 Og det gælder bare, det gælder de sjerter, der sidder her i Berkeby Auditoriet, men det gælder også dem, der sidder og ude og ser den her debat-aften på nettet. Velkommen, velkommen til den nye Vardite-debat, som I kalder den. Velkommen til en forsamlingshus-debat eller højskole-debat om, hvad de er's betydning for samfundet for demokratiet og for politik. Nen hedder Mikael Bøs, jeg er hvert i den første del af aftenen, som I ved består aften af to dele. I den første del er jeg ved at interviewe de to personer, der sidder til venstre for mig på Engelsk. Og det er fordi den ene ikke forstår Danse. I havde nok forventet at se tre personer, den tredje personer strandet i kastet. Det er Ron Engelhardt. Og vi vil forsøge at gøre godt, så vidt vi nu kan. Specielt Peter Gundelhardt er en god kænder af Engelhardt's teorier. Jeg kan se jo flere, og Ron Engelhardt's meget gode venner og kollegaer kan også sige noget. Og det vil vi have sådan en samtale om, hvad de er, og hvad de er politiker. Hvornår vil vi det hele tiden begynde at tale om, om hvad de er politik? Det er jo ikke noget, vi har gjort i så mange år. Hvorfor går vi det, og hvornår begyndte det? Og det vil vi gøre frem til kl. 8, og så vil det være en meget, meget kort pause. Som kun kan bruges det højst og vatelige. Der kan være forskellige behovsfølge, men altså, tænk på det. Vi skal lige starte meget kort efter kl. 10. år og 8. Og så skal vi have den her debat om, hvad de er i Danmark. Og hvordan vi diskuterer, hvad de er, hvilken betydning de har, de er, de er, de har for politikken, for samfundet. Og det er en debat som de, hvor, når vi skifter ordstyr, der måtte de lede til styret af chefredaktør Erik Bjerger fra Kristi Dagblad. Kristi Dagblad er den ene af samarbejdspartneren omkring den her aften. Den anden er folkundværelse til det i Aarhus, og er gerne benødt i lejligheden til at tage vægge for eres medvirke i den her aften. Det er fantastisk, at vi kan medvirke til endnu et folkligt arrangement, indenfor en match på en seminar. Fordi det er jo meget vigtigt, og det er noget, vi kan stå væk på, at vi har nogle akademiske dele, så har vi nogle dele for rød offentlighed, nogle, ofte nogle debat arrangementer. Det ligger helt et tråd med det, som vi ønsker på Aarhus universitet, nemlig at bruge match på en seminar, som en åben dør til det offentlige samfund. Det vi ønsker, det er at tage emner op, som har ræd offentlig betydning. Og vi håber også, den ambition har vi også, at vi måske kan komme med vores indspil i den hjemmele debat. Så velkommen til al sammen, og så vil jeg stå på engelsk. Vi kan nok forsøge at tale et engelsk, som er rimeligt forstået. Så velkommen til vores gæster her. På mænden, først, Prof. Robert D. Partman fra Harvard Universitet, vores afsætterende professor i Aarhus universitet i 2014, og Prof. Peter Gondolag fra Universitet Copenhagen. De her gæsterne, og de ved meget om valgene, og det er den signifikeren af valgene, som er trøst for demokratiet, for demokratiet, for society, for politik. Og jeg tror, at det må være en god idé, hvis vi snakker om valgene. Hvad er vi understående med dette koncept? Hvad er valgene mig? Hvordan er vi understående med socialt valgene, Gondolag? Det er en svært sætning, fordi der er virkelig hundreds af valgene, men jeg preferer en meget simpelte definisering, som siger, at valgene er ønskeligt, noget som vi har. Vi kan ikke observere det direkte. Det er en meget stabil konstruktion, der betyder, at valgene ikke er dependente på forskellige situationer, men de er meget brugtere af de fleste situationer, og det er selvfølgelig, hvad det er god eller bedre. Så det er visuelle ting, at vi konstruer dem, baser dem på valgene, der er en sådan measurement. Dr. Padnam, vil valgene spille en mål i din forskning? De vil. Jeg tror, at det er faktisk det seneste, at tænke på politikken, som er baseret på valgene, med at kontraste det med noget andet, fordi det første reaktion er at tænke på, at alle politikken er baseret på valgene, det er ikke den måde, der er ment ved Ron Engelhardt, som er vores missingpartner her. Og ofte når folk taler om politikken af valgene, de er indtageret med politikken af interesse, så vi prøver at spille om, at det er en stik af, at det er de stikere af det, for at spille omvendelsen, ikke om valgene, men om interesse, men vi vil tænke på, at det er en amerikansk skole, med en ting af gæd maris eller om homoseksuelle regler, som en valgingsinteresse, fordi det går til dække personale valgier, som folk har. På den ene side, jeg tror, at man vil hjælpe en politik af valgier. Man kan sige, at man vil have politikker, bare om at være om at møde en intresse. Hvis vi ikke alle aspirere til politikken, som engagerer vores dækkelige sense af moral, røg og røg, som du siger. På den anden side, man kan være færdig af politikken, baser på valgier, fordi man kan sige, at det er svært at få en kompromiss på valgier. Man kan sige, at det er svært at få en kompromiss på valgier, så at vi kan gøre en kompromiss. Hvis du tror, at der er et sted for valgier, så skal det være 2 euro. Hvis du tror, at det skal være 1 euro, så skal det være 1,5 euro. Hvis du tror, at det er valgier, så tager jeg et eksempel fra USA, og hvis det er en ny kesel fra en avorskning, så kan du finde, at det er en fundimentale sætning om, hvordan du er sikker på vores liv, hvis du er på den side af vores aforskning. Eller hvordan du er sikker på den fundimentale fritimsfald