How open borders make us safe | Andrew Solomon | TEDxExeter

Identifying a dangerous isolationist trend behind the election of President Donald Trump in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK, renowned author and TED speaker Andrew Solomon makes a passionate case for the personal and political benefits of travel. He argues that discovering other countries is the best way of finding ourselves, while ignorance of other cultures gives rise to fear, suspicion and war.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

The great 19th-century naturalist
Alexander von Humboldt once said,

"There is no worldview so dangerous

as the worldview of those
who have not viewed the world."

And I believe that travel
is a moral imperative

for those of us who can afford it,

that we owe it to the world to be engaged.

Everyone needs, at some point,
exposure to the larger world,

and I believe that if everyone spent

two weeks in a foreign country
before the age of 30,

no matter where they went,
and no matter what they did there,

that half of the world's diplomatic
problems would be solved.

I think if the government understood
this social function of travel,

there would be government
programs to support travel

in the way that we have programs
to support health and education.

Travel is both a window and a mirror.

It's a window,

because it lets you see another society
and culture that you're visiting.

But it's a mirror
because when you go abroad,

you're stripped back
to your essential self,

and you see what that essential self is

with the clarity you could never
otherwise achieve.

We all need to have our compatriots.

If we don't have a place we call our own,

figuring out who we are
is nearly impossible.

But without unlike people,

you become a caricature of yourself.

Neither model needs to win.

Neither of them subverts the other.

I'm a dual national of the United States
and the United Kingdom.

In the last year, I voted
against Brexit and against Trump,

and I lost both times.

(Laughter)

The results of those voting sessions,

like the appointment
of nationalist governments

in Poland and Hungary
and Turkey and Russia

represents a rejection of human diversity
and of the open borders

that have characterised the world order.

In the October Conservative
Party Conference, Theresa May said,

"There is no such thing
as a citizen of the world.

If you believe you are a citizen
of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere.

You don't understand
what the very word 'citizenship' means."

Theresa May is wrong.

Patriotism is not nationalism,

and you can love your own country
and love other countries too.

It's not a binary.

If the identity politics
of the last 20 years

has given us nothing else,

it has given us the vocabulary
of intersectionality,

the understanding that we all have
multiple identities all the time,

and that you can be old
and Conservative and British and gay,

or young and deaf and radical and French,

or Anglo American and European
and a world citizen.

It's a hallmark of sophistication

to tolerate and celebrate
coinciding identities,

and the absence of that ability
is a mark of alienation and objection.

But we err in presuming that because
we share the same problems,

we all require the same solutions.

When I was working in Cambodia,
I met a woman named Phaly Nuon,

who had lived through unbelievable
horrors during the genocide there.

She had had to watch, been forced
to watch, while her daughter was raped

and then murdered in front of her.

The baby she had died

because she was too malnourished
to produce breast milk.

At the end of the war, she found herself
in a camp on the Thai border,

and she noticed, in that camp,

that there were a lot
of women in particular,

who had somehow survived
the horrific indignities and atrocities,

but who are now just sitting
in front of their tents in the camp,

staring into space, not taking care
of their children, not doing anything.

She went to the people who ran the camps.

They said, "We've got our hands full
with infectious diseases."

They said, "We can't do
anything about this."

So she decided she
would have to do something.

And she came up with what she
referred to, when talking to me,

as her "three-point program."

She said, "First, I would go
to these women,

and I would teach them to forget -

not that they would ever really
forget the horrible things

that had happened to them,

but I would give them
other things to think about

and fill their mind a bit
with something else,

and that was the beginning
of a kind of forgetting.

After I'd taught them to forget,
I would teach them to work.

Some of them could do
no more than clean houses;

some showed a skill at handicrafts;
some could do other more advanced things,

but all of them needed something

that they knew was their thing
that they could do."

She said, "Once I had taught them
to forget and to work,

I would teach them to perform
manicures and pedicures."

And I said, "I beg your pardon?"

(Laughter)

She said, "What people had lost most
in that Khmer Rouge period

was the ability to trust one another.

These women had gone so many years
without any opportunity to feel beautiful.

I would invite them into my hut,
and fill it with steam,

and within minutes,

they were holding out their hands and feet
to strangers bearing sharp implements."

(Laughter)

"After a few minutes of that,

they began to tell
one another their stories."

She said, "Then I tried to teach them
that these were not three separate skills,

but part of a single way of being.

And when they understood that, why,

they were ready to go
into the world again."

Now, democratic government
must be rooted in the view forward,

and that entails forgetting.

But we must also strive
to work and to trust.

At the moment, we forget too well,
and we work and trust too badly.

During the campaign, Donald Trump said,

"I've got no time to travel.
America needs my attention now."

Can you see America if you
don't sometimes gaze at it from abroad?

There is a feeling in all
of these nationalist movements

that difference is threatening
rather than beautiful.

