“Nostalgia is just memory lane without the potholes that it had”
Irritates the hell out of me as well. I mean, ever since recorded history older generations were noted to claim that their own halcyon days were the pinnacle of culture and that the younger generation’s culture was a harbinger that the world was going to shit. The thousands of years of history, and each generation being a tiny fraction thereof: and we’re supposed to believe that in the one particular case of a curmudgeons ranting, their own tiny slice of history is/was THE watershed moment of cultural shifts. Yeah, got it.
When I was younger I took great delight in hearing discussions/friendly arguments at family functions with 3 generations present. Each contradicting the other as they desperately tried to keep their own cognitive dissonance at bay as to the silliness of it all.
That will happen at some point, but I don’t think it’s always been the situation. I doubt anyone in 1977 had seen something like Star Wars, not even the old man born back in the 1800s.
To be fair, I think the amount of change in music over the last 20 years has been a lot less than in other 20 year periods. That’s not to say that the music of 2022 is worse than the music of 1982 or 2002, just that the differences are a lot less if one is comparing 2002 to 2022 than say, 1962 and 1982.
The special effects were a bit better, but Scifi had been a staple of movie and TV for decades before.
And a boy prodigy accompanying an older mentor to gather an adventuring party and go on a quest to save the mcguffin has been a staple of storytelling for millenia.
Apparently millennials weren’t buying napkins being perfectly content to just buy paper towels and use those, or, presumably, nothing. Which is pretty much how I’ve lived my entire adult life. I’ve only bought napkins a handful of times my entire life.
You you never know. That man born long, long ago may have traveled to a galaxy far, far away.
I’ve had repeated cycles of this as an adult as I discover and master new art forms, ways of being, cultural immersion. Each of those has associated music and perhaps another layer of identity. The participatory learning process kind of renders me vulnerable again, which maybe opens up the way to new identities.
I don’t really like the word “identity” because this isn’t about politics. It’s more about earning my place in these different communities.
And the young often imagine that, if they’d been living in the older times, they’d be missing the things they enjoy now. They wouldn’t. Nobody felt deprived because they didn’t have any internet, or because they couldn’t order pizza at three in the morning, or because their parents couldn’t reach them on the phone when they were out somewhere (I’d say very much the reverse, in the last case.)
I remember thinking, quite a few years ago, that later generations were going to have to work hard to shock people who grew up in the late 60’s/early 70’s. Were they going to shave half their heads and dye the other half purple?
Why, yes, yes they did. I wasn’t shocked by it, though.
There’s that, too. Quite a lot of people remember their childhoods fondly – they were taken care of, they knew who and where they were in the world. They forget that they were genuinely afraid of The Dark In The Closet, and they either didn’t notice or didn’t care or took for granted or forgot all about the kid in the next row who came to school with all those bruises and nobody did anything; or the ones who were mocked or worse for wanting to do something only boys got to do, or only white kids got to do. And if nobody ever said anything to them when they were 6 about sex or gender then it must have all been just fine!
(Actually people said things to them about gender all of the time – it’s just that it was the things they grew up listening to and assumed there was no argument about.)
Of course. I can guarantee that they said the same thing about the Boomers when we were in our teens and twenties. Spoiled brats, all of us, who didn’t know how to work or how to behave and wanted everything handed to us on a platter. It’s all a load of shit indeed; and it’s the same shit. Somebody needs to take it away and make fertilizer out of it.
There’s some of that, too.
I update some version of a computer, and the update changes the background colors in a fashion I’d have to go out of my way to put back. Or it changes the name of a function – yes, it’ll still do that, but I have to figure out what they’re calling it now; and no, it’s not because it uses a character now being used for something else, somebody just felt like naming it differently. So every time I update I have to figure that there’ll be probably some actual improvements, but also some changes I think make matters worse, and also some changes that appear to have been made just in order to change something; and that I’ll have to spend some significant length of time figuring all of this out, and quite possibly be blindsided by something when I’m just trying to, say, join a Zoom meeting on time.
It was interesting, learning how to use a computer for the first time. It’s not interesting to have to learn how to do the same things on it over and over again.
I just searched Youtube for SNL for the last handful of musical guests SNL has had and they all seem like pretty mainstream musical acts that I wouldn’t have blinked at 20 years ago.
As I get older, I find myself on the opposite end of this.
I look around and see numerous examples of “fences” (laws, beliefs, traditions, practices, and so on) which are genuinely obsolete. But because there is no immediate loss to doing nothing about these, they persist. Anyone that does try to clear them out will face stiff resistance, but mostly of the “it’s always been that way” kind and not for any good reason. So civilization gets cluttered up with fences that no one is willing to do anything about.
The fences have costs. New things are not always better, but without trying them you’ll never know. And very frequently, they are much better.
