May Rindge was a tough old bird. She’d owned almost the entire Malibu coastline since 1892, when her husband acquired it for $10 an acre, and she wasn’t about to let anyone take it from her. Not an inch. Malibu was her sanctuary—an “earth paradise” in her late husband’s words—a pristine realm of mountain and shore, and with sentimental attachments besides. She intended to preserve forever this reminder of the kindly, Christian man who’d rescued her, a plain, prospectless schoolteacher, from a Michigan farm, whisking her away to a sunny Eden.
May’s enemies were legion, and they had declared war on the Rindge family even while her frail husband was still alive. To begin with, there were the homesteaders, crusty, uncouth squatters, living in tin-roofed shacks on state land in the Santa Monica Mountains. They didn’t pay much attention to property lines when they tramped across the Rindge ranch, stealing cattle and produce, hunting, and using the ranch trail as a shortcut to Santa Monica, where they traded for bullets at the general store. When the homesteaders encountered a fence, they weren’t inclined to become good neighbors. These were rough men, men who would, and sometimes did, shoot a man over a fence they didn’t like. Rindge had other enemies, too. They came from Los Angeles, in the form of grasping county and state government officials who saw in Malibu something they didn’t have and wanted it. They weren’t as hotheaded as the homesteaders, but they wielded more power.
The real troubles began in 1895, when May’s husband, Frederick, dismayed by the crowds of Los Angeleno day-trippers invading his land to sightsee, ordered locked gates installed at both ends of his vast ranch—Las Flores Canyon in the east and Point Dume in the west. Frederick obligingly supplied the homesteaders with keys to the gates, allowing them free passage, but to these ruffians, accustomed to coming and going as they pleased, the new arrangement was an insult. The arguments, fights, and lawsuits that commenced in 1895 would last another thirty years.
Life in paradise was never quite the same after the gates went up. After a November 1903 fire—which May blamed on arson—consumed the ranch, May was consumed with a fire of her own. When her frail husband succumbed to his illnesses in 1905, she all but declared war on his enemies. She would allow no one to ruin his beloved Malibu. May instructed her ranch hands to construct five gates on the ranch’s coastal trail, and when trespassers kept destroying them, she responded by beefing up her security patrols, adding dozens more men, armed with shotguns. May herself stalked the grounds with a gun holster slung across her hip, a terrifying sight to the homesteader children who occasionally encountered her. But she couldn’t scare off the state, which won a lawsuit demanding she open her trail to the public. Hundreds of automobiles soon clogged her Malibu beaches, while homesteaders mutilated ranch cattle and uttered death threats. May bought a gun for her teenage daughter to wear while she was playing and another gun for her daughter’s friend.
In 1917, May celebrated an appeals court victory by shutting down the coastal trail yet again and enclosing the entire ranch with fifty miles of fencing. A group of homesteaders unsuccessfully tried to kill her by blocking the ranch road with three cars, connected by chains, behind which they waited in ambush with their guns. A few months later, they poisoned two hundred of May’s sheep. She ordered several homesteaders’ trails dynamited the very next day. By 1918, the battle between her ranch hands and the homesteaders had escalated to shooting.
It was a battle that May Rindge could never win. In 1923, the US Supreme Court, in a landmark decision that proved pivotal in establishing the reach of eminent domain, ruled that the state could seize land from the Rindge ranch to build a coastal road—the Pacific Coast Highway. May stayed in denial for a while: when the construction crews arrived, she held them off for three days with a force of forty guards, mounted on horseback. But paradise was lost, and May knew it. In 1926, strapped for cash after decades in court and defeated in her dream of preserving the estate of her beloved husband, she agreed to lease some property on the Malibu beaches.
