Walls

What are walls from a cultural symbolic uh level of thinking? Yeah, I mean we'll talk about sort of subtle mental walls, like political maps, sriven as walls, even the walls of yourselves. Right. Plus there's podcast Gold because I believe that Robert will mention loving a disease cow over enemy lines in order to gain some faction in the wall. Awesome stuff. Yeah,

all right, so let's roll it this episode. We're talking about walls, which sounds a little big, and it is a big topic because we live in this world of

walls all around us. We have walls that we've erected, walls that are physical walls that are made of stone, that are made of wood, Walls that are legal walls, walls that are are mental, walls that are that are composed of ideas, ideas of legacy, ideas of division, hidden walls, walls naked to the eye, firewalls, censorship, and and with any situation with the wall, you have an outsider and

you have an insider. Generally, when we're contemplating walls were on one side of the other, I guess it's possible to stand on the top of the wall, but that's a that's a different situation, a precarious position to be in. Yeah, right, you want to strad at the wall. But this is one of the oldest ideas really in human civilization. We've been building physical walls to protect cities and towns for ages. Walled cities are one of the earliest symbols of civilization.

How do you protect the settlement against marauders who were using their horses to try and steal your agricultural excess. And in fact, the Chinese word for city and walls is the same chain, which I found was interesting because that's how that's how important walls were in the emergence of cities in Chinese history. Yeah, and if you guys haven't already figured out, we are seriously talking about walls today,

like the actual physical structures. One of the things that I was thinking about is that walls are these concrete abstractions of what I think of as maps. Right this this way to delineate territory, to try to say my power base is going to be here. And it's kind of like, it's a very interesting way that we took this abstract notion of ownership and then said, ah, we'll show you. We'll put up a wall right from our points.

It's like when you're in your back seat with your sister are on a long car ride as a kid. You each have a side of the back seat that you're supposed to stay on, and your stuff is supposed to stay on those sides. But during borders disputes, it becomes necessary then to point out exactly where the line is. It may become necessary to put some tape down that line to market in the physical world, and maybe even

construct a barrier out of luggage or pillows. Yeah, and from time to time, though, one might want to show their might by crossing that border and knocking down luggage and making a political statement really about how they feel about you humming for three hours in the car, right, Yeah, And then of course you end up with everything that has a symbolic power and human culture. Walls take on

multiple purposes, and I found this particularly telling. In ancient Chinese tradition, you have these city gods ching Hung who protect the moats and walls of towns, so that they're important because they're helping protect your very livelihood. Your very life and everything you hold dear is protected by these walls and moats and therefore by the deity that attends

to them. But the chiang Hung also make sure that the king of the dead doesn't take any souls away without his permission, and so not only is he a lord of walls and moats, he's also a lord of death. And I find that's an interesting just symbolic economy there. What I like about this is that this city god, or these lords of walls and moats, that's another name

for them. Uh. There's a bit of bureaucracy involved with this, and that they're usually considered to be the reincarnation of a human being who had been an official in earlier times, and the city god was thought to change every three years, just like a living magistrate would change office every three years, and both the magistrate and the gods hold sway over the same administrative area. So as you say, you know there's some supernatural areas there, but there's this expectation that

there's formal reverence paid to the city god. So and that you see both Chinese efficiency but also this very important notion of venerating your ancestors culture combined in this idea that that someone was dispatching their souls to the underworld realm. Speaking of China, this brings us, of course to the Great Wall of China, which is when you when you talk about walls, there are various examples that come to mind. There's the Whaling Wall, There's the Berlin Wall,

