The split between the rooted and the mobile is described as a modern affliction, a wound globalisation opened. It's one of the oldest fault lines there's. Treating it as new is how you misread it.
Crossbencher · 20 July 2026
One part of this really is modern. The class of people whose sense of self travels with them - educated into portable skills, at home in any city, attached to networks rather than places - is larger now, and more powerful, than at any point in the past. Mass higher education, cheap movement and an economy that rewards the mobile have swollen the ranks of what has usefully been called the Anywheres. And they have thinned the standing of the Somewheres: the people whose identity is bound up with a particular place and the life it holds. When that mobile class also staffs most of the institutions that set the tone - the universities, the media, the civil service - the older, rooted majority can find its own instincts described as backward in its own country. That's a real and modern imbalance, and pretending it away helps no one.
But the fault line itself isn't modern at all. The mistrust between the person who could live anywhere and the person who is of somewhere runs through the whole of recorded society. It's the tension between the walled town and the country around it. Between the cosmopolitan port and the inland village. Between the lettered clerk who served wherever he was needed and the farmer whose world was the parish he was born in. Every settled civilisation has held both types and has had to manage the friction between them: the universalist who finds the particularist parochial, and the particularist who finds the universalist rootless and not quite to be trusted. The vocabulary is new. The division it names is as old as towns.
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