The Last Border Is the Mind

The Kingdom of Ice “It is possible to die of cold inside a heated room. It is possible to die of loneliness inside a connected city. The new poverty does not announce itself by its symptoms.” I want to turn, in this third part of the book, to a story the wealthy world rarely tells about itself. It is not a story of failure. It is, in many respects, the story of staggering success — and of what that success has cost the inner life of the societies that achieved it. I call it the kingdom of ice. I do not mean by this any particular country. I do not mean Scandinavia, though I have lived there. I do not mean North America, though I have worked there. I do not mean Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia — though the phenomenon I describe is visible in all of them. I mean the condition of late-modern affluence itself, as it manifests, with eerie similarity, across every prosperous society of the twenty-first century. The condition is not climatic. It is psychological, social, and spiritual. It is the coldness that a certain kind of prosperity, when it goes uninterrogated for too long, produces in the human relationships of the people who enjoy it. I want to write about this without sentimentality, without anti-Western reflex, and without the moralizing impulse that, in lazy hands, treats wealthy societies as objects of contempt. I have deep respect for what the wealthy world has built. The medical systems, the universities, the rule of law, the public infrastructure, the technological capacity, the artistic depth, the institutional patience — these are real, hard-won achievements, and the rest of the world has many things to learn from them. I do not engage in the lazy reflex of treating the wealthy world as if its prosperity were illegitimate. Most of it is legitimate. Most of it represents centuries of accumulated effort, sacrifice, mistake, and correction. What I want to discuss, instead, is the blind spot of late-modern affluence. Every civilization, no matter how successful, has a blind spot. The blind spot of the African condition we have already begun to discuss: the disorganization of opportunity, the broken chain of because. The blind spot of the wealthy world is, by my observation, the organization of loneliness. The wealthy world has solved many of the material problems that, for most of human history, made life unbearable. In solving them, it has produced — and this is not an accusation but a measurement — a set of new problems that are now, themselves, making life unbearable in ways the older problems did not. The blind spot is not a moral failing. It is a downstream consequence of an upstream success. To see it clearly is not to condemn the success. It is to ask the next, harder question: what now? Let me describe the kingdom of ice in concrete terms. It is a city in the global North. It is well-lit. It is well-policed. Its public transport is efficient. Its hospitals are competent. Its libraries are open. Its parks are tended. Its restaurants are diverse. Its retail is abundant. Its digital infrastructure is excellent. Any visitor from the global South would describe it, on first acquaintance, as enviable. And yet. In this city, a meaningful fraction of the adult population lives alone. They sleep alone. They eat alone. They commute alone. They watch screens alone. Their interactions, throughout most of an average day, are transactional — they buy coffee, they receive parcels, they speak briefly with a colleague over video, they message a friend whose physical presence they have not enjoyed in months. The transactions are courteous. The transactions are efficient. The transactions are, by any measure of historical comparison, miracles of social organization. And the transactions are not, in any sufficient quantity, the same thing as companionship. In this city, a young professional in their late twenties or early thirties has, by the standards of their grandparents, achieved things their grandparents could not have imagined. They have a degree. They have an income. They have a passport that opens most of the world. They have access, on a phone in their pocket, to the accumulated knowledge of human civilization. They can speak with anyone on earth in seconds. They can travel, on a few hours’ notice, to almost any continent. And they will, with statistically significant frequency, tell anyone willing to listen that they are unhappy, that they are unsure of their purpose, that they are exhausted by the pace of their work, that they are anxious about the future, that they suspect they are missing something they cannot quite name. In this city, the elderly often die without their families noticing for days. There are entire bureaucratic procedures, in some wealthy countries, dedicated to discovering when an isolated person has died — postal accumulation, unanswered medical appointments, unattended utility readings — because the social fabric is too thin, in too many neighbourhoods, to register the death in any other way. This is not an exotic phenomenon. This is a routine feature of municipal administration in some of the most prosperous societies on earth. In this city, the children of professional families are, in significant numbers, reporting levels of anxiety and depression that would, in any earlier era, have been considered the symptom of major life trauma. They have not, for the most part, suffered any such trauma. They have, instead, grown up inside an information environment whose design optimizes for engagement rather than for wellbeing, and an academic environment whose competitive pressures optimize for credentials rather than for meaning. The children are, in a sense, the canaries of an environment that was constructed for everyone — and the canaries are telling us something about the air. In this