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Why the Border Matters
I’ve been re-reading Confessions of a Heretic, a collection of essays by Roger Scruton that was published in 2016, the year after his death. Scruton’s prose is both entirely accessible—he prefers plain language and straightforward sentences—and so rich that I find myself stopping again and again to savor this sentence or ponder that paragraph. Take the question of borders. I’d always thought of borders as purely utilitarian—the place where our law stops and theirs begins. Crude, but necessary. Scruton demonstrates instead that borders represent one of mankind’s highest achievements:
The national idea is not the enemy of Enlightenment but its necessary precondition. The country is defined by a territory, and by the history, culture, and law that have made that territory ours…. Take away borders, and people begin to identify themselves not by territory and law, but by tribe, race, or religion. In short, Enlightenment means borders.
The bureaucrats who run the European Union, the Biden administration—both seem to suppose that borders represent throwbacks, mere hindrances that need to be overcome, transcended, ignored, removed. They have it backward. The rule of law, a certain level of decency and civilization—all depend on borders. Rip down the borders, Scruton shows, and you rip down civilization.
Published in Immigration
Begging the Colonel’s pardon, but some of us have been demanding this stance from our own party for years, even right here on this site. You could say that it was the most pressing issue for some of us who were not going to accept yet another gang-of-anything border sell-out.
We voted accordingly.
How can this not be the foundation of any practical political conservatism?
Here’s me asking a key question in 2014: Do Americans have a right to America?
This was the beginning of a lively back and forth. Use the link there (“View Comment”) for three pages of goodness. This is all in the past, so nobody hunt down the perpetrators. As much as I admire Peter Robinson, one need not be Scruton to have figured this out.
And starting a little earlier in that thread:
…and …
Bold emphasis added throughout in [current year].
@peterrobinson, after this Damascene conversion, would you say that you hear arguments such as the comments above in a better light than your “I’d always thought..” implies you had back then?
First you realize that borders are right and good. Then you realize that Democrats and Eurocrats are actually suppressing that defense intentionally. Eventually, you see that the GOP is just as bad, for different but allied reasons. Finally, you decide to do something about it.
Not naming names here, but uh…
“Take away borders, and people begin to identify themselves not by territory and law, but by tribe, race, or religion. In short, Enlightenment means borders.”
Claire Lehmann (the founder & publisher of Quillette), asserts that Nationalism is the antidote to racism. (video)
Discussed here.
This video shows the death of a microscopic animal of some kind. What happens is a little disturbing to watch but the microscopy is excellent. You can see the animal in three dimensions, clearly wrapped in a membrane. Its little cilia push it around vigorously.
Then a tiny piece of the membrane breaks off (I’d have missed it except for the narrator) and the animal starts leaking its guts. It continues to swim around almost normally as it sheds pieces of itself, but the hole opens wider and you know it’s doomed. Eventually it runs into something it might have eaten once, and dissipates into the medium.
Peter, the first thing I thought about when I read this, after our southern border, was how the Soviet Union deflated when the Germans tore down that wall.
I’m glad you figured it out and I’m impressed you admitted to your misunderstanding of it.
But I’m flummoxed. I don’t know how you can not come to the Scruton conclusion.
I would be very interested to hear what, in your education, contributed to the priors that had you accepting the utility only concept of borders.
This feels very much like too much education led you to accept as true things that just aren’t so.
This is a wonderful video. It’s remarkable how haunting and poignant it is. Thank you for posting this here!
I suspect that Robinson as a member of what Codevilla calls the protected class (but one of the nicest!) has just never been confronted with the everyday significance of borders. Perhaps if it’s not the Berlin Wall, it just doesn’t seem like such a big deal.
But it is a big deal. Which is why it matters so much that even W’s attempted amnesty in 2007 (?) was rejected so vehemently by the rank and file, and why many of us will never trust Rubio again. Hell, no.
I miss some of those members quite a bit.
Aw, don’t be blue — I just changed my name is all.
Several times.
;-)
Apparently you just… no, I better not.
History, culture, and law are pretty much the same thing as tribe and religion.
You have your people. Your people share your culture, language, history, religion, morality, traditions, and law. That’s a country.
