Meditation on the Nature of Walls
People have always built walls. Some walls are built by accident, some by default, and a few are built on purpose — but it’s not always obvious which one is which. These walls are implicit or explicit, social or mental or linguistic, but they are real, and most merely physical walls are built because of them. Once, people respected walls, cared about them, even worshiped them. Now, walls are optional. This series of meditations is about appreciating where walls once stood, and the freedom bestowed by progress, and its price.
Part the First — A History of Walls.
If you go back far enough, walls were simply the sides created by the accumulated wearing of paths, into ditches. At some point, the path became so worn that the walls became too high to climb. These walls weren’t even noticed by most — they were just how reality was shaped. Over time, many once-wide paths became cluttered with reinforcements and layered walls of cultural norms, hiding the nigh-impenetrable barriers that already existed. Humanity wasn’t always sure what exists behind the walls built by others over time, but our imagination filled them with what most saw as horrors. As always, some minority imagined these horrors as beautiful, and sought them out — though for most of our history, this was mostly to be disappointed when the walls, or those that respected the walls, prevented such quests.
The wall builders were always interested in the walls as individual convenience — you built your own walls to keep out the cold air, or simply to block the view of areas you didn’t want to see. However, it was soon noticed that some walls provided a way to corral people, as well. This was sometimes done for the protection of the masses, as wall builders noticed low lying areas that flooded, and places that seemed to let in the cold wind despite their best efforts. Other times, of course, people built walls maliciously or selfishly for control of others.
It turns out that even the flimsiest wall separating people would be reinforced by those on either side. Walls were built that kept groups apart, sectioned off seldom used areas of reality, or simply hid areas that the builders wished people to abandon. A few fights ensued, but wall building was in our nature, and it seemed much harder to bring ourselves to ignore certain walls than to further build them. And once walls were built, it seemed only natural to hate those on the other side.
Humanity grew within the confines of their self-imposed walls, only occasionally needing to expand them. At times, groups managed to hear others inside walls of their own. Sometimes, more walls were built, creating new paths to others, and new routes evolved — or were destroyed by clever or careless bisections of critical pathways. The nature of the builders, and the exigencies of structural soundness, made certain patterns stable or unstable, and eventually humanity had only a few basic structures in which they lived their lives.
Eventually, some tribes allowed each other to share their pathways — many such paths melded together easily, with almost no further mortar needed to cement the paths together. Others were jealously guarded, tribes constructing walls that only allowed their kin through, and many internal walls were built, needed for keeping their kin safely inside, away from the demons that must surely exist in far-flung passageways of the others. Over time, fortresses were connected, and it became rare to find unexplored areas not already walled off by some ancient stone wall, or at least guarded against further exploration.
Many people lived comfortable live in the well-worn pathways, but as ever, the walls that kept most of humanity comfortable, insulated from the cold uncertain winds, forced an unlucky few out into the windy hell-scape outside, or trapped them tightly between various walls meant for our protection. These unfortunates were left without any place to find comfort, or companionship. Some, perhaps many, found or dug tunnels that led back inside humanity’s now-giant fortress, those tunnels were perforce narrow, requiring those coming in to scrape through, leaving treasured parts of themselves outside. Wider paths into our fortresses would have threatened the stability of the walls. For the truly unlucky, the tunnels occasionally collapsed, crushing the spirits of those that couldn’t leave enough behind. Others went back to enjoy the wintery wind, or to see if unexplored vistas existed outside — but for those accustomed to the dimness inside, it became hard to see in the harsh unshielded glare.
Part the Second — Reshaping Castles.
It took millennia, but more and more of humanity began noticing certain of the walls that shaped their reality. Humanity slowly started tearing the most offensive of them down; walls like slavery, which were built out of humans to keep away the prospect of physical labor. The reshaping of our world in the wake of such construction always changed the layout, often drastically, but also subtly, and could make simple and formerly stable paths suddenly longwinded and treacherous. Given their longevity, it turned out that most walls were being used to prop up identities, and those that leaned on them might need to learn how to walk. Unfortunately, the beautiful glass structures that kept some select few elevated above the hoi polloi seem to all rest on these newly undermined foundations.
Of course, once people saw which walls were not load bearing, and where the structure they supported was rotting on its own, they began to experiment with new structures, building roads by fiat instead of by tradition. Designers could imagine the broad vistas that would be seen if only the narrow paths of the past could be expanded.
Communism ripped out what were, in retrospect, some structurally important walls, and many newly created social and mental structures collapsed, having been built on unknowingly shoddy foundations; millions were killed by the impersonal forces once kept at bay by the stout but outdated building standards of the past.
Many construction methods have now fallen out of favor — like walls to separate those who look different, or those that keep genders away from parts of the intricate world-maze once considered off-limits. Other walls are left alone, if only because humanity is unsure how to remove them. Genetic walls are like this, for now — gender, less so, but only recently was there a realization that walls were there at all.
Part the Third: Building Futures
Walls do divide, but Frost was right when he said good fences make good neighbors. Sometimes separating those with differences sets apart those whose tastes in buildings differ. Yeats saw a widening gyre, ripping apart the walls of Christendom. The shape, and the very identity of these earlier societies come from their walls. The passionate intensity of destroying walls can set adrift the anchors of moral compasses; without any walls, as Yeats noted, even the best of humanity lacks all conviction.
Chesterton warned us of removing fences, but humanity proceeded, sometimes recklessly. Some worry that humanity could easily find that some acted as dams for forgotten or never imagined Lovecraftian horrors which can rampage through carefully built mazes. But breaking walls showed that our maps, full of imagined terrors, were wrong — the dragons were no more a part of the territory than the walls. Mostly, what lay beyond the walls were parts of humanity that had, perhaps wisely, been walled off. But this does not mean the the forces that were unleashed were inconsequential — they are even now both freeing many of those formerly trapped, and trapping or crushing many of the formerly free.
The walls held up by previous societies are rapidly crumbling, and it is hard to keep even convenient walls, walls that harm no-one. As new notions are adopted about which walls aesthetically verboten, they may well be lost. If people act in haste to destroy the old and unfashionable walls, without replacing them, they may topple things they wish to keep.
Walls might be Whorfian, but that does not imply all remaining walls should be torn down to let humanity experience reality directly. Walls may help slice reality at its joints, but that doesn’t mean they should be immutable or permanent. In either case, they should be torn down, always mindfully. Each time they are replaced with new, ever expanding constructions, letting post-human minds and societies expand to fill the space available.