It is here that Anna Q. Nilsson enters the story. The Jazz Age movie star was coming off a rough year. In 1925, she had divorced her second husband, an alcoholic, then suffered a serious accident while riding a horse. She’d been making a dozen films a year and was badly in need of a break when she elected to check out the new lots for lease in Malibu. In 1926, Anna passed through the guarded gate at Las Flores, where May’s trail turned off the Pacific Coast Highway, drove down the one-lane dirt road to the shore, and fell in love. May’s private Eden enchanted Anna just as it had once enchanted Frederick. She saw in it the ideal place to relax and perhaps even duck the fans who deluged her with thousands of letters each month. Anna signed a lease for $75 a month and built a summer home. Soon after came her peers—first Marie Prevost and Raoul Walsh, then Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, Ronald Colman, Bing Crosby, and others. Past the gates and down the private road, movie-studio carpenters, accustomed only to building temporary backdrops for film productions, constructed flimsy cottages for Hollywood royalty, creating what would soon become known as the Malibu Motion Picture Colony. Movie stars had discovered that they liked living in a private world, walled off from the hoi polloi.
* * *
Who were the wall builders?
It’s a good question. More than four thousand years of history have passed before us since we first posed it while puzzling over the mystery of Syria’s Très Long Mur. In some ways, the problem remains as baffling as ever. Who were the wall builders? Whoever they were, they’re still at it. In the seventy-odd years since the surrender of the Maginot Line, border walls have proliferated around the world, and their resurgence has only accelerated since 1989. Berlin Walls have grown into Great Walls. Razor wire, motion sensors, electrified fencing, and concrete slabs consume horizons, rolling across countrysides for hundreds of miles. By some recent estimates, there are as many as seventy extant border walls, although the number changes annually, if not weekly. The new walls, no longer expected to withstand military assaults, most commonly take the form of specialized fences. Otherwise, they have much in common with their mud-brick ancestors.
When we search contemporary maps for walls, familiar names and places poke at our memories, as if to underscore just how little has changed. The Iraqis, whose Mesopotamian ancestors struggled incessantly against the impermanence of their mud-built world, still fight against impermanence. They have constructed a wall against the water that is so vulnerable to erosion that teams of workers have to shore it up daily lest their world finally be washed away in an epic deluge. The Chinese, who constructed long walls to protect their trade routes and even longer walls to isolate and protect themselves from their enemies, carry on much the same today, with protectionist economic policies guarding their trade, border fences guarding against North Korea, and a great internet firewall maintaining their cultural isolation. The Persians, whose erstwhile emperors once built elaborate systems of walls against their enemies, still place barriers on their borders. So, too, do the people of Uzbekistan, whose Silk Road ancestors once constructed hundreds of miles of walls enclosing oases or defending borders. Migrating Syrians, terror of whom once inspired the world’s first border walls, continue to inspire fear and walls around the world. Even distant European nations have fortified their borders against them.
The players are the same, but the story line has been revised. Walls can no longer stop armies or even slow them down. Cities are no longer contained by walls, either. They sprawl unchecked over the surrounding countryside, gobbling up farmland and becoming more and more reliant on a fantastically wasteful long-distance trade in food. The unity of the walled city has become a thing of the distant past, too, replaced by ghettoization and neighborhoods walled against neighborhoods.
* * *
In the early years of the new millennium, the world entered its Second Age of Walls. Few of us even noticed. It all happened quickly, like a worldwide Barbed Wire Sunday, but drawing far less interest from Western observers than the earlier walling of Berlin. Two factors—mass immigration and the rise of Islamic terrorism—were the immediate precipitators of the new walls, and both tended to affect other countries before reaching Europe or America. If the West had snoozed for a full day after Berlin was enclosed in 1961, it hibernated during the first decade of the new age, when non-Western nations from Saudi Arabia to Malaysia embarked on wall-building projects that quickly surpassed the combined efforts of the Romans, Persians, and Chinese.
