Good point but that's literally in the original formulation. You just have to know why the fence was there before you consider whether to remove it. "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."
That was my first point, but you put it well. I'd quote further.
"This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in 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. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served."
To apply this to racial segregation, I think we can say the purposes were bad.
People segregate from blacks to protect their families from black dysfunction. It's a very positive and noble emotion. I've met progressives stupid enough to try living in the ghetto and it ends badly.
The probabilities calculated below refer to a one-year period. Figure 1 traces the evolution of black-on-white violent crime as a neighborhood transforms racially. The probability, ΦB, that John is victimized at least once in a year is plotted versus the black fraction of the neighborhood. Beginning insidiously, the preying of black upon white is barely noticeable until the community is about 20 percent black. At that point, the probability of John being attacked by a black is still only 0.02. However, the probability that at least one member of John's family will be attacked by a black is about 8 percent. When the black population grows to 50 percent, the likelihood that John will be attacked by a black rises to 8 percent, and the chances are 29 percent that someone in John's family will be attacked within the year. For most whites, this threat crosses the threshold of intolerability, but those more hardy or less able will remain. As blacks begin to predominate, the situation for whites grows worse rapidly. If John hangs on until his neighborhood is 65 percent black, the risk of victimization will be 15 percent for him and 53 percent for his family. Should John be among the most foolhardy hangers on, when the black population reaches 90 percent, John will have a 54 percent chance of being victimized by blacks, with the chances of someone in his family becoming a victim being better than 95 percent -- a virtual certainty. "
---
Segregation as policy protects the middle class broadly, rather than a particular family as an individual. By making segregation a public good it allows the middle class to participate in it as a whole, rather than it being a privilege of the upper middle class and above.
Segregation attenuated by income turns being able to offload underclass black dysfunction onto others into a zero sum bidding war. They have to be somebodies problem, so we all just keep increasing house prices until those without enough money get stuck with them.
Many people, both liberal and conservative, seem to think that "Black", "urban" and "poor" all mean the same thing - that all Blacks are poor living in big cities, that all people living in big cities are poor and Black, and that all poor people are Black and live in big cities. If you put it this way, of course, almost no one actually believes that, and it's not even close to true. Nevertheless, many people speak or write as if they think it. In fact, most poor, dysfunctional underclass people are not Black, and presenting it as a racial issue is both inaccurate and unhelpful.
You talk about urban crime as if it's a primary consideration for most people. I don't think that's true - most Americans don't live in big cities. As of 2023, only 28% of US population lives in the 300 largest cities (population over 105,000), and not all of those live in high-crime areas.
Suburban segregation is driven by two things:
1. Habit, where people generally tend to move to, or stay in, neighborhoods where they don't feel too out of place.
2. Zoning, where towns with high desirability enact building and development policies to maintain high property values. Since wealth and income are still correlated with race, this enhances racial segregation, but it keeps out poor and working class people of all races and ethnicities.
You are partly correct in identifying housing prices as a component of the problem, but it's not primarily a racial problem, even if many people perceive it that way.
33% of all adult black males have a felony conviction. Obviously many more either got away with it or have misdemeanors (many bargained down from felony charges). And the worst felonies (violent crime, murder) are bigger racial disparities.
That's staggering. By the time you include cousins and nephews you are likely to have a felon around.
What this means is that even when you let in those top 10% middle class acting Bill Cosby blacks...they are only one or two degrees removed from a felon. People tend to want to live where people like them live. The friends and family of those well behaving blacks are often not well behaving, and their friends and family even less well behaved.
That's why when you start with a core of middle class blacks, once it reaches a certain critical mass (urban, suburban, doesn't matter) you no longer have just well behaved blacks anymore. The bad moves in next to the good. The whites that see this happening try to flee for their own safety and because they know what will happen to the most valuable asset they own. The changeover excelerates. Once you hit 20%, it's almost impossible not to swing to 80%.
