The Last Border Is the Mind

The Mirror at the Border “We thought the border was a wall. The border was a mirror. We were looking at ourselves the whole time.” Stand at any contemporary border between the wealthy world and the developing world. Stand at the line that separates the kingdom of ice from the kingdom of fire. Stand at the airport check-in counter where one passport opens every door and another passport closes every door. Stand at the maritime patrol vessel that turns back the boat. Stand at the desert checkpoint that prices the smuggler’s bribe. What do you see? You see, in most contemporary discussions, two different conditions. On one side of the border, affluence. On the other side, deprivation. On one side, security. On the other side, danger. On one side, the global North. On the other side, the global South. The border, in this conventional framing, marks the line between two opposite worlds. This framing is wrong. It is wrong not because the differences are imagined. The differences are real, large, and measurable. It is wrong because the framing misses the deeper fact that the two sides of the border are not opposite worlds. They are complementary halves of a single global condition, and the condition cannot be understood — and certainly cannot be healed — by looking at either half alone. This chapter is an argument that the border is a mirror. The wealthy side of the border is suffering from one specific failure of late-modern civilization: the organization of loneliness. The developing side of the border is suffering from a different specific failure of late-modern civilization: the disorganization of opportunity. The two failures look opposite. They are, in fact, the same failure refracted through different prisms. They both flow from the same upstream choice: a global civilization that has organized itself around material accumulation without organizing itself around dignity distribution. If this is right, then the cure for one side of the border will turn out to be related to the cure for the other side of the border. The reforms that would restore communal warmth to the kingdom of ice are not unrelated to the reforms that would restore opportunity to the kingdom of fire. They are, in deep structural terms, the same reform — applied at different points along a single global system. This is one of the central insights of the book, and the rest of the book will develop it. In this chapter, I want to lay it out as cleanly as possible. Let us name the two failures together. The wealthy world’s failure is the privatization of belonging. Its citizens have organized themselves into smaller and smaller social units — the single household, the single individual, the single screen — and have, in the process, attenuated the connective tissue of belonging that human beings biologically require. They have prosperity without thickness. They have safety without companionship. They have material comfort without communal warmth. The result is the loneliness epidemic of the previous chapter. The developing world’s failure is the privatization of opportunity. Its institutional capacity to deliver, at scale, the conditions of dignified opportunity for its citizens has been hollowed out — by external interference, by internal collaboration, by the architecture of lost potential described in Chapter Six. The result is that opportunity, where it exists, has been captured by small elites — political, economic, familial — and the rest of the citizenry must improvise, evade, or emigrate. They have thickness without prosperity. They have communal warmth without material comfort. They have belonging without dignity. Notice that the symmetry is precise. The wealthy world has commodity without community. The developing world has community without commodity. The wealthy world has solved the material problem and forgotten the relational one. The developing world has retained the relational structure and lost the material one. Each is, in some sense, the anti-image of the other. The migrant who crosses the border, in either direction, is performing — without realizing it — an arbitrage between the two halves of this asymmetric failure. The young African who arrives in Berlin is trading belonging without dignity for dignity without belonging. The European who retires to a Mediterranean island, or moves to Bali, or to a coastal village in Mexico, is trading dignity without belonging for, at least in their imagination, belonging without dignity. The trades go in both directions. They are not symmetrical in their stakes — the African migrant is fleeing for survival, the European retiree is choosing for lifestyle — but they are structurally related. They are both attempts, by individuals, to compensate for what their original civilization failed to provide them. This is the mirror at the border. The migrant is the messenger. The message is that neither half of the world is currently complete, and that the two halves, in their present configurations, need each other in ways that the political conversation has not yet acknowledged. What would it mean to take this insight seriously? It would mean, first, that the wealthy world’s policy toward the developing world cannot be only a policy of containment. The wealthy world cannot resolve its own challenges — including its labour shortages, its demographic stagnation, its loneliness epidemic, its declining birthrates, its weakening civic life — by walling itself off from the developing world. The conditions that have produced the wealthy world’s communal failure are intrinsic to its current developmental model, not the result of external influence. Walling off the developing world does not cure the wealthy world’s loneliness. It merely insulates the wealthy world from