Ant bridges are a lesson in the miracle of solidarity. When ants reach chasms they cannot cross, they link their bodies together to form a bridge. An ant’s brain is very small, but if they looked at their problems as many humans do (as logical individuals) their obstacles might seem hopeless.
An ant’s sense of solidarity creates new possibilities that would be impossible for individualist thinkers. Many of humankind’s most insurmountable problems might melt if we simply lived in solidarity and mutual aid.
Ant bridges are also a parable about the dangers of abstraction. We humans come together to create bridges we call “government” or “religion” or the “economy”. Unlike ants, our brains are very large and we can come to imagine that these bridges are more real than ourselves.
When we surrender responsibility to any system we are like ants who have made the bridges more real than ourselves. Whenever someone says “trust the market,” or, “we must not question scripture,” or, “we must support the troops,” it is possible they have surrendered their own responsibility for being human. When we look at the institutions of our culture as static forms we can forget that we are building those structures with our words and deeds. There is a basic sanity in not believing that the categories of our culture are concrete realities to which we must conform.
WE are responsible for how we treat each other. In the end, It’s just we ants, but our lives fit together to create new possibilities that would be impossible so long as we think of ourselves only as separate individuals.