This is what happened in the suburbs of west Baltimore. They used to be white, but the second they hit 20% the switch happened. Now you drive through and its beautiful houses in disrepair and public schools where they have brawls at graduation. You can find plaques of how Civil Rights law desegregated these all white suburban schools, only to have them turn into all black ghetto schools.
The only way to prevent this from happening (without segregation) is to FORBID affordable housing. If blacks in general and poor blacks especially can't find any housing nearby then you can arrest this transformation. Hence zoning. I think of this less as an attempt to make an asset more valuable and more as an attempt not to ruin where you live and watch your housing value crash.
"33% of all adult black males have a felony conviction."
Well, I'm appalled. For the moment, I'm taken aback. I'm reading the paper this chart came from, and trying to figure out what to think about it. Especially trying to think of something that's not really ugly.
Suburban segregation is driven by Hispanics, Asians, and blacks wanting to live among people of their own race. Sometimes whites, too, but in high immigration areas that's often not a choice.
I agree, you don't want to live in a dangerous neighborhood. Neither do most Blacks. They just weren't allowed to buy homes in safer neighborhoods or get loans to do so. They were often the victims of racial pogroms. The first city ever bombed from the air was a relatively prosperous Black neighborhood, and, no, they got no aid, no one was prosecuted and they never quite recovered.
I suspect that if you re-ran history with that allowance, we'd still have the world of today.
𝘤𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘣𝘰𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘪𝘳
Universally considered a bad thing; mentioned often. But if we are keeping score, the Black crime differential has swamped that damage by geometric proportions.
You dismiss the legacy of slavery rather lightly. It wasn't just about housing. Blacks were denied political rights, education, employment, even the right to stay overnight in many towns. if you want an idea of how Blacks would have faired in a US without those institutions, look at modern immigrants from Africa. In NYC, their children are among those with the highest grades and test scores. Seattle has lots of small businesses run by African - Congolese, Somali & Ethiopian - immigrants. They still run into racial prejudice, but it's a much easier road than the folks kidnapped and brought to the US as slaves.
The Black crime differential in northern cities was about southerners moving north. Southerners are much more violent than northerners even now. They brought a lot of that crap north. Throw in the fact that it was policy for the police to ignore Black on Black crime, and you have a recipe for lawlessness. Harlem was explicitly declared a no-enforcement zone in the 1930s.
In NYC, they built the police HQ on Five Points, a neighborhood notorious for crime and full of European immigrants. The Irish gangs especially were notoriously dangerous and Five Points was the most dangerous neighborhood around. When the Irish rioted during the Civil War, the whole city was in turmoil. If you keep score, the Irish were much more dangerous than the Blacks who kept to their own neighborhood. The Irish criminals were much more ambitious and much more ruthless. Slamming police HQ on top of the old crime nexus was a major symbolic act.
There are risks for middle class people moving into any low income area, whatever the ethnic mix. Progressives claim that poverty causes crime. A case can be made that crime causes poverty. Either way, more prosperous people become targets. It’s especially bad the more they stand out from their neighbors.
In Baltimore I had a black neighborhood on one side and a “white trash” neighborhood on the other. Both were poor, but the black neighborhood was a lot worse. All of the crime that leaked over into our neighborhood was from blacks, even though we were more physically separated from them.
When gentrification came it came to the white trash area. It was just safer. And the local elementary school was the only on not rated 1/10 in the city outside of the rich part of town. The black area was untouchable.
This is statistically true in general. Poor whites are simply nowhere near as violent or I’ll behaved as blacks. Even controlling for income, blacks are a lot worse.
I lived near a Black neighborhood. I even attended an integrated school there. The Black kids were just fine. It was the asshole parochial school kids, all white, who were the street toughs that it was wise to avoid. (At least they were easy to spot in their uniforms.)
