By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Walls are always porous in one way or another, yet people keep building them because boundaries are frightening places where various sorts of intellectual and physical miscegenation occur.
The space between armies or warring states is traditionally a no man’s land, a place that’s safe for no one. As one set of laws and customs meets another, a gap occurs where no writ applies, especially if that boundary coincides with mountains or jungles or pirate-ridden oceans or vast deserts, all of which have always symbolized the unbounded—the savage, the fantastic, the unowned, the undisciplined. Walled or not, legal or not, borders are essentially arbitrary. They break down. They become bones of contention. They make news.Borders have been much in the news this week. The Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago. That erasure of ideological boundaries was celebrated this week. Meanwhile, India and China were at odds over the Dali Lama’s visit to Tawang because the two countries cannot agree on where their Eastern boundary runs. Here at home, the U.S. Supreme Court has to decide whether there is an inviolable line to be drawn between adulthood and adolescence when it comes to punishment for violent crime. Many of the issues in play during the current period of economic recovery have to do with the boundaries between government and private enterprise in our economic lives. The American doctrine of the separation of church and state is also a border issue—as is the application of Sharia Law.
Dragons and Diplomacy
So far as China is concerned, the dragon has been breathing heavily, in hopes of controlling people and events far from its physical borders. The Frankfurt Book Fair erupted in controversy when China attempted to dictate which writers of Chinese origin could be featured during the Fair. Because of its intense concern about its internal boundaries, China breathes heavily on countries that allow Uighur nationalists to speak more freely outside China than they may within Chinese borders; ditto for Tibetans. As I wrote last week, China’s baleful influence even reached into the White House, preventing President Obama from meeting with the Dali Lama. Sanctions and financial manipulations are other ways to achieve, more or less subtly or successfully, cross border influence.Thus, there are so many ways in which countries attempt to control events beyond their formal boundaries. War is one. The threat of war is almost as effective. Diplomacy is another way to achieve influence across borders, as is its hand-maiden public diplomacy, which characteristically attempts to distinguish itself from propaganda. The latter is no small debate. It concerns the borders to be respected when attempting to influence. At one end of the spectrum is rational persuasion through information and facts; at the other end is emotional manipulation—or worse. At what point does legitimate persuasion turn into fraud, deceit, duplicity, conning? All of the latter are usually considered to be immoral and/or illegal, however effective they may be in achieving the manipulator’s ends. And how about this one—when does psychological pressure or physical discomfort turn into torture? In domestic politics, a related boundary question is this: when does an inspiring speech turn into demagoguery? Indeed, much of the debate over health care reform has crossed the border from informed debate to scare-mongering.
Human Rights and Welfare
When does a child turn into an adult? What is the proper age of consent for legal matters, for military service, for consuming alcohol, for driving a car? When is a juvenile fully able to take responsibility for his or her bad behavior? When is a person, of any age, mentally competent and able to tell the difference between right and wrong? Can a defendant fake mental incompetence? There are no hard and fast borders between childhood and adulthood, sanity and insanity, though neurologists are making some progress in determining how and when the brain matures. If the human brain does not mature until an individual is nearly 20 years hold, is it right to try a 14 or 15 year old murderer as an adult? All of these questions ask us to take a defensible stance along a continuum, and they spark ferocious debate.National sovereignty is fiercely defended by all governments, and the dignity of the human person is more or less sacrosanct in most societies. Human rights groups abound to protect the latter, but when is it justifiable for outsiders to violate sovereignty to alleviate a massively distressing situation? For that matter, what is the healthiest boundary between parents’ rights and children’s rights. When can a harsh disciplinarian be accused of child abuse, and what is the difference between child neglect and relaxed sloppy child rearing? How can we strike a balance between the intrusive nanny state and selfish indifference to poverty, injury and manipulation? Similar concerns have begun to agitate the international sphere as well. When does run-of-the-mill repression turn into genocide? When does hunger turn into starvation and at what point, if ever, may foreigners intervene? Increasingly there are those who advocate an “obligation to protect,” but few governments would welcome uninvited intervention. In fact, there is another continuum here, the continuum that stretches from acting to protect others to acting to protect oneself. The Bush 43 administration proclaimed a preemption doctrine that would allow armed intervention without proof of hostile intent.
The Common Core
Obviously this catalogue of contentious borderline situations could be extended, but let’s consider what they have in common. Action on all these boundaries requires discrimination and difficult decision-making. On the border, nothing is cut and dried. There’s no stark black and white, no pure good or evil, no formulaic right or wrong, no clear segregation of ethnicities, certainly no unshared access to air or water, all of which brings us to another continuum: discussion, debate, argument, insults, law suits and war. When matters are so complex, it’s difficult to write laws that can be applied uniformly. Judgements, at best, have a short shelf life. Lines drawn in sand get blown away.It’s easy to see why people may be attracted to authoritarian solutions political or religious. All of us sometimes want to be obeyed. All of us are happy, sometimes, to be relieved of the burdens of deliberation and decision-making. Do this! Yes suh! But most of us are capable of flexibility and tolerance if the context is conducive. Control freaks and tyrants, petty and otherwise, are different. Unable to tolerate uncertainty or opposition, they take over while the rest of us dither over complexity. Yet human life is by its very nature contingent. Sooner or later what’s rigid shatters.
What To Do?
Anyone who is still with me is probably asking, so—what’s my solution? A nice neat one preferred. Since I can’t change the borderline nature of so many of the situations that throw us into confusion and turmoil, I do have one thought. We need to learn to recognize when we are in borderline territory, that space where lines are hard to draw and rules are hard to apply—and where strong opposition is likely to occur. We also need to train ourselves to talk before we shoot and think before we talk—and to learn to like it. Does this sound pretty simplistic? Well, if it’s so easy, why do we so seldom do it?
My hunch is that we don’t negotiate honestly, for the most part. We don’t want a fair solution. We want a self-favoring solution which, in time, invites reversal or reprisal, and—here we go again!.