The coming of the walls was so sudden and simultaneous that it is difficult to pinpoint its inception. The Middle East, home of the world’s earliest border walls, has, in the past fifteen years, become a honeycomb of fences and walls. Saudi Arabia, in particular, has come as close as any nation since Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon to realizing the dream of a fully enclosed state. In 2003, the kingdom commenced work on a barrier along its eleven-hundred-mile border with Yemen. Hearkening back to so many ancient walls situated on the fringes of wastelands, the Saudi structure cuts across Arabia’s desolate Empty Quarter, the uninhabitable home of the world’s largest oil deposits. Designed to stop illegal immigration, as well as terrorism and sectarian violence, the Saudi barrier uses the sort of materials that were unavailable to the shahs of ages past, who built walls facing the other direction, against the Arabs. Ten-foot-high steel pipes, filled with concrete, provide the structure, the sides of which bristle with razor wire. Tunnels run deep underneath to prevent terrorists from circumventing the barrier from below. A sister wall—this one stretching six hundred miles along the border with Iraq—supplements a preexisting twenty-foot-high sand berm. The Saudi-Iraq barrier includes five layers of fencing, spaced some hundred meters apart and rendered uncrossable by razor-sharp concertina wire. Underground sensors detect any movement, and sentinels in guard towers maintain watch with the aid of night-vision technology.
Tracing their course on a map, the walls lead only to more walls. The Saudi-Iraq barrier ends at Kuwait, whose 120-mile-long border with Iraq was fortified by the United Nations. The Kuwaiti structure, initially an electrified barbed-wire fence, has recently been upgraded to a steel wall. Not far away, the United Arab Emirates has fortified its border with Oman.
More prominently, Israel has enclosed itself with walls. The tiny nation, long sequestered from its neighbors by fenced towns and kibbutzim, constructed its second-most-famous wall in response to the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising that lasted from 2000 to 2005. In the first years of the Intifada, frequent reports of bombings and other attacks traumatized Israeli citizens. By 2002, the government had commenced work on a barrier that would eventually stretch 450 miles and spawn several more walls totaling hundreds more miles. The West Bank Wall—to its critics, the Wall of Occupation or even the Apartheid Wall—features various technological advances, many cribbed from the old Iron Curtain barriers. Infrared night sensors, radar, seismic sensors, balloon-borne cameras, and unmanned, remote-controlled Ford F-350 trucks, equipped with video cameras and machine guns, augment the wall’s concrete slabs and concertina wire. The technologies have acquired admiring notice from American politicians and drawn close attention from other nations seeking to secure their borders, leading one skeptic to label Israel “the biggest exporter of cages in the world.” For Israeli companies, such as Elbit Systems, border security has become a $100 million international business. The technology so impressed outsiders that some politicians have argued that it obviates the need for a physical structure, a suggestion strenuously resisted by the wall’s architect, Dany Tirza: “Virtual fence? I don’t believe it. It’s not realistic. It cannot catch a man. And even if you do, what to do with him? He can just say he didn’t know he had crossed the border.”
The Israel–West Bank barrier was soon replicated on other borders: In 2011, work began on a 45-mile wall along Israel’s Syrian border. Two years later, Israel had completed a 150-mile barrier facing Egypt to its west. More recently, construction has started along the borders of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, and 2017 saw the creation of a partial and—by Israeli standards—somewhat halfhearted fence on the Jordanian border. Proponents of the walls point out that the barriers have effectively eliminated illegal immigration and brought about a drastic decline in terrorism. Critics, however, charge that the borders themselves are invalid.
In the meanwhile, Israel’s neighbors have been building walls of their own. On its border with Gaza, Egypt constructed a steel wall that extends more than sixty feet below the ground. Jordan, too, has erected barriers, with a little help from friends. From 2008 to 2016, the Obama administration provided over $500 million, in addition to more than $2 billion in loan guarantees, to support construction of a high-tech 287-mile barrier along Jordan’s border with Syria. The Obama administration also supplied technical support, and the work was largely contracted through the US company Raytheon.
New walls haven’t been limited to the Middle East. In Southeast Asia, the borders of India are no older than those of Israel, although they haven’t inspired the same level of scrutiny from Westerners (whose interest waned shortly after a harried British mapmaker drew up the boundaries of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh in 1947). Only after the rise of Islamic terrorist organizations in Pakistan and Bangladesh galvanized the world’s largest democracy were the long-fuzzy lines turned to concrete and steel.