I lived in Baltimore for a bit in the 80s. What you say seems possible or even probable but I also remember there were many areas where it was very black along the main roads yet there'd be large single family homes of the wealthy in the white neighborhoods off the main roads. I can remember there was a stretch of Greenmount Ave like this but there were others too. This would seem impossible for many reasons besides what you described yet there it was.
The problem wasn't crime. The problem was that a lot of white people would do anything to avoid having to treat Black people fairly. The reason employers wouldn't hire Blacks was that the whites would quit or riot. (Until the 1960s, race riots were white people clobbering Blacks.) The reason middle class Blacks weren't allowed to buy homes in white neighborhoods had nothing to do with their likelihood to commit crimes. The reason Blacks weren't allowed to attend the same schools as whites had nothing to do with their likely criminal behavior. Jim Crow laws weren't passed because Blacks were committing crimes.
You seem to know a great deal about the motivations of the people who moved out.
I would suggest that racial tensions are a special case of ethnic tensions. We should not treat them as anything special. The same remedies apply, if modified for the fact that some ethnicities are easier to spot.
I think that the Great Society programs are a bigger factor in the dysfunction of our lower classes. They have changed everyone’s behavior, in different ways, by changing the incentives. Some people will only hold themselves together well enough to survive. The easier that survival becomes, the less they hold it together. When we remove the need for male providers we remove the women’s checks on male behavior.
I think that these days anyone able and motivated to get out of a bad neighborhood can. Not everyone has the talents to do so. This is not Lake Woebegone; all the children are not above average.The crappy conditions, especially in the schools, don’t help.
I think it is entirely reasonable to insist on certain standards of behavior from everyone. It does no good to make excuses for people.
I got to watch the transition. The suburbs were heavily subsidized but only for white people. The big move to the suburbs started in the 1940s but really picked up steam in the 1960s. I got to watch the realtors in the 1960s. When a middle class Negro moved into a middle class white neighborhood, everyone in the area was bombarded with warnings to sell now or get stuck in a poor, crime ridden neighborhood. The suburbs beckoned. The Negroes couldn't follow. That was the big selling point.
I assume you are talking about the Great Society's AFDC and its no adult male household member rule and not, let's say Medicare or the moon landing. The Great Society covered a lot of ground. You make an interesting statement, "The easier that survival becomes, the less they hold it together." That sounds like an argument against inherited wealth because it weakens moral fiber, and a lot of Americans made that argument until fairly recently. Some liberals have been making that argument again. They argue that we had much higher economic growth and rising living standards back when we had ruinous inheritance taxes.
Clinton reversed that policy ages ago, and we haven't seen much in the way of societal improvement. If anything, the general decline in living standards across the lower bulk of the economy has made things worse. I live in an area with lots of poor white folks, so I know that the problems cross racial lines just fine. Men aren't going to marry without some income stability and, ideally, prospects. Despite the lack of marriageable men, some women are going to want children that they can't afford or that they can afford until private equity buys out their firm or they get sick.
Moving into safe housing isn't that simple. Most jobs in the US don't pay very well and for the bottom 50%, at least, pay and conditions have been getting worse. Meanwhile, housing costs have kept rising, and they rose most in places where one could get a job. People stuck in bad neighborhoods also have another tradeoff. They usually have a support structure in that neighborhood, family and friends they can borrow money from, have take care of their kids, get a ride from when their car is being repaired and so on. Unless they manage to pull off a major change like getting a degree or certificate, they're stuck. I've watched enough local people struggle with these tradeoffs. There used to be a tier of mid-level jobs with better pay, especially in cities, that let people crawl uphill, but those have been vanishing. The game has changed over the years.
You may think it is reasonable to hold people to certain standards, but you want to choose those standards. I can't blame you, but most of the big arguments of the day have been exactly about those standards. A lot of the politics of the last 40 years has been about lowering the standards we place on the wealthy and powerful while raising the standards we place on everyone else. Take a good look at the dystopian age of government overreach, the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s. A surprising number of conservatives and liberals find that era attractive but for different reasons. The liberals like the progressive economics and high standards for the wealthy. Conservatives like the sense of societal order and high standards imposed on everyone else. People claim that politics is about principles, but most of it is about whose ox is gored.
