Walls are things. Borders are ideas. Hadrian’s Wall used to be both. Now it’s neither. Some borders have walls. Most don’t. They don’t because they don’t need to. They don’t need to because most people think borders are things. More particularly things you’re not supposed to cross. And so they don’t. But that they’re things you’re not supposed to cross isn’t a thing. It’s an idea.
What we might call a normative idea is an idea about what we’re supposed or not supposed to do. When such an idea is presented to us, it can be accepted, rejected, or, more often than not, put on hold, to be evaluated, if ever, when we’re more at our leisure. If someone tells you – but remember, we’re imagining it’s the first time you’ve heard it – that borders are things you’re not supposed to cross, which of those three responses would be your least likely?
To accept that borders are things you’re not supposed to cross you’re going to have to have already given uptake to a whole lot of constituent ideas. For each one of those, to a whole lot more. And so on. If you’ve accepted that borders are things you’re not supposed to cross – and I assume you have – try to enumerate all the constituent ideas you must have already accepted, and how few of them you’ve taken the trouble to evaluate. Try it. It will boggle your mind!
But now suppose you weren’t exposed to the lion’s share of those constituent ideas, as most of the people in what we used to call the Third World have not. They weren’t exposed to them because they were too busy trying to survive. I’m not suggesting they’d reject the idea that a border is something they’re not supposed to cross. I’m suggesting they’re too busy trying to cross that border to give the idea much if any thought.
The border between the western halves of the United States and Canada is the 49th parallel. Crossing that border in search of pasture are animals that weigh about 150 pounds. Most are deer. A few are primates. Neither give much thought to the idea that a border is something they’re not supposed to cross, though both have similar thoughts about how dangerous it might be.
We’re not outraged that the deer don’t seem to accept that a border is something they’re not supposed to cross. But we’re outraged that these primates don’t. We tend to be quite kind to the deer. But apparently we have a special category for primates. We don’t just send them back. We separate them from their young.
Very occasionally a dog crosses the border. When it does we don’t send it back. We try to find somebody on this side of the border to adopt it and give it a nice home. This is not a complaint. I’m a dog lover too. People I can take or leave.
Categories: Editorials, Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy
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