city, the great houses of worship that, for centuries, structured communal life have been progressively emptied. The civic associations that, two generations ago, organized millions of citizens into bowling leagues, choirs, masonic lodges, parent-teacher associations, fraternal benefit societies, and political clubs have, by the dispassionate accounting of the sociologists, withered. The institutions of belonging that were the connective tissue of pre-digital civic life have not, in most cases, been replaced. They have been, in effect, unbundled — and the unbundled fragments do not, in aggregate, deliver what the bundled institutions delivered. This is the kingdom of ice. It is not a place. It is a texture. The texture of having achieved many of the dreams of one’s grandparents, and discovering, upon achieving them, that one’s own dreams have not been correspondingly fulfilled — and that the fulfillment one had imagined was somehow swallowed by the very mechanism that delivered the achievement. Why does this matter, in a book whose first half was about Africa, about migration, about the children of the sun? It matters for two reasons, and they are the two reasons I will return to repeatedly in the remainder of this book. The first reason is that the kingdom of ice is the destination that the children of the sun are, in many cases, attempting to migrate into. The dangerous boat sets out for the kingdom of ice. The young person who survives the crossing arrives in the kingdom of ice. The kingdom of ice, as it currently functions, is not, in most cases, the kingdom of welcome. The kingdom of ice is the kingdom of transactional courtesy in the presence of social desert. The migrant who arrives there will find efficient hospitals, functional bureaucracies, abundant retail, and — for most of them, for most of their early years — a crushing absence of the communal warmth they left behind in the village they fled. They will discover that, having traded material desperation for material adequacy, they have also traded thick belonging for thin survival. They will rarely write this in their letters home. They will rarely say it on their video calls. The next generation of migrants will set out toward the kingdom of ice with the same illusions their predecessors had, because the architecture of communication between migrants and their home villages is structurally optimized for the production of aspiration narratives rather than for the honest reporting of the texture of arrival. This is one of the underdiscussed truths of contemporary migration. The kingdom of ice is not a destination of automatic fulfillment. It is, at its current level of social design, a destination at which one must separately construct the belonging one was promised would be present. Many migrants succeed in this construction over years and decades. Many do not. The ones who do not constitute a quiet, large, invisible population of human beings whose arithmetic of having-traded-warm-poverty-for-cold-affluence does not balance in the way they had hoped. The second reason the kingdom of ice matters is that it represents the natural failure mode of any civilization that does not deliberately invest in the architecture of human connection alongside its investment in the architecture of material progress. It is what all of us, including the African societies and Asian societies and Latin American societies now in the midst of their own development arcs, are on track to produce if we follow the existing path uncritically. The African mid-century city, if it develops without learning from the kingdom of ice, will become, by 2070, an African version of the kingdom of ice. The Asian megacity, if it continues its current trajectory, will become an Asian version of the kingdom of ice — and indeed, in several Asian capitals, this transition is already advanced. To understand the kingdom of ice, then, is not merely to understand the wealthy world. It is to understand the failure mode of development itself. It is to learn, before our turn arrives, the lesson the kingdom of ice is currently teaching about what happens to a society that organizes itself around individual material achievement and forgets, in the process, to organize itself around collective communal warmth. Is the kingdom of ice irreversible? No. I do not believe it is. The same societies that produced it have begun, in various ways, to recognize it, to name it, to measure it. The contemporary discourse on the loneliness epidemic, the appointment of ministers for loneliness in certain governments, the rising interest in what social scientists call “social capital” or “civic infrastructure,” the resurgence of attention to community design in urban planning, the renewed conversation about the integration of work and meaning — all of these are early signals that the wealthy world is beginning to ask the question that this book argues must become central: what is prosperity for? The chapter that follows — The Loneliness Epidemic — will engage that question more directly. The chapter after — The Mirror at the Border — will draw the connection between the African condition and the wealthy world’s condition, and will show that the two conditions are, in a sense the global conversation has not yet fully grasped, mirror images of a single underlying civilizational failure. The cure for one will turn out to be related to the cure for the other. For now, the central observation of this chapter stands: A civilization can succeed materially and fail communally. The kingdom of ice has done the first. It has not yet done the second. Neither, on its current path, will the rest of us. The remainder of this book will argue that doing both is possible, that doing both is necessary, and that doing both is, in fact, the project of the renaissance to which this book is dedicated.