417 | Go Away and Think

Here's what Chesterton actually wrote.

It's in a 1929 book called The Thing in a chapter titled The Drift from Domesticity, Domestic Life.

I'm going to read the whole thing.

It's a little bit long, so bear with me.

In the matter of reforming things as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle, a principle which will be probably called a paradox.

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 up to it and says, I don't see the use for this.

Let's 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.

This is a completely different argument, right? The first is that it's dialogue with a condition and a permission, which is back to Burke, right? This idea that, yeah, let's, sometimes you have to reform, but we're going to reform to preserve to conserve the thing that we're actually trying to conserve the second is that the standard he's setting isn't agreement he's saying come back and tell me you've changed your mind or he doesn't say come back and tell me you've changed your mind he says come back with evidence essentially come back with evidence of what this thing is for and then we can have a conversation about it you could demonstrate that that thing isn't actually doing what it's for you can demonstrate that the thing it's doing isn't necessary anymore or whatever right or that the costs outweigh the benefits there's a lot of things that can happen there the third is that the object has two names he writes fence or gate erected across one road one paragraph later he reverses to the gate or fence we named the principle after one of them chesterton gave us two on purpose because what kind of thing it is happens to be one of the things that you don't know yet it could be a gate or it could be a fence right this is the um the elephant paradox where different sized creatures are seeing the elephant from different angles and different perspectives and they one of them thinks it's a tree one of them thinks it's this or this or this right uh it isn't until you back up and see the full picture that you know exactly what the thing is and then here's the part that gets cut from the quote very often.

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense.

The gator fence did not grow here.

It's not natural, right? It was not set up by, I have no idea what that word is, who built it in their sleep.

It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics, for there was some reason loose at the street.

Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody.

And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable or not.

That's the familiar argument.

And there it is.

That's the argument, right? This is why it is so integral for all of us to understand the history of our Constitution in a meaningful way.

Because we call things unconstitutional, then we say we're conservative and that we're trying to conserve the Constitution, but do we really know what that means? Because conserving the Constitution means conserving the purpose of it, right? And as we mentioned in the last episode, Some people in the antebellum South thought that meant conserving slave ownership.

And Lincoln made a great case against this, saying that – We put it – we designed a feature inside of our system of government to get rid of that.

And even before the Constitution, during the Articles of Confederation, the new territories were not allowed to expand slavery except for the Missouri Compromise.

So the founders constantly voted in a certain way.