Sorry, but I consider this article quack. It claims to show deep insights but achieves this by neglecting important things and viewing the world only through the conqueror´s eyes: Perhaps the Eastern cultures would have preferred to stay aloof of the great Alexandrine fusion-culture - it would have meant cities not looted, people not slaughtered or enslaved. Same for those who contributed -often against their will- to the Roman -oh so rainbowy- culture. You can read Caesar to realize how many Gallic tribes had to be annihilated to achieve this. They would have preferred to live behind a wall rather than to invigorate Roman culture by being slaughtered and enslaved. Same for the people impaled by the thousands by the Huns. And maybe Native Americans would also have preferred to stay behind their wall, the Atlantic, and live rather than constitute a fertile ground for US culture with their corpses.
3
Exquisite essay!
The is a totally ridiculous and poorly substantiated presentation.
3
. . .and while the West pursued all these pathetic little gestures, China was building the greatest civilization on earth, including the greatest fence on earth. how can an article that discusses fences ignore the East? but it matters not. the East is rising, the West is sinking. the 21st century belongs to China, but this time, China is not reviving the fence. it is building a network.
3
I am not an ethical relativist as the author appears to be. I have certain values which I believe should be universal, among them freedom of speech and conscience and equal rights for all under the (non-theocratic) law. At the very least, I will seek to stop anyone from trying to suppress my rights by imposing their antiquated values on me by force.
That, Ms Rossellini, is reality. You may want to sit around a camp fire holding hands and singing Kumbaya, but there are certain folks - and we all know who they are - who seek to overthrow western civilization and impose a theocracy. They make no bones about it and only those suffering from cognitive dissonance fail to see it and oppose it.
You appear to be suffering from the Stockholm syndrome. Get help. Get information. Get knowledge. Get a moral backbone.
3
Because people who live in gated communities tell us that fences don't work.
4
It's true about fences . . . just ask the guy whose garden just got devoured by the neighbor's cows, due to 'bad' fences.
2
Give Dr. Rossellini a break, children. What reads like a low-end book review or a Cliff Note, is just an attempt to put a large, and probably scholarly work into the tiny format herein. Bound to be a bit choppy.
Meanwhile, this scholar of early New England must note that our stony ex-glacial bulldozer soil provides far too many rocks for the only purposes of restraining animals or delineating property. Worse, we get a brand new crop every year. Simply put, we have to put them somewhere, especially a short walk away, and wind up with a wall-quilted patchy landscape that contains no deep messages about anything other than hopeless attempts to make arable soil.
2
Talk about "doublespeak"! Defeat somehow becomes cultural "victory" for the vanquished because of the "diversifying" characteristics of the conquering culture? Right. I'll keep my fences.
6
If you're going to build a fence, don't forget to build a gate.
1
Robert Frost ends his often-misread "Mending Wall" by comparing his "good fences" neighbor to "an old-stone savage armed" who "moves in darkness" and will not consider thinking outside his own mental fence.
Perhaps an example of someone who would not choose to take a different road.
Doug Giebel, Big Sandy, Montana
2
“Good fences make good neighbors.”
And as Frank Booth said in "Blue Velvet:"
"What's your name, neighbor?"
I had wondered about the personage of Isabella's twin sister, Dr. Ingrid Rossellini.
Now we know.
1
She misses the whole Central Eurasians impact that made all her boarder very porous and formed the world’s cultures in untold ways; a classic deficiency wide spread but now being opened by the rediscovery of the Silk Road topic.
During the recent Palestinian/Israeli conflict, a fence was proved as a solid deterrent to a potentially harmful invasion.
4
Frost's poem is often, in my opinion, misunderstood and misrepresented. Good fences make good neighbors not by being a wall that divides yours from mine but from the common work needed to build one. The poem's narrator and his neighbor do not see each much but the common wall and work needed to maintain it make them good neighbors. Working together, not a wall of separation, is what Frost is referring to.
18
Wonder what the Romans would say about "fences" and "good neighbors" . The fence referred to by Robert Frost is the Declaration of Independence and its operating agreement as amended, the United States Constitution. Your rights are limited by my wall; or conversely, my happiness is restricted to the area inside my wall.
