The Borderlands

Reflections on the simultaneous impossibility and presence of The Borderless World

“He that is a traveller must have the back of an ass to bear all, a tongue like the tail of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a hog to eat what is set before him, the ear of a merchant to hear all and say nothing, and if this be not the highest step of thraldom, there is no liberty or freedom.”

Thomas Nashe – The Unfortunate Traveller, 1594

The jabbering about a Borderless World has been widespread for quite some time. If you live a considered life of repose you won’t have it shoved into your face often; you’re one of the few who can still afford to create something resembling borders in your life. But if you live in the cities, watching the clock next to the people who pretend to work in the office buildings, if you live from day to day with the credit card companies calling, or surrounded by shit you can’t afford to fix, under growing pressure from incoming cohorts of your truculent and ungrateful replacements, you’ve probably heard about our promised future many times. Along with talk of tolerance and diversity it’s a central feature of the rhetoric by means of which the miserable are convinced to accept further immiseration.

It’s enunciated almost as a kind of creed. We hear things like “No borders, no nations”, “There’s no such thing as an illegal person”, “Freedom of movement is a human right”, and “Migration is not a crime”. There’s no shortage of such examples, each of which you’d expect to see scribbled repeatedly on the cover of a schoolgirl’s notebook – if anyone still knew how to write.

The idea on offer is that humanity is on the threshold of a secular, materialist millennium, a prophesied 1,000-year period of enlightened peace and righteousness. Everyone will be able to ride those freakish little scooters as far as they need to go, which won’t be far, because nowhere is different. We’ll all experience persistent, fully-consensual climatic electrogasms as a result of solar power. Somali tribesmen will be recognized as excellent babysitters. Lesbians will impose their calm and patient post-matriarchal order. Men will stop being so, well… masculine. Humans of every stripe will be recognized as entirely interchangeable, as fungible as AA batteries and just as easy to drain.

However, the reality is no such world is possible. By this I don’t mean only that the entire fantasy is stupid and pernicious. Of course it is. But anyone for whom there’s any hope already knows this, and my aim here is to point out something most people don’t already know. Or at least share a way of looking at things that might not yet have crystalized into full consciousness in the mind of the reader:

In the absence of any places set aside for specific peoples with specific instincts, languages and laws, everywhere becomes a borderland.

There are powerful people who have imagined (or pretended) we can remove our borders and be left with that which is not bordered, thus realizing the longed-for dream of unbounded love and unlimited progress. This is a piece of imbecilic naiveté. Reality presents a manifestly different picture. To remove borders is to erase that which was within them, the inside. And in the absence of the inside all that’s left is what’s outside, the wilds outside the hedge, the primeval place of muddy and flea-bitten contest, the place with no single law and no single people. A place without anything that can properly be called civilization.

From the series Crowd (1987-1991) by Misha Gordin.

Imagine a white background divided into sections by a black grid of equidistant horizontal and vertical lines forming squares. Each of these squares is a bordered place. Our masters assume that in doing away with borders the black grid has disappeared and we’ve been left with an unbounded white space. I assert the opposite as true. All they’ve done is erase the white squares. We are now confronted with an undivided black background. Everything is the border.

In such circumstances our world becomes something like an international airport terminal. The expectation of privacy is gone for anyone who can’t afford the Platinum Lounge where one shits in clean, cool and quiet solitude before heading to the bar for a complimentary cocktail. The rest of us are left queuing up to micturate in anxious crowds under the flickering LEDs and cameras before tracking it all through the next security screening checkpoint. It is a world in which people are strictly forbidden to make a fuss, in which we must always be ready to show identification, in which the staff are impossibly disinterested and inefficient, in which everyone is subject to search at any time, and not infrequently you end up sleeping on the floor.

Such airport terminals are the places between. They offer a clear picture of what is in store for us as what used to be our countries also become places between.

The basic idea of The Borderless World is that people who have very different values will be living cheek by jowl. In order to make that possible it’s necessary to prohibit any activities that would or even could cause offense to anyone. Our masters see clearly that the potential for offense is the potential for discord, for disunity and strife. Therefore anything that might cause offense – free speech for example – must be suppressed. All the pockets of safety and coherence that once kept the borderlands narrow have been excised. The betweenness of the borderlands is now unbounded, and has unfolded itself across the board. One must always speak cautiously because one is never in one’s own native land. There is no longer any such thing as a native land. The words of Jack Wilton come to mind, quoted from Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller at the opening of this essay. Except there’s no way not to be a traveller. We can’t ever go home. We’re all strangers, everywhere.

The substance of the expression “there’s no place like home” has transformed from a commemorated yearning for return into a bald admission of our current circumstances.

In The Borderless World it’s taken for granted that in order to keep conflict from breaking out, in order to maintain what our masters imagine as social harmony, people have to shut their mouths and keep their opinions to themselves. Those who determine our fates imagine that somehow this will allow everyone to get along. Never mind the thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – of rapes of young girls, women and men. Never mind the vehicle and knife attacks. Never mind the stink and the trash. Never mind the utterly irreconcilable cultural differences that preclude anything other than a slow motion fight to the death for cultural supremacy.

From the series Crowd (1987-1991) by Misha Gordin.

In the borderlands, each competing tribe seeks to establish its own white square, while above the murderous, squabbling tribes those who shape our futures assiduously work to ensure that nothing of the sort is allowed to happen. After all, this would entail the return of borders. It would entail the return of places. And peoples.

Meanwhile we are expected to adopt. Adopt alien laws, adopt alien customs, adopt alien music and food. Even adopt alien children. And much like the old written laws that have grown so numerous and byzantine it’s literally impossible not break a dozen in a single day, the unwritten laws of the scores of half-literate peoples we live among are impossible to respect – simply because they’re impossible for us to understand.

This is why we must be silenced. This is why we must be disarmed. The members of our recently engineered rainbow family cannot bear to hear things that are offensive. The explosions of murderous rage are not infrequent. How can we be trusted to speak our minds? How can we be trusted to own weapons? How can they? The borderlands are splintered and fractious. Therefore the sheriff insists that before anyone enters the town, they must surrender their weapons – words included. Of course it never works. Only one group of peoples esteems the law. And so ever-greater pressure is brought to bear. Ever more granular surveillance is instituted. Ever more minor infractions are policed. As all this continues to fail to improve circumstances in any way, more and more pressure is applied. Real borderlessness has never been tried.

Soon the places outside prisons really will become indistinguishable from the inside of prisons. Perhaps that will be the point at which order is restored. For the great irony of all this – and the damning and incontrovertible indictment of its imbecility – is that prisons, the places in which the most granular control can be exercised over every aspect of your life, are precisely where people sort themselves into ethnic and racial groups for their own survival. The people who seek to impose ever-greater controls to enforce The Borderless World would do well to meditate on this fact. But of course they won’t.

Perhaps you will.