om vores egne kan kontrollere vores eget. Så er det et andet fundimentale valgier. Og du kan tage, hvordan du kan sige, hvad der er analog i denne sætning, til en billigte sted for 1,5 euro. Så jeg kan... Jeg tror, at der er nogle atrækter til politikker, som er med valget, og nogle koncerner om politikker, som er med valget. I den danske kontekst, politikker og søger vil det være, at politikker og søger er med valget. Vi har en speciel ord for politikkerne og politikkerne i dag. Vi kommer tilbage til det, men en af min valget er informativitet. Så jeg skriver og siger Peter. Peter, kan valget være medvalget? Du har været medvalget over dager. Du er responsiv for den danske part af den europæiske valgetidsprojekt. Hvis du kan sige et par ting om, hvordan du medvalger valget, og hvorfor det hele idé, eller medvalget, er europæiske valget. Hvordan det kom op. The way it's done in the European Value Survey and in the World Value Survey, that Ron Egelhardt is chairing, is true. The use of questionnaires, identical questionnaires on different kinds of values in different countries. So use exactly the same question in many different countries, which means that it's possible to compare all the countries on the same variables, so to speak. And also these questions are, some of them are measured several times. Several times, in my own case, they have been measured in 1981, 1990, 1999, 2008. So this means that you are able to compare between countries across time, which is very important for describing what is going on. Another characteristic of this project is that they measure many different kinds of values, religious, political code, work values, family values, and so on, which means that it's better than just measuring in a very specific project, a specific type of value. So you can, for instance, correlate, compare values in different countries in relation to the impact of religion on family values, things like that. So that's sort of the basic asset of this project. In Europe, this project began in 1981, that was the first data collection in 1981, and ten countries participated at that time. It originated from a group of scholars at universities in Germany, the Netherlands, in particular those countries, and in particular people from Catholic universities. And they created this project in order to get data to understand what was going on in Europe at the time, because after the 60s, there was a general concern about what would happen to the values in Europe. Would there be, I mean, people were watching divorces, women's entry into the labour market, legal impact from the families, religion seemed to be threatened, all kinds of things that seemed to point into a direction of deterioration of the integration in society. So these people, they wanted to figure out what was going on, and instead of just being concerned about them once they started it. And actually just to tell you an anecdote about this, Denmark was not part of that group in the beginning, no data scholars at the time were interested in values, they were interested in interest, use your phrase. And so the first wave of data collection was carried out without any social science scholars in Denmark, and it was financed by some foundation from abroad. So, but you are in the fortunate situation that these values studies have been carried on every ten years. So we are now 30 years removed from the beginnings. So could you confirm, were the originators of this idea, were they justified in being worried about the change of values, the deterioration of values? On the contrary, they were completely wrong. And some of this may be due to, if you talk misogologically about it, may be due to the fact that most of the changes that they were concerned about weren't earlier than 1981, in the 60s, in the 70s, and after the 1980s, things have been much more stable, and there are no signs of social disintegration or anything like that. So values are pretty, social values are pretty robust? They are, they are pretty robust and stable, and if I should just explain why, since von Engelheim is not here, he would have, he would have, he has a certain machine for explaining that, which is a generational explanation, what he calls the cohort replacement, which means that the values that you acquire in your formative years, before you are something like 25 years old, they tend to be stable for the rest of your life. So people like us, who are pretty old, we have not gained any kind of change in our values since we were young. That would be his argument. Many, many differences of course, and nuances, but that would be the general idea. So he suggests that, to speak metaphorically, you sort of, you get your values, and you enter, you could walk into an escalator, and then you stand still by the escalator's works, changing or moving, so you feel that things are moving, but actually you're just in the same position as ever. Okay, I'm teaching at a university, I'm teaching within the humanities faculty, what used to be called that, which is called arts nowadays. I'm used to listening and teaching postmodern theory, and postmodern theory is that we are living in an age where values are fluctuating, so you don't, this thesis is not correct. Of course there are some values that are changing, more rapidly than others, and maybe we can come back to that, but the general result of our analysis is that there are no reasons to believe this