Our differences are infinite. We'll never find another person exactly like us. Somehow, most of these differences do not bother us. We miss or dismiss them as unimportant. Only some differences, on some occasions, leap to our attention and prompt an urge to do something, to selectively draw a border, start looking for its justifications and explain why it should be kept intact.
Our present obsession with borders is the product of the hopeless hope that we can actually insure ourselves against all sorts of risks and dangers, that we can cut ourselves off from vague, unnamed threats. We are desperately trying to find local solutions to globally produced problems, though such solutions don't exist and cannot be found.
All historically created tools of collective action are local. They reach as far as the borders of the nation state. We don't have any effective tools above this level. The point, though, is that real power to do things or have them done has evaporated from local institutions. There are local politics without power and global powers with no political constraints. As a result, we suffer uncertainty and fear the processes over which we have no control. It all boils down to a hazy feeling of insecurity perhaps best described by the French word précarité: the experience of walking on wobbly soil, of a frailty which shows itself in virtually every aspect of our lives. The company to which you have dedicated many years of your working life suddenly goes bankrupt or is swallowed by a bigger firm, together with the job it offered you and the demand for your skills. Human relationships are equally transient and easily breakable. They are "until further notice", no longer "until death do us part". They last as long as the satisfaction they bring. And if your partner is the first to be dissatisfied, you are going to find yourself alone. In whatever direction you look, the story is the same.
As a student, half a century ago, I was taught Sartre's advice to construct and abide by a projet de la vie, a project for life. To my younger colleagues, such advice seems laughable. Who is still planning for the rest of his life? Researchers of contemporary labour conditions warn that "you are as good as your last project". And the memory of your most recent success doesn't last long. Life is cut into a series of non-sequitur episodes only poorly connected.
The second lesson received as a student was straight out of Emile Durkheim: fleeting, floating, ephemeral pleasures are too volatile, capricious and short-lived to produce a happy life, but fortunately, he added, there is the everlasting, solid reality above you – society – which outlives you and your short-term pleasures, so you can render your life meaningful by investing in that indestructible totality. Since I heard this, I have lived through three or more different kinds of society. The only stable element that seems to have connected these stages of my life was precisely that laughably short, individual, bodily and mortal joy which Durkheim dismissed.
If we are serious about mitigating our obsession with borders and enmities, we have to do something about their foundation stones: we have to reduce, if not eliminate altogether, fear and insecurity.
