The Bordered Thing
My opening remarks at a Battle of Ideas event on borders
The question I’m going to address — are any borders worth defending? — is one I felt particularly drawn to when reading the rubric describing this event. I’m hoping that thinking about it might get us to the heart of the matter.
First, it seems obvious that ‘border’ is a pretty expansive concept. Yes, it’s quite a clear concept — it’s definitely widely understood — but man, it’s wide. I mean, in some sense, the word ‘border’ could be seen to describe pretty much any delineation — an edge of anything with any kind of edges. And that’s most things. It means there’s a border, or borders, between you and me and everyone else. Between pieces of paper, placed side by side or on top of each other. Between concepts. Between ideas. It would seem, really, that anything that is distinct — whether it’s physical or not — is going to have some borders, and probably go some way to forming various other borders, too. And maybe, that anything that doesn’t have borders isn’t distinct…
Straight off, therefore, it’s going to be hard to pass any general judgement on ‘borders’ — in the sense of trying to decide whether they could the kind of thing I should be defending.
It’s also important to recognise that these things — borders — are often just here, and here to stay, whether we defend them or not. Yes, many borders are created; but many are simply an essential descriptive fact of life, whether we want them to be or not. In some cases, then, if you don’t like a border, it might be more that you need to find a way around it, rather than trying to pull it down, or deny its existence.
I suppose what I’m saying is that there are some real-world conceptual and/or physical feasibility considerations that we need to take into account, when thinking about most if not all borders, even when doing so normatively. And this is on top of the way that these border things are all over the place.
All that said, the first classic example of a border that I’d like to consider is probably the most obvious: the national border. Now, getting rid of this kind of border — failing to defend them — might sound, superficially, like a really nice idea. It’ll appeal on some level to anyone with an interest in equality, or an interest in recognising the role luck plays in happiness and success — the luck of the draw regarding where you’re born, maybe, particularly — and to anyone with an interest in freedom, too, as well as many other things. Of course, however, when you start to think about national borders even just a little further, you realise you also need to take into account some complex potentially-counter issues, too, like cultural and societal norms, scarcity and allocation, security, and so many other things. And, quickly, getting rid of them is not half as obviously such a nice idea.
Now, I realise that’s an incredibly cursory look at one of the most important and emotive topics of our day, and I’d hate you to think I’m being flippant — but rather, I just wanted first, to repeat my point about feasibility. About reality and the laws of physics, rather than utopian impossibilities that ignore both the world in which we live and the kinds of creatures we are. But also, secondly, to signal the important role that competing interests play here — a point I’ll come back to later.
Before that, however, let’s try to go as simple as possible. The two most definite examples of borders I can think of are the border between two contiguous identically-sized squares, and the border between true and false. You can’t have more truthful or less truthful — there’s a single, clear, all-powerful line, there. As there is between the two squares. Sure, it’s a matter of truth that the UK is surrounded by the sea, and that various European countries are divided, in part, by mountains, but those lines are messy, and the issue of national borders doesn’t just depend on those kinds of truths.
Truth plays an important part in all border questions. Indeed, I’d argue it plays an important part in all questions of all kinds. And my view is that many difficult current issues have been made purposefully and unnecessarily complicated by a lack of commitment to the concept of truth. Some people (postmodernists, for instance) want to deny there is such a thing as truth. And some people (let’s call them the Richard-Dawkins-Steven-Pinker crew) want to persuade us that there is truth, but that the only route to it is via the scientific method. Now, I love science, too — but those guys’ approach ignores the other important routes to truth: arguments about values, for instance, which can help to lead us to search out truths about politics or morality.
This brings me to my second classic example of borders: the border between men and women. Yes, the border. The division. The idea that there are these two different delineated sets: men and women. Now, again I don’t have time to address this — also highly important and emotive — issue properly, today. But I do believe there is a biological difference — a border, if you like — between the set ‘women’ and the set ‘men’. To me, this is an example of the kind of truth that is indeed determinable through the scientific method. And that me publicly admitting this, here, is highly controversial — go ahead, shout at me on Twitter! — shows again the salience of this topic of borders, and particularly its necessary relation to truth.
But, basically, what I’m saying so far is, when considering the topic of borders, and their aptness for a defence, there will be some — various — conceptual feasibility-type questions, some science-type questions, some moral and political questions, and so on.
My final classic example of borders is the border between home and the wider world. And this brings us — even more than when thinking about national borders — to the most obvious reason we might defend a non-natural, human-created border: security.
It’s sad fact of life that human beings are pretty vulnerable. That we face dangers. Not just from bad people, but also from natural forces. Without the border of a dwelling place, we face the weather, the wolves, and so on. Now, of course, there are many further reasons to value a home, but most people would see some sort of defined shelter as one of the most very basic of human needs. That’s not to say its border must keep everyone else out, of course — but it does lead to questions about who should be let in.
Now, in terms of a small shelter, maybe it seems obvious and reasonable that the main dwellers of that shelter should get to determine who should be let in and not. But, as soon as we move beyond the small shelter — or even in cases of these small shelters, if resources are particularly scarce, or the outdoors is particularly dangerous — we reach the complex world of competing interests, once more. Why should the owners of the big house keep out the poor? Or the nation with the vast natural resources…? We return quickly to a wide range of questions and truths, even with this most obvious of examples. Some, as before, relating to feasibility or truth. Some relating to preferences for certain approaches — approaches to community, to wealth creation, to certain principles and guiding goals.
But much of all this, I think, relates to the domain of the domain. What it is that we seek to determine the scope or extent of — the edges around, the borders of. The bordered thing, itself. And how it is we seek to determine the decision-makers of these matters — the people or truths that are most relevant. Public. Private. Individual. Familial. Local. Regional. National. International. And sometimes we get these fundamental things wrong.
To think about a border, we have to think about what it’s bordering, whom or what it shows differentiation from or exclusion to, and why. And that’s just the starting point for being able to begin to decide whether it’s a thing worth defending — yet, too often, we seem as if we can’t even get there.
https://www.battleofideas.org.uk/session/understanding-wall-and-borders-today/