"Good Neighbors" respect the limitations on their "Rights" and for my "Pursuit of Happiness". "Bad Neighbors" break down walls destroying "Rights" and "Pursuits of Happiness".
7
Let's break down this narrow minded statement: "What fences have very often indicated is not simply what is mine and what is yours, but, more subtly, who I am versus who you are. This tendency is based on the human inclination to define one’s identity in contrast to someone cast as a different, an untrustworthy Other best kept at a distance."
Properties have borders. Buildings have walls/offices; homes have walls, rooms; automobiles have a driver's seat; banks have a safe/vault; EACH of these places have doors with locks.
NO two people are alike and we each enjoy some modicum of privacy/alone time. For example, I bought my apartment in 2005 and saw the investors who own/rent out the unit not 10 feet across from my door at a Homeowner's meeting I attended shortly after purchasing.
In the 13-years I've never met any of the renters and rarely speak to the elderly Slavic lady who lives downstairs.
The ideas in the essay are simplified, as generally happens when condensing an argument that unfolds in hundreds of pages into an essay that does so in hundreds of words. Some of the readers' comments raise the point that Dr. Rossellini is confusing actual and metaphorical walls, and that there is an essential difference between the two. This is true to some extent, but it's worth noting that every actual wall is also a metaphorical wall. A 30-foot wall along the entire southern border might or might not serve a practical purpose, but it if built, it will be cast in history as a metaphor for many troubling things about our present moment.
2
I don't know if this interests Ms Rossellini, but when I was in college many years ago Robert Frost visited our campus and gave a reading that included (of course) "Mending Wall." I recall distinctly that Frost introduced that poem by saying (to this effect) "There are two speakers in this poem; the one who speaks for me says 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall' (twice) and adds 'That wants it down'. The other ('my neighbor') is the one I describe as 'like an old-stone savage armed' and it's he who repeats that old saw about good fences making good neighbors." Frost recited with relish the lines that go, "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling out,/ And to whom I was like to give offense." And he chuckled in comic pride pointing out the little pun contained in that word "offense" ['a fence']. Of course Frost wanted the poem to speak for itself, but it was obvious he wished to make clear to us students how he himself felt about fences.
7
"... it was obvious he [Frost] wished to make clear to us students how he himself felt about fences."
These lines show that Frost's speaker accepts fences where there is a reason to have them:
"Isn't it / Where there are cows? But here there are no cows."
Thus, Frost and his publishers availed themselves of copyright law, which "fences" off artistic works from use by others.
Ancient is the Golden Age of Greece, the Roman Senate, the Chin Dynasty, the Pyramids. The Chartres Cathedral might be old and the Magna Carta might be old - - but how did Robert Frost get thrown back more than two millenia.
It appears that one steady principle uniting all of these proud states is pretty simple: don’t be a woman.
3
Yes, this essay doesn't have anything much to do with real fences.
But in modern societies, fences have value, especially in urban environments where some people have no respect for other people's property, and so they trespass.
They jump their neighbor's walls even when they have easy ingress and egress onto their own property.
Others litter. Or search for bottles to recycle but don't leave things as they found them. Or as what some folks do after a night partying, they trespass and then relieve their bodily functions on their neighbors' property. Others let their pets do so.
There aren't enough fences to be locked for privacy purposes and to keep the riffraff out.
1
On May 13th I opened my comment on Maureen Dowd's column with these words: "Maureen, I truly love this column and especially the repetition 'Everything is plausible'."
Once again, I can open with "Ingrid Rossellini", I truly love this column and even the wall between the two kinds of comments."
You, one of the twin daughters of the coming together of two worlds, the Swedish and the Italian by having Ingrid Bergman as your mother and Roberto Rossellini as your father, illustrate what can be the very best of joining worlds, languages, modes of thought.
I even like the comments because they illustrate the existence of a fence between readers who have a literal mindset, and those of a metaphorical turn of mind. To those of you who think that Ms. Rossellini is not aware of the function of real fences, fences that both can keep in and keep out, rest assured, she understands those functions very well.
Ms. Rossellini speaks for me: "...the regeneration that culture always needs can occur only when the fences of prejudice are breached to allow encounters between different people, traditions and ideas."
