No more walls: part one — The Iconic Wall-raiser

Walls. The very symbol of curtailment, of intransigence, of closed societies, of dead ends. I think I can safely state that, not since the fall of the Berlin Wall more than a quarter-century ago, has there been so much talk about walls and fences in the United States and Europe. And, unfortunately, not about their coming down, but about putting them up.

Isaac Newton, a key figure in the scientific revolution of the 17^th and 18^th centuries and, as such, a believer in breaking through the frontiers of knowledge and progress, once said that “we build too many walls and not enough bridges.” I contend that this quote has seldom been truer than it is today. This seems to be imperceptible to far too many people, given that we are daily immersed in social media and worldwide communications. But at the political core of our societies there is an ever more powerful movement afoot to separate global communications from physical contact and, indeed, from open society—to be ever more connected electronically, but, paradoxically, to foster political and, therefore, social isolationism on a global scale.

This kind of thinking is cynical and dangerous at a time when it has never been more important for the different segments of the world community to put aside their differences, make peace and work together to solve our universal problems, to save our planet and, in the process, to save our species and our race—the only race we belong to: the human race. It is, if we think logically, suicidal to be turning away from and against one another at precisely the time when we must pull together if we hope to survive and flourish and if we hope to leave anything but suffering and eventual extinction to our descendants.

While a large proportion of the world population would readily agree that fundamentalist movements like Islamic State, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram or the Taliban are nihilist organizations whose ends are a potent threat to enlightenment and advancement and whose means are violent, senseless, totalitarian and socially absurd, all too many so-called civilized people are, more and more, ready and willing themselves to give in to their fears and seek isolation rather than understanding and to reject and ban—even to the point of literally “walling out”—members of “foreign societies” rather than embracing diversity and carrying freedom and light to the darkest corners on earth.

Central to an isolationist mentality is the idea of only being “with people like oneself”, a notion that is the negation of freedom, individual rights and liberal society. Any system that rejects diversity also rejects freedom and must necessarily be maintained by an autocratic leader or ruling elite symbolizing “the norm” and maintaining it through restrictive measures. This is the antithesis of liberal democracy, but, unfortunately, it is also a growing political vein in supposedly liberal Western society. This is a movement that actually thinks it can wall out the world, a clearly obtuse stance, since open liberal democratic society is not only synonymous with diversity but is also the only answer to obscurantism and Dark Ages mentalities.

Being as closed and isolationistic as the very extremist movements we fear won’t defeat them. On the contrary, it will give them the upper hand by destroying the freedom-based societies we were born into and that pose an existential threat to closed societies everywhere, as long as we remember our roots and are willing to make the effort necessary to not only remain free but also to help free and support the oppressed worldwide. Furthermore, thinking that in the Information Age we can physically “wall out” whatever we fear is a folly as childish and ignorant as thinking that we can be safe and secure by jumping into bed and pulling the covers over our heads.

Without a doubt, the most “iconic” figure of the day in this “new isolationism” movement, with all of its blind ignorance, hostility, segregationism and stupidity, is US presidential candidate Donald Trump. But the biggest mistake US and global society can make in the case of Trump (as he has amply proven already) is to pretend that the vile mix of bigotry, arrogance, jingoism and populist hate speech that he proffers—very much in the manner of a snake-oil salesman—is so out of bounds that it doesn’t matter. Those who have—rather in the manner of whistling in the dark, I feel—claimed from the outset that Trump’s candidacy was a mere “flash in the pan”, a show, a radical sidebar with a clown as its protagonist before the “real candidates” sent him packing, have been proven catastrophically wrong. And those who continue to try to shrug off Trump, now that he is America’s virtual GOP candidate, by claiming he’s the best thing that could have happened to the Democrats because Hillary Clinton is thus sure to be a shoo-in for the presidency could also end up being sorely mistaken and tragically disappointed.

If Trump himself is a symbol of the West’s own brand of fundamentalism—he is obviously not, as some of his followers are wont to contend, a conservative, since his attitude toward basic guarantees and institutions upheld by the founding fathers of the United States flies in the face of his country’s Constitution and Bill of Rights—his infamous Mexico Wall project is symbolic, in itself, of the closed society mentality that he and the majority of his followers represent. It is, moreover, the physical manifestation of the re-emergence of racism in the United States, where the advances achieved through the civil rights movement of the 1960s and through subsequent anti-discrimination norms stand to be gravely undermined and socially tested as Trump’s contemptuous lack of concern for political correctness rubs off on his followers.

In the days to come, I will be talking more about walls, both symbolic and material, about why they pose a clear and present danger to open society, but also about why they don’t work, even when they might temporarily hinder the development of peaceful integration and cooperation as opposed to distrust and hostility. For the moment, Donald Trump remains the poster boy for closed society attitudes in the unexpected terrain of Western society. And the damage the US Republican Party has done to its image, in terms of the discriminatory innuendo that Trump represents and espouses, by even reluctantly embracing him as its presumptive candidate, is unlikely to heal for a generation to come.