Chesterton's Fence
G.K. Chesterton, in The Thing (1929): “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.’”
The fence didn’t grow there. It wasn’t built by sleepwalkers. Someone had a reason — perhaps to keep cattle in, perhaps to mark a boundary disputed for generations, perhaps to prevent carts from falling into a hidden ditch.
The reformer who doesn’t see the use has identified only their own ignorance, not the fence’s uselessness.
This is an epistemological claim. Chesterton permits removing the fence — after you understand why it was built. The sequence matters: understand, then act. Reversing that order means discovering the fence’s purpose through the consequences of its absence.
The principle applies broadly:
In code: Legacy systems encode solutions to problems the current team never encountered. The function that looks pointless might handle an edge case that took production down in 2017.
In organizations: The process everyone hates might exist because the previous process caused a disaster. The meeting that seems pointless might be the only time two teams synchronize.
In policy: The regulation that seems burdensome might address a harm that’s now invisible precisely because the regulation works.
Second-order effects hide behind first-order costs. Removing the fence is easy. Discovering why it existed — after the cattle escape, after the carts crash — is expensive.
The question to ask: “What problem was this solving, and is that problem gone?”
Go Deeper
Books
- The Thing by G.K. Chesterton — The 1929 original. Chapter 4 “The Drift from Domesticity” contains the fence passage.
- Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott — Modern treatment of what happens when reformers don’t understand systems they’re changing.
Essays
- The fence passage is short. Read Chesterton’s original — it’s more nuanced than the common paraphrase.
Related: [[galls-law]], [[legibility]], [[feedback-loops]]