The argument was never that you never tear down the fence. The argument was always precisely what you are saying here. Look carefully and make sure you know what you are doing, and figure out why it’s there, before you tear it down.
There's another important aspect. It's how hard it is to put up a new fence or solve the fence problem another way. You can often tell because different kinds of fences are built for different purposes. If you take down a fence and some unwanted cows wander in, then you can just put another fence. If you take down a fence and all of your citizens flee to the other side, you have another problem and might not be able to put up a new Berlin Wall and get everyone to come back.
Surely if one wants to nuance Chesterton's Fence, the first place to look is Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France - a book which, as well as being the foundational text of modern conservativism, is brimful of reflections on "finding out that fences may have served useful purposes"? https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
Given how much we talk about Civil Rights law here its worth revisiting how integration failed.
Brown v Board ended school segregation, but most private individuals (north and south) wanted segregation for the most part. The attempt to end run around this desire, like school busing, were abject failures. Modern attempts like adjusting school zone lines to achieve racial balance or ending skills tracking cause similar uproar.
Attempts to end housing discrimination lead to exclusive zoning to recreate the same thing. This ties in with school zoning as well. The result was to recreate most of the effects of segregation but with everyone paying a lot more for housing.
It seems to me that the assumption behind Civil Rights law is that private individuals were "wrong" or "evil" and that once the government forced them to stop being "irrational" we would achieve equality. That is what I was taught growing up in school. That's a pretty big leap to make when you describe it like that.
Civil Rights law is its own Chesterton's fence. It's such a part of our civil religion and now over fifty years of legal precedent that there is nothing "conservative" about trying to fundamentally alter it.
"most private individuals (north and south) wanted segregation for the most part."
What is your basis for this claim? Perhaps I was unusually fortunate, but I grew up in a town where no one, as far as I could tell, wanted segregation in schools. The town had a few Black neighborhoods, literally stretched along "the wrong side of the railroad track." Before about 1955, the Black neighborhoods were served by a neighborhood elementary school whose neighborhood boundaries matched the boundaries of the Black neighborhoods. Around 1955, the town decided that the existing elementary schools needed to be replaced with three new ones. The town, recognizing social trends, deliberately drew the boundaries for the new schools to include some of the Black neighborhoods in each of the new schools. There was, as far as I know, no significant opposition. Certainly, by the time I attended elementary school in 1965, it was completely normal that the schools and classrooms were integrated.
Data on racial segregation shows that it either remained the same or increased after civil rights in the north. The huge upswell in black violence and dysfunction that accompanied civil rights made what integration there was often untenable.
There is even a term "white flight" for the process. The emptying of the cities and the flight to the suburbs was driven in large part by white flight.
My own school growing up was mostly white, while there was a school in the next town over that was mostly black. Real estate values reflected this phenomenon. I've seen it replicated every single place I've lived. People aren't paying several multiples for housing a couple blocks away for any reason other then separation from blacks.
Before civil rights made it illegal there were many "whites only" HOAs in the north that were extremely popular, and even when not explicitly whites only they were often unofficially whites only. Segregation passed "the market test".
What a lot of people mean by "integration" is "we have a couple of middle class blacks around that act like us, but not too many."
I think that the story of desegregation perfectly illustrates the limits of the progressive and reactionary worldview. The reactionary wanted to maintain a world of unequal justice and unequal rights; the progressives wanted to manufacture a world in which the injustices of the past were eliminated through top-down control. The liberal solution-- stop imposing penalties on the basis of race, and let people sort themselves out over time-- was never really tried.
In environments with few blacks there is less risk of "the deluge". When the friend and family (and their friends and family) of those middle class blacks move in and cause rapid neighborhood shifts. There is no Schelling point between 20%< and >80% black.