So I strongly advocate clearing fences away, and try to practice this in my job and life. Perhaps one in ten times I was wrong; the fence was there for a reason that I didn’t see. I put the fence back in place and only paid a small cost. But the benefits to eliminating the other fences greatly outweighed that small cost.
If a fence was mistakenly destroyed, it can always be rebuilt. It was built once in the first place, after all. But a fence for which its supporters impose too high a cost on changing will never be removed, even if it is well and truly obsolete.
When I was younger, I blindly accepted that there must be good reasons for all the seemingly stupid things around me. But as I gained knowledge and experience, I found this to be largely untrue. Stuff largely persists due to momentum, and over time it accrues defenders that can’t rationally justify its existence, nor even themselves produce the original (perhaps obsolete) justification.
All of this is true, but it’s unrelated to the Chesterton’s fence principle. The principle simply states that a thing shouldn’t be discarded without first gaining an understanding of why it was established in the first place. It’s not about a mindless adherence to tradition, it’s about rationalizing change before embarking on change.
Working in the tech industry I would say that more than half the projects I worked on were complete waste, just a total duplication of other work that was discarded because it wasn’t new or shiny enough. Often because nobody went through that exercise of asking “why are we replacing this?”
Are you perhaps referring to this, often attributed to Socrates:
Children; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room, they contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers. Children are now tyrants.
[Quote Investigator] has determined that the author of the quote is not someone famous or ancient.
It was crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907. Freeman did not claim that the passage under analysis was a direct quotation of anyone; instead, he was presenting his own summary of the complaints directed against young people in ancient times. The words he used were later slightly altered to yield the modern version. In fact, more than one section of his thesis has been excerpted and then attributed classical luminaries. Here is the original text [CAMB]:
The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. …
Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs. They tyrannised over the paidagogoi and schoolmasters.
…anything that follows is a letdown because it’s not as exciting as our first beer so to speak.
The problem is that defenders can raise the cost to arbitrary levels–enough to discourage anyone. It is furthermore asymmetrical; defenders can blindly say “but what about this and this and this”, which the fence destroyer has to respond to. Defenders can demand these responses in any level of detail they wish with all the costs being paid by the attacker.
Obviously, I don’t support ripping down fences completely blindly. But I oppose putting a greater burden of proof on the attackers. Defenders should be obligated justify the existence of a fence. If their justification is weak, the fence should be destroyed.
Some fences are so old that the original justification is completely lost. There is only way to discover the purpose of the fence, and that is to destroy it and see what happens. Most likely, fences that old are obsolete. If not–well, what you’ve learned probably exceeds the cost you paid.
Then I guess it’s a good thing that nobody’s suggested anything remotely like that?
Again, all of this is utterly unrelated to Chesterton’s fence. It suggests merely that you cannot logically declare a thing unfit for purpose until you’ve determined what the purpose is.
I detect that you’re processing some sort of past work-related trauma here, but there’s no need to make this any more or less than what it is.
I reject the very idea that actively declaring a thing unfit for purpose is necessary to have sufficient reason to discard it.
To keep things simple: civilization is littered with things that impose a burden on all of us but for which the original purpose is completely lost, or at least highly speculative. And yet we keep them around due to conservatism, and put the burden on the reformers to justify their case.
In fact, it is likely that the very worst of the obsolete fences are exactly those for which the justification is hardest to discern. “Chesterton’s Fence” imposes the highest burden on these, when they should be the easiest to discard.
In the specific case of laws, I think all of them should come with a sunset clause so that they disappear after some period. If the law truly has continued value, defenders should be able to justify it. If the justification is lost, and there are no defenders around as advocates, then we will see what happens.
And to be clear, this does not mean there is no justification. The possibility of discarding a useful fence is simply a cost I think civilization should pay, to be balanced against the benefits of clearing out the detritus. The cost to a mistakenly discarded fence is temporary and likely small, whereas the benefits to discarding an obsolete fence are permanent.
You’re the one that brought up dissatisfaction about tech projects that weren’t new or shiny enough. I’m thinking far more generally here.
I’m finding this discussion between @Dr.Strangelove and @HMS_Irruncible both fascinating and frustrating—frustrating because it would help if you’d provide some specific examples of the kind of “fences” you’re thinking of.
Gay marriage would be a big one. Proponents suggested that we stop limiting marriage to traditional heterosexual ones. Defenders of “traditional” marriage put forth all sorts of unconvincing arguments about how it would lead to the collapse of civilization.
Should it be up to the reformers to prove that the concerns of the traditionalists are invalid? Should we concern ourselves with the original intent of marriage at all, if one could even discover it? Or should we just try it, and if there is any fallout then we can add corrections later?
