Boundary Check

Ripped from the Headlines this weekend…

·      Teenage boy and adult male fatally shot in New York City Saturday

·      Texas judge arrested for cattle rustling.

·      Durham investigation accuses Clinton attorney of lying

·      Revelations of decades of sex abuse rock large church denomination

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“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Quaint, bucolic and homespun, Robert Frost’s poetic aside is much more than a recollection of a springtime farm ritual. It can be read as a parable, one of our more insightful descriptions of the delicate relationship each of us has with each other. The two farmers of Mending Wall carefully reset winter’s harvest of fallen stones, positioning them carefully, some precariously, in demarking where each property begins and ends. “Good fences make good neighbors” is the repeated incantation that put both charm and finality on their restorative efforts to keep the barrier, and the peace, between them.

History makes clear that there really is something about us that doesn’t love a wall, just as it bears sad witness to our inability to live without boundaries of some kind that both reign us in and offer us the comfort of turf security. A sociological study I once read noted how children tend to stay close to their school building and to each other when there is no physical perimeter enclosing their campus. But when surrounded by a fence, they preferred to hang out near its limiting barrier. Perhaps the old Texas cowboy song, Don’t Fence Me In, says more about us than we care to admit.  We may not like being constrained by walls or rules, but feel a bit insecure when they can neither be seen nor felt.

This may be why we should never be surprised upon discovering the barriers that have been in place, ordering and governing human social behavior, since our ancestors first started leaving records. Whether in Sumerian cuneiform or Hebrew script, attributed to Hammurabi or Moses, they make clear that people live best when operating within certain boundaries of conduct, either codified in laws or assumed within cultural values. While all physical or legal borders are, by nature, confining, yet within them we enjoy a degree of protection from the abuse and manipulations of our worst enemies:  people like us.

I first took notice of these necessities of social existence while teaching religion and philosophy over several decades. Lying at the very core of most moral and legal systems are four universal concerns that human societies have always recognized and accepted as critical for survival. They can be found within the charters and constitutions of highly sophisticated civilizations as well as in the customs and traditions of tribal cultures. Like well-understood and sometimes fiercely protected borders, they form a perimeter around human communities, at times rigid and imposing, yet always permeable and passable.

Four boundaries? While no two people or communities spell them out in identical verbiage, they nonetheless exist in some form wherever two or more humans gather. For they are universal boundaries within which our existence, survival, and well being most depend. When observed and respected they afford us protection and comfort. But when ignored or breached they invariably throw us into conflict and strife with one another, often leading to pain, suffering and death.

Each of the four can be readily discerned in our modern law codes, including provisions embedded in our own U. S. Constitution, our ultimate national boundary.  For they draw upon the ancestral wisdom of the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, upon which Judaism, Christianity and Islam—Western Culture—are grounded. As a visual learner I have found it helpful to depict these boundaries in the following diagram or blueprint. It contrasts life as we would ideally want to enjoy it (in green) with the darkness of strife, pain and death that surrounds us whenever we venture across any of the yellow, cautionary divides which frames each human life and every human community.

It is revealing that half of the ten absolutes spelled out in the Ten Commandments address these four boundary areas of our shared existence:

·      Thou Shalt Not Kill—the boundary limiting the power we have over each other;

·      Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness—the boundary limiting the impact of our words on each other;

·      Thou Shalt Not Steal and Thou Shalt Not Covet—the boundary limiting the extent of our desire for and deliberate possession of what belongs to another;

·      Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery—the boundary limiting our sexual passions to those sanctified by marriage and by extension, protecting others from assault through rape and incest.

Most of us could recite these particular commands from memory. Yet in the Bible they are commands that none of us can possibly obey as written. For in their absolute form they require elucidation and clarification lest they hover over our heads as little more than unrealistic, theoretical irrelevancies. Thou Shalt Not Kill is empty of meaning until we ask, kill what? Plants? Animals, and if so, which ones and for what reasons and by what means? And when it comes to other humans, is killing forbidden if we are defending ourselves from attack, or if we meet on fields of battle defending our country? Or what if those we feel compelled to kill are guilty of unforgiveable crimes, or crying out for a merciful end to their terminal sufferings, or are not yet old enough to cry?  Without further clarification, a command that prohibits all killing is impossible to fulfill.

Our biblical ancestors certainly understood this too. That is why they composed 619 case laws (mitzvot)—running from Exodus through Deuteronomy—that spell out in surprising detail the instances and applications in which each absolute principle could be kept inviolate. And in every age since that time, right up until the present, further elucidations have been advanced by clerics, lawyers and politicians in an effort to adapt each of the four moral ideals to changing times and shifting values.

When is killing justifiable? When is it murder? When do our sexual relationships amount to an invasion or exploitation of others, inside and outside of marriage?  What distinguishes our words as being honest and true as opposed to insincere and inaccurate? Do lies require the intent to deceive for them to bear false witness? In what sense do any of us ever own anything to qualify it as our property? And if so, are our claims of ownership limited to material possessions, or do they include our words, our ideas, our creative imaginings or our privacy? As I hope this cursory examination of boundaries makes clear, we live each day of our lives on intersecting grids of shared, and conflicting interests and turfs. 

If this isn’t enough, how do we know if or how far our boundaries should be drawn around those not fully mature or yet morally competent? At conception, birth or sometime in between? During adolescence? Or is it a gradual coming of age as they transit those arbitrary passages signaled by their 16th, 18th or 21st birthdays when we grant them so many freedoms and permissions? And do the boundaries that have kept us in tact get redrawn when, due to the incapacities of age, we enter a second childhood of dependency on those who must now care for us?

Understanding how powerfully these four boundaries circumscribe my world and measure my horizons helps me come to terms with where I stand and why I am so provoked to care about the issues of the moment. It also provides me with some insight into where others draw their lines, and why they find their convictions both reasonable and right. Frost was right: something there is—something in us—that doesn’t like a wall, especially not a permanent one. But unless we periodically meet, face to face, to repair the breeches in the walls that constrain our impulses to power and sex, that temper our speech and confirm our respect for properties owned and shared, our boundaries will be meaningless and our neighborliness insincere. For it is then, and only then, in dialogue among equal stakeholders, that we can begin to find that common ground upon which we may live well today, and endure well into tomorrow.