Soon I will leave for the Red Cross where Sweden gave me the best gift of all, a setting where for the past 18 years I have spent 1000s of hours with people from everywhere, Iran, Somalia, Syria, Eritrea and many more, each of whom has given me at least as much or more than I have given them.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Dual citizen US SE
6
LL (Sweden): "... readers who have a literal mindset, and those of a metaphorical turn of mind."
"A metaphorical turn of mind" is not too helpful when Russian subs are patrolling Swedish waters:
Lessons from Sweden’s Sub Hunt
by Magnus Nordenman
October 28, 2014
https://news.usni.org/2014/10/28/lessons-swedens-sub-hunt
1
I don't think conquering and vanquishing/enslaving a people is the equivalent of the "fences of prejudice coming down", even though there is always a residual cultural influence.
3
According to the author, cultures truly flourish when the barriers we build to define themselves break down. I hate to rain on anybody’s parade, but doesn’t that mean that when there are no barriers left to break down, cultures decline and fall? I guess we should keep both our sledgehammers and our mortar trowels handy. And maybe you should think twice about calling great poets like Robert Frost purveyors of obsolete wisdom.
5
It is doubtful that the Times intended or suggested or implied that 3 people or 13m or 30m people Aare welcome to the US under the terms you described. I agree that the article is a weak effort.
I am sure that by now there are multiple tunnels under the border already finished and ready for use when the wall is finished. It seems that if the US enforced current border laws and regulations more actively, maybe we could all just get along.
1
Rossellini: "In Ancient Greece, where a profound appreciation of human reason produced a brilliant civilization, pernicious biases were also established."
That's a severe oversimplification. There were dozens of Greek city-states, with differing cultures and governments that evolved over centuries.
The author knows that, because she says so in her chapter on "Sparta and Athens" in her book. Rossellini has done herself a terrible disservice with this OpEd.
1
The Greeks might have avoided the massacre of the Corinthians among other inconveniences if they'd had better fences to keep the Romans out. Likewise the Romans probably would have preferred not to have their capital sacked and their government deposed by Germanic immigrants.
Want to continue? How about the Christian populations from the Bosphorus to (and across) the Straits of Gibraltar who lacked strong enough fences to prevent Mohamet's followers from destroying their world? Or the North Americans who were pushed into desert reservations by European migrants.
This has been going on since at least the displacement of the Neanderthals by Homo Sapiens, and, it's true, it DOES represent progress for the newcomers. But for those swept away by a tsunami of newcomers the process usually represents something other than "a reconnection with their own cultural roots."
3
Re "What fences have very often indicated is not simply what is mine and what is yours, but, more subtly, who I am versus who you are. This tendency is based on the human inclination to define one’s identity in contrast to someone cast as a different, an untrustworthy Other best kept at a distance.":
On the contrary, people who otherize must by definition disrespect socially essential fences — personal boundaries — because respecting those fences would admit equality, and is therefore antithetical to subordinating others.
This holds true for any "issue" involving races, religions, sexes, spouses, ages, abilities, classes, or cultures. Such issues have nothing to do with their purported topics, and everything to do with how we see ourselves vis-à-vis others — as everyone can plainly see if they merely swap shoes.
Examples:
Should Our personal lives and private acts be subject to Their approval? Should They have say-so over Our lives, Our rights, Our freedoms, Our bodies, Our bedrooms, Our spouses? Should They be legally authorized to hold Us to the beliefs, values, requirements, and restrictions that They have freely and rightfully chosen for Themselves? Should They have government-sanctioned authority to make up little non-white lies about Us, to tell Us about Ourselves rather than ask Us about Ourselves, and to mistreat Us according to Their lies?
It’s not good fences that make good neighbors. It’s respect for those fences that make neighborhoods possible.
18
Having lived in Vermont for 6 years my take on Frosts poem is,
Working on their fences together, the task made the neighbors good. Not to fence each other from one another. It was a classic Vermont rock wall in woods of long abandoned pasture, the cows long gone. That was why they puzzled over the fence’s utility deciding to keep it in repair out of a work ethic and friendly maintenance.
Have a shot of maple syrup and it will be clear.
