Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking
It troubles me that Chesterton charges the man who would tear down the fence with a duty: "Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."I see the charm of Chesterton's favourite rhetorical judo. But we have learned many hard lessons about the cost of losing the documentation. We should charge the man with the duty of looking up the purpose of the fence in the archive, and finding the date that the purpose ceased to hold.We should go further and invent the conservatism of the archive. When we contemplate changing the rules of society, the archive needs to contain more than just the justification of the new rules, analogous to the purpose of the fence. The defeated opposition must also have their place in the records.Write down your rules. Write down why you have chosen them. Write down what your critics say will go wrong. Write down what your critics say we should do instead. Keep it all safe in the archive for 100 years.When things don't go according to plan, dig through the archive. Did you stick to your rules? Really? In a way that is faithful to the reasons why they were supposed to work? What about the critics? Did things go wrong in the way that they predicted, or in some other way?If the critics predicted the exact way that things would go wrong, they win. Dig out their suggestions and give them a try. If the critics predicted different screw-ups than actually happened, cry. Nobody knows anything. But at least you have an archive. What it was like. What people thought. How it actually turned out. That is a basis for working out what to do next.