the very encounters that might otherwise reawaken its capacity for thick community. Many cities in the wealthy world that have most deeply integrated immigrant communities are also, by interesting coincidence, among the most communally alive cities in the wealthy world. This is not an accident. The newcomers bring with them, often, the thick community practices that the host society has forgotten. It would mean, second, that the developing world’s policy toward the wealthy world cannot be only a policy of resentment. The developing world cannot resolve its own challenges by externalizing all responsibility for its condition to the historical and contemporary actions of the wealthy world. There are real responsibilities to externalize, and they should be named. But there are also internal reforms to perform, and they cannot be deferred until the external accounts are settled, because the external accounts will never be fully settled, and the internal work cannot wait. The young African generation, as we have discussed, cannot wait. It would mean, third — and this is the deepest implication — that the next stage of global development is not a story of one half of the world helping the other half. It is a story of both halves recognizing what they need from the other, and building, together, a civilization that integrates the strengths of both. The wealthy world’s institutional capacity for material organization, paired with the developing world’s cultural capacity for communal organization, would produce a civilization neither half can produce alone. This is, in essence, what I will call in later chapters the Divine Presence of Peace — a civilizational configuration in which material competence and communal warmth are no longer trade-offs but complementary engineering disciplines of a single design. This is not a utopian sentiment. It is, in the most precise sense, the engineering brief of the twenty-first century. I want to make one more observation in this chapter, because I think it is the observation that will most surprise the reader, and it is one of the few observations in this book that I have arrived at slowly, against my own initial inclinations. The observation is that, on balance, the developing world has the easier task. This will sound counterintuitive. The developing world is poorer, more politically unstable, more institutionally fragile, more environmentally vulnerable, more demographically pressured. How could the developing world have the easier task? The answer is that the developing world’s challenges are upstream and visible. Its citizens know they are poor. Its citizens know the chain of because is broken. Its citizens are not in any doubt about what is missing from their lives. The work — hard, slow, contested as it is — is the work of building what is known to be missing. The construction problems are immense, but the design problem is relatively clear. We know what a functioning vocational training centre looks like. We know what a reliable electrical grid looks like. We know what a transparent budget process looks like. We know what an accountable parliament looks like. The developing world is, in this sense, doing known engineering on hard problems. The wealthy world, by contrast, has the harder design problem. Its citizens are not poor. Its citizens have, in material terms, abundance. The thing that is missing in their lives is something they cannot easily name and have not been culturally educated to recognize. They have not been told, from childhood, that belonging is something they need. They have been told that achievement is what they need. The thing that has been hollowed out — the architecture of thick community, the institutions of bundled meaning, the slow, embodied, multi-generational social fabric — has been hollowed out so gradually, over so many decades, that most citizens of the wealthy world have no living memory of what its presence would feel like. They are like fish that have grown up in slowly poisoned water and would not, today, recognize the taste of clean water if it were presented to them. The reform they need is not the construction of what is known to be missing. The reform they need is the recovery of what they have forgotten was possible. This is, in some respects, a harder reform. The implication is that the global future will depend more than we currently realize on the teachers from the developing world — on the migrants who, knowingly or unknowingly, carry the cultural memory of thick community into the cities of the wealthy world and contribute, often invisibly, to the slow re-warming of those cities. It will depend on the children of the sun, in other words, being received in the kingdom of ice not as labourers to be tolerated but as cultural creditors whose practices of community might be worth learning from. This is a reversal of the current cultural posture of much of the wealthy world’s politics, and it is a reversal that will not happen quickly. But it is, in the long run, what the analysis of the mirror at the border implies. I close this part of the book — Part III, The Western Paradox — with a single proposition: we are all in this together, and we need each other more than we have been willing to admit. The wealthy world needs the developing world’s cultural memory. The developing world needs the wealthy world’s institutional capacity. The migrant at the border is not the symptom. The migrant at the border is the evidence of a global system whose two halves are still, despite everything, capable of recognizing each other. The recognition has been slow. The recognition has been contested. The recognition has been politically expensive. The recognition is, however, the precondition of the renaissance the rest of this book describes.