3
What you say about cultures disparaging foreign neighbors through history is certainly true & your examples are good evidence of that. But going back to the story of the neighbors meeting while rebuilding the fence, they came to agree. The fence symbolized their agreement on the location of the property line. In their case the good fence really did mean they were good neighbors. The example we could take from the saying is that a workable agreement to the benefit of both sides of our southern border with or without a physical wall would mean that we were in fact good neighbors. Maybe it will happen someday.
7
Thoughtful article. But it's all about cultural or metaphorical barriers. Nothing at all about the actual physical fences and barricades (ancient Sumeria, the Athenian "Long Walls," Hadrian's Wall, The Great Wall, the Maginot Line, etc.) that have played such a prominent role throughout the history of civilization.
1
Discarding commonsense notions that people have built up over centuries, because they are politically inconvenient, seems a very bad idea. "Good fences make good neighbors" is not an ancient myth, it is a basic principal of social harmony which people have known about for centuries. If this writer thinks she knows better, she is mistaken.
22
It seems that there can be no discussion of a middle ground in any context. Walls and fences serve good purposes as do borders. Recognizing that some cultural norms are not all good for all people. That is particularly true for women. Progress in one culture for women is viewed with suspicion in another and sometimes with aggression and violence. I for one say we must recognize the difference between those elements of a culture that are benign and those that put humans at risk. Judgment is key and the insistence that each and every culture is, in all respects, just as good for all is simply untrue. That doesn’t mean that differences in cultures can ever justify violence or discrimination but it does mean that resisting the insistence that we tolerate those elements of a culture that are damaging to the rights of humans is important.
6
I thought this was a thought provoking article. We are better off when we allow ourselves to cross fences and expand our outlook.
3
In spite of the title, this piece has nothing to do with real fences, barriers and separations.
Two points: 1. the concept of formal boundaries or boundary lines, physically marked off was not very common in the ancient world. There were boundaries but they were fuzzy. After all cartography was not a very developed science in the ancient world. 2. Those fuzzy boundaries were often stamped with the sign of divine approval. They were marked off by God. This of course led to no small amount of wars. # 2, for better or worse, is very much alive today and even in secular societies, scratch the surface and you get #2.
3
JS: "1. the concept of formal boundaries or boundary lines, physically marked off was not very common in the ancient world. There were boundaries but they were fuzzy."
Ancient boundaries were established geographically by rivers, lakes, seas, oceans, mountains, etc. Josephus describes the boundaries of Judea in those terms and in terms of the villages that are in it:
"In the limits of Samaria and Judea lies the village Anuath, which is also named Borceos. This is the northern boundary of Judea. The southern parts of Judea, if they be measured lengthways, are bounded by a village adjoining to the confines of Arabia; the Jews that dwell there call it Jordan. However, its breadth is extended from the river Jordan to Joppa." (Wikipedia: "Judea")
JS: "After all cartography was not a very developed science in the ancient world."
However, land surveying was well-developed. Examples of surveying applied to ancient construction include the Pyramids and Stonehenge. Ancient Roman surveyors were known as "Gromatici". (Wikipedia: "Surveying")
3
To ENF---I do this for a living. There is no boundary between Judaea and Samaria. Northern Judaea is southern Samaria. The borders in Josephus War are classic for being "fuzzy". Do you think that you can draw a line from that description. One village and a continuation that is not comprehensible.
“who I am versus who you are”
Please. Fences were needed to keep the cows in. Neighbors had everything in common with one another and enjoyed working on the fences to build good neighbor relations and get a little time to chat.
14
I mean - seriously - everyone knows that the whole good fences... idea refers to the combined nature of the work and the fellowship
...and not the separation of the two properties.
'Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,'
4
Most Westerners do not know, and probably would not believe, that during the middle ages, Jews were actually safer in Muslim lands than in Europe. Anyone who has served in the military knows that, when your life is on the line, it doesn't matter what color or religion your buddy is. Too many Americans reject their own history: Children of immigrants who spoke other languages, yet managed to contribute to this country's greatness. Indians and Pakistanis barely remember that for centuries, they co-existed in peace, before the partition of India.
Tribalism is on the march, and it must be turned back if our country or our planet are to survive. How? I don't know. I am an Asian-American who always refused to join ethnic-identity groups in school and afterward, because it made no sense to me. I know in my bones that giving in to the instinct to fear the "other" is the greatest threat to our survival as a country or a planet.
