Chesterton’s Fence is often invoked by the people who tore down a Chesterton’s Fence.
A really quite facepalmingly excellent example of this is American middle-class attitudes toward child-rearing; in between 1900 and 1960 we medicalized almost everything about how kids are born and cared for and raised, in the sense that we promoted what random doctors think over the established collected wisdom-of-the-ages.
Which, to be clear, is not a thing I’m fundamentally against; actually checking our assumptions against the data is how progress is made, and how we get things like handwashing and vaccines, and kids do die way way less now than they did in the year 1900!
But a bunch of things unrelated to the actually important medical stuff were also outsourced to doctors talking out of their asses (er, excuse me, “outside of their domains of expertise”), and a bunch of how kids have lived and been socialized for approximately forever was suddenly pooh-poohed and delegitimized and subsequently vanished or began slowly drying up.
Cut to a few decades later, and most people think that the way it’s been done for about two or three generations is the way it’s always been done (it isn’t), and if you try to do something different, they invoke Chesterton’s Fence and shout “don’t tamper with this, it’s the received Wisdom of the Ages!”
When it really, really, really isn’t.
This is a single example of a thing that happens A LOT. Cultural memory is short and fickle, and often it is precisely the Dangerous New Experiment that gets defended as being the Timeless Wisdom.
(There were of course other things going on with child rearing besides medicalization, such as e.g. the development of national media causing people to be afraid of a lot of things that were extremely unlikely to happen to them.)
There’s a different principle that’s important here, which is that the space of bad ways to do things is almost always larger than the set of good ways to do it, and appealing to what has been sufficient so far is at least a great way to ensure you don’t do far worse. I’m not going to try to make the argument fully right here, but in general, doing things differently means you’re risking new failure modes—and the fact that it was once done this way doesn’t avoid the problem, because the situation now is different. (On the other hand, this is a fully generalized argument against trying anything, which is bad if overused. It does function as a reason to exercise significant additional caution.)
Yeah, I agree with that, and it is an important consideration to keep in mind, that anything outside the yellow brick road is a minefield, but sometimes you have to bring a minesweeper and carefully make your way. I guess my point is that it pays to be aware of and to respect the minefield.
I don’t want to speak for Duncan, but that’s not the meaning I took away from his reply. What I took away was that the received traditional wisdom often times is neither traditional, nor especially wise. Very many of our “ancient, cherished traditions”, date back to intentional attempts to create ancient cherished traditions in the roughly 1850-1950 era. These traditions were, oftentimes, not based on any actual historical research or scientific investigation. They were based on stereotypes and aesthetics.
To return to the fence analogy, it’s important to do a bit of historical research and try to determine whether the fence is actually a long-standing feature of the landscape or whether it was put up (figuratively) yesterday by someone who may not have known more about the territory than you.
EDIT: One common example is “blue for boys, red for girls”. In the past, red was the preferred color for males, because it was considered to be more “active” and “energetic”, as opposed to the “cool” “passive” energy that blue exuded. At some point this flipped, with blue becoming the color of reason and consideration (and thus associated with “rational” males) and red becoming the color of passion and emotion (and thus associated with “passionate, emotional” females). Why did it switch? Some people blame some marketing campaigns that were carried out at the turn of the 20th century, but the reason isn’t totally clear cut. What is clear to me, however, is that when people started associating blue with male-hood and red with female-hood, it wasn’t because of some careful consideration and close examination of the previous era’s choices regarding color associations. So, today, when associating colors with gender, I don’t feel any particular loyalty to “blue = boy; red = girl”, because that association wasn’t chosen via a considered process and hasn’t been in place nearly long enough to have established itself as a truly time honored tradition.
Definitely a common situation, where “our ancient traditions” are barely two generations-old. I think that was Duncan’s point, as well as yours. Sometimes there is a good reason for the tradition to exist, and sometimes there is not. And sometimes there was a good reason but not any longer, and it is impossible to tell without earnest historical research, as you say.
Cut to a few decades later, and most people think that the way it’s been done for about two or three generations is the way it’s always been done (it isn’t)
As possibly one of those people myself, can you give a few examples of what specifically is being done differently now? Are you talking about things like using lots of adderall?
I wasn’t thinking adderall, although that’s a plausible example.
I’m thinking of things like “it’s not safe to leave ten-year-olds alone in the house, or have them walk a few miles or run errands on their own.” It’s demonstrably more safe now than it was in the past, and in the past ten-year-olds dying from being unsupervised was not a major cause of death.