And part of their shared function
is to disavow our humanity

Which is why it's not surprising

that in the months
following the Brexit vote

London's Metropolitan Police Commissioner
spoke of a horrible spike in hate crimes,

while the Southern Poverty
Law Center in the US recorded

more than 1,000 hate-fueled incidents
in the three weeks following the election.

When we don't know one another,

it's much easier for us
to kill one another.

When I was about six,
I was in the car with my father.

We were driving in the country.

He started to tell me a story

which included an allusion
to the Holocaust.

He thought I knew about it, and I didn't.

I asked him to explain it,
and he explained it,

and it didn't make sense to me,
and I asked him to explain it again.

He explained it again,
and when I asked him the third time,

he said, "It was pure evil."

He said it in a tone of voice
that was meant to end the conversation.

But I had one more question.

I said, "But why didn't those Jews
just leave when everything got so bad?"

My father said, "They had no place to go."

I remember thinking, even then,
even when I was six years old,

that I was never going to be
one of those people,

that I would always have some place to go,

that I would have people
ready to welcome me

with open arms on every
inhabited continent.

And it became a defining part of my life.

We're in a moment of isolationism,
when people have forgotten

that the nexus of safety
is having many places to go.

I was in Moscow about a year ago

when Putin had brought through
some of his autocratic measures.

I was with Andre Reuter, someone
I've known for many, many years,

who was involved
in the resistance to the Putsch,

when the Soviet Union ended,

and who had fought idealistically
for freedom and justice.

I said to him, "Do you regret it?

Do you now regret that you gave
so much energy to those hopes

that have not been realised?"

He looked at me and said,
"Do I regret it? No, I don't regret it.

It's in the engine of everything
I've done or thought since then."

He said, "That moment of idealism
was like a happy childhood.

It was a thing on which you can build

to deal with everything
that comes along afterwards.

And I realised in that moment

that a crushed hope
is suffused with nobility

that mere hopelessness can never know,

and that the moment when things shift
can be valuable in the present tense,

no matter where the shift itself leads,

and that change occurs only
after hope's multiple inceptions.

In February of 2002,
just after the invasion,

I went to Afghanistan.

I went in good part because I thought
it could not be a country

composed entirely of war-like peasants
and corrupt bureaucrats,

which was the image it had in much
of the Western press at the time.

I had someone there
who was my translator and fixer,

and who remains a great friend: Farouq.

I'd said to him that I wanted
to get one of those those fur hats

like the ones Karzai wore.

Farouq said, "Oh, if you want that,

we have to go to that street
of the hat makers and commission one.

So we went and ordered a hat,

and the next day,
we went back to pick it up.

And Farouq said, "Our next appointment
is just five minutes from here."

He said, "We can just walk
right through that market."

And I said "Okay," and at the time,

most of the people from the West
who were in Afghanistan

were either UN or military,

and they weren't allowed to walk
through things like crowded markets.

So we're walking along
and Farouq said to me,

"Put on your hat."

I said, "Farouq, foreigners
going native look ridiculous."

(Laughter)

"I'm not going to put on my hat."

He said, "Oh come on."

I said, "Really, Farouq, I'd rather not."

And he said, "Please, put your hat."

And I said "Okay, I'll put on my hat."

So I put on my hat, and suddenly,
everyone around us burst into applause.

(Laughter)

And one old man stepped forward
and he embraced me.

He said, "You were a foreigner,
but you have come to our country,

you are here in the market with us,

you are wearing a real Afghan hat
in the real Afghan way,

and we want you to know
that you are welcome here."

About a week later, I was interviewing
three women activists,

and they came to meet me,
and they arrived wearing burkas,

and they took off their burkas immediately
so that we could sit and talk.

But I said to them,
"It's no longer Taliban rule.

You no longer have to wear those things.
Why are you still wearing them?"

The first woman said, "Well, if I go out
without a burka and I get raped,

everyone will say
that it was my own fault."

The second one said,
"Well, if I go out without a burka,

and the Taliban comes back to power,

they might punish anyone they know
has been out without a burka."

But the third one said to me,
"I swore when the Taliban failed,

that I would burn this garment
and never see its like again.

But after five years, you grow
accustomed to being invisible,

and the prospect of being visible
again is very stressful."

I understood that, for this woman,

her invisibility gave her
a kind of freedom.

But I also recognised that
that freedom is itself a prison,

and recognised that it's often
the people who are the least free,

who understand freedom most deeply.

As Tony Morrison said,

"After you are set free,
you must claim a freed self."

In a free society, you have a chance
to achieve your ambitions.

In an unfree one, you lack that choice,

which often makes
for more visionary ambitions.

People who are constrained often
use their words most powerfully,

but the word "freedom" is a verb.

You have to relive
and achieve it again each day.

It does not sit static.

It is not a state
to be presumed continuous.

And it takes so much time
and so much commitment

to build freedom.

And yet, hard-won freedoms
can be obliterated with alarming rapidity.

Nazism, apartheid,
Hutu Power, Greater Serbia -

each of those arrived and swept away
the justice that had preceded it.

