Political Dichotomies 2 – Borders

This is my second entry in which I will explore the political landscape using the filter of a narrow dichotomy. As I stated in the previous post, these dichotomies are never perfect, but sometimes they can be accurate enough to uncover some valuable insight.

The dichotomy that I want to talk about in this post is the dichotomy of borders. I was going to wait a bit to post about this, but the current controversy surrounding the Trump administration and the U.S./Mexico border was too timely and I decided to get this one up real quick.

The dichotomy that I am trying to frame in this post is the dichotomy that I learned from Jordan Peterson. The way he explains it, one of the key differences between the right and the left is the issue of borders. Not just national borders, although that is an important topic and the one most likely to be brought up, but borders at every level of analysis. Broadly speaking, people on the right want to maintain tight borders around things, and people on the left want to break borders down. Both the right and the left have good reasons for their views of borders, and Jordan Peterson stresses the importance of both sides talking to each other so that people know in which direction they should be leaning.

From the view of the left, if borders are too tight, then valuable things can’t flow freely across them and what exists inside the borders is less rich than it could be. Likewise, if borders are too rigid, then a sudden change in the environment can result in the complete shattering and collapse of the structure.

From the view of the right, if borders are too loose then people are left without any framework for action. Borders make it clear what you can and cannot do, and it is much easier to figure out what you should do when there is clear differentiation between things. Borders are what differentiate right from wrong, good from evil, better from worse. If the borders between things are dissolved too severely, then everything is left in an undifferentiated miasma of chaos and meaninglessness. To those on the right, great things are created and kept pure by clearly defining the borders around them.

The case of national borders is instructive for understanding the tension in which the two sides exist. If national borders are too tight, then genuine contributions from people outside of the nation are not allowed in and societies can face economic and cultural stagnation. On the other side, if national borders are too loose, then a nation can be flooded with people and ideas that don’t share any of the values that the nation was built upon and everything that the nation was trying to accomplish can be lost.

The same concepts apply to more abstract borders, and I have a particular fascination with the borders of language. The borders around a word are what define its meaning. A word means some things because it necessarily does not mean other things. Just as with physical borders, a word with a meaning that is too tightly restricted risks becoming outmoded and obsolete. However, what good is a word with a definition so broad that it encompasses everything? What could possibly be meant by the expression of such a word? Obviously we need distinction between concepts if they are of any value.

This is one of the major frustrations that the right has for the left in the current culture war. The left keeps redefining words to suit their purposes, and the right gets incredibly frustrated that the goalposts keep being moved linguistically. The right is told that racism is wrong, but then the definition of racism keeps expanding to the point where “not seeing color” is racist. Likewise the right is told that they can’t be sexist, but then the concept of gender gets blown up into an infinite number of categories that are impossible to make any sense of. To paraphrase Jordan Peterson: “conservatives just want to know what the damn rules are!” Rules are borders on behavior, and if those borders are clearly defined then conservatives feel more comfortable about acting without running afoul of them.

I really came to understand this idea as I applied it to the gay marriage debate of yesteryear. What conservatives were concerned about, and failed to articulate adequately, was the expansion of the word “marriage” to include things that it previously never included. Marriage, to their mind, meant the very specific act of a man and a woman being bound together for life with the intention of starting a family. There were exceptions of course, but the exceptions never completely invalidated the ordinary understanding.

And here is where the rubber meets the road. Along with this traditional definition of marriage came an entire host of long-established cultural traditions: bridal showers, rehearsal dinners, vows, religious ceremonies, and eventually baby showers and naming godparents. To the conservative mind, if someone said they were getting married we know what that meant and we know just what to do with the information. However, redefining marriage to include things outside of the accepted categorical boundaries blows apart the substructure that underlays the understanding and the subsequent implications of the concept. Suddenly a bunch of things that were taken for granted had to be questioned. Do we have a bridal shower if it’s two men? Who pays for the rehearsal dinner? Is there a rehearsal dinner? Who pays for the wedding? Do we have a baby shower if they adopt children? What if they have children through artificial insemination? In the mind of the conservative, the traditional concept of marriage was beneficially predictable and most people were humming along with it just fine. Start mucking about with it and they have an understandably emotional reaction.

Many people think that conservatives are afraid of what will happen when borders are broken down. To understand what is really happening on a biological level, Jonathan Haidt is the man to go to. He explains rather convincingly that the motivation behind the conservative desire to preserve borders around things isn’t fear, but is actually sensitivity to disgust. Haidt explains that it’s an evolved response that is supposed to protect us from pathogens. It allows us to differentiate between categories such as “food” and “not food.” Similarly in the marriage example above, the conservative sees the concept of “marriage” being contaminated by something that is “not marriage” and has a natural repulse reaction. And contaminated is really the right word. Marriage is something that is deeply good and valuable, and it’s disgusting to a conservative in a very real way that something so important to the functioning of society is being contaminated by the inclusion of something that doesn’t belong.

Borders are a very important concept, and how they are dealt with is a very useful way of understanding more about the differences between the right and the left. The more we understand about how the other side thinks, the better chance we have not tearing ourselves apart in partisan tribal warfare.