Around Chesterton: Think twice before changing something – 01/14/2024 – Science

Don’t destroy what you don’t understand!

This is, in short, what a simple rule called Chesterton’s Fence advises, which suggests that you should never destroy something, change a rule or alter a tradition if you don’t understand why it was created.

It is, in a way, a call for humility when criticizing and wanting to reform everything from policies or institutions, to family customs, work protocols or lines of code in computer programs.

This theory highlights that, without fully understanding what is happening, the consequences of a hasty action can end up being much worse than what is intended to be repaired.

That fence thing may seem strange, but it is called that because of the way the idea was illustrated by the person who made it famous: the English writer and philosopher Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936).

Chesterton was an “obese giant”, as Jorge Luis Borges described him in the prologue of the story “The Eye of Apollo” from the book “The Library of Babel”.

The Argentine writer said he was “a kind and affable man” who “could have been Kafka or Poe, but he courageously chose happiness or pretended to have found it.”

He described Chesterton’s critical writings as charming and penetrating and said that his early novels combined “the mystical with the fantastic”.

But the works that made the biggest impact were about 50 short stories about a detective who was a seemingly naive but psychologically perceptive priest named Father Brown.

“Literature is one of the forms of happiness; perhaps no writer has given me as many happy hours as Chesterton,” wrote Borges.

When he was not writing or, later, giving interviews for the BBC, he loved to debate, often engaging in friendly public disputes with intellectuals such as George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and Bertrand Russell.

Or played with them.

He once said to Shaw, “To see you, anyone would think a famine had struck England,” to which Shaw replied, “To see you, anyone would think you caused the famine.”

But something he took very seriously was religion.

“From the Anglican faith he passed to the Catholic faith, which, according to him, is based on common sense,” said Borges.

“He argued that the strangeness of this faith fits the strangeness of the universe, just as the strange shape of a key fits exactly the strange shape of the lock.”

Precisely and interestingly this was taken from a book entitled “The Matter: Why I am Catholic” (1929), in Portuguese, something like “The subject: why I am Catholic”, in which he spoke about the fence that bears his name.

Reform without deforming

He declared that “in the matter of reforming things, instead of deforming them, there is a clear and simple principle.”

He suggested imagining “for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected along a path.”

“The more modern type of builder comes in happily and says, ‘I don’t see any use in this; let’s tear it down.'”

“To which the most intelligent type of builder would do well to respond: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you eliminate it. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you see the use of it , I can allow you to do this.”

The idea is that only when you know what the purpose of something was can you decide whether it is still necessary, whether it should be modified, or simply omitted.

According to Chesterton, this principle is based on the most basic common sense.

“The fence didn’t grow there. It wasn’t created by sleepwalkers who built it in their sleep.”

“Someone had some reason to think this would be good for someone. And until we know what the reason was, we can’t really judge whether it was reasonable.”

And he warned that if we are not sure, “it is very likely that we will miss a whole aspect of the issue.”

The fence, for example, even if it was in poor condition and small, might separate the cows from the sheep, imagined philosopher Jonny Thomson in Big Think.

Sheep, when eating, pull up grass almost by the roots, while cows need tall grass to eat with their prehensile tongues. Shortly after removing the fence, the cows would be malnourished and hungry.

From refreshments to sparrows

Now, although Chesterton defended the analysis of decisions that implied change in this way because he tended to be conservative, the principle continues to resonate in various fields, from the personal to the political.

When trying to change bad habits, for example, we often fail to take into account that they don’t appear out of nowhere: they usually evolve to satisfy an unmet need.

If this aspect is not taken into account, even if a habit is eliminated, it may be replaced by another more harmful one.

At the business level, in a post considered classic, entrepreneur Steve Blank gave an example he saw in startups when they grow and hire financial directors.

These, in an attempt to reduce costs – and show off – often decide to do away with company details for employees, such as free soft drinks and snacks, as they consider them a useless expense.

In Blank’s experience, the result is always the same: For the employees who helped the company grow, even if they can afford the sodas, it feels like a sign of a change in the company’s culture.

And that can lead to the most talented people leaving because suddenly everything feels very corporate, it’s not like it used to be.

Like these, there are many examples, including a tremendously tragic one: the extermination of sparrows in China, part of the Four Plagues Campaign of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward project (1958 to 1962).

Sparrows were suspected of stealing grain from the fields, so millions of Chinese did everything they could to eliminate them, successfully: the sparrow population was brought to the brink of extinction.

The locust outbreak, on the other hand, without sparrows to control them, soared and became one of the triggers of the Great Chinese Famine, one of the greatest man-made disasters in history.

Viewed this way, Chesterton’s fence looks like a mechanism for avoiding the law of unintended consequences.

The principle invokes the excessive enthusiasm of reformers and seeks to contain it.

But it can be used for the opposite.

Reforms, big and small, always tend to have a force working against them: resistance to change.

An organization, for example, can easily become unnecessarily complex and no longer fit for purpose. But the longer it survives, the less likely it is to be reformed or abolished.

In these cases, it is advisable to behave like that “intelligent builder”, and thus have solid arguments to demonstrate exactly why it has become useless.

But sometimes, no matter how much you want to, you can’t afford to scrutinize every decision. So perhaps it is more worth invoking Alexander the Great than Chesterton.

According to legend, when Alexander conquered Phrygia he was challenged to untie the Gordian knot, which was so complicated that an oracle declared that whoever could undo it was destined to rule all of Asia.

Alexandre tried for a while until he got tired. He declared that it didn’t matter how he achieved this, so he drew his sword and slashed in one fell swoop.

The important thing is to know whether you are looking at a fence or a knot.

Sometimes yes sometimes no

There are certain strategies that can be used as guides in these cases.

Those who work in computing, as in Alexander the Great’s strategy, sometimes use what they call the Scream Test, which they apply to products, services, or capabilities that are active but no one uses.

It’s simple: take it out and wait to see if anyone screams. If this happens, reinstall.

It’s a case that could fall under the type 2 decisions described by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in a letter to shareholders that many use as a reference to discern between closure or node options.

But he talked about doors.

There is only one way: once you cross it, it closes behind your back and is not opened again.

Another is two-way: you can enter and exit through it.

“Some decisions have consequences and are irreversible or nearly irreversible (one-way doors) and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully and slowly, with great deliberation and consultation.”

“If you go through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you won’t be able to get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions.”

“But with most decisions it’s not like that: they are changeable, reversible, they are two-way doors.”

“If you made a less than ideal decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for so long. You can open the door again and come back.”

“Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by individuals or small groups with common sense.”

Are you going to renovate or seek to solve an easily reversible problem?

Then you could quickly make changes with imperfect information and see what happens.

If it is irreversible, it is advisable to collect information, even if the process is slow and involves costs.

Chesterton would have agreed to this kind of caution before the decision.