The United States seems determined to turn its back on the rest of our planetary neighbors. The Trump administration’s recent decision to withdraw from 66 international treaties, conventions and organizations is striking for the range of its rejections. Everything from the global treaty on climate change to multilateral efforts to address migration and cultural heritage, clean water and renewable energy, and the international trade in timber and minerals has been summarily dismissed as “contrary to the interests of the United States”.

It’s no surprise that an administration hellbent on physical walls around the United States would also put up such walls of indifference, as if all of these longstanding collective efforts were simply “irrelevant” to our interests as a country, as the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, put it in a public statement. And yet, as we know, the reality of contemporary life on Earth is so profoundly otherwise. How has the truth of our interconnectedness with others elsewhere become so difficult to grasp in the United States?

Over the last decade, I’ve been studying this problem as a cultural anthropologist. In a recent book, Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them........

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