It is Friday morning, and I have no choice but to check my e-mail.

In theory, I don’t have to do anything at all. In theory, I could drop out of all this and go live on an island. But islands don’t exist anymore.

Geography isn’t dead yet, but it’s not getting any more significant, and has in fact done nothing but lose significance for as long as there’s been anyone around to question that significance - and for a billion years before that. Chief among those things “sought” by early lifeforms was the ability to monitor and manipulate the surrounding environment beyond the limits of one’s own physical presence. For an organism to detect light or its absence was to know what was afar without having to be there; to be there, then, was that less crucial. Ever so slightly, geography lost its importance.

There is a great deal to be said for knowing, but to be able to act on what one knows is, I would argue, also neat. Let us turn to speech. In a somewhat advanced form, very specific information could now be conveyed to others who in turn could convey it on to others still. The original meaning is subject to every form of corruption as the message is passed on, but it is indeed passed on. Potentially, it is passed on across great distances. By necessity, it is passed down through time, it being difficult to repeat an anecdote before one has first heard it. But beyond that simple requirement of the time entailed by the telling, a good anecdote can pass down through thousands of years, particularly if it is designed to do so. Regardless of the specifics, the limits that are placed on us by virtue of each man inhabiting only a certain space are reduced by speech. And to the extent that we learn how to use speech, those geographical limits are reduced even further. Other limits are also reduced, and to such an extent that we begin to think less in terms of limits than we do in terms of abilities.

There came a point at which a man skilled in speech could found an institution.  Eventually such institutions existed almost everywhere, both in physical space and in the shared imaginations of practical human beings. A kingdom would have a defined space, more or less, where that kingdom was said to be. And to the kingdom’s credit, there would exist in that space such things as villages and fortresses which would collectively give some weight to the idea that this particular portion of land was indeed something more than that, rather than just a metaphysical agreement.

Even with speech, it still remained easier to rule over those things which were close than those things which were far. With the advent of writing, one could expect to rule more firmly over a wider expanse, and to plague the future with one’s current ideas, but geography remained the limiting factor. Even today, it still limits those nations by a variety of means, even aside from having saddled them with borders (borders can be altered, but not without a great deal of trouble; it has often been necessary to expend millions of one’s subjects in order to move them into the proper place). Note that these various political entities are largely contiguous, and that you and your neighbors all live in the same “country”; that’s geography talking. Rather, that’s the echo of what geography had to say back when geography still had the floor.

But those kingdoms - now republics, dictatorships, and mixtures of the two - still exist. We can’t dismiss them in a wave of liberal artsy triumph just because I can sit here and write cute things about the diminishing role of geography and the hazards of metaphysics and dust in the wind. The state is a real thing.

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Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302