(More safe because crime is lower, more safe because medicine is better, more safe because more people carry cameras and GPS at all times, etc.)
Up until three or four generations ago, people routinely got naked to swim in creeks and ponds and quarries, casually and easily, and it was fine and not a major vector for sex crimes or moral corruption.
Up until three or four generations ago, people (in America) weren’t insanely terrified of cosleeping and didn’t erroneously believe that it was putting your infant at irresponsible risk (it isn’t; the data are clear and cosleeping is done in the majority of the world, including many nations with lower infant mortality than the US).
Up until three or four generations ago, kids would rub shoulders with way more adults, in way more contexts, rather than today, where lots of people think that kids should never be around adults who aren’t currently doing a professional kid-oriented job (and should restrict their interactions to the domain of that job).
It wasn’t even three or four generations ago that our system of taxation (in the US) was wildly different, and now many people act as if wanting to increase taxes on the wealthy is an affront to the Founding Fathers.
These are just off the top of my head, and they’re skewed in the direction of some of my areas of interest; apologies for that. The main point is, it doesn’t take very long at all for people to forget—if your parents raised you insisting that X was commonplace, and the people around you largely got the same programming, it’s hard to know (unless you check) whether X was actually brand-new at the time, or maybe just a generation old.
EDIT: The “nuclear family” is baaasically an invention of the twentieth century; the term wasn’t even coined until the 1920′s iirc and it didn’t become the assumed default until post WWII.
EDIT II: Suburbs! Levittown.
EDIT III: the number of foods that people think we’ve had forever (bananas, broccoli) but are actually quite recent additions to the human diet.
My mom (who had children starting in 1982) said that doctors were telling her (IIRC) that, when a baby was crying in certain circumstances (I think when it was in a crib and there was nothing obviously wrong), it just wanted attention, and if you gave it attention, then you were teaching the baby to manipulate you, and instead you should let it cry until it gives up.
She thought this was abominable; that if a baby is crying, that means something is wrong, and crying for help is the only means it has, and it’s the parent’s job to figure out how to help the baby. Furthermore, that if the parent’s response was to not help the baby, that would be teaching the baby something extremely bad about the parents’ relationship to it. And generally she was in favor of mothers listening to their instincts.
I believe she said that, as time went on, some actual research was done, which generally favored her views.
In April 1971, Sylvia Bell and Mary Ainsworth presented a paper at the Society for Research in Child Development. Using data from Ainsworth’s now famous ‘Baltimore Study’ of 26 mothers and their infants, they reported that infants whose mothers responded more quickly to their cries in the first 3 months of life were less likely to cry at 9–12 months of age than mothers who responded more slowly. The following year, a paper including these data was published in Child Development and in the nearly 50 years since it has been cited more than 1,500 times. The paper challenged then the dominant view of behavioral theory, which held that responding to crying reinforced the behavior and fostered dependence.
I guess the “behavioral theory” was what my mom found abominable (and what the doctors she complained about subscribed to), and the Ainsworth study favors her views.
The linked study seems to say that further evidence looks ambiguous. Not gonna dig into it now, but I would lean towards trusting my mom’s opinion.
Yes, and:
There’s a different principle that’s important here, which is that the space of bad ways to do things is almost always larger than the set of good ways to do it, and appealing to what has been sufficient so far is at least a great way to ensure you don’t do far worse. I’m not going to try to make the argument fully right here, but in general, doing things differently means you’re risking new failure modes—and the fact that it was once done this way doesn’t avoid the problem, because the situation now is different. (On the other hand, this is a fully generalized argument against trying anything, which is bad if overused. It does function as a reason to exercise significant additional caution.)
Yeah, I agree with that, and it is an important consideration to keep in mind, that anything outside the yellow brick road is a minefield, but sometimes you have to bring a minesweeper and carefully make your way. I guess my point is that it pays to be aware of and to respect the minefield.
I don’t want to speak for Duncan, but that’s not the meaning I took away from his reply. What I took away was that the received traditional wisdom often times is neither traditional, nor especially wise. Very many of our “ancient, cherished traditions”, date back to intentional attempts to create ancient cherished traditions in the roughly 1850-1950 era. These traditions were, oftentimes, not based on any actual historical research or scientific investigation. They were based on stereotypes and aesthetics.