For the past fifteen years, India has rivaled Saudi Arabia and Israel as a consumer of razor wire. India’s fences now gobble up thousands of miles of often spectacular terrain, occasionally bisecting regions whose traditional identities predate their modern “nationalities.” In a feat of engineering surpassing even the works of the ancient Chinese, Indian workers climbed into thin air in 2004 and snaked twelve-foot-high, partly electrified barriers across some of the world’s highest mountains, securing part of India’s absurdly placed border with Pakistan. Around the same time, the Indians constructed over two hundred miles of fencing and walls along the border with Bangladesh—a first step toward what quickly grew into two thousand miles of barbed wire and concrete. In 2013, the Indians picked up their climbing gear anew and trudged into the Himalayas to wall off another region of the Pakistan border. Rather than relaxing after these fantastic efforts, they’ve taken up wall building with a growing perfectionism. In 2016, the Indian home minister visited Israel to observe state-of-the-art border technology; the lessons were to be applied on borders in the northwestern states of Punjab and Jammu. Later that year, India added Maginot-like underground bunkers to some of its borders. By then, India’s relative success at stemming terrorism was being emulated by Thailand and Malaysia, whose governments agreed to cooperate on the creation of a mutual border wall after Thailand had suffered over sixty-five hundred deaths at the hands of Malaysia-based Islamic militants.
On the other side of the world, Africa reacted to the spread of terrorism and mass immigration with walls. After an April 2015 attack by the Islamic terror organization al-Shabab left 148 dead at Garissa University, the Kenyan government initiated work on a 440-mile barrier along its border with Somalia. Morocco and Algeria built walls primarily to slow illegal immigration and drug smuggling. And, in 2016, the United States quietly provided funding for a 125-mile barrier along the Tunisian border with Libya to prevent the movement of jihadists. This was the second such wall funded by the United States under President Barack Obama, who in April 2016 publicly dismissed border walls as “wacky.”
* * *
The rapid expansion of walls across Asia and Africa was historically unprecedented. In its first fifteen years, the Second Age of Walls eclipsed the First in nearly every metric. More countries had built longer border walls than at any other time in history. The movement affected countries whose populations totaled over 4 billion people, and even this estimate excludes those distant nations whose emigrants could cross several borders before reaching a physical barrier. However, the massive expansion of border walls was, in its first decade, a movement that largely bypassed the West, whose borders remained, until recently, conspicuously open. Consequently, the re-walling of the world attracted little notice except from a handful of academic specialists.
Only one Western nation matched the early efforts of the Asian and African countries. Well before plans had even been drawn up for the long walls of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, a series of Clinton administration initiatives, aimed at tightening security on the porously fenced Mexican border, led to the extension or enhancement of physical barriers in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The earliest of the Clinton walls was rolled out just four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Operations Blockade and Hold the Line in 1993, Gatekeeper and Safeguard in 1994, and Rio Grande in 1997 were succeeded in 2006 by the passage of the Secure Fence Act, which saw the Clinton-era walls extended by hundreds of miles under the Bush and Obama administrations.
The American barriers made for some potentially awkward criticisms. Even seventeen years after the events of 1989, the Berlin Wall remained a potent symbol, and politicians were careful to avoid any use of the term wall in reference to the southern border. The eighty senators who voted for the Secure Fence Act—a bipartisan majority, which included two junior senators with presidential aspirations, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—thus sought to escape the taint of unseemly historical comparisons.
The insistence on a largely meaningless semantic distinction between two functionally identical structures provided an early foretaste of debates that would soon be waged primarily with symbols, slogans, and inaccurate historical generalizations. In public comments on the 2006 act, proponents commonly resorted to the folk-saying “Good fences make good neighbors.” The phrase had strong positive connotations in American society, being widely attributed to the nation’s bland former poet laureate Robert Frost. It was bandied about frequently in congressional debates, and even Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, picking up on the pithy aphorism’s evident popularity, quoted it while lobbying for his West Bank wall. Ironically, Frost had been given credit for an axiom that was already a trite cliché when he wrote “Mending Wall” in 1914. By then, local versions of the venerable proverb were already common throughout the world, in languages ranging from Hindi to Japanese. An 1840 edition of Blum’s Farmer’s and Planter’s Almanac is believed to have carried the first known American appearance, although Americans initially preferred the cheekier “Love your neighbor, but don’t pull down your hedge.” The sentiment was quite ancient. In fact, neighboring Roman farmers were so convinced of the value of well-marked property lines that they venerated the stones that bound their fields, seeing them as manifestations of the god Terminus.