postmodernist description, and we have done that in two, to have checked that in two ways. First of all we have checked whether the values that people have in different groups, for instance, men, women, young, old, different or compassionate groups, whether the correlation between those characteristics and the values have changed over time, and they have not. The second check is to analyze whether the correlations between different values are stable or have disappeared, which in this latter case that would be postmodernism, everything is dissolving, and there are no signs of that either, so we are standing firmly on a modernistic analysis. So Bob, if you excuse me for being so ethnocentric, maybe we just finished with the Danish case. So what are the stable Danish values? There are several of them, religion is fairly stable, family values are fairly stable, many political values are fairly stable, but there is also this increase in, as predicted by Ron Engelhardt, in values that are becoming more self-realization values, less authoritarian values. We also find a huge increase in the levels of trust and levels of tolerance towards immigrants, increase in freedom of speech values related to freedom of speech. So all in all we find that the integration part of the Danish values are fairly strong. So there's no risk, no risk of, it doesn't make any sense to talk about the values crisis in society. Yes Bob? I just wanted to ask a question. You talked about the increase in tolerance for immigrants and increases in I think you said emphasis on free expression, if I understand correctly. Are those changes, are those as Ron would say cohort changes, that is are those driven by the fact that younger Danes are consistently more open to immigrants or more convinced of the rights of free expression and therefore it's the generational arithmetic that's increasing that change or are those changes applied across the board to all age groups? Well it's both actually, but the most important thing is then what you call across the board what he would call period effects. So during this period there's a general increase in tolerance in trusting someone. But that's one factor, you mentioned you may share values within your generation, and what generations change. Generations change, so we might not be sure that the new generations would share your values. No of course not, and that's a part of this idea of the cohort replacement. I could just give you one of the best examples in the case of cohort replacement is a question in the questionnaire where people ask, well they would avoid to pay a ticket in public transportation. And this is extremely well described as a cohort replacement. So the younger cohorts are much more reluctant to pay for tickets in public transportation. And if you draw a graph of that, the lines would be completely horizontal. Ron Ingehart would argue that as society becomes more prosperous, as it becomes more secular, as we tend to cherish what he calls post-material values, also he calls them self-expression values, we're bound to become individualists. And that is one might suppose that might be a problem for the sense of community. Now Bob, would you say that is that your own experience, is that the results you have from your research that the changes that you are observing are not affecting community, community cohesion in America? Well I have to make several points here. First of all, there are many ways to assess the state of a culture or of a society and examining values is one important way of doing that. Another way of doing it is to examine behavior. Whatever people say, do they walk the walk. In the American political jargon we distinguish between walking the walk and talking the talk. You could talk the talk means you're able to, you say what values you have, but the walking is actually doing, implementing those values in practice. In my own work frankly I've spent more time on the measures of behavior than on values, but in the US case there are significant cohort differences in America, both in terms of value and in terms of behavior. I wouldn't put them all under a single rubric, but let me give some examples. There's an extremely strong cohort difference that it's according to different, when people were born, different birth cohorts on issues surrounding homosexuality. So younger people in America are much, much more open-minded and less sensorial, less critical about homosexual behavior, including gay marriage for example, than older people are. There's been some change among all generations, but overwhelmingly the change is driven by generational arithmetic. By that I mean given the sharp differences, I don't know, I don't have the exact numbers in my memory, but something like 80% of people who are now in their 20s and 30s favor gay marriage and people my age at the higher end of the age hierarchy, by 20 or 30% of my age contemporaries support gay marriage or homosexuality. One of the things about cohort, one of the reasons Iran is interested, and I also am interested in cohort changes, that cohort change is by its nature slow because it depends upon my generation passing from the scene and my grandchildren who have a much different view and that happens fortunately slowly. But surely it's slow, but it's changed, it's very hard to reverse, whereas period effects as you've described can move in one way or another way pretty easily. So the