Frontier Mythology

U.S. - Mexico Border at the Pacific Ocean, from the Tijuana side (2005)

America has always defined itself by the promise of a better life. The Nation has drawn its strength from the diversity of its people and the innovation of its immigrants. Despite its imperfections, the Union has led the world in a way that no other nation of more entrenched traditions can. Throughout its short history the supremacy of America has been forged in places like New York and Chicago. Cities like these are unique in their diversity. They are possible only in America. They are the places that truly define our culture. And yet the United States has never popularly considered itself an urban nation. Instead American folklore has romanticized an escape from urbanity, idealized the individual and promoted our collective retreat to an ever more elusive frontier of freedom.

The idea of the frontier is essential to our imagination of America. It allows us to project our hopes away from a messy present to an unknown future. In our minds the frontier is a void of opportunity. The idea of the frontier is traditionally synonymous with all that we associate with the future. Yet too often our yearning for the next frontier has devolved into an impossibly selfish mythology of escapism and irresponsibility. By constantly projecting ourselves elsewhere, few Americas have learned to care about where they are.

At its evangelical extreme frontier mythology promises the individualist both a transcendent escape from the responsibilities of living in a society and a return to an idealized state of nature not unlike biblical portrayals of Eden. Indeed, frontier mythologies contradict themselves. The wilderness is supposedly the place where man is most human, where he is able to cultivate his survival skills and his divine independence. On the other hand, the frontier is often imagined as space of domestication, like the original garden, where the fruits of the world are unquestionably bestowed upon man and woman. The frontier is, thus, simultaneously the place where man derives value through a connection to nature and is magically rewarded with its supreme bounty, comfort and simplicity. As a myth the frontier is a romantic image that promises something for nothing. Frontier myths promote an idealization of the individual as the master of his private universe, unburdened by society. On the frontier every man is Adam and every woman Eve. In a social abyss the individual is king.

The problem, of course, is that there never was a void. There never was a frontier. The continent was not pure. The land was not untouched or virgin. Some estimates put the native population of North America at close to twenty million before Columbus arrived. The demonization of those people, their near eradication, and the systematic enslavement of another 20 million Africans has always been the skeleton in the closet of American folklore. These are the truths that uncomfortably expose an undercurrent of imperialism in an ostensibly democratic society. History contextualizes frontier mythology and individualism within a pursuit of manifest destiny, wealth and power. To this day the near religious promise of the individualist dream - of wealth, stardom and total escape from society - prohibits an investment in civilization. Pushed to its extreme, that dream and the divestment that it encourages will ultimately tear the Union apart and render our society incapable of collective survival.

Frontier mythologies ultimately encourage us to perceive nature as a pure, simplistic, romantic image - as an ideal that exists outside of human reality. Such ideals prevent us from understanding our true relationship with the environment. Idealization of natural purity implies that nature can only survive if human civilization falls. Those of us that attempt to escape the degraded environments that we've created and start new in our own private commune with wilderness inevitably harm nature far more than those that remain in the city to improve where they live. If humanity has any hope of surviving at a sophisticated level, if we wish to solve our resource, environmental and social crisis, if we ever truly find a home in nature - we will inevitably do it together in an urban context.