There's Hadrian's Wall. There are plenty of examples, but the big one the mainlanders of the world is the Great Wall of China. And the history of the wall is really fascinating because it's easy to just sort of are You've seen a picture of it, you know what it looks like. You know, it's a something to see if you're a tourist in China, But what is it? What

is its history? How is it conceived. And the wall dates back more than two thousand years to a time of unification in China, and this is when you had the Tin dynasty uniting seven warring kingdoms, that's including itself. And as they do that, they have all these separate walls that were built by independent kingdoms and so the Jin dynasty being slenk them together and the idea is to protect against marauders, so they can script hundreds and

thousands of workers. We were talking groups of prisoners, politic onomies, peasants, soldiers, and they work for ten years on this project. Thousands upon thousands die, as tends to happen, and legend has it that the bones of individuals who died constructing the wall are then then become a part of the wall, making it, in some people's words, the longest cemetery on earth. Yeah, and much of this is because this is happening during

the Chin dynasty, right. And this is again you talked about the neighboring territories that were finally united, these little fiefdoms that had a lot of strife, but it was united under what I guess you could say was China's first emperor. Because China wasn't trying to until this this guy united them. And when I say guy, I mean thirteen year old and this thirteen year old is Chin Chi Wong d He is I guess you could say

a bit of a megalomaniac. He begins to actually think about this unification and becomes obsessed with this idea that demons in these barbarians are going to take over China. And so that's where he mandates this length of the wall to be constructed. And again there are bits of construction of these walls throughout these thousands of years, but this is the guy who decides that it's really important to have from the Gobi Desert to the Yellow Sea

this fortress. Yes, it's fascinating the idea that the wall is protecting not only against actual barbarians, but also it against demons, so that it's not just a a military barrier, it's a it's a spiritual barrier as well. Again, keep in mind with all of this is two thousand years ago, so this is a time when spiritualism, megalomania, and abuse of the peasantry we're pretty much in vogue everywhere. So so this is, you know, not unique to China by

any stretch of the imagination. But the idea that that you're you're protecting against not only things, but against ideas. I think it's very telling because we see the symbolic power of the wall rather overtly, as we'll see in various examples of the walls we look at here too. When when humans build walls, they're almost always thinking of that symbolic power as well, not only to the outsider and to the outside or the wall is a clear

statement of hey, you're not welcome here. You stay on your side of the back seat and I'll stay on mine. And then to the insider, the wall says I have built you a wall. You were protected, you were safe. You know. It is saying there is a physical barrier between you and the things that you were afraid of, and you can thank me for it. Well, I mean yeah, it's very much like the Boogeyman, right. And to this point, this emperor decided that he wanted the circuitous wall built

and not a straight path. And the reason is because a straight line in demonology is great for demons because they're able to navigate only on straight lines and not on curves. So he's gonna make it even more difficult for these demons by making this this serpentine wall that's

twenty ft high. And certainly that's one of the things that's amazing about examples of the wall today and again, examples of the wall today, as we'll discuss fees are the wall has been added to and renovated numerous times throughout history, so we're not necessarily talking about the same physical wall in the same bricks. But you still see

that shape. It's like a serpent lying across the hills. Yeah, and it is fascinating because it's one of those things that people had long assumed was one big, coherent, linked up wall, but in fact it's not. That was one of the myths another methods that you could see this from the moon. Yeah, I see it from space, and it's it's just not so No, it's not so lovely story, but it is lovely. But to go back to this emperor and talk a little bit about Schinchu Wangdi and

how he treated peasants. You refer to this as the world's longest cemetery. At least some people have talked about this the Great Wall of trying to being this again, he's sort of indulged in sooth saying and a little bit of paranoia, And it is said that his soothsayer told him that the wall would actually never be built, which he was mortally frightened of right, because the barbarians were going to come get him in the demons unless

ten thousand men were entombed in the wall. Wow, what a sous can you imagine being that guy being on the payroll that takes a lot of comments relate to you know, this is the message ten thousand You gotta you gotta execute them, throw them in there. So Shinchu Wandi decides, you know what, he's the ruler. He realizes that he full well can't just spare that many men. So he finds a loophole in the form of one guy who has the word or the character for ten

thousand in his name. I guess what his fate is. He is killed and buried in the wall. Yeah, he's tossed into the wall. But again there's this idea that this wall begins to take on meaning of forced labor being subjugated. As you can start to see peasants are not really digging this wall, right. The symbolic power to the insider is not just an idea of protection, but an idea of This is the kind of thing that

governments and rulers create out of your blood right. It becomes a symbol of oppression and actually is very much a symbol of that for a long time until we get to the twentieth century. And we'll talk about that in a moment. But let's talk about this as being