10
And yet, that is the way humans have behaved for the whole of recorded history. Interesting, isn't it? And don't forget, often the other WAS dangerous.
4
Trying just a little too hard to conjure a profound metaphor out of fences. The author should spend some time on a working farm or ranch where wandering livestock can cause all kinds of problems with neighbors.
30
Is this piece about Trump's border wall or is it about fears of challenges to traditional gender roles? Is it about Greeks and Romans or or is it about a dangerously divisive two-party system fed by stereotyped cultural myths concerning tribal identity? Is it about Islamophobia or is it about America's shifting and perhaps declining role in the global economy?
Or is it perhaps about our own assumptions as readers--readers of this piece, readers of Frost, readers of history?
There are all sorts of walls, and there is a difference between loving a wall and employing one, judiciously, towards a virtuous end.
4
This is a well thought out essay to which I agree. I know so many people are thinking of our own dilemma here in the US: Those who want the Great Wall as trumpeted by Mr. Trump vs those who say no to the idea of such nativism and bigotry; those who want to welcome desperate refugees from the Middle East vs those who say no to all Muslims.
One commenter asked, and I paraphrase, if we want to be "overrun" by "third world immigrants." Now is the time for all of us Americans to refresh our memories as to this nation's history. And we should all think back to our own ancestors who were considered third world...e.g., my own poverty-stricken Southern Italian grandparents, the Irish "papists" starving because of the Potato Famine, our Southeast Asian refugees escaping the horrors of war-torn Viet Nam. Were they and others resisted at first? Yes. But in every case, they assimilated, were accepted, and went on to successful lives, contributing to and enhancing our society. Let us hope our history as a nation can repeat itself in this fashion.
4
Yes, and we can continue to accept people fleeing danger. But the problem here is that there are too many not assimilating, instead creating little nations inside my nation. We are fractured as a society. My thoughts are to slow it and give us a period of assimilation first. We are not the wide open spaces nation we used to be.
4
This is such a 2018 urban essay.
Fences were designed not for people, but for animals. Fences do make good neighbors. They keep the dogs from running all over, the cattle in, their sheep on the hill rather than the gully, and the wolves away from all of us.
Walls... Walls, on the other hand. From the Great to the Berlin to the modern privacy "fence" (it's a wall, folks), the intention of walls is clear: stay out (or remain in) at your own peril. And invoking peril isn't very neighborly, is it?
5
So what distinguishes flourish from "truly flourish"?
2
According to the author, cultures truly flourish when the
barriers we build to define themselves break down. I hate to
rain on anybody’s parade, but doesn’t that mean that when
there are no barriers left to break down, oultures deoline and
fall? I guess we should keep both our sledgehammers and our
mortar trowels handy. And maybe you should think twice
about calling great poets like Robert Frost purveyors of
obsolete wisdom.
2
You want to see fences, visit Miami; every house and yard is closed off with 8-10 feet gates and fences; a virtual prison to keep people out.
Robert Frost is an American folk hero for his beautiful but simple poetry.
In "Mending Fences" the two neighbors cooperate in repairing the wall but on our southern border, we have a neighbor who is obsessed with invading our yard and sending usurpers into our house and who play a game of musical chairs as it pertains to their perceived right to stay in our yard and camp on our porch and demand dinner once they set a foot on the steps.
In a relationship where each person is respectful of the other, no wall would be necessary; human nature being what it is, we need that wall.
Americans and Canadians have quite a respectful relationship; this is not the case on the southern border.
We do need a barrier on the southern border; a big, tall wall a.s.a.p.
16
Maybe you people are over-intellectualizing this.
In New Hampshire, where I live and where Frost once lived, good fences do make good neighbors. Fences keep your cattle out of my garden and my dogs from killing your chickens.
And if they keep the barbarians at the gate, all the better,
19
Dear Professor Rossellini,
It was Voltaire who said that illusion is the first among the pleasures and I certainly concur. But what the world is showing us now and always is that the average person would sooner fence off half of humanity than endure a trace of fear or a dollar of lost wages.
The truth, as Berkeley reminds us, is the cry of all, but the game of few.
C’est la vie.
