I wanted to share with you an old parable that I just learned of that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s called Chesterton’s Fence and I think it’s important today.
“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’
To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. 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.”
But here is my version…
A man is walking a new piece of property he recently acquired when he comes across a fence that seems out of place and unnecessary. The man begins removing the fence, and soon the nice elderly woman next door approaches him and asks, “What is the purpose of that fence you are taking down?” The man replies, “It serves no purpose, so I’m clearing it away.”
The woman replies, “It sure looks like someone took a lot of time, care, and resources to erect that fence. Are you certain you know its purpose before you set out to destroy it?”
The man grows frustrated that this stranger is telling him how to manage his new property. Showing his frustration, he replies, “Please mind your own business and allow me to improve my property.” The lady shakes her head and returns to her house.
But the next June, they awaken to find their crops trampled. A bug that only spawns between June and July had reappeared, flooding their fields. And when the rabbits, raccoons, and other critters came to eat them, they trampled the entire crop, destroying the family’s income for that year.
When I was younger, I wanted to reform everything. I would come across a fence and want to destroy it. But the fence most likely served a greater purpose that I was unaware of. Tearing down the fence could result in unintended consequences in the future.
Think about when you come across a stop sign that seems pointless. Maybe it was erected because of repeated fatal accidents at that intersection over the years.
Think about the new “boss” at work that comes in and tries to “fix” everything but is actually destroying decades of progress and improvements that the previous team only learned through the scar tissue of their experiences. (This explains exactly how I felt after we sold Liquid Web and the new guys came in and changed everything! Only now, 10 years later, are they realizing that may have made a mistake.)
There is another recent example that sticks out to me and that all parents deal with and something that caused massive harm to thousands, maybe millions, of kids.
Around the year 2000, a committee of pediatricians came across a proverbial fence. Parents were feeding their children cows milk, eggs, peanuts and fish for thousands of years. The pediatricians were trying to reduce allergies, which can sometimes be very severe, in their young patients.
The pediatricians convened a committee and came up with the “1, 2, 3 rule”. It was their “expert opinion” that parents should delay cows milk until age 1, eggs until age 2, nuts and fish until age 3.
This was a massive change for parents and a large educational campaign commenced with pediatricians everywhere warning their patients to avoid these foods
or risk allergies in their children.
So what was the result? In 2000, the rate of peanut allergies in kids was about .4% and severe peanut allergy was extremely rare. Within 2 years, the rate had doubled to .8%. Today, the rate is about 2% or more. But most troubling, the rate of severe peanut allergy and death has skyrocketed. Which is why schools and daycares have to treat peanuts as if they are a biological weapon and ban them everywhere.
By removing what seemed like a fence, natural early exposure, experts created an epidemic of food allergies that harmed an entire generation of kids.
It’s easy to laugh at the mistakes of past experts with the benefit of hindsight. But the truth is, we are all standing in fields full of old fences. Some are wise, some are useless, some are harmful to leave standing, and some are dangerous to tear down. The lesson of Chesterton’s Fence is not to avoid change. It is to stop, ask why something exists, and understand the scar tissue that built it before you swing the hammer. History shows us clearly that rushing to remove a fence without knowing its purpose often makes things worse, not better.
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This is great. I've never heard that parable, but always think to myself, "Every law was signed in blood." I know that is the extreme case (and related to government/law) but I use it as a reminder that there's a reason things were done the way they were and you need to understand what that is before you can come up with something to replace it or a reason to eliminate it. One such situation: at our last house, we had a farmer's drain next to our deck, about 3 feet from our property line. It was nothing but a very deep hole (about 10 inches across) and if you didn't know what it was, you wouldn't realize its importance. Well, our neighbor's yard got a little wet one spring and she decided that drain was the reason - not the fact we were on a hill and her property was lower than ours - and angrily filled that hole, swearing as she went. She thought our hole was somehow helping us and screwing her. Cam just let her do it, watching, after explaining how it's actually helping. Within a few days, her entire yard was a lake. The peanut allergy thing is something I just heard yesterday. I had my kids between 1995 and 2001 and was an avid reader of all the parenting magazines...and during those years we weren't yet being told not to feed our kids those foods or I would have certainly complied. : ) Luckily (or perhaps because we fed them everything) there's not a food allergy in any of my kids but I'm equally happy I was able to throw a peanut butter sandwich at my 11-month-old for the sake of my own time and ease and sanity.
This is one of my favorite parables, even though I am not great at following it. On the peanut front, I just saw today that peanut allergies have dropped by 43% since we rebuilt the Chesterton Fence.