an imperfect barrier. That's the thing. Obviously, the wall is important, like we said, as an idea of protection, but does it actually offer protection on one level, You're building these walls often at the on the extremes there on the frontier there between civilization and the barbarians and the demons, So you're having to basically establish colonies there. I mean, think of it in almost in terms of like an

off world colony kind of a situation. You're having to have soldiers there that are also growing their own food, and they are more a part of the frontier than they are of the homeland, so they actually end up having some sort of rapport with the local populations with the barbarians, and as such are susceptible to bribes. Just you know, here's there are a few bucks look the other way. Uphon we march an army through and join our army or join our army, then that happens as well.

So it becomes very difficult just to to man and protect it. And then you're gonna have gaps as well. Yeah, for instance, just in terms of the wall itself, the wall is not You might think of the wall as being in this NonStop wall that actually snakes across the entire country. But there are gaps in it, and there are places where just natural barriers are depended on to to serve as the wall well, and it has been maintained, so there are there are parts of it that are

in ruins. So you have Genghis Khan or Jengis Khan see sometimes refer two K, the Big g K. He brings with him a huge army and martial arts and a flair for psychological terror, and he reaches the wall right, and for a good hundred years, the rule of China comes under Mongol. Yeah, they were the ones in charge when Marco Polo visited. That's right, that's right, and so Mongols are really taking over. But then in thirteen sixty eight, a Chinese peasant leads a rebellion against Mongol rule, and

this helps to establish the Ming dynasty. I only mention this because the Ming dynasty is really important in actually giving a lot of shoring up to the wall. Yeah, this was thirty eight, and the Ming dynasty looks at the wall and says, you know, this is something we need to fix up. You need to get it going

because we don't want to be conquered by the barbarians again. Right, and with it, they actually are responsible for architectural embellishments on it and beginning to document various points in history. So you really begin to see more of a coherent picture of the Wall with the Ming dynasty. But then here's another thing that happens under man to rule, the wall no longer matters since the land on both sides

just ruled by man Chow. When China is invaded yet again, Yeah, this is seventeen hundreds, the Manchew invade the Ming dynasty, the man a number of changes to it. They added to its length, to its width, double and triple walls in some places to really reinforce it. But then when the Man Choos invade in seventeen hundreds, it's largely abandoned as a military priority. It kind of stays that way for a while, pretty much the until very recent times.

During that time, the wall crumbles, the wall is looted for building supplies because you have all these stones right there are ready to use, and so people carry it off to build things that are of actual value to their lives. Because the walls are sitting there, it's not

even a military factor anymore. And then when Mausadung comes to power, he encourages Chinese people to use this, to use the bricks, to use parts of the wall to build things, and now brings in also this idea of the modern you know, part of the cultural revolution, cultural revolution, and a huge part of it is we're going to focus on the modern China and the future China. Yeah,

we're going to obliterate the past. Right. The wall is very much a piece of the past, and a piece of the past that has still leaves a bad taste in a lot of people's lives because it is this thing build out of their blood. It is this symbol of the domineering, violent rule. Yeah, it's not the one of the wonders of the world that we now think

of it. But this it begins to to recast itself in modern times right around are there's this idea that the wall begins to take on national pride, and they actually say, let us love our country and restore our great Wall. This becomes a big mission for them. Yeah, you have important foreign heads of state visit. Reagan visits, Scorba Shop visits where they go, they go to the

Great Wall. Nixon visits, you know, And it was gonna say Nixon, who wasn't he the person who said something like only a great people could build this great wall, which starts to even then recast its image. Yeah. Luckily he was a wall enthusiast. He was all about putting Floyd but this wall is in general, so yes, he added to that vibe that this was something that was important and worth celebrating. And so over the last few decades you see this increasing restoration of portions of the wall,

increased commercialization of portions of the wall. I'm treating. In the Lonely Planet China Guide, they point out that there are sections of the wall that are just insanely populated. Really, I mean, you just have tourists there almost all the time, unless you go in the dead of winter. Their gift shops, their tourists are people selling things, and I mean that's