By 2009, the United States had walled off—or at least Securely Fenced—some seven hundred miles along its southern border. Mikhail Gorbachev, whose English apparently didn’t include the use of euphemisms, had his doubts, remarking, “Well, I am not going to repeat what President Reagan once said, but I think the Great Wall of China or the Berlin Wall have not been very effective, nor particular efficient.” Gorbachev’s comment wasn’t unique. It had been more than twenty years since Reagan’s famous speech, and its original anticommunist context was already long forgotten, allowing Reagan’s words to experience a second life as an anti-wall manifesto. Wherever walls went up, they were spray-painted with Reagan’s exhortation or Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner.”
* * *
Two events finally drew attention to the worldwide rise of border walls. The first was the expansion of mass migration into Europe. The second was an American presidential campaign that sensationalized the issue worldwide.
The walling of much of North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia during the early 2000s had an unintended yet profound impact on Europe. The Somalis, Sudanese, and Ethiopians who annually arrived in Saudi Arabia through Yemen, the Afghan and Pakistani migrants who sought entrance into India, and the would-be Syrian migrants to Jordan all found they could no longer cross borders that had once been porous. Subsequent waves of migrants sought detours around the razor wire. The alternative routes took them across the Mediterranean or through Turkey into the Balkans and eventually into northern Europe. Meanwhile, their numbers swelled with the addition of refugees displaced by the outbreak of civil war in Syria.
The timing of the new wave of immigration was inauspicious, coming on the heels of the stock market collapses of 2008. Before reaching the promised lands of Germany, France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, migrants passed through a series of nations that were still reeling from economic crises and were ill equipped to handle the flow of so much human traffic. In 2011, Greece, the chief entry point into Europe from the Middle East, started construction on a fence along its border with Turkey. The fence was completed in 2012, cutting migration through the area by 90 percent. However, the closing of Greece’s borders only forced new detours, rather than reducing the numbers of migrants. Many new arrivals traveled by sea to Italy or the Greek islands, which couldn’t be walled off. Others found new land routes through Turkey. All across southeastern Europe, cash-strapped nations, unable to afford the policing and social services necessitated by the sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants, played a furious game of whack-a-mole, erecting walls wherever migrants entered in great numbers. The dominoes fell quickly: starting in 2013, Bulgaria built a fence along its hundred-mile border with Turkey. The new fence lay just north of Edirne, the old Adrianopolis. The newly fenced-off “city of Hadrian,” named for the Western world’s greatest wall-builder, had also produced the cannon that ended the age of city walls. Irony was now biting its own tail. A year later, Turkey began construction on its own five-hundred-mile barrier, a ten-foot-high concrete wall topped with razor wire, which shut off its border with Syria. The walling crept north in 2015, when Hungary constructed a 109-mile electrified fence along its border with Serbia, Austria constructed a barrier on its border with Slovenia, Slovenia commenced work along its four-hundred-mile border with Croatia, and Macedonia added a second line to its preexisting barrier facing Greece.
Locally, the new walls succeeded at their goals. The success of Turkey’s Syrian wall prompted the country to announce plans for future walls along its Iran and Iraq borders. In areas walled by Hungary, the number of migrants plummeted from as many as ten thousand a day to as few as forty. From a more global perspective, the walls had merely shifted the burden. Migratory routes evolved yet again, putting even more strain on Italy as a primary point of entry for immigrants arriving from Africa by sea. In 2016, Austria began work on a barrier along its Italian border. Italy, unable to wall its coastline, is, as I write in 2017, contemplating closing its ports to migrants, while a cash-strapped Spain grimly anticipates the bulk of the mass migration shifting to Gibraltar.
