The Sins of the Fathers

© Laurence B. Winn

Mar 1, 2000

One of frontier theory's central themes is that social, economic and scientific greatness arise from territorial expansion. When this expansion is blocked, or never undertaken because of internal malaise, or it is frustrated by killing off those who would leave, a kind of putrescence sets in.

Society divides along ethnic, economic and generational fault lines.

Change endangers the lives and prosperity of citizens, instead of enlivening and renewing them.

Freedom becomes just another word.

All of these aspects of enclosure, which is the opposite of territorial expansion, are reflected in the literature. We find that depressing visions of the future, for example George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, do not include the idea of frontiers. To do so would permit escape, which violates the fundamental premise of these grim scenarios.

A mass of creative historical thought points to enclosure as the chief villain of our mutual history. Coming as it does from such a variety of backgrounds and perspectives, we are entitled to view it as an almost universal epiphany, the sudden recognition of what the organizing principal of humanity ought to be: a constant pioneering reach for distant horizons.

Because the world no longer has new lands, one writer who makes his presence felt on the Internet from Duke University expects the world's large nations to fission into "tinier countries". The former Soviet Union has already done this. Overpopulation and diminishing resources have, arguably, been the cause of a maldistribution of wealth, political famine, and civil war among the former Soviet states. A case can be made that China, Canada and India will soon follow, along with some of the European states where enclosure has created a divisive zero-sum ethic that pits religious, ethnic, linguistic and generational persuasions against one another. Because these thoughts are advanced in the chatty format of Internet newsgroups, they evoke responses which describe a range of alternate views.

In Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the Twentieth Century, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley J. Brad DeLong points to the economic gulf between regions as a source of conflict.

During the twentieth century, according to DeLong, in spite of an overall explosion of wealth, "the world became more unequal in relative material prosperity than ever before." Today, a quarter of the world's population live in countries that have not made the transition to economic growth. "It is hard to imagine, "writes DeLong, "that the median inhabitant of Africa is better off in material terms than his or her counterpart of a generation ago." This is a source of great danger, as DeLong points out, because it is a reservoir of division and conflict in a world whose infrastructure is susceptible to disruption by terrorist acts.

It is probably not a coincidence that Africa, the longest-enclosed place on earth, assuming human beings originated there, is also among the most conflict-ridden and the poorest. Joshua Derman in "Frederick Jackson Turner and the Gospel of Wealth" makes a strong case that the western frontier, if it did nothing else, established individualism as a chief element of the American character. The frontier's "self-made man" was a creature of progress synonymous with motion, to whom land was not sacrosanct, not bound to his tribe or his family, but a thing to be passed over on his way to prosperity. Eyes always on the horizon, the frontiersman never looked back. Compare this with the traditional tribal lands of Africa, the sense of group responsibility that holds the sons responsible for the sins of the fathers, and it becomes clear how the absence of frontiers can be a cause of enduring strife.