few years ago, I coined the phrase “border anxiety” to capture a phenomenon that seems to have gripped the West even more powerfully since. The peoples of Europe, North America, Australia, and other former imperial outposts live in fear of being overwhelmed by waves of migration that their governments seem powerless to control. It matters little whether the threat exists in reality or is mainly a figment of the imagination. Borders have been essential to civilization since its inception. Border anxiety is an instinctive human response to the re-emergence in a modern guise of ancient tensions between nomadic and sedentary peoples. Nation states are the only mechanism yet devised that can reliably banish the fear of war and anarchy—and nation states by definition require borders. A world without borders would be a utopian dream, but as nightmarish in reality as the Hobbesian state of nature, in which “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
In his new book, The Great Great Wall: Along the Borders of History from China to Mexico, Ian Volner never admits to having felt the deep-seated emotions that prompt border anxiety.1 Contemplating the walls of Jericho, the oldest city for which we have both archaeological and literary evidence, he suggests that this structure “may not have appeared for any particular reason; instead, it created its own rationale—the idea itself of difference—that there could be not only an ‘us,’ but a ‘them.’ ” Volner is a writer on architecture for reputable organs such as The Wall Street Journal, but like many intellectuals he is resolutely opposed to any non-ideological explanation for a phenomenon such as wall-building. “Archaeology,” he opines, “throws us back into the realm of ideology, and thence to myth . . . .” Offering no evidence, other than a vague analogy with the invention of fire, he goes on to dismiss the possibility that the inhabitants of this “tell,” or artificial hill, living nearly ten thousand years ago, might simply have built a wall to protect themselves. “Using the built environment as an instrument of separation was never the work of intellectual innocents seeking a purely practical means to a purely practical end. It was always and already a matter of ideology, an ideology born the instant the people of Jericho began stacking their undressed stones.” To which many readers, including this one, may respond: “How does he know?” Surely it is not the act of building protective walls that is the stuff of myth, but the notion that there has ever been a human community with any claim to be called “civilized” that could do without boundaries, borders, frontiers, and, yes, walls. Only in the Garden of Eden, the Elysian Fields, the Land of Cockaigne, or other idyllic places that transcend what we normally understand by history have people dispensed with the need to defend themselves. Volner himself comes up against this irreducible fact of life when he visits the site of Jericho and finds that the Palestinian children who seem so charming suddenly morph, from one minute to the next, into rock-throwing little monsters.
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