advantage of thinking about cohort change is it's very likely to be fundamental and continuing. There are big cohort differences on homosexuality and big cohort differences in America on attitudes to free speech, as you say. And big cohort differences, younger people are much, much more tolerant along racial lines, much more tolerant of, for example, racial intermarriage. And all of those are cohort changes and that means they're slow but very likely to persist. And given my values, I think all of those are changes in the right direction. On the other hand, both with respect to values and with respect to behavior, it is true that there are cohort differences that are moving our society towards a more individualistic society, people more focused on me and less focused on we, and that, those sorts of changes, which means people are much less likely to take part in collective activity and more likely to take part in individualistic activity. That means that, again, because those are cohort changes, they're slow but they're moving all in the same direction and I'll change my metaphor here, that if you think of a pendulum that swings between an emphasis on individual rights and an emphasis on collective responsibilities, the American pendulum in my lifetime has swung from being, when I was growing up in the 1950s, a good deal of emphasis on collective responsibilities. It's swung very far over towards a de-emphasis on collective responsibilities, a de-emphasis on social solidarity, for example, and an increased emphasis among the younger generation on individualism. I think they're both changed positive. What I would think of myself as positive and negative changes. Peter, this is not the observation in Denmark and your team didn't observe a less emphasis on community values and community fail escape. No, not really. One of the important things that you have shown on social capital and the decrease of social capital so it's not found in Denmark. We found just the opposite, that there's an increase in trust in membership of voluntary associations and so on. We may be overemphasising that if you go to different data sources because when people have published on this, they have published on survey data. But we also have registered data, for instance on membership of the Danish State Church or trade unions, which are extremely important integrative associations. And when we look at that, it seems that they are bleeding, very slowly they are bleeding, so fewer members of the state church, fewer members of trade unions. And we can see that has some kind of relationship to Inglard's explanation since people who are not becoming member of the state church or trade unions have parents who are not members. So they are socialised into that. And this may not be completely a cohort effect, but still it shows you the importance of socialisation. Let's turn to the question of values and their implication and the significance for politics. Now when Ron Inglard started making his research into values and their impact on politics, he noted that there was a difference between the values and norms that motivated voters in the 1960s and in the 1980s. In the 1960s people were still concerned with their economic security, with their physical security. They were voting on issues of social welfare the economy, etc. But then he noted that in the 1980s the voters would have different motivations. They would be voted, what would interest them was actually issues like the environment, like identity, like gender inequality, things like that. And these are the values that he calls self-expression values or post-material values. And this of course must have had an effect on politics. Because politics until then had been, or political parties had been a product of industrial society. And so the various parties reflected various class interests. But now when the situation changed, political parties had a harder time determining and finding out what their voters were interested in. And so we had this change from ideologies, from political ideologies to values. And in the 1990s all over the world, especially in Europe, we talk about values, politics. And you may remember how Tony Blair said, in order to make the transformation of the Labour Party in Britain, he said, while politics today is not about ideologies, it's about values. And he often spoke and wrote about this. Did we see the same thing happening in Denmark in the 1990s, Peter? We did. But it takes a certain specific flavour in Denmark, since this in Denmark, what he put values, politics, was very much associated with the question about immigration. And I think this is maybe a very specific Danish story, which had huge impact on the political system. The political parties were divided in relation to the question of immigrants, and it became sort of the same values, politics, were the same as saying something about immigration. Of course there were other issues that were close to that. You mentioned the environment, other things, but if you should talk about value politics, in one word you would talk about immigration. And this changed, I mean it became a strong political debate and fierce struggle between different political parties. And even within political parties the social democrats were divided for a long period in relation to this. So this was one of the very strong social debates at the time. But certainly today we also talk about values, values