The so-called Enlightenment idea is to throw all of this away, supposedly in the name of reason, which is building on a foundation of sand. Reason doesn’t tell you what you should value. The principles of the so-called Enlightenment, at least as understood in the 20th Century, apparently preclude teaching our culture, faith, traditions, and history — well, perhaps except as a source of shame and guilt.
Oh, but all points of view get equal billing, and no one can object to anyone else’s behavior. Except for the intolerant, of course. You don’t have to tolerate the intolerant. Which means that the only thing objectionable is to hold to any standard of decency or decorum.
I’m not sure if the racial gap can be bridged. The experiments in multi-racial societies don’t seem to be going very well. I’m not convinced that they are impossible, but they seem very difficult. A few minority groups hold to their own distinct identity, it seems.
Jerry, I’m happy to agree with much of your comment (not all of it). I would add that language (if we may separate that from what you’ve already mentioned) is an enormous part of this. There is no such thing as an accurate translation.
I never thought of it quite that way before, though I have planned that the next time I hear someone say, “I’m a citizen of the world,” or “I’m a citizen of the planet,” I’m going to emphasize that I most certainly am not a citizen of that entity.
I also agree that good fences make good neighbors.
He probably didn’t write THAT one for Reagan.
Just a boring editorial comment. Peter writes that Confessions of a Heretic was “published in 2016, the year after his death”. In fact, Scruton died in Jan. 2020, although Confessions was published in 2016.
Yes, indeed and we have a party that denies this reality because they are controlled by fools and a country that wants us destroyed in the next two plus years. Were it not for the Chinese we could overcome this with time, but we’re not given that choice. We have to solve our problems this year. If they steal the next election, they will steal the presidential election. We’ll have no choice. States and pieces of states have to leave. Pieces of states is key as is defense. The new states will have most of the bases and the troops. We’ll have to pay them but think of the savings from not paying the rest of the Federal government. China is better at top down than any other country but it too will fail and collapse, especially without the US driving innovation and growth. We will collapse very quickly as we don’t know how to run things from the top. The digital companies think they do, but they don’t. The top narrows, consolidates, gathers around as they attempt to survive, but it won’t work for long. Until we came along all countries were top down, but the tops were narrow and knew what they were doing and the economies were small and narrow which in some form we’ll return to if we can’t rebuilt a bottom up modern economy again.
Peter Robinson is a person who actually might be able to enlighten us on how this happened in his case and we could all then work to see if his experience applies across a broader spectrum of things learned in our education approach that are not true. Such things are imaginary.
EDIT: Have we done about the same thing on the streets and public transportation facilities in our big urban cities that we see on our border? There were rules that have been abandoned.
Indeed. Here’s a guy in TPTB, whom we like, and who has self-reportedly (if unbeknownst) just taken a huge step toward Pepenlightenment. Once you see the civilizational imperative in borders, the pediments of Chamber of Commerce and AEI rationales begin to look increasingly like papier-mache.
Can anybody help me source this quote, presumably Solzhenitsyn? “What if the whole fearsome edifice is just so much papier-mache, and if poked hard, will collapse to show how flimsy is our prison?”
Something like that.
p.s., not the one about “How we burned in the camps…” but in a similar vein.
I added an edit to my reply about what’s happening in our cities.
Could it be this one?
Ooh, could be. Thank you!
Do you know we actually put together a nation in the late 1700’s where individual freedom was enumerated as the highest priority right to be guaranteed to the people by the government?
Border control was not high on the list of priorities perhaps because of the transportation difficulty associated with any potential interference with that right to individual liberty but as things changed the need for border control changed. So, once upon a time, we actually had a world where we were able to separate those who cherished individual liberty from those who preferred group dominance. In that world, there were always those who chose to migrate to America, not so much going the other way.
Now we face the possible loss of that choice.
I’ll raise you one there — the importance of borders was so well understood that nobody thought it needed to be spelled out, and more than the need for food. Same for citizenship.
Nostalgic! When I was younger I spent many hours of my life watching scenes like that. Later I got to enjoy introducing that world to children and their parents, and helped develop related materials for classroom use. But that, too, is now in the distant past.
I like Peter, so I was trying really hard not to resort to a derisive reaction. And I hit on the same thought as you – that if anyone possesses sufficient intellect and self reflection to shed light on how we got here, it would be him.
Maybe so, if he’s willing to go that far.