we’ve been toying with the idea of moving out of london for a while. for the cost of a london family home, it’s possible to buy something bigger and better, if you’re prepared to travel over an hour. we’ve largely given up on the idea, partly through inertia, partly because none of us really wants to be more that 20 minutes from the bright lights. but during this process ita was approached by some guy about a family house that shared a dozen acres with a bunch of others. apparently you can’t just buy the place, but have to secure the acceptance of the other houses. i think this is what is called a “community”. of course i wouldn’t entertain the idea, no matter what the place/people were like. that way madness lies.
however, i often say that one of the worst things britain ever did was popularise the passport in the 19th century (popularise because it originally came from the greek city states). what if no one stopped cross-border migration? what would the late 19th / early 20th century have looked like? where would we be now?
and today i read, in the economist, about the big sort. this term describes the geographic clustering of like-minded groups in the united states.
Where you live is partly determined by where you can afford to live, of course. But the “Big Sort” does not seem to be driven by economic factors. Income is a poor predictor of party preference in America; cultural factors matter more. For Americans who move to a new city, the choice is often not between a posh neighbourhood and a run-down one, but between several different neighbourhoods that are economically similar but culturally distinct.
and groups of like-minded people reaffirm each others views, and the group becomes more extreme. america is splitting into “balkanised communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible.”
ha etc.
There are a couple of places in the Orwell essays where he comments that before WW1 there was only one country (Russia, I think, or maybe Albania) that had passports and border control inhibiting the free movement of people. Is that wrong? Or had there been passports for millenia but not used for travel? I have no idea.
Comment by Terry Jones — June 23, 2008 @ 12:08 am
as far as i remember, passports go way back. in britain at least 600 years. but i think they started in the italian city states before this. not used in earnest until WW1, as you say. when passport use died out in the 19th century (permits to travel), russia was the only country to retain them.
Comment by rustle — June 27, 2008 @ 12:19 am