Catalog of clever ideas: Walls

Some ideas are so good they couldn't wait for humans to come along and think them. The wall was one such idea. In fact, it had to precede humans, for without the wall, human life and earthly life of any other kind would have been impossible.

The wall—any mechanism or device for fencing off one part of the world from the rest—allowed pockets of resistance to emerge against ineluctable entropy. Physics dictates the diffusion of energy. Billions of years ago some molecules combined, accidentally reproduced, and constructed a membrane that locally defied the global diffusion. Inside the membrane was a cell, where a new realm, biology, emerged. Some cells developed stiff cell walls. But whether soft membranes or stiff walls, they served the same purpose. They shielded what was inside—the resources that were gathered, the innovations that emerged—from the outside. Entropy’s reductionism still ruled the outside, but evolution’s complexification reigned within.

Eons later humans, great bundles of billions of cells, applied the same exclusionary principle to their dealings with one another. Tribes and nations built fences and walls against enemies. Actual barriers were complemented by symbolic ones, delineated by law and custom and policed by force. Within the walls a nation established its own rules, based on its vision of the common good. Within their walls other nations devised their own systems. 

Within some nations lesser walls were built. These fenced one person’s property from others’. A farmer manured his fields and bred his livestock. His fences protected his improvements, encouraging further improvements. His tradesman neighbor built a wall around his warehouse to protect his goods from pilferers. Property laws reinforced the fences and walls.

Other nations allowed no interior walls. Property was held in common. Sometimes fellow-feeling allowed these nations to prosper. More often the lack of walls permitted domestic entropy to set in, diluting the efforts of the ambitious and thrifty and thereby discouraging them.

Certain physical walls between nations grew famous for being rare as more walls became virtual. Hadrian’s Wall, the Great Wall of China and later the Berlin Wall were the exceptions when most walls were borders drawn on maps. But the borders were guarded no less jealously. It was not an accident that many borders coincided with rivers or mountain ranges, which made the guarding easier.

Occasionally efforts were made to lower the walls between nations. Under the British empire, the several North American colonies were provinces unto themselves. They were separately sovereign under the post-independence Articles of Confederation. But the Constitution of 1787 transferred sovereignty to the United States, depriving the borders between states of much of their meaning. Eleven states broke away in the 1860s and tried to build a new barrier between themselves and the other states, but their effort failed.

The European Union dramatically lowered the walls between member states, allowing free movement of goods and people. Yet the project didn’t impress Britain, which left the EU and put up new walls between it and the diminished union.

The demise of the Soviet Union created new national borders where none had been. Russia, the largest of the successor states, subsequently ignored some of the new borders, most notably by invading Ukraine.

Borders and walls became a political issue in many countries when war, crime and economic distress set large numbers of migrants and refugees in motion. The United States built a wall along its border with Mexico. The lack of walls against migrants was the main complaint against the EU on the part of British voters who made Brexit a reality. Insufficient borders had been a conservative lament for years in numerous countries, but now centrists and some liberals joined the cry.

In the 1980s, globalization had appeared to be carrying all before it. Tariff walls and other economic barriers were indeed coming down. But by the late 1990s attitudes had changed. Walls kept imports out, but they also kept jobs in. And in country after country, preserving jobs came to seem more important than facilitating trade. People had caught a glimpse of a world without walls, and many decided they didn't like it.

Why should they? From the first cell membrane, walls had provided security for what was inside them. Walls allowed the emergence of distinctive organisms and then societies. Without the walls, the distinctions dissolved.

To globalists and others of like mind, this seemed a positive development. People who live behind walls look on other people as enemies. Walls defend in wartime, but they also contribute to a martial mentality.

Yet the alternative was scary. It amounted to leaving one's country at the mercy of the world at large. Poor countries can't avoid this condition, but rich countries can, and increasingly they did.

Would a world without walls be a better world? Maybe. But the wording of the question might have things backward. A better world might allow the lowering of the walls.

Most people in the early twenty-first century didn't seem to think we were there yet. Since time out of mind, walls had been a good idea. To their many fans, they still were.