Walls, fences, gates, and other barriers:

Something between us

   

My wife alerted me to this one. Anthropologist here at Hopkins. A "neighbor," actually. Very interesting read. Vividly written. Adroitly argued. Acutely timely given the ascendant chafing MAGApocene.

 

Let me begin with the end in mind.

The very possibility of common sense, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt observed in The Human Condition, requires the existence of a common world, a shared reality, “the presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear.” Already in the 1950s, Arendt foresaw how “conditions of radical isolation, where nobody can any longer agree with anybody else,” could reduce people to fully private beings, “deprived of seeing and hearing others, of being seen and heard by them.” Such was the case in circumstances of political tyranny, she observed, but also with “the unnatural conformism of mass society,” where each individual is “imprisoned in the subjectivity of their own singular experience.” 

Conditions of collective life in the contemporary United States bear out Arendt’s grim warning, as I’ve tried to show in this book. Walls at home and on the road, shielding the body from exposure and the mind from uncomfortable ideas: these are symptoms of an atomizing politics of fear and suspicion, yielding circumstances of isolation and neglect rather than the safety and security they promise. But security itself can be imagined and pursued otherwise if anchored in a sense of common fate, as the writer and organizer Astra Taylor suggests in The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart. “The simple recognition of our mutual vulnerability—of the fact that we all need and deserve care throughout our lives—has potentially revolutionary implications,” Taylor writes. “Indignation at the way insecurity is fostered and exploited under capitalism can help strengthen existing movements and galvanize new ones, coalescing powerful coalitions with the capacity to expand and fight for collective forms of security based on compassion and concern instead of desperation and fear.” 

The walls that divide are difficult and real. But they do have the tendency to crack and fissure … Work with others to chip away at those cracks, and another side can come into view. You can begin to imagine a shared and encompassing world once again, maybe even begin to rebuild that world in unlikely company. “It’s about meeting people where they’re at,” as Anusha Singh put it. “You don’t want to drive them away.”

CONCLUSION 
LIFE BETWEEN THE LINES 
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND 

Boundaries are ubiquitous and essential in human cultural life. But they don’t always have to take the shape of walls. Organizer and facilitator Prentis Hemphill has reflected on the interpersonal and psychological dimensions of this distinction. One can set boundaries as a way to care for oneself and others, pursue healthy relationships, and navigate the vulnerability that such relationships will bring. Walls, on the other hand, represent a refusal to relate altogether. Walls take “the risk of connection to be too high to engage,” Hemphill writes; “they have a way of keeping you captive when they were once designed to keep you safe.”

The argument may seem metaphorical when extended to social and national life at a larger scale. But as we’ve seen throughout this book, the politics of national borders and social boundaries often tack between reality and metaphor, the physical and the psychological. “The defense that walls establish against siege works the fantasy of impermeability into a psychic politics in which the enemy is figured as raiding, invading, coming to take or plunder what is rightfully the nation’s own—its safety, security, peaceful or prosperous way of life, its jobs, its wealth, its First World privilege,” Wendy Brown notes.3 We need ways of imagining our collective existence that resist this hard logic of division, that don’t fall back on a hard and inflexible line between life inside and the world outside…

Pandian, Anand. Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down (pp. 213-216). (Function). Kindle Edition.

I now live in Bsltimore, since 2019. I have traveled through most of the U.S. lower 48, repeatedly. Born in NY, raised in NJ, I've lived in Birmingham AL, Seatlle, Tuscaloosa AL, Knoxville TN, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. I could really resonate with Anand's travels and encounters.

 

I would love to buy him lunch one day and pick that learned brain.

 

UPDATE

 

A great use of 21:09 of your time. Interesting interview host.

 

 

Will have to get up to speed on her work. Lots of mutual interest.
 

HMMM... TAKE TWO ANANDS AND CALL ME IN THE MORNING

 

The Persuaders is quite relevant here.

 

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