As the first walls finally reached northern Europe—most famously the Great Wall of Calais, a thirty-foot-high concrete barrier designed to protect automobile traffic from attacks by migrants encamped in the so-called Calais Jungle, on the coast of northern France—the US presidential election, keenly watched throughout the world, brought walls to the forefront of public consciousness.
The presidential race saw walls enmeshed for the first time in broader debates on borders and immigration. Perhaps never before had a single issue created more confusion or witnessed more frantic reconfiguring of positions. As the campaign unfolded, both major Democratic candidates initially expressed skepticism over open borders. Hillary Clinton boasted that she had, as a senator, voted “numerous times” for barriers against illegal immigration, arguing that it was important to “control your borders.” Vermont senator Bernie Sanders dismissed open-border policies as “a Koch brothers’ proposal,” linking the idea to the billionaire businessmen famous for funding right-wing causes. Sanders was correct in highlighting the influence of lobbying, which had not been widely noticed by the electorate. Prior to 2016, support for open borders came chiefly from corporate interests. The Wall Street Journal—often considered a mouthpiece for its right-wing owner, Rupert Murdoch—was particularly relentless in editorializing for unfettered immigration. The Journal was originally opposed by liberal economists, such as Paul Krugman, as well as unions and environmentalists. The former calculated that immigration reduced wages, while environmentalists stressed the impact of immigration on natural resources. However, some left-wing immigration activists opposed border controls, and the power of the checkbook had muddied the voice of environmentalists after billionaire David Gelbaum pressured the Sierra Club, an American environmentalist organization, to support open borders in return for a $100 million donation.
Against this confused backdrop, the entry of Donald Trump into the US presidential race brought sudden, artificial clarity to the issues of borders and walls, forcing politicians and voters alike to rethink their traditional positions. Trump’s announcement that he would build a “big, beautiful wall” on the US border with Mexico became one of the most controversial events in modern political history, galvanizing supporters and opponents equally. Ironically, Trump himself had originally been indifferent to the idea, picking it up only after observing the wildly enthusiastic response it drew from an Iowa crowd in January 2015. Later, Trump eliminated references to the wall from his prepared remarks, but his supporters—crowded by the thousands into auditoriums, convention centers, state fairgrounds, and airport hangars—refused to let the issue die. Joyfully chanting, “Build that wall!,” they interrupted Trump’s speeches until he would respond, “Oh, we’re going to build that wall. Believe me, we’re going to build that wall.” To the objective observer—and there were few of these to be found—it was clear that, whatever second thoughts Trump might have harbored after interacting with pro-immigration Republican donors and party bosses, his constituents would have none of it. The wall had outgrown the candidate.
Previous administrations had built miles of concrete walls, corrugated steel walls, and flat steel walls along the Mexican border, always careful to refer to all barriers as “fences.” Trump, with no patience for semantic distinctions—“Nobody builds walls better than me, believe me”—left his proposals open to all the criticisms that the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations had labored to avoid. In 2016, the Berlin Wall was no longer a fading celebrity, clinging to the limelight. It was in full comeback, making splashy cameos in endless articles and commentaries. The former symbol of Communist oppression had seamlessly morphed into a bogeyman for a new age. To a new generation, largely sympathetic to the ideology that had brought about such abject misery to those living behind the Wall, Communism was no longer the great evil. The Wall itself was.
In the endless opinion pieces written about Trump’s proposals, the Berlin Wall shared the stage primarily with its new partner, the Great Wall, which, by virtue of its monumental size, had been recast as a symbol for all that was preposterous or impossible in human endeavors. That Saudi Arabia had, in short order, constructed barriers longer than those proposed by Trump, or that Israel—a country with less than 3 percent of the population of the United States and just a fraction of the landmass—had constructed barriers half the length proposed by Trump was not widely known. Senators scoffed authoritatively at the notion that the United States could ever accomplish what Saudi Arabia had done in less than a decade.