involved in the system of justice. Or in education we are going through a debate now, we are preparing for educational reform. So isn't there other values involved in many other public areas? My argument was at this cursed level that at that time immigration became values in a sense of the perception of immigration. And now it has changed somewhat to be a much broader concept as we have indicated relations to the environment, to justice, to freedom of speech, many other things. But at that time when the concept sort of became public in beginning became public it was very much related to immigration since the Danish political parties had strong problems in coping with the problems that were caused by immigration. Now of course we will return to this discussion in the second part of tonight's program. However I want to turn to you now Bob, because you became famous, well famous for a book that you wrote around 2000 called Bowling Alone. And you are a very committed person, I know enough now, you are very engaged in the things that you do your research in. What was it that motivated you to go into the studies that you are to the data collection that formed the basis of your later book on Bowling Alone. Perhaps you can explain us something about this. Yes, well you know when one talks about one's own work and tries to explain it one can use one of two frames of reference, one can talk about what is the intellectual frame of reference that led you to address a particular problem. And I'll say a word about that. I had done this earlier work on a completely different topic, namely government in different parts of Italy. And that research which was trying to explain why some places in Italy were better governed than other places in Italy. And the shorthand answer to that was choral societies or reading groups in some regions where there was a dense civic society or what I came to say, what I came to call social capital, that is networks that brought citizens together were better governed than places where there wasn't this active civic engagement. And you could actually go out and count how many choirs are there in this region of Italy and in the northern part and the southern part where there were most choirs that would also be best governance. That's right. Indeed, eventually we showed that if you tell me how many choral societies a region of government had in the year 1200, I can tell you plus or minus three days how long it will take you to get your health bills reimbursed by the regional bureaucracy. So it's a very strong relationship between these deep traditions, either of active civic engagement or not active civic engagement. I came to call that social capital and there was in the Italian case a very clear relationship between social capital and democracy. And then that led me back, that kind of thinking led me, as I went back to America, to wonder whether there was any connection between what I had been studying as a scholar and what I was concerned about as a citizen. As a citizen I was concerned about how well or poorly American democracy had been functioning. When I was growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, if you ask Americans, do you trust the government to do what's right most of the time? 75% of Americans said they did trust the government to do what's right most of the time. Now that figure is about 15% from 75% to 15%. It's been steadily declining. And of course it's interesting to try to figure out what might have caused that. One possible hypothesis is that if you look carefully at the data, the data begin to decline, the trust in government in America begin, and the quality of government begins to decline exactly the year in which I personally started to vote, which is 1964. So it occurred to me that I personally might have caused this collapse of American democracy. But of course like a good social scientist I was interested in other hypotheses. And so it occurred to me to wonder what had been the changes in social capital in this sense of civic engagement participation in community life over the previous 50 years. And what I discovered, frankly, I was originally a little surprised at the discovery, was that there had been a pretty steady decline, not in values measured in surveys, but in the actual participation in organized groups of various sorts. And not just organized groups, but the frequency of having dinner with your family was going down. There's been about a 40 or 50% decrease in family dinners. There has been over the last 30 or 40 years in America about a 60% decline in picnics. There's a little notice national picnic crisis in America. And I found, of course I didn't really think that American civilization depended upon picnics, but what I'm trying to indicate is what we found was a sharp decline, not just informal voting, although that was down to, but in all these ways in which we got together with one another. So the first answer to your question, I'm not trying to filibuster her, but the first answer to your question is I was led by my scholarly interests to try to understand a public problem that was of concern not just to me, but also to other Americans. And I produced this book and then we had various groups that tried to figure out what we do about it. Bob, you have used the term social capital several times. Maybe you should explain how you define that concept. Sure. I simply mean, by it I mean