just the way it goes with with popular locations. But there are still plenty of portions of the wall that are not super innovated, that are still beautiful and don't have like a restaurant in them. Not that they're portions of the wall, they have restaurants in them, but you know what I'm saying, don't have ads in them. Yeah, there are places in China where you can go if you you look into and you do the research, where you can get more of a serene via the wall

as opposed to a hyper commercialized version. But it's it's still it's even if you go to those areas where there are a lot of people and there's a lot of commercialization, it's still a stunning site. Indeed, all right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to move beyond the Great Wall of China and discuss some more modern examples of walls in our lives, including cosmic walls. Sow. All right, we're back. So um, when you think beyond the Great Wall of China and

you think of modern walls, what comes to mind? Okay, well, I mean, you know, I think about Berlin Wall. I also think about the Atlantic Wall that Hitler was I think it's like eight hundred miles of sea coast, at least in France. Um that he had been constructing, um as a barrier of and and a bit of military might. Yeah, the stuff from saving brabt Ryan of everyone remembers that flicked. Yeah. But of course, here in the US one of the most strikingly obvious walls, it's more like a fence. The

US Mexico border. Well, we call it a fense, but it sure as heck looks like a wall in many areas. And it's been in the news a lot, especially with the conservative primaries leading up to this year's presidential election. You've had a lot of people touch on this as a hot is a hot topic issue immigration in the United States. A lot of our listeners are US based, but a lot of you are based on other countries. US Mexican migrations are very much on voters minds, especially

conservative voters. So you have people like Herman Kane, the pizza mogul, who came out and said, We're going to build an electric fence made out of pizza not made out of pizza. He did not rule out alligators as

I remember, so moats and walls. And then there were some other half cocked ideas that were thrown around by some other candidates, But it all comes down to this idea of the wall right sending this message to Mexico saying Mexicans are not wanted here, and sending more importantly really, because these are politicians talking about wall building, sending this message to their constituents in the US to say, we care about what you care about so much that we

built this thing. We're going to erect this giant symbol of what we're talking about, even though their YouTube videos of people scaling up these things up and over them in seconds. And it's the same situations coming to play that came into play with the Great Wall of China. They're gonna be gaps, They're gonna be places where care of the border is either less maintained or or it

is not maintained at all. Well, here's the thing. Last year was the biggest sustained drop and immigration from Mexico to the United States leave to be surpassed and scale only by losses in the Mexican born US population and during the Great Depression. So we're actually seeing a drop

in immigration to the United States from Mexico. And much of this is because well, first of all, the Mexican cartel are are acting as border agents on the Mexican border and their demanding money and sometimes they actually use immigrants as drug mules. So it's become far more dangerous as if it weren't already to try to cross. But also um on the U s side, it's become much more difficult and rigorous in terms of trying to prosecute

people for for doing this. But of course there's been an economic downturn as well, and also you can factor in changes in legislation in some of the Southern states

that have cracked down on the use of migrant labor. Yeah, so it is one of those things that we wanted to point out because it is a huge symbolic effort by the United States, but in terms of efficacy and really getting at the what they think, or what the United States politicians think is the root problem doesn't isn't really solved by this fence, right, And and though some people may have giggled at the idea of building a

wall to keep demons at bay. Like I said, that is just an advert statement of what all walls ultimately symbolized, Like even this wall is about keeping demons of the mind at bay. To some people on the inside, it is a demonization of the threats that in a simple vocation of the threats that that lie outside and are

waiting to get in. It's also worth noting, though, that when you build walls or fences of this nature, you're building them in environments that did not previously have barriers, So you're you're going to cut into not only the migration of people, but the migration of animals. So there have been a number of studies that have looked into what effects order fences on the US Mexican border have

had on migrating animals. And it doesn't pay a pretty picture, no, I mean, you're altering the psychic and the geographical landscape, right, Yeah. And it's interestingly mentioned the psychic because that was one of the things that has also been brought up about the Great Wall of China and throughout China's history, that there were people who out of it as a disruptor of g you know, this is disrupt disrupting the earth energies, you're building this unnatural thing that breaks up natural flows