“Good fences make good neighbors” experienced early retirement. In its place came the untested phrase “Build bridges not walls.” If nothing else, the new slogan seemed designed to give military historians fits. Throughout history, bridge building had been recognized as an act of aggression. Since at least the time of Xerxes bridging the Hellespont, Caesar the Rhine, or Trajan the Danube, bridge building had preceded invasions, enabling troop movements across natural barriers, and as late as the twentieth century, military uses had figured prominently in the thinking behind the bridges of Germany’s autobahn and the American interstate highway system. None of this was enough to slow the rise of a hot catchphrase. The slogan showed up on T-shirts, wristbands, and banners. It became a popular hashtag on Twitter. Protesters chanted it. Politicians invoked it. Even Pope Francis paraphrased the sentiment.
In the eighteenth century, Voltaire had dismissed the Great Wall as a “monument to fear.” Nearly three hundred years later, the French philosophe was hardly more than an afterthought in a Western Civilization lecture, but his comment lived on, unattributed to him, echoed in a thousand different combinations and permutations.
And yet the walls kept coming—even if we didn’t always recognize them.
* * *
Let us return to California. Whatever became of the glamorous Anna Q. Nilsson? The Swedish-born actress had started quite a trend. Her Malibu home, sequestered behind the Colony’s locked and guarded gates, was later bought by Robert Redford, then Bob Newhart. Nowadays, even a cursory search for similar gated communities yields an avalanche: endless gushing lists of the hippest, the most expensive, the most celebrity filled, or the most exclusive private neighborhoods. There’s Beverly Park, reputedly the richest, competing with Hidden Hills, legally incorporated behind its massive fence. There’s Mulholland Estates, Bel Air Crest, Beverly Ridge Estates, and dozens of others, all reputedly fabulous.
Walled neighborhoods are no longer the exclusive prerogative of movie stars. When the Seal Beach, California, retirement community Leisure World opened—or, more accurately, locked—its gates in 1962, it established a new trend: walled enclaves for the masses. In short order, there were hundreds of gated communities in the United States, followed by thousands, then tens of thousands. By 1997, authors Edward Blakely and Mary Snyder had concluded that Americans were “forting up”—a rather overwrought hyperbole for a retiree who enjoys living in a country club by the putting green, but we get the drift.
The trend hasn’t been limited to the wealthy—many of whom have no need for community gates as they write their pious homilies on immigration and border policy from behind the confines of their personal walled compounds—or to the United States. Gated communities are found among every class and ethnic group. Abroad, gated communities are common in countries with border walls, such as India, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia, but they’re equally common in nations that face walls built by others. Mexico is filled with walled neighborhoods, as is Pakistan.
The total number of people worldwide living in walled communities is not known. However, if a 2009 estimate of 6 to 9 million in the United States is at all accurate, that still leaves over 90 percent of us to judge and criticize them. With a little flair for the dramatic, we can describe them, as some academics have, as dreading the world outside their gates, even if they don’t seem so fearful when we see them shopping for socks at Walmart.
* * *
A funny thing happens when you tell an acquaintance you’re writing a book on walls. He or she almost immediately forgets that walls are tangible, physical structures and starts asking you if you’ve ever thought about all sorts of metaphorical barriers. Firewalls, for example, or antiviruses. Some suggestions have a physical dimension, such as the ubiquitous home-security system, a business expected to grow to $35 billion by the end of 2017. Others are entirely immaterial, such as the mental walls we erect, or at least we imagine other people erect when we wish to feel superior to them. But there has always been more brick, stone, tamped earth, wrought iron, corrugated steel, and barbed wire than most of us realize.
Are we forever building “monuments to fear”? It strikes me as an ironic testimony to the lingering influence of our primeval warrior past that cowardice remains the harshest and most stigmatizing opprobrium that can be cast on another human being. Those are fighting words, or would be if we weren’t afraid to fight. Perhaps we should at the least take a breath and consider what they might mean. Can we build things out of fear?