social networks, the networks that we're all involved in and the associated norms of reciprocity. The core idea of social capital is simply that social networks have value. They have value to the people who are in the networks. You live longer, the more you are involved in, the more group involvement you have. The data here are very clear. As I said earlier in this room, and some people will have been here and others will not, holding constant all of the other things that affect your life expectancy, holding constant your age and your gender and whether you jog and whether you smoke and so on. Your chances of dying over the next year are cut in half by joining one group, cut in three quarters by joining two groups. One of the reasons, the statistics suggest that Danes and in general Scandinavians are healthier than most other people in the world is that you tend to be joiners and connectors. There's a high level of social capital in this part of the world. And so part of what we were noticing is that Americans were, well, we're smoking less, which is good news, but we're joining less, which is bad news and that sort of balances out. But you sort of like to get us to stop smoking but start joining again. I have to say the other social capital just simply means these social networks that have value for the higher the social capital in the community, the lower the crime rate, because people are looking out for one another, the higher the social capital in the community, the longer people live, the better the schools work, the less the tax evasion, the more efficient the government. Indeed, it began to seem after a while that social capital did everything you'd want. I used to have a lot of us take two capsules of social capital and you'll be happier. It turns out happiness too is strongly affected by social capital. However, I'm just about to conclude, this is now in a little more personal mode of self-reflection. I'm afraid, I don't want to have this, what I'm about to say, be too widely discussed and open up a tax on my work of a particular sort, but I know that Danes are very trustworthy. So I'm just speaking privately among us group of friends here. I happen to grow up in a small town in the middle of America, a small farming and small industry, light industry town in 5,000 people. So Arhus seems like a really big city to me. This was the 1950s and the town, it turns out, had a lot of social capital. People were joining and cooperating and people would help one another and they would help other people's kids and large numbers of my classmates who came from relatively poor backgrounds nevertheless went to college because although their parents would not maybe be able to help them go to college, somebody else would step in and so on. And this is not now just the standard affliction of older people, which as you remember your past as being nicer than it was, we've now gone back and looked and that recollection of this town as having a lot of social capital was true, it really did have a lot of social capital. Measurements show it, I will show you the statistics that show that this town had a lot of social capital. But I think there's probably at a subconscious level, I might have been saying although it was not a conscious motivation, I had a pretty good childhood, people were looking out for one another and taking care of one another and it was a pretty equal kind of place. There wasn't anybody very rich in my town and there wasn't anybody very poor. It was in a way a slight approximation of, I never thought of this before, Denmark, not many rich people, not many poor people, people looking out for one another, high levels of social trust and so in a way that book Bowling Alone might be read as simply the ruminations of an aging progressive who thought I had a pretty good childhood and I wish kids now had that kind of a childhood. I would call that your hometown a socially cohesive community. Yes. And why? It was a socially cohesive community for good and ill, I have to say. This is important to add this. It was a socially cohesive community. People thought of themselves as responsible for one another. So I'm going to say the positive first and then I'll say the negative. People in my hometown talked about our kids, our children, and we've got to do things for our kids so that they can have a better life and so on. When my parents said our kids, they did not mean my sister and me alone. They meant all the kids in town. The word our was a collective. It meant we, it was a collective we. It was the we in Portland. If you listen carefully to people nowadays in America when they talk about our kids, wearing about our kids getting to college, they mean my biological kids. That across America over this period, and this is the embodiment of the decline in social cohesion that you've talked about, there's been a narrowing of the concept of we. We means people like me or actually just means me. And that's a sense in which I really bemoan, I regret more than I can say, the collapse of that sense of shared responsibility for one another. I think it leads to, is leading in America now, to a growing gap between rich kids and poor kids to a, the movement of the society frankly a little bit in a direction of two Americas, a relatively well off America, my grandchildren are going to be in that part, and a relatively less well off America, and other kids who are just as nice as my