Not every fence is as big-picture as that. In the area of technology, there was the transition between phones with keypads vs. touchscreens, led by the iPhone. There was immense wailing and gnashing of teeth (some of it by me!) about the downsides of touchscreen input. And yet almost all of us have seen the advantages at this point. The “original reason” for keyboards is because that’s all the tech allowed early on, and basically because there’s an evolutionary line between mechanical typewriters and smartphones. Those reasons are now irrelevant.
Chesterton’s fence is really just a description of conservatism writ large. We shouldn’t try things until we can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they won’t be harmful. I posit that the harm from trying something, even when the original reasons are unclear, is rarely all that bad, because it is temporary at worst (if gay marriage proved to be a disaster, it could be repealed; if physical buttons proved indispensable, they could have been re-added). But the benefit to removing the truly unneeded fences can be immense. We should err on the side of progress, not conservatism.
That’s a pretty massive generalization. There are lots of things that we don’t know how to fix if they’re once broken. We can’t bring back a species, or individual lives. The costs of discarding a fence that turns out to have been preventing such breakage are very likely to be permanent.
That’s a point. They may be thinking of entirely different sorts of things.
That’s a fence that most certainly needed removing. It needed to be removed because it was doing clear and obvious damage. But also: one of the pieces of evidence for removing it was that while the traditions of this society included that fence, there have been other societies that didn’t have it; and that one of the more plausible reasons for its existence had to do with encouraging the production of children and setting up clear systems for raising them, but we now have plenty of humans and have worked out multiple successful ways for raising them.
Count me as one who hasn’t. Maybe I’m just fat fingered. A significant percentage of the time, when I try to do something on a touchscreen, I wind up accidentally doing something else instead; which does happen occasionally with a keyboard and mouse, but much less often.
The primary advantage of a touchscreen is in not having to haul a keyboard and/or mouse around with the device. Sometimes that overwhelms its disadvantages; not always.
But that’s minor. We know how to build keyboards and touchscreens; making one of them is unlikely to result in our being unable to make the other. We don’t know how to repair all the damage that’s been done by taking down all the fences that kept, say, forests standing.
Progress is a great thing if you look where you’re going. Progress for the sake of progress is a car with a great engine but no steering or brakes.
I will officially be a senior in a couple of months.
I don’t fixate on any particular time as the good old days. All through my life I have lived through what I consider good and bad changes. There are some things that I consider to have been mostly bad all my life and before my time as well, wish they would change. My life was on the irregular side from birth. So change in my personal sphere was quite constant and sometimes drastic. That may have led me to not be one who longs for a particular time and ways.
Maybe those folks who long for the good old days, led more stable unchanging lives in many ways. If it happened to work out well for them, change would be more challenging. Others have mentioned that not all are faced with the consequences of the bad things past and present.
Why not? Those things are so obviously wrong that it should only take a 5-minute session every 20 years to re-up the laws. Do you not trust those future lawmakers to re-up the laws? If so, then you don’t trust them to not repeal the existing laws.
Of course it is. Chesterton’s fence is a massive generalization. There’s no way to address it except in generalities.
We could treat Chesterton’s metaphor more literally. We have someone who is paying the costs for a fence, either due to inconvenience or maintenance. There is no obvious use for the fence: no sheep in sight that might be enclosed by the fence, nor is there evidence of wolves that need to be kept out. There is someone else that controls the fence, unwilling to defend its existence, but simply says:
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.
Chesterton clearly places the burden of proof on the reformer. He does not appear to require anything of the defender, and yet gives the defender maximum power: he is the one that controls the removal, even though our reformer would not have bothered unless he was paying the costs as well.
Gay marriage opponents would never have been satisfied with your arguments. You could have presented them with reams and reams of data about population growth and outcomes of same-sex-parent households and they would have hand-waved away all of it. The solution ended up being to ignore them, and focus on the obvious harm reduction.
Fine, but you’ve been outvoted. The tech industry is a relatively healthy and free market, and so the solution to the fence here is for touchscreen devices to compete against physical buttons. The latter lost.
Many markets are not so free or healthy, and end up being stuck behind a fence. It takes a strong innovator to break it down. And of course many fences are not market-based at all.
Brakes are important. Healthy conservativism would consist of a light touch on the brakes when clear problems have been identified. But society is massively conservative (in the general sense, not just the political sense) and consists of keeping the car in park and holding the brakes down with full force. It takes immense effort to change even the simplest things.
Identity in this context isn’t really about politics (although that is a small part of it). Its about your sense of self. Supposedly thats why children like to role play in games (playing cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, dressing up, etc). They are experimenting with different identities and senses of self. As you grow your identity forms and solidifies, and as a result the media you’re exposed to doesn’t have the same level of impact as it did when your identity was forming.