The idea doesn’t seem too unreasonable. In many ways, fear is the most powerful of all human emotions. When fully roused, it lords over happiness, anger, sadness, and even love. Its power derives from its direct link to the survival instinct, a connection that makes fear the most practical and necessary weapon in the emotional arsenal of living creatures. In its extreme form, fear becomes panic, but in its chronic state—insecurity—it allows for a degree of deliberation and planning and still exerts a powerful influence on decision making.
Biologists tell us that animals have but two choices when they feel threatened: fight or flight. History suggests that human societies have developed other options. Of these, the oldest was surely this: that men were trained not to fear. They were forced to undergo lifelong exposure to desensitization exercises—beatings, vision quests, periods of forced deprivation, pubertal circumcisions and other tests of pain tolerance, as well as times forcibly spent alone and in the dark—so they could function as soldiers without succumbing to the urge to flee. Desensitization worked, as long as it was measured only by its capacity to win wars.
As an alternative to desensitization, some societies built walls.
In the preceding chapters, we’ve seen that, over the last four thousand years, the struggles between those who built walls and those who assaulted them have frequently decided which states have endured and which have disappeared. Those same struggles have influenced the spread of languages and religions. They’ve brought about the economic dominance of some areas and the desolation of others. They’ve affected our thinking about matters that have little to do with politics, war, or walls.
Of equal importance, however, is how the walls themselves transformed us. As we’ve seen, walling provided certain advantages—we might call them evolutionary, although certainly not in the biological sense. The psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed, in his famous “hierarchy of needs” (usually presented to us as a pyramid), that once humans achieved security they could then concentrate on more elevated needs, eventually achieving “self-actualization.” That may be a tad far-fetched, but history has demonstrated that the sense of security created by walls freed more and more males from the requirement of serving as warriors. Walls allowed them to engage fully in civilian pursuits—making things, building things, thinking, creating—whether or not they ever got around to actualizing themselves. By releasing men to the agricultural labor force, walls also freed women from bearing the sole responsibility for food production.
However, the wall builders sacrificed something of themselves in gaining these freedoms. They would never again possess the same immunity to fear. The wall builders would endure countless defeats by the people outside their walls. The resulting feelings of insecurity were paired with equal feelings of inferiority. The builders suffered a chronic failure of confidence that had them forever hiring soldiers from the ranks of their unwalled enemies. The apparently superior courage of the outsiders shamed the wall builders, repeatedly causing them to dream of returning to a more primitive lifestyle that might restore their manly virtue. As early as ancient Sparta, or the time of those Old Testament prophets who exhorted the Israelites to return to their tents, the wall builders dreamed they might be stronger in a world without walls. In time, this admiration for the unwalled and the longing for a life of courage lived outside the walls evolved into one of the most powerful and pervasive belief systems in the Western world. It crystallized into what philosophers have deemed primitivism.
Primitivism is one of the quiet cornerstones of Western thought, so deeply embedded in our thinking that we are rarely even aware of its influence. We might define it as that philosophy by which wild, natural things—even wild, natural people—are regarded as inherently more virtuous than civilized, artificial ones. It is the reason we instinctively opt for a product that is marketed as “natural” rather than “artificial,” the reason we prefer our crafts handmade rather than machine produced, the reason we camp and hike when perfectly good hotels are available, the reason that so many books have rehashed the argument that hunter-gatherers are wiser, healthier, happier, and in every way superior to their miserably wrongheaded brethren from the tribe of civilization. Recently, there has been some excitement over the “Paleolithic diet”—and this, too, merely exposes our primitivist inclinations acting on us. On a confessional note, I once nearly crippled myself, injuring both of my Achilles tendons after becoming swept up in a primitivist fad for barefoot running. The seductions of primitivism can snare us at any time.
In the end, we restrain most of our primitivist impulses because although toughness sounds fun, achieving it hurts, and none of us want to slide backward down Maslow’s pyramid. We could learn to fight for survival, but it’s a lot easier to close the door, lie on the couch, and watch some television in a space we know is physically secure.
And so we build walls—metaphorical ones, as acquaintances constantly remind me, but mostly real ones—while we wait on everyone else to become just as civilized as we are.
Who are the wall builders?
We are the wall builders.
It was us all along.