To return to the fence analogy, it’s important to do a bit of historical research and try to determine whether the fence is actually a long-standing feature of the landscape or whether it was put up (figuratively) yesterday by someone who may not have known more about the territory than you.
EDIT: One common example is “blue for boys, red for girls”. In the past, red was the preferred color for males, because it was considered to be more “active” and “energetic”, as opposed to the “cool” “passive” energy that blue exuded. At some point this flipped, with blue becoming the color of reason and consideration (and thus associated with “rational” males) and red becoming the color of passion and emotion (and thus associated with “passionate, emotional” females). Why did it switch? Some people blame some marketing campaigns that were carried out at the turn of the 20th century, but the reason isn’t totally clear cut. What is clear to me, however, is that when people started associating blue with male-hood and red with female-hood, it wasn’t because of some careful consideration and close examination of the previous era’s choices regarding color associations. So, today, when associating colors with gender, I don’t feel any particular loyalty to “blue = boy; red = girl”, because that association wasn’t chosen via a considered process and hasn’t been in place nearly long enough to have established itself as a truly time honored tradition.
Definitely a common situation, where “our ancient traditions” are barely two generations-old. I think that was Duncan’s point, as well as yours. Sometimes there is a good reason for the tradition to exist, and sometimes there is not. And sometimes there was a good reason but not any longer, and it is impossible to tell without earnest historical research, as you say.
I never heard “red for girls” (or “red not for boys”, for that matter), only “pink for girls”.
As possibly one of those people myself, can you give a few examples of what specifically is being done differently now? Are you talking about things like using lots of adderall?
I wasn’t thinking adderall, although that’s a plausible example.
I’m thinking of things like “it’s not safe to leave ten-year-olds alone in the house, or have them walk a few miles or run errands on their own.” It’s demonstrably more safe now than it was in the past, and in the past ten-year-olds dying from being unsupervised was not a major cause of death.
(More safe because crime is lower, more safe because medicine is better, more safe because more people carry cameras and GPS at all times, etc.)
Up until three or four generations ago, people routinely got naked to swim in creeks and ponds and quarries, casually and easily, and it was fine and not a major vector for sex crimes or moral corruption.
Up until three or four generations ago, people (in America) weren’t insanely terrified of cosleeping and didn’t erroneously believe that it was putting your infant at irresponsible risk (it isn’t; the data are clear and cosleeping is done in the majority of the world, including many nations with lower infant mortality than the US).
Up until three or four generations ago, kids would rub shoulders with way more adults, in way more contexts, rather than today, where lots of people think that kids should never be around adults who aren’t currently doing a professional kid-oriented job (and should restrict their interactions to the domain of that job).
It wasn’t even three or four generations ago that our system of taxation (in the US) was wildly different, and now many people act as if wanting to increase taxes on the wealthy is an affront to the Founding Fathers.
These are just off the top of my head, and they’re skewed in the direction of some of my areas of interest; apologies for that. The main point is, it doesn’t take very long at all for people to forget—if your parents raised you insisting that X was commonplace, and the people around you largely got the same programming, it’s hard to know (unless you check) whether X was actually brand-new at the time, or maybe just a generation old.
EDIT: The “nuclear family” is baaasically an invention of the twentieth century; the term wasn’t even coined until the 1920′s iirc and it didn’t become the assumed default until post WWII.
EDIT II: Suburbs! Levittown.
EDIT III: the number of foods that people think we’ve had forever (bananas, broccoli) but are actually quite recent additions to the human diet.
My mom (who had children starting in 1982) said that doctors were telling her (IIRC) that, when a baby was crying in certain circumstances (I think when it was in a crib and there was nothing obviously wrong), it just wanted attention, and if you gave it attention, then you were teaching the baby to manipulate you, and instead you should let it cry until it gives up.
She thought this was abominable; that if a baby is crying, that means something is wrong, and crying for help is the only means it has, and it’s the parent’s job to figure out how to help the baby. Furthermore, that if the parent’s response was to not help the baby, that would be teaching the baby something extremely bad about the parents’ relationship to it. And generally she was in favor of mothers listening to their instincts.
I believe she said that, as time went on, some actual research was done, which generally favored her views.
A quick google turns up a study: https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcpp.13338 , which says this:
I guess the “behavioral theory” was what my mom found abominable (and what the doctors she complained about subscribed to), and the Ainsworth study favors her views.
The linked study seems to say that further evidence looks ambiguous. Not gonna dig into it now, but I would lean towards trusting my mom’s opinion.