Fortified walls surrounded towns of any size throughout history until recent times. Some early towns in the United States began as stockades or forts. Most of us in the United States, however, with our suburban-surrounded cities, never think about walls. We have no ruined walls, no gates to pass through, as do cities in older civilizations as a reminder that bandits and enemies were a constant threat in earlier times.

Central authority in those days was nonexistent or too weak to provide adequate safeguards against wrong-doers. Barons and warlords provided what protection there was. (Today we see the same sort of “protection” by weapons-ruled warlords in countries like Somalia.)

As populations grew in Europe and elsewhere, law-abiding citizens came together to provide, not only publicly supported military and police, but also schools and hospitals and fire halls.

Lately, some note a trend toward the establishment of private good over public good for those who can afford it: gated communities, expensive private schools, nannies for stay-at-home childcare. Even the all-volunteer army might be seen as a way to pay others to do our fighting (usually the less well off) instead of requiring every citizen to serve in the military or perform service work before beginning family and career.

Those with money buy computers and tablets in a world that divides the digitally adept from the digitally challenged, establishing a kind of electronic barrier. We digitally adept join electronic communities in which we never talk over coffee or walk together, listening to the silence as well as each other.

T.S. Eliot died before the age of computers, but his poem “The Rock” is strangely prophetic:

Where is the life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?