in the environment. Of course, we raise the walls not only against human and imagined threats, we also raised them against mother nature. In Japan, the sea walls because as an island nation and given its past history with threats from the sea, you want to be able to mitigate

that to some degree. Nearly half of the twenty two thousand mile coast in Japan actually has concrete sea walls, which would make sense right because I mean that there's a lot of earthquake activity in that area and you would want to have some sort of structure try to protect you from really high waves. So there's something very practical about it. But some people, the opponents of it, say that it's not necessarily that effective, and in fact

we saw that with the tsunami. They are fascinating constructions though, that well worth doing a Google image search on because you've never seen when you may imagine just a it up wall, but there are a lot different because stopping a flow, a massive flow of water, is different than stopping some marauders on horseback. It's not just about putting up the straight barrier, but putting up a structure that will slow and halt this approach of water. And that's

what proponents say. They say, Okay, well maybe it didn't sift guard us against the nuclear reactors, right, seawater got in there. The wall wasn't actually high enough. It should have been built much higher, but it did slow down the encroachment of those waves. Sometimes, you know, it gave people a couple of extra minutes to try to evacuate, which is, you know, the difference between life and death.

And another example of walls that comes to mind if you think back to our episode on the black Blizzards of the the Great Depression of the Dust Boll, we mentioned the green walls that you see popping up in some portions on green wall projects in China in Africa, and the idea here is building a wall against desertification, building a wall that will try to prevent the desert from encroaching on fertile lands. Yeah, there's something called the

Yellow Dragon. And each spring, the dust from China's northern deserts are swept up by the wind and whipped eastward and they blast into Beijing. They blank at the city in a huge coat of dust particles. And that has actually created a lot of respiratory ailments in the dustas also clogged machinery and posted down airports and destroys crops. I mean, it's a very serious problem. And really we

see walls everywhere in the world around us. We see walls in our body, sell membranes, our skin even is often seen as a wall, even though when you actually examine it, we're talking about a porous layer. Things move in and out off there's a lot of traffics. It's kind of like the Great Wall of China in that regard. It's not not a perfect barrier by any stretch. There are gaps, there are ways to negotiate your way inside,

and that's more like calanders, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah, And then not only when we're looking in our inward, but when we're looking outward as well. There's something called the Sloan Great Wall, and this is a far distant grouping of galaxies that spans over one billion light years. It's longer than any quote unquote structure ever measured. And I put structure in quotes because it's kind of hard to

argue this is actually a structure. These are clusters of galaxies, so it's more it's no more a structure really than a constellation in the sky. It's a structure. But we're so fascinated with walls when we define our limits on things through the symbol in the language of walls. So as we stare out at these distant clusters of galaxies, we can't help but think of them in terms of walls. Well, and I guess we could say these are sort of

cosmic webs, right, and they do create borders between things. Yeah, there's void beyond them. They're known as galactic filament, so that's not like filaments in a giant light bulb the size of the moon or anything. They're actually known to span these vast distances and they're lattice like structures. And the cool thing about these filaments is that they are integral to the evolution of galaxy clusters in the way

that they form. So there you have it, walls. Um, I would be remiss if I didn't mention a Game of Thrones with real quick uh or figure with this book series and HBO TV series. I have heard you speak of it, and I know of it. I have not seen it. Now. Well, it's a it's it's very

entertaining and UH. In part of the plot revolves around a northern wall that is built against our barians and demons, though in this case built out of ice and UH and the series explore some of the ideas of UH, at least the military ideas that we discussed with a Great Wall of China, like how do you maintain it? How does a political climate affect the maintenance and the and the staffing of the wall, And then is it

ultimately an effective barrier against these outside forces? I would say, now, well, it's gonna guess well, it would make a good story. How would you write seven books about it? Seven class books about it? If that's how you do it? Yeah? Yeah, So there you had it. It was a rerun, but I think a really good one and one that I imagine a number of our newer listeners may have missed. So I hope you enjoyed hearing all about watz Uh. In the meantime, you can certainly write to us as ever.

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