Cordially,
S.A. Traina
4
After a lifetime listening to yard dogs bark symphonically, I retired to a town that requires a permit to build a fence, one rarely granted for residences except to secure swimming pools. Mother nature provides us gorgeous fencing and winter views to live for.
2
So what do you do with the dogs?
Really, I would like to know.
I’m having trouble getting past the fact that in the poem two neighbors voluntarily meet to work hard at repairing the wall between them. They freely communicate as they do so. One has second thoughts about whether the wall is necessary but the other remains convinced it’s mutually beneficial. I don’t see that as supporting the idea that in general more is lost than gained with a wall.
I’m also having trouble getting past the idea of discussing the upside of conquest and empire without discussing the downside. As I understand it, conquest and empire usually involved bloodshed, slaughter, rape, enslavement, and pillaging. By my lights that overwhelms the upside. Additionally, I’ve read there are people who think that some civilizations conquered by Alexander lost much more than they gained in terms of their cultural and religious practices.
We should discuss arrangements that are intermediate between isolation and unguarded openness. Walls have gates that can be opened voluntarily. Trade and cultural exchange can happen voluntarily, governed by agreed on rules. Even if pressure must sometimes be brought to bear to force the gates open for trade and cultural exchange, that’s still different than smashing the walls. There’s a difference between Alexander of Macedonia riding into Asia and Commodore Perry sailing into Tokyo Bay.
16
Well said, Jack. Best comment. Thoughtful and relevant.
Fences indicate "what is mine and what is yours, but, more subtly, who I am versus who you are". No, I think the author was right the first time. The second bit is not subtle, but rather dubious and contentious. If "who I am" is declared by "what I own", then my identity does not require a fence to define it.
The second assertion is instead a segue into a discourse on the evils of xenophobia, from which everyone outside my elite group suffers. That personal deficiency is more than sufficient to explain any disagreement with me about matters such as mass immigration.
5
"If "who I am" is declared by "what I own", then my identity does not require a fence to define it."
One of the cornerstones of commercial advertising and marketing is playing on the conflict/envy between two neighbors - often in an open suburban setting --
We see a man or woman telling their neighbor with delight about the bargains they found while shopping for he holidays -- only to be one-upped by he neighbor who announces with sheepish smugness that they also got a great bargain -- as they point to their brand new shiny car displayed in the driveway --
There are no fences in those commercials - and they're not necessary - because the implication is most certainly "What I own declares and defines who I am" -- thereby creating a psychological barrier of envy, jealousy, resentment and conflict much more intense than any pile of bricks or logs of fencing --
"I need to take care of me and mine" -- or -- "Best wishes to you and yours" --
Those expressions make me shudder when I hear them - and suggest to me a fence with a warning sign which says "Keep Out" -
And --
at the beginning of Stanley Kubrick's film "2001 a Space Odyssey" -- when one of the apes picks up a stick and realizes he can use it to smash other sticks - and then uses them to terrorize the apes in he "Other" group -- we have the first inkling of what putting up fences is really all about...
1
Fences usually provide the paranoid with a false sense of security, and safety. For every ten foot fence, there's a guy with a twelve foot ladder. Or shovel. The only truly effective fences are very tall with razor topped cutting wire, coiled on top. DOUBLE fences, with Armed Guards and vicious, trained Dogs patrolling 24/7, Between the fences. Are we prepared to pay for THAT, ad infinitum, along the entire Southern Border ??? NO. It's Security Theatre, just like the vast majority of the functions of the TSA. A waste of resources, to make the nervous less frightened, and give certain Politicians something to bluster and rant about.
Just saying.
9
The article is nonsense. With about 350 million legal crossings annually, the U.S.-Mexican border is the most frequently crossed border in the world. As Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto pointed out, "We share the most travelled border through which every day, legally, more than a million people cross it and over 400,000 vehicles."
The border fence covers only 580 miles of the 1,989-mile border. It doesn't stop encounters between different people, traditions and ideas. It stops about 50 to 60 percent of illegal border crossers, but illegal border crossers make up less than one percent of border crossers.
20
Fences appear at the cellular level. They are called membranes. They are apparently meant to keep out foreign objects, and define the cells boundaries. 'Boundaries' used to be a term used by social workers and psychologists to define acceptable behavior, as in the phrase "especting other peoples boundaries". And I would say that boundaries are a necessary aspect of integrity.