kids are going to be in that America. So that's a good part of social cohesion. It kept, if you were part of that community, it was positive. But I also have to say that this was largely a white community, and it was not always a community that was very tolerant of difference. It was certainly not tolerant of differences in sexual affinities, no one was out of, nobody was out of the closet, and I imagine that there were people, in fact I know that there were people in my class, who were gay or homosexual in their private preferences, and felt enormously oppressed by this social cohesion. I mean really deep pain they felt. These were close friends of mine that I didn't know they were gay, but I now do. And black people were, although they were not, this was a northern city, so there was not legal segregation, but black people faced serious problems in this town. And women, there was a very sharp ceiling beyond which women didn't go. And so I think in some respects America is now much better off that the country as a whole is not so hemmed in by those older prejudices. I don't for a moment want to say, it's my view about America, it's not that everything has gone bad, it's just that some things have gone great. We're a much less racist society than we used to be. We're a much less gender segregated society than we used to be. We're certainly much less homophobic than we used to be, but we're also, we care about one another less, and I'd like to have the, I'd like to keep the good changes and not have the bad changes. And whether that's the kind of vain hope of an aging idealist or whether it's a practical political program, if I thought it was a practical political program, I probably would run for president. So I don't quite know that it's practical, but I do think it's a good aspiration. Peter, when the concept of social cohesion or social samlingskraft is used in Denmark, does that reflect the same experience as we, as Bob described, or how is it used in the Danish context? Well, unfortunately it's used in quite a different way. It's used as a political metaphor, and it's mostly valued by right wing politicians, I would say. And one example of that is when the minister of social affairs Karen Jesperson, who was minister for Vindstra, as you all know, a right wing party, she was, she became minister of social affairs. She said she wanted to be a minister of samlingskraft social cohesion, and by that she meant two things. She meant that there should be a little inequality in Denmark, so at the vertical level there should be, Denmark should be as it is, a very glycerian society, but she also meant that everybody, I'm sort of paraphrasing her, making it a bit stronger than she said it, everybody should adhere to basic fundamental Danish values, so she wanted a value homogeneous society. So on the one hand she wanted a traditional social democratic way of organising society, on the other hand she wanted social cohesion to mean strong integration of all kinds of values into the same pattern. But I'm sure that there would be many Danish social democrats and socialists who would argue that they also have a concept of social cohesion, that is a society where there's too much inequality would be in danger of collapsing or fragmenting. Is there this tradition also? Yeah, exactly, but she had two dimensions, both the economic inequality and the values dimension. I think that is what is characteristic of that kind of debate, that was also a French minister of social affairs who called himself minister of social cohesion, and it's a very specific way of using the word in a Danish context I think. So if you use it in your term, it's quite a different story. But actually I do think there's a deeper similarity here, which is in a sense what I'm longing for is a sense of social cohesion in the sense of feeling responsible for one another and feeling obligations outside the self. Without at the same time bringing along the value exclusiveness that was characteristic of that of Port Clinton in those years. And I think that is actually, it certainly is a challenge that America faces now. It may be a challenge that Denmark faces. Can you keep the kind of good, from my point of view, good sort of solidarity that treats all of us as members of the same community and that we have responsibilities to one another and that we really are only going to succeed if we all succeed. That's the first meaning, but can you get that without having the feeling that we all have to pledge allegiance to exactly the same values and we all have to have exactly the same sexual preferences and we all have to have exactly the same hair color and so on. And I think I'd like to have the one without the other, but maybe you can't get the one without the other. That's the dilemma. Rob, does culture not play any role in the formation of values and for social cohesion? Sure, absolutely. We know that from lots of research, also from Inglard's research that there's a strong path dependency over time where different cultures tend to create much fairly stable values and that, for instance, religious values, religious patterns are very strong differences between Catholic countries, Protestant countries, and so on. And these patterns are very stable and have a lot of impact on how people react as you talked about this morning when you referred to Max Weber's theory about Protestant system. But if culture does play a