Blurred Boundaries

The internet is mainly cats, right? So here are our cats. Except they're not our cats. Shadow, the one on the table, belongs to our neighbour two doors down. Sox (our name) is the new guy in the neighbourhood. Pronouns not yet determined so lets assume its him/his. He's been around for a week or two but we don't know where he came from. More about Sox and Shadow later.

 

You don't have to be an expert to recognise who painted these: Piet Mondrian and Mark Rothko. Both are abstract art and neither represents anything. They just are. But they are very different and very recognisable. Mondrians use primary colours and rectangular shapes. Rothko's tend to have more subtle colour differentiation and less regular, though still typically rectangular shapes. The most significant difference though is probably how boundaries are handled. Mondrian is a 'hard edge' artist with flat colour fields with sharp boundaries. He often further defines boundaries with black lines, as here. Rothko blurs boundaries. His colours are modulated and meld into each other.

Two maps of India. A political map, hard-edged abstract in the sense that the colours represent states clearly separated by boundaries - abstractions and inventions not necessarily related to the landscape or even to the people living there. A physical map showing highlands and lowlands, rivers and mountains. There is no sharp distinction between highland and lowland - one transitions into the other. The only boundaries are coasts, rivers and mountain ridges - very much not abstract - physical features which can inhibit or maybe facilitate movement and communication. There are obviously common features to these two maps - the coastline, the sea and the Himalayas separating India from Sri Lanka, Nepal and China - but there are few obvious features determining the boundaries of the Indian states or even between India and Pakistan.

Fuzzy sets

Many people have dual nationality. Many are mixed race. Many more have holiday homes in other countries. In physical terms, moving here and there, and in more abstract terms relating to ethnic or political affinities, many people do not exist entirely within just one country. They effectively blur the edges giving the Mondrian-like political map some of the qualities of a Rothko.

Fuzzy logic deals with the grey area of partial truth, with probably and maybe rather than the yes or no of Boolean logic. Closely related are fuzzy sets. Countries are sets - sets of people living within a boundary and sharing institutions. And there are other sets: sets of people with the same language or religion or ethnicity or philosophy. Certain ultra-nationalist, far right viewpoints see a nation as a set of people who not only live in the same country but speak the same language and outlook and skin colour, but they are misguided. They see the world like a Mondrian with homogeneous zones divided by hard boundaries, but the real world is more like a Rothko with some unevenness and variety, especially around the boundaries.

Fuzzy cats

Sox and Shadow live in a world divided into territories. Not their territories - they know about them but we know very little. The territories are gardens - our garden, our neighbours' gardens. These territories have territorial boundaries - usually hedges, walls or fences, and it's not unusual for neighbours to fall out over them. Cats do not recognise these territories or these boundaries, they move freely across boundaries from territory to territory, over walls and under hedges. I don't believe cat territories have much in common with ours. From the little I know of cats, having had them around for the last fifty-plus years or so, their territories seem fluid and indefinite, and territories overlap. Shadow seems very relaxed about what we might assume would be his territory. He has basically moved in with us. He goes home very occasionally but they have three barky dogs there and there's peace and quiet as well as food at ours, so... 

Shadow is like an immigrant who has been accepted, found his place in society and found a job catching the occasional vole. Sox, on the other hand, is a new arrival, hoping to be accepted as one of the community. He is tentative and unsure, worried that the authorities might pick him up or chase him away. He might have escaped a bad environment or been discarded as unwanted, an asylum seeker, but he seems like a nice cat and we are tolerant people so we feed him and let him sleep in the potting shed. Shadow more or less ignores him so long as he doesn't overstep the mark (and only they know where the mark is). Cat society seems to work. They seem to rub along together pretty well, disagreements are few and far between, they can cope with a bit of isolation. They may have some idea of territory but it is beyond our understanding except that it doesn't involve walls or fences beyond, perhaps a bit of scent-marking. Maybe we should be more cat.

Be more Rothko

Humans are more complex than cats and human society is more complex than a painting. Our identity is not just where we live. It is multi-faceted and has many dimensions. Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson and Charlie Kirk have all been in the news recently. Their ideas of their respective countries seem to me to be very similar and very simple. White, English-speaking, Protestant, heterosexual people populate their countries. Deviate too far from one or two of these descriptors and you might find yourself unwanted. But we are more complex than this. Our countries are more complex than this. Society is more complex than this. I am English and I match this description, but I do not see myself through this lens. I look at my country and see Celts, Romans, Germans, Danes, Normans, Indians and West Indians. I see Celtic carvings, Scandinavian glass and furniture, Roman arches, Indian, Italian and Chinese food, croissants, doughnuts, Morris men, reggae, rap and blues. I can watch French films and read Chinese sci-fi novels. I can appreciate the respect, honour, economy and refinement of Japan or the egalitarianism and democracy of the Nordic countries. My family live in Scotland with its own legal and educational systems. Others might observe the Sabbath or Shari'a law while still seeing themselves, quite accurately, as British. Many of the wealthiest enjoy the benefits of life in Britain but avoid the paying for these benefits by using tax havens outside Britain. The far right accuse foreigners of coming to Britain to access our welfare benefits and health service. So society, nations, populations are not homogeneous but are nuanced and can sometimes overlap and blend into each other. Yet borders are still seen as hard and clearly defined. Why not treat the boundaries of countries like the blurred edges of Rothko's colour fields? If I live within reach of the Scottish border why should I not be able to choose to pay my taxes to the Scottish government and have a university education without the fees? To take this further (since there is already considerable overlap and blending within the United Kingdom) what about Russian-speaking ethnically Russian people living in eastern Ukraine? Could they opt to pay their taxes to Russia and use Russian health services while being subject to authoritarian rule, and could not Ukrainians might live in Russia or the south of Belarus but still be citizens of Ukraine, observing both local and Ukranian laws? There are many facets to both individual and national identity and many of these facets already overlap between states. If this overlapping was to be acknowledged in a softening and blurring of boundaries the world might just be a happier and more peaceful place.