41
Talk about your leap of imagination. This writer leads us from repairing fences on the farm to ancient Greece, to Rome, and then to the Crusades. This journey is supposed to inform us about our "fences of prejudice." I wonder if the expression "let sleeping dogs lie" can be tied to ancient Egypt, the Persian Empire and Genghis Khan, somehow warning us about another prejudice ?
5
The author of this piece needs to read Garret Hardin's The Tragedy of the Commons. And if the idea that good fences makes good neighbors is merely a myth, why does the NYT have a pay wall?
43
"Isn't that where there are cows?"
1
Trump's wall is precisely this sort of border. It is both physical and metaphorical. Inside his wall are the real (white, patriotic) Americans. Outside his wall are the others: the lazy, criminal (brown) people. Frost was no believer in Trump walls. Thank you, Ms. Rossellini, for quoting him correctly. Something in me simply will not tolerate this walling in and walling out that the Trump mob is doing.
8
Fences do make good neighbors because familiarity breeds contempt.
5
So the cultures drew from each other and improved over the centuries - wonderful!
But you left out what happened to the people whose fences were overrun: war, rape, murder, oppression, poverty, starvation, homelessness, slavery ....... all before their culture "grew".
I'm not sure how to interpret the author's premise in light of this reality.
11
Nature’s dislike of artificial barriers? Surely this meant as a joke. Don’t you mean nature’s dislike of roads, piers, breakwaters, dams, roofs, tents, buildings, paint, rose bushes, trees and basically everything else. Weather destroys everything. The author is thinking way too hard to be anti-Trump.
3
Ms. Rosselini has her theory and she is sticking to it: Graeco-Roman civilization was based upon a false dividing line between civilized natives and savage foreigners. In the process, she reduces the complexity of Greek, Roman and Christian civilization to a series of sound bites. The reference to Frost is similarly tone deaf.
I expect a more nuanced analysis from the NYtimes.
11
I must say, you made it through the author's 496-page book in record time, especially considering it won't be released for another week. How can I hear more about your obviously educated opinion on Western Identity From Classical Greece to the Renaissance?
10
@ Randall - Thanks Randall, Endora ends by giving us the impression that she thinks "The Times" wrote the article.
I will note here for the record, that although in my comment way down I stated I liked seeing two kinds of comments, on showing and understanding of what Rossellini is saying and the other treating the OpEd as an essay about real stone walls.
But now when I see that all of the most highly recommended think Rossellini is onlhy interested in real stone walls I wonder.
As for Endora I think Randall and I would join in noting that we would expect a more nuanced comment from anyone writing here and more careful writing. Endora might have made clear if she is basing her generalizations on the column or on what she thinks is in the book.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Dual citizen US SE
I read her article. That is all I claimed to do. I also have a Ph.D. from an Ivy and am fluent in Latin. Are you?
The decision of Athens to erect the long walls between Athens proper and Piraeus around 450 A.D. was likely a contributing factor to the collapse of the Athenian empire, and 30 years of war. I sort of expect that this example is unknown in the current Administration.
15
It's kind of ironic that here in California houses have fences that surround the entire property. But as a rule we don't believe a border fence is practical. It won't work. In the mid-western parts of the country housing has long been built without fences, yet the conservative mid-west wants Trump to build "that wall." Maybe in twenty five years the reverse will happen. The mid-westerners will build fences around their houses (to protect them from the hordes). While here in California new housing may not come with fences so we can all mingle together and get along.
1
The tendency to erect fences is derived from the atavistic desire to protect and stand one's own in the face of incursions by others. How effective they can be, depends much on the circumstances. But, not to forget, most humans want to live within four walls, which are similar a fence.
10
The metaphor of the fence suggests the dilemma that confronts human beings in their relationships with each other. As Ms. Rossellini shows, barriers deprive us of the enrichment made possible by interaction with individuals and groups which differ from us. The resiliency and creativity which have historically characterized the American economy and society stem directly from the polyglot nature of our population.
At the same time, however, the health, indeed the very existence, of a community requires boundaries. All countries achieve the sense of identity and solidarity that make cooperative action and sacrifice possible through a focus on those characteristics which differentiate them from their neighbors. In America, a nation defined in large part by ethnic and cultural diversity, we struggle to transcend those differences through an emphasis on the political ideals which inspired our drive for independence.