When there are a lot of blacks around, letting in even a few good ones is likely to let in a lot of bad ones.
People who aren't at risk of "the deluge" can't understand why one would resist letting nice middle class blacks move in.
In the south and many industrial northern cities there are a lot of blacks. In Vermont, not so much.
I think there was a lack of understanding of the local conditions that led to people acting the way they did.
Having not actually solved "the deluge" problem, people turned to zoning and other measures to accomplish the same thing.
I think you're reading in more than you can support with respect to motivations. It's true that "white flight" was a thing, but it didn't only affect whites. Going again to my town's history, there were significant numbers of middle class and professional Blacks who moved to town (or built new houses) in the 1960s and 1970s.
I'm not aware of any evidence that flight from the cities had anything to do with segregation. It was certainly driven by increased mobility, which meant that workers could drive to jobs, so they didn't need to live near their places of employment. Cities tended to have more environmental problems than suburbs and rural areas. Home ownership became more attainable after WWII, largely because of government programs, and lots of savings driven by high wages and low spending during the war years. Recently, housing prices seem driven largely by school district boundaries - I had a friend in the next town who had a house larger, newer, and more attractive than mine, yet it was worth considerably less than mine, because my town has a reputation for extraordinary schools, while his has a reputation as a hard-luck ex-industrial town beset by a lot of poverty, even though it's still mostly white.
I tried to look at your map link, but the link doesn't work.
I'm aware that people are OK with the top 10% of blacks being up to 20% of their neighborhood/school. Once you pass 20% you tend to get rapid white flight. Also, 90% of blacks aren't the top 10%.
As to flight from cities, one can see it explode after the racial riots of the 60s and the increase in crime. In 1950 Detroit was 16.2% black. In 1970 44%. In 1990 75%.
Many of the cities in the north went through a similar transformation.
I spent a lot of time in Baltimore, which on all the maps you can notice the "White L". There is an especially strong divide running right down the center where the left side of the highway is white and expensive and the right side is black and cheap. School district lines are divided by that line.
Good schools = schools without too many blacks.
P.S. Middle class blacks also flee underclass blacks once segregation ended, such that blacks remaining behind in the city are even worse.
Another book I was linked to, a first-hand account not by a resident but by a liberal social science professor involved in community organizing, is Left Behind in Rosedale by Scott Cummings. It's a truly appalling book to read, both because of what it describes and because of the author's attitude to what it describes. What sort of person does one have to be to describe grandmas being robbed and beaten up in their retirement houses with the phrase "Crime transforms the lives of the elderly found in its path and alters their enthusiasm for daily life"?
I quite latterly became aware that the neighborhood my father grew up in was a semi-famous sort of "case study" of white flight. There was even a documentary about it.
To set the scene: the development was in a very beautiful area - within a not-so-beautiful city. A little relief is very striking amid flatness. The children had a big ravine in the middle of the main boulevard, in which to play; and of course the streets were theirs as well then.
There was a fancier section which contained the fine homes of many successful Jewish businessmen (but not solely Jewish, others as well) denied the opportunity to move to the city's most exclusive neighborhoods. Then there was a more modest section. There was a synagogue and school in process of being built though ultimately abandoned. My father was not Jewish nor in the fancy section but friends were in both and he had a truly enormous paper route encompassing all, for which he also had to collect the $. (He would pick up the pile of papers dumped nearby early in the morning; roll or if rainy, wrap them; eventually at fourteen he bought a car to make the job easier.) There were a variety of ethnicities all hustling to succeed in the boomtown but there were no blacks within the neighborhood apart from domestic workers (and sometimes their children - my father mentioned that he knew a later-famous jazz musician whose mother lived-in with one of the wealthy families). However: developers also built a black neighborhood directly across the bayou, where my father recalls watching group baptisms. There's separateness and there's separateness.
