One of my teachers in grade school grew up in Europe in the preceding and early years of World War II in one of the many nations bordering Germany. If I were to judge based on my memory of her slight accent, I would guess Austria, but to tell the truth, she’d been in the US a long time by then, and the accent had faded a good deal, much like my mother’s deep Southern accent which she had when I was little, and mostly lost by the time I was in middle school. In truth, the teacher seemed ancient to me, and I was interested in other things than her prattling… like starring off into space while she talked on and on wondering how many marshmallows I could stuff in my mouth if my oppressive mother would stop interfering. “You’ll choke to death!!!” She obviously lived to spoil my fun. Anyway…. My teacher’s mother would frequently send her to the store and she would take a dirt road through the woods to get there. As time passed, she recalls watching a distant fence get a little closer day by day, moved in the night by the Nazi soldiers, consuming more and more of her town, until one day they had consumed the whole road and she was cut off. No one in the town even seemed to care until the shifting fence suddenly impacted their personal life in a major way. No sense going to war over that little bit of woods… well I suppose we can give them one hardly used dirt road… maybe that will be enough for them… maybe that will satisfy.
Reflecting on this story over the years, it has struck me that it has relevance for human thinking about boundaries and the varied impacts that different kinds of boundaries have on us… whether it is the 300ft cliffs that protected one city against whom Alexander the Great marched, or the Mountain ranges that Hannibal crossed on elephants. There are rivers and valleys, oceans and seas all standing in striking contrast to other types of boundaries.
We have fuzzy natural boundaries that are nonetheless quite real, like the seasons of New England, with markers like the summer and winter solstice… of course, we’ll just have to trust the astronomers that those boundaries are quite real unless we are particularly skilled with a stop watch and have a lot of time on our hands. Even so, we know the difference between the seasons; we know what the temps will generally be, what nature has in store for us in each, the joys and annoyances. But, yet again, exactly when does one begin and the other end? Men made calendars to decree these boundaries, a construct, but let’s not pretend that the dynamic between Earth and Good Ol’ Sol always plays along in terms of lived experience… we don’t have a prognosticating ground hog for nothing.
We also commonly find man-made boundaries like Frost’s stone wall, paved roadways, or the wired fence out in those lonely woods standing between the Nazi’s and my old teacher’s village.
So, metaphorically speaking some boundaries are of creation itself and stand as testaments to the very essence of natural law. Even if the exact rules seem fuzzy at times, a little “artificial,” few dare ignore them. Other boundaries are hard learned constructs of societies striving to survive and thrive in various environments. Others are whims and habits with seemingly little value beyond the power of agreement, tradition, and habit. Tradition, agreement, and habit are nothing to sneeze at, however; stable societies have stable traditions, agreements, and habits.
Male and female are the stuff of life; this divide represents boundaries like mountains and oceans, but does it ultimately matter if one drives on the right side of the road or the left? No. This is a well-built stone-wall boundary… but we better be on the same page or there will be chaos, accident, and death.
Is there more than one way to build “family”? Yes, there is more than one way to establish an environment for rearing children, but are they all equally stable and productive for survive and thrive? No. Marriage may feel like “a piece of paper” or “government intrusion into the making of families”[1] but it clearly marks the boundaries of what would otherwise be rather fuzzy, like calendars for our solstice and seasons. Marriage is a special and sacred bond and should have all the fanfare that it has historically been given. It should also have a central place in one’s preparations for responsible adulthood, making choices on the road to it and through it that sustain it best. The two great markers of success in marriage is chastity before marriage and fidelity in marriage.
In life, there are ideals and compromises, but some patterns are death and others life… some lead to thriving and others to mere subsistence.
Manners may wiggle from place to place; their exact expressions may seem arbitrary but there are hard themes in them. Manners express not just particular cultural values, (shoes on or off at the door?) but the value one gives to other people: Consideration, A desire for harmonious relationship, Honor where honor is due, Respect for another’s person, property, time, labor, feelings, and basic natural rights.
Clothing styles and expectations may shift from place to place and through time, and may seem arbitrary but there is always a difference between clean and neat vs. dirty or disheveled, casual and special. There is always contextually appropriate and inappropriate. There is modest and seductive. Clothing communicates and as a communication device it is made to serve the same general communication goals no what cultural styles are in play.
As Chesterton notes, it is the habit of the young to despise the “artificial” boundaries of their forebears, testing them, pushing them, mocking them, until they grow old enough and wise enough to understand their purpose and value. It behooves the wiser adults to hold the line against arrogant naiveté.
Going even further, it is the way of Critical Theory to paint all boundaries as human constructs built artificially so that oppressors can keep their victims under their power. Oceans are to them as a mime’s box. They resent the idea that nature confines them, and that consequences punish them. They rage against hedge rows and seas alike, despising mountain ranges and picked fences equally. They promote ugly art, down with Rembrandt up with a “Cross in a Jar of Urine,” and yippee for graffiti; they advance dysfunctional biology, obesity is beautiful and healthy, men can become women; they reward incompetence, everyone gets a trophy and a job and if you believe in punctuality you are racist, and celebrate ignorance, if you think 2+2=4 you are racist; they take joy in disorder, the disheveled, the bizarre… and even weird hair color… anything unnatural will do. Their masters believe only in power, and no, they will not be satisfied with a little more; this or that offering will never sate their desire for control and disruption.
Some things are not constructs, however, and other things are constructs responding to things that are not constructs. There are unseen rocks below the waves of human cultures that will shipwreck the careless traveler. Disorder and order are NOT equal. Beauty is NOT merely in the eye of the beholder. There is preference, but only within set boundaries. Men and women are NOT the same and cannot change places willy-nilly.
Ben Shapiro wisely warns, “Human beings have sussed out eternal truths over the course of millennia, and to discard those truths in favor of subjectivism is crippling.”[2]
In Shrek 2, Shrek and donkey each take a potion from the Fairy Godmother that turns them into dashing examples of manhood and equus-kind. Shrek gets the great hair, manly physique, the cleft chin, and donkey becomes a great white stallion. These are not random evaluations that only find meaning in the haphazard perspective of the individualized interpreter. Donkey doesn’t want to go back to being a donkey, for a stallion is more noble, more attractive, more… more-more. Wisdom recognizes these realities and walks in step with them, not at odds with them. Only fools promote the dysfunctional as equal to the functional. Find the functional and stick with it… promote it with a will, defend it with all you have.
A friend of mine, who had broken free from homosexuality, married and had children, was pontificating one night as we sat and chatted. He asked us aloud, why things like pedophilia and homosexuality seemed almost impossible to break, but other sexual sins could be overcome more readily with determination and discipline. He wasn’t wrong about his observation. Some sins cut deeper than others. He, of course, had his own answer ready at hand; it had been on his mind since he first set himself to recover his divinely ordained function as a male image bearer of God. It involved the different nature of boundaries. I paraphrase from memory here. “Some people color outside the lines, and they do pay a price for it, but other, people like me… we shake our fists at nature itself. We break through iron barriers, and seek to rewrite the whole order of God’s creation. That is not a small thing.”
[1] When we say that possession is 9/10ths of the law, an ongoing joke that few actually get anymore, we acknowledge one of the fundamental roles of government, the protection of property rights. Property rights need rules of ownership. Rules of ownership must include inheritance and the recognition of ages-old relationship categories… like parent-child, husband-wife, sibling, etc. This means that government is not in the marriage business, but is rather, fulfilling one of its primary roles by tracking, validating, invalidating relationship categories relevant for family, property, and inheritance.
[2] Ben Shapiro, Facebook post, https://www.facebook.com/officialbenshapiro. (3/21/2023)
