The Edge Of The Plain:  How Borders Make And Break Our World, by James Crawford

It is a great shame that this book is so political, and from an obviously biased left-wing perspective (that manages to include anti-American and anti-Semitic approaches, as is to be expected from the refuse of the contemporary left) that when the author occasionally stumbles on the need for human beings to have and enforce borders and boundaries on a biological level, fails to draw the obvious conclusion as to why beings who must always defend their bodily integrity might be programmed or hard-wired in some fashion to defend other boundaries as well when they are involved in social groups.  The author seems to think that groups defending boundaries is a bad thing, and stacks the deck to make it seem like the defense of boundaries is an illegitimate matter and that it is violence to the poor people who simply want a better life and to have free access to harm others and take what they want without having to follow proper rules.  The author, though, strikes this reader as being a moral anarchist, and is not used to being told that things are wrong and finds the thought of being prevented from doing what he wants to be deeply offensive and wrong, rather than seeing his desire to transgress boundaries as wrong.

Strangely, though, for someone who does not share the author’s perspective, the author manages to provide plenty of evidence as to why it is that borders are so important to defend and, when properly viewed, gives us an understanding of the relationship that borders have to do with life.  Indeed, when a person or group or nation is no longer willing or able to defend their boundaries from hostile aggressors, be they illegal immigrants or viruses or foreign armies, the result is the death of that organism.  The author has all of the evidence available right in front of him to come to that conclusion, and yet he cannot see that people borders easily become natural because they represent a fundamental aspect of reality, and that is the need to separate ourselves from interaction with hostile elements.  When, as is the case with the collapse of Communism, what was once a wall divides people who are no longer enemies, the wall is no longer necessary.  The author’s politics lead him to draw the wrong conclusions from the collapse of the Berlin wall and from the proliferation of walls as ways to separate nations from those who wish to do them harm, but the sound reader will be able to read against the grain of the text to come to reasonably sound conclusions, at least, and figure reasonable solutions to the questions of why borders are so natural to mankind that seem to elude the clueless author.

In terms of its contents, this book is almost 400 pages in length and is divided into four parts and ten chapters.  The book begins with an introduction and a prologue about the first border known to mankind, between two Mesopotamian cities that fought over farmland and water that sat between them.  The first part of the book discusses making borders, with a discussion of how borders affect the Sami people (1), borders and their role in shaping the world of the Greek polis (2), and the struggle of borders and limits for the Roman empire (3).  The second part of the book examines moving borders (II), including the green line between Israel and Gaza and Judea and Samaria (4), and the lost border between the United States and Mexico that existed between 1819 and 1845 (5), as a way to inflame Mexican irredentism, I would imagine.  The third part of the book discusses the issue of crossing borders, including the efforts of the American government to protect the nation from illegal immigrants through the use of technology and diverting illegals into more dangerous terrain (6), a sensible strategy, and the habit of burning borders by African illegal migrants trying to overrun Europe (7).  The fourth part of the book then turns to breaking borders (IV), with chapters dealing with the melting border in Tyrol between Italy and Austria where Otzli was found (8), the wall of flesh that protects people from diseases (9), and a discussion of efforts by Africans to defend land from the expansion of the Sahara through planting trees and engaging in farming to encourage locals to stay home and work rather than flee to Europe (10).  The book then ends with acknowledgements, image credits, notes, and an index.