportion of the population but much less politically and culturally influential.
They tend to be less well educated.
They tend to be more rooted to places.
They tend to value security and familiarity, and they find a social change harder to surf
and they also tend to have much stronger group attachments.
There's also a very useful distinction that parallels my Anywhere/Somewhere distinction
that comes from the American sociologist Talcott Parsons talking about human identity, he talks
about people with achieved identities and ascribed identities.
We all have a mixture of the two, but Anywheres tend to have a higher proportion of their
sense of themselves that comes from their own achievements.
They passed exams when they were young, they have been to good universities, they have
more or less successful professional careers.
So their sense of themselves is more kind of portable, they can fit in anywhere.
Whereas if you're a Somewhere a bigger proportion of your identity is linked to particular places
in groups and therefore is more easily discomfited when those groups or those places change as
a result of immigration or just social change in general.
So I think what obviously a lot of contemporary analysis is focusing on, this the educated
versus the less educated divide—I think what is distinctive about my look at things
is stressing both how large the educated group is and how dominant in our political system
it has become, but also focusing on two things that distinguish the so-called Anywheres from
the Somewheres.
One is attitude, feelings about social change: on the one hand relatively positive, on the
other hand pretty negative.
And also feelings about group attachments: in the case of the Anywheres pretty weak,
and in the case of the Somewheres much stronger.
And this I think he has a huge impact on politics, on divisions so Anywheres both of right and
left tend to stress politics of equality, kind of more universalist equality, a sort
of horizontal politics if you like, whereas Somewheres tend to stress group attachments
and more kind of vertical communities if you like.
One must stress here is that both of these world views are completely legitimate, both
of them are completely decent, at least in the mainstream variations.
But the problem for our politics in modern liberal democracies is that these world views
conflict in certain fundamental ways.
I'm an Anywhere myself, I mean most of the people watching this will be Anywheres, but
I think Anywheres have over dominated politics and some ways have felt excluded, and that
has created the instability that has led to Brexit in Britain and Trump in the United
States, and I think we need to take those political events as a kind of a warning, a
kind of early tremor of what might come, and we need to adjust.
We need to create politics in which Somewheres feel they have a louder voice and feel that
their priorities and their intuitions are taken seriously.
Because I spend some time in my book just going through the extent, the domination of
the political and policy agenda in a country like Britain, I think it applies to America
too—of Anywhere priorities.
If you look at everything from the economy to education policy to family policy to attitudes
of social mobility and the achievement society, we have created societies in which cognitive
ability has become the kind of gold standard of human esteem, human measurement.
And a lot of people, by definition half the population, are always going to be in the
bottom half of the cognitive abilities spectrum.
But even people who are not in the bottom half of the cognitive abilities spectrum I
think often feel rather alienated by society dominated by cognitive elites who perhaps
feel less attachment to duty to non-elites, they are less paternalistic than the previous
generations of elites.
I think one of the interesting questions is why is this happening now?
On the face of it you might say that society has always been divided to some extent between
the highly educated and mobile people with perhaps more open minds, and more rooted people
with more skepticism about the outside world.
But why is this now risen to such an important place in our politics?
I think there are two reasons for that.
One is that, and this is particularly true I think of Britain and Europe, one is that
the framework of politics until quite recently has been essentially socioeconomic, it's the
key blocks have been social classes, the issues have been about size of the state, attitudes
to equality and inequality, these have been the things that have dominated British and
European politics.
In the last generation or so you've seen the emergence of what one might call sociocultural
politics, politics that stresses issues of security and identity.
And that's relatively new in Europe.
It's perhaps not so new in America.
Religion and race has always played a bigger role in American politics than it has in Europe,
at least recently.
So I think you've seen sociocultural politics emerging to kind of challenge the traditional
dominance of socioeconomic issues.
And that is in itself partly a reaction to the much greater openness of our economies
and our cultures over the last 20 or 30 years.
It's a reaction against that openness that you've seen the sociocultural politics emerging
so strongly.
And the second reason is simply that the number of Anywheres as grown quite dramatically.
I mean just go back 50 or 60 years...
American common sense was essentially Somewhere common sense, British common sense was essentially
Somewhere common sense.
It is now in the public realm almost entirely Anywhere common sense.
What it is to lead a good life, an achieved life is about being an Anywhere, it's about
leaving, it's often about leaving your hometown going to a good university, becoming a member
of the kind of upper professional class, being part of that cognitive elite.
And it's logically impossible that everybody can do that.
Not everybody can join the upper professional class.
And I think we've kind of eroded the stories for people who are not part of that that successful
achieved group.
And you see it also in the way in which – we talk about the knowledge economy.
I mean the knowledge economy by definition is one that is beneficial to the highly qualified,
and at the same time, as we've seen the emergence the knowledge economy, we've also seen the
disappearance of so many of those middling jobs that used to give people status and protection.
Somebody said to me the other day, I actually didn't write this in the book but it's something
I've learned talking about the book is: somebody who used to be a manual worker said that so
many jobs used to require not a huge amount of cognitive ability but a lot of experience
to do well.
And that I think applies particularly to the kind of skilled manual manufacturing jobs
that we've lost so many of.
And jobs that you couldn't just walk in off the street as a kind of successful Harvard
graduate or whatever and do that job, there was a protection to your status for the fact
that it required a lot of experience to do well.
And I think we've seen that kind of replicated, we've seen it kind of draining away.
This is so much more I think about this is Weber not Marx, I mean this is so much more
about issues to do with status and recognition and what we might call, it sounds rather old-fashioned,
what one might call “social honor” that people used to feel they had doing ordinary
middling things that they no longer feel they have.
They feel the kind of status, it's not just – that we've also had stagnant wages, particularly
in America for a generation or more, exacerbated obviously by the financial crash, but certainly
in Britain and Europe I don't think this is primarily an economic issue, it's much more
a cultural issue, much more to do with status and recognition.
Obviously the two things are very tightly wound up together in many cases and rather
hard to disentangle.