17 July

Chesterton’s Fence is a principle stating that you should never remove or change a rule, tradition, or system until you first understand exactly why it was put there in the first place. Chesterton, like Edmund Burke before him, realised that the rules and physical structure of our world emerge from past problems, for which they were the solution. But the problem disappears from view, and people who come later then chuckle at what seems like ridiculous ‘red tape’ or ‘bureaucracy’, or the placement of a fence or some other material thing.