The obsession with national differences can, as Rossellini argues, promote arrogance and conflict. But distinct national communities can also form alliances, bound to each other by common interests and ideals. Fences, after all, usually have gates, enabling neighbors to interact with each other in a cooperative way.
Walls, in short, can play a positive as well as negative role. The sense of security created by boundaries can give groups and countries the confidence to work together. And the absence of borders can encourage imperial dreams.
10
Why would you cite a Latin-derived word (virtue) to talk about a Greek life? The Greek analogue, arete, does not have an explicitly gendered derivation.
Also, not to be pedantic, but some of the history in this piece is inaccurate. For example, the contention that all other civilizations of the period other than Greece were ruled by absolute monarchs is definitely wrong, as the many Phoenician city-states of the era attest - though not democracies, they were also definitely not ruled by absolute monarchs. And of course if you venture away from the Mediterranean you can find many other examples of contemporaneous civilizations not ruled by absolute monarchs.
20
Aristotle's Politics is a survey of many varieties of government in the eastern Mediterranean. A few were absolute monarchies, but most were not.
As they say about investing, past performance is not a guarantee of future returns. An argument that Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and Crusader Europe was (or would have been) better off when (if) those cultures were more open to upending their mores, and more tolerant of influxes of the not-like-minded? Even if valid, that does not mean that the same lesson applies to a world -- millennia or centuries later -- where demographic, geopolitical, and social circumstances are so different as to constitute another planet altogether, the one we live on now. Before taking a rosy-hued history lesson as prescription for present policy, hesitate. Please.
12
The idea that tribalism is a learned behavior and not a part of human nature is a perennial dream that wishful thinkers from J-J. Rousseau to John Lennon have shared. Efforts to build anything but subsistence societies on this dream have foundered, however. Best to accept tribalism and strive to keep the fences in good repair.
29
So the author is saying that we should allow Western civilization in the USA and in Europe to be overrun by third world immigrants so that we can be enhanced? Right.
35
You need long hedges and short hedges.
4
Your call for the fences of prejudice to be breached is all fine and dandy but Robert Frost wasn't talking about fences that keep apart neighbors who come from different peoples or have different traditions or ideas. In fact he was probably referring to neighbors who were very much alike. He was simply saying that fences keep neighbors from getting on each other's nerves.
45
That is not at all what the poem says. What about the pine versus apple metaphor? It isn't the speaker of the poem who utters the famous line; it's the benighted neighbor who can't "go behind his father's saying." The poem's last lines:
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."
17
Nope. He was saying that working on walls was work that made neighbors more neighborly.
1
Perhaps "good fences make good neighbors" is a folksy way of channeling Plato's "mind your own business."
Or, more likely, it was an ad campaign by a local fence-building concern.
13
The old saw 'good fences make good neighbors' is best interpreted as a statement on property rights. Community respect of property is essential for economic and, i daresay democratic, progress. If my fence is not respected -- ie, you and anyone can do whatever you want with and on my land -- how can we live in peace? I appreciate the effort to reflect on this in service of greater acceptance of those other than us, a worth goal -- but that is not what the old saying is about.
42
In Frost's poem, the joke was that the folksy saying, in complete, was, "where there are cows, good fences make good neighbors." But there were no cows in the poem. So it was less a poem about fear of the other than about fear of injuring the other, except sans item of potential injury.
7
If that's what Frost meant, it's what he would have written.
He clearly meant to mock the phrase as a rigid rule, putting it into the mouth of an unthinking, robotic human.
7
Exactly! The poem begins, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall,That wants it down." ["Something" seems to refer to Nature, or to God.]
Frost goes on to describe typical rural New England walls, not "fences" of wood or wire. They're constructed with stones of various sizes and shapes, piled neatly upon each other up to 3 feet high and about 2 feet across. These walls usually surround several acres of the farmer's property. During the winter and spring, "frost heave" of the ground dislodges some of the stones, causing sections of the walls to fall down. "Mending Wall" has to do with the annual need to put the fallen stones back in place.
It's not just about mending a wall. It's a metaphor for mending the relationship between the neighbors. The speaker of the poem does not want a wall.