That such walls fail, to fall, too? No matter.
Only raise more. That all walls, facing out or in,
Fail, fall, leaving fossils of lives in numb rubble?
No matter. Raise more. Only raise more.
– C K Williams in "WALL", the New York Times, 8 November 2009
In an oft-repeated Himalayan lore, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, legendary mountaineer George Leigh Mallory is believed to have retorted laconically, "because it's there". It has been since called "the most famous three words in mountaineering". Mountains, walls that nature builds, are there to be conquered – to an ant, a pebble is merely a barrier that must be bypassed or crossed over but a man needs to surmount it, step over it or sit upon it. But when human beings began to aspire to replicate nature, complications started. Manmade walls are not meant to be climbed; they can be breached, broken but not mounted while standing intact. A manmade wall is a line of division and anyone scaling it without permission risks being shot down.
The Berlin Wall, a symbol that has since ousted the Chinese one for the epithet of 'The Wall', was erected to create and defend two competing German ideologies: public versus people, creed versus code, community versus commune, merchant versus mediator, in short, Max (Weber) versus (Karl) Marx. The fall of the Wall heralded the triumph of economic realism over aspirations of a utopian society.
History, however, celebrates ironies too. Marx was voted the most influential thinker of the twentieth-century even though his ideas barely survive anywhere in the world. Meanwhile, Samuel Huntington has pipped Max to the post in the race for the European mindscape. Max's hypothesis about religious origins of economic development is passé; what matters in the post-Wall unipolar world is the Huntingtonian formulation of cultural militancy along civilisational fault lines. There is yet another problem with history: it marks events as cataclysmic, definitive, decisive or seminal, often ignoring processes behind the final outcome. That is perhaps natural. Who has the time to value the toil of the seed collector, the planter, the caretaker and the gardener while gazing at a fallen tree? But nothing happens in a vacuum. Causative factors precede every event even as the incident itself becomes a reason for something else.