role, Bob, is multicultural a problem? Well, no, I don't actually see that that follows. I certainly do think that culture or tradition and history play important roles here. It makes it easier for some countries that have a lucky history to be, to move in one direction and countries that are regions or societies that have a different history. It's harder for them to move in another direction. I'm reminded in that context of an experience I had in one of the southern Italian regions that we were studying. We spent 25 years doing this study of Italian regional government and I got to know the people very well. And one of my closest friends, and someone I admired very much was the president of a southern region who was a reformer. He was trying really hard. He was not corrupt himself. The setting was a corrupt setting, but he was not corrupt. And he was wise and he was also sympathetic to my work. But he said to me at one point, Bob, I trust you, you're a close observer. I know you're a good researcher. But you're telling me that my fate as a political reformer here in this region was sealed 800 years ago. And that there's no way to get from where I am now, from where I've been left by history to where I and you want us to go. And that's a kind of cultural determinism that you might easily read from my research. And he said I can't allow myself. I can't be a real political actor here. If I believe that all I'm doing is simply running down a set of railroad tracks that was fixed 800 years ago. So I do think that it's the job of political leaders and for that matter of engaged intellectuals, not merely to recognize the importance of these historical trajectories, but also to figure out how to get from here to where I want to go. Final question then. It might be a long answer. I know, but I'll stop you, okay? So you wouldn't follow Kant Jespersens line and say that actually diversity, cultural diversity would endanger social cohesion. We've talked about this this afternoon, indeed much of today. I think that there are advantages to cultural homogeneity, to social and cultural demographic homogeneity. And doubtedly it's possible to get things done more quickly if everybody knows exactly the culturally appropriate actions in a particular context and so on. And there's no doubt, it's hardly a secret that the places in the world that have high levels of social capital and that have high levels of democracy and so on tend to be places that are demographically or ethnically homogeneous. On the other hand, there are real virtues from cultural diversity and you'd expect someone, I suppose you'd expect someone who's inevitably aware of my own national experience. We are not a homogeneous country or rather we're homogeneous with respect to a particular set of things but certainly ethnically we're an extremely diverse country. We've done all right and indeed I would say our ethnic diversity is one of America's greatest advantages at this point. I think indeed if you're looking at countries in the world into the 21st century and you say what are the assets and the liabilities that various countries have, my country has lots of liabilities, we have some assets, we have good university system, that's an asset, we have a reasonably good science enterprise, that's an asset, but by far, I mean seriously by far I think the most important asset that America has over the next century is we're less bad than most places are at immigration. We're not perfect at it but we've done it a lot and therefore we can evolve as the world evolves and that's going to mean frankly we have big advantages and I think countries that are ethnically homogeneous they have some advantages, we've talked about those but they have some disadvantages and I think that what the trick will be to learn what are the dimensions along which you have to be homogeneous and what are the dimensions along which it's not quite so crucial that you be homogeneous. I think myself, and America fits this, that it is important that you be homogeneous with respect to commitment to certain values. Certain core American values. Absolutely right. But it doesn't matter what your skin color is, it doesn't matter what your religion is actually it turns out. The core American values I think are certain tolerance, not perfect, I've already said it's not perfect but a certain tolerance. A certain, we don't emphasize, my country doesn't emphasize equality of outcome as much as Northern Europe does and I wish we were a little more Scandinavian in that respect but we do as a value care a lot about equal opportunity that is that everybody ought to have a chance, this is called the American dream. We're not doing well on that value right now but it is a core value where it's possible to do as I'm doing right now in America to try to start a political movement to say look we're not doing as well on that value and because it's a widely shared value the idea of equality of opportunity all men are created equal and a certain sense of values that we've inherited often from England the sense of fair play, political fair play and so on you've got to be committed to those values but I don't think you have to be ethnically. Okay, so I think we should end on that note observing that as we had a discussion about Danish values Americans always also have a sense of American values core shared values. Thank you. With this we end the first part. Thank you very much.