Taking a chainsaw to Chesterton's Fence

American conservatives are sinking into collective madness

The inimitable G.K. Chesterton wrote one of the wisest paragraphs in the King’s English.

Here it is:

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.”

For more than a century “Chesterton’s Fence” has been part of the repertoire of any conservative who has read a book or two. Do not assume you know all there is to know, you zealous liberals. Learn why something came to be before you raze and replace it. Or you may learn the hard way.

Simple. Elegant. Inarguably true.

And if you took Psych 101, or have read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, you will know that this lesson needs to repeated, constantly, because thinking we know all there is to know comes as easily and naturally to humans as breathing. So if we see a “fence” — an institution, a program, a law, a regulation, whatever — and we see no good in it, it’s only human to conclude “there is no good in it.” And merrily tear it down. It takes real effort and care to say, “I see no use in it but I should investigate further to ensure there is not more to the story that I do not know.” As Daniel Kahneman wrote, the human brain is “a machine for jumping to conclusions” and it is able to do this because a central operating principle of the mind is “WYSIATI” — What You See Is All There Is.

This is all easy to understand in the abstract. But in the particular? Especially when the particular involves politics and passion? We tend to forget it in an instant.

Which brings me to Elon Musk.

Elon Musk at CPAC, a conference of alleged conservatives

I won’t summarize what Musk and his merry band of Muskovites are doing to the government of the United States. You surely already know that. You also know who is reacting, and how.

Liberals, progressives, Democrats are appalled. But conservatives and Republicans? Thrilled. Delighted. Excited like never before.

In these polarized times, the fact that the political camps line up like this is more than enough to get most people to line up accordingly. If you’re on the left side of the spectrum, you hate it. If you’re on the right, you love it. And you love Musk.

But set aside those political alignments for a moment, if you can, and think about this from the perspective of Chesterton’s Fence.

Elon Musk may think he knows everything about everything, but no one does, and there’s little reason to think he knows very much about the operations of the US government at all. His band of pimply hackers knows less.

But they started their work with the rock-solid conviction that government is the enemy and it is absolutely stuffed with waste, fraud, and abuse which the Muskovites would rout with a blitzkrieg of cutting. Then they rolled into various departments and agencies, slammed Red Bull, raced through databases, scanned bare descriptions of programs and expenditures, and hit the “delete” button as fast as a master telegrapher typing Carthago delenda est in Morse code.

From the perspective of Chesterton’s Fence, that is a textbook illustration how not to reform. It is mad. Lunatic. It is the sort of thing Bolsheviks do. Unintended and appalling consequences are all but inevitable.

You know how Musk and Trump bellowed that USAID was spending $50 million on condoms for Gaza? And beat their chests about putting a stop to it? And it turned out that the “Gaza” in question is not the future Riviera of the Middle East but a province in Mozambique? And the condoms played a critical role in HIV prevention?

Oops!

I’m sure that had the ghost of G.K. Chesterton shaking his head. You can learn more, then decide. Or you can decide and learn more the hard way. One way or the other, you will learn

Of course, Musk being Musk, he simply shrugged off this revelation. “Nobody bats a thousand,” he smirked. Trump being Trump, he repeated the original falsehood, but doubled the figure to $100 million.

It’s easy to laugh at the absurdity here. But remember, we aren’t talking about unmanned rockets, or software for social media. “Move fast and break things” is a fine ethos for engineers working with ones and zeroes or atoms that can’t kill. But this is the government of the United States of America. What it does matters immensely to the lives of people in America and around the world.

Thanks to Musk’s little whoopsie real people will get HIV. Real people will die. “Move fast and break things” doesn’t work when the “things” are people.

There are only two ways to defend what Musk and Trump are doing.

One is to argue that entrenched bureaucracies are so resistant to real reform that only a blitzkrieg approach can overcome their defences. I don’t buy that in this case. The Republicans have control of all the levers of power for at least the next two years. If committees of serious people had gone department by department, agency by agency, taking at least a month to seriously investigate what those apparatuses do and why before making recommendations on what to cut, they could still have carried out a massive overhaul of government.

The other defence is to argue that I have the wrong goal in mind. Musk and Trump don’t want to reform what is. They want to break it. And burn what remains. But this defence amounts to an admission that Musk and Trump are, in spirit if not ideology, Bolsheviks. Which should give self-described conservatives pause, one would think.

But self-described conservatives have no doubts. Support for Musk on the right is sky-high. When Musk waved a chainsaw at CPAC like a pro wrestler hyping WrestleMania, the crowd went wild.

Because American conservatives have outsourced their minds to the Party. And if the Party says the Czar’s family must die, or farmers must starve, or the Soviet Union must make a pact with Hitler, that’s all you need to know. Stand and applaud.

G. K. Chesterton would be horrified. As any sensible person should be, whatever political label he or she chooses.