When I was in China,
I spent time with Zhang Peili,

an artist who was among the students
in revolt in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

He was there, he fled the scene,
he made a painting of what he had seen

and hung it from a bridge in Hangzhou,

then had to go into hiding
because he was a wanted man.

He said to me, "You know, probably,
it was the right thing what happened,

because if it hadn't,
there would have been a revolution,

and hundreds and hundreds
of thousands of people might have died."

I said, "But Peili,
how can you possibly say that?

You almost gave your life for this.
You went into hiding for this.

You believed so strongly
in that student protest."

And he said, "I'm an artist,
and idealism is my right as an artist.

But idealism in the hands
of a leader is a terrible thing."

My husband and I, our family,

recently took in a Libyan
refugee named Hassan.

We did so in part because the lives
we live as gay Americans

are such an abstract privilege
to gay people from his part of the world,

and to so many gay people
around the world,

and partly out of the sense
that we all have a moral obligation

to help in this time of refugees,

and partly because we wanted
to send a message,

to our children, to our friends,
and even to ourselves,

that this much-maligned
"other" can be someone

who is not only familiar, but also loved.

It's political for us to have Hassan
as a member of our household,

even though he's coaching our son
in football, and working in a hospital,

and bakes fantastic cakes,
and makes us all laugh.

I had hoped that time would divest
his presence of its politics,

but that eventuality slipped away from us,
on the U.S. election night.

The Italian political theorist
Antonio Gramsci once said

that revolution requires pessimism
of the intellect and optimism of the will.

And I think all social change requires

pessimism of the intellect
and optimism of the will.

At the time that apartheid
was winding down,

I went to report in South Africa.

I felt I was coming from the society
in which democracy functions

to one where that was only
a distant hope on the horizon.

But these things can turn around.

Just after the election in November,

the South African artist,
William Kentridge,

with whom I'd spent a lot of time,
came to New York,

and we talked about what had happened.

He said, "What is most shocking
is not how shocked you are now,

but how unshocked you will be
in six months' time."

I took that as an invitation
to stay shocked.

(Laughter) (Applause)

Thank you.

Staying shocked is a long game.

It requires that we resist the ways
that repetition desensitises us,

and recognise that we, as a society,
are right now at risk of becoming brutal

and we must resist that tendency.

Travel is the opposite of chauvinism.

Chauvinism is a curling inward.

Travel is an opening outward.

And witnessing a global world

is one of the best ways
to make a global world.

The American poet Robert Frost wrote,

"Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was likely to give offence.

Something there is
that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down."

To which the neighbour
in the poem can only say,

"Good fences make good neighbours."

But history shows us that good fences
mostly make real enemies.

Donald Trump is talking
of this great project

to build a wall between
the United States and Mexico.

Great Britain has been working
on the great wall of Calais,

which is supposed to prevent
illegal immigration from the continent.

The peace walls in Northern Ireland

are now going to be retained
in some places.

Hungary has sworn to the construction

of a massive border fence
all around the country.

And Israel is well on its way
to being a walled nation.

Walls are concrete symbols of exclusion,

and exclusion often hurts
those who are excluding

as much as it hurts
those who are excluded.

And this process entails an overlooking

of how the liberal world order
benefits all nations,

and it shows a callow disregard
for the spread of war,

for nuclear proliferation.

It would make America weak again -

and Britain too.

It's a trivialising of it delicate peace
forged after two world wars,

which is never a given.

Because walls are our burkas;

they're symbols of safety
that oppress us terribly,

and we suffer under them.

Those of us who champion internationalism

have to acknowledge
that it can be confusing

and difficult to negotiate.

The cheap labor closes jobs in the West

while Western management
exploits the world's scattered poor.

We have to remember

that language gaps lead
to misunderstandings,

and that values are often challenged.

But so long as the world is infected
with war and starvation and poverty,

there will be people striving to escape
troubled and impoverished places

to apparently less troubled
and more prosperous ones.

They don't go because emigration is fun.

They don't go to exploit places.

They don't go without regret.

They stay shocked,
whether they want to or not.

Reporting from Tripoli
on the end of the Gaddafi regime,

I interviewed all of the ministers
in his government.

I was struck that everyone I met,
who wanted rapprochement with the West

had lived or studied in the US,
the UK, or Western Europe.

And that everyone who wanted Libya
to remain a rogue terrorist state

had not done so.

Quarantining otherness, locking people out

breeds an ignorance of us
that engenders hatred.

It is openness that makes us safe.

It's striking that New York and London,

the cities with the largest
immigrant populations,

are much less afraid of immigration
than people in outlying areas.

The people who are most afraid
of immigrants have never met one.

Building walls does not
address their problems.

it's a weakness masquerading
as a fortification.

Engaging is the only way forward.

Theresa May had it inside out.

We must take action
as citizens of our countries,

yet embrace the larger whole.

Believing we cannot be citizens
of the world will lose us the world

of which we might have been citizens.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Thank you.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Thank you, thank you.