And: my grandmother's longtime housekeeper (even long after they moved away) was hired on during this period because they met in the grocery store where people shopped together regardless of race. He also mentioned that the races amicably frequented the same music clubs and pool halls (he, like many kids then, was smoking and drinking from childhood).
This goes to the point that laws can change - and yet - the past can have seen more mixing if incomplete mixing, than now. Whatever virtue is conferred or signified by the ability to get along with others - the law, or even support for the law, does not "earn" that for you.
He never spoke about any of this but in piecing it together I asked him about a porch-bombing (no injuries) that occurred when the first black family moved in. He didn't seem to remember it. But it was front page news! So that seemed weird being as he delivered the news. There was a massive police turnout, and it was a big scandal. This was not countenanced, in other words.
Candidly, everything I have tried to find out about that, has made me feel - not alone in the idea - that it was possibly a false flag operation, and that the VIPs covered that up so as to avoid inflaming people. Nobody was caught or tried.
One could come to the opposite interpretation, of course; and there's a third possibility that some hate-filled outsider sociopath took advantage of the situation. What is true is that the home was purchased in the name of 3rd party activists and the move was done in a middle of night way the neighbors found odd. And then the immediate effect of the bombing was the opposite of its putative intent. And the good liberal Jewish neighbors seem to have been shocked by this event, rather than be its orchestrators. (I mean, does a pipe bomb seem good for property values?)
Over time the neighborhood became an all-black neighborhood. I can tell you that my father would not in the least begrudge blacks having the neighborhood. What makes him sad is that the housing stock and the yards went so far downhill. It looks depressing, far from his childhood Eden, though in recent years there are finally a few signs of reviving "gentrification" including by blacks themselves. (There is an HBU nearby as well.) That's his only observation. He plainly doesn't feel his family was owed that neighborhood forever. He never mentioned any of this episode at all, in fact, until I drew him out.
(I am also suspicious that this changeover was not worked in a smoky back room somewhere in order to make the neighborhood easier to plow a freeway through. Roads and real estate are ripe for corruption down here.)
(The freeway's effect was typically and only disastrous, no matter your race.)
It also bears noting that in the many documentary interviews I don't remember anyone saying they moved for racial reasons. Maybe they *wouldn't* say that, though it was filmed in a more candid time.
They all seemed to principally blame the realtors, for stirring folks up, for knocking on doors all the time, for causing the sell-off and spiral of property devaluation. They repeatedly mentioned - we didn't want to lose our home - but we couldn't afford to lose our asset.
The neighborhood where I lived in suburban St. Louis until age 10 went through the same blockbusting and is today all black (it was all white when I lived there). As far as I know, no documentary was made, although the novel White Palace gives a description (the movie supposedly based on the novel ignores the social history).
A less remarked-upon implication of Chesterton's fence is that poorly understood institutions serve some purpose that it is hard to articulate because that purpose is a very harsh and ugly one.
In the case of drug legalization, I think that it is quite easy to state that "substance abuse affects the quality of life for many people who do not themselves take drugs". Likewise that people have conflicting impulses, and that prohibition aids long term goals over short term impulses.
An uglier rationale, harder to defend, is that prohibition makes it easier to police undesirables. Some people have low impulse control. We suspect they are up to no good - or will be. It may be hard to catch them in the act of a harmful crime, or we may not care to wait until they hurt somebody. It is much easier to police them for the tell-tale signs of their low impulse control.
If we attempted to truly understand the purpose of a Chesterton's fence (and not just for drug legalization), we would need to wrestle with these uglier rationales for these institutions, not just the easily defensible justifications. Conversely, when somebody claims society doesn't really appreciate the benefit of an institution, we may harbor some suspicion whether they have shared a fully candid view as to the purpose for that institution.
They legalized marijuana in my state. They're no worse than the places selling alcohol or cigarettes. The serious users go for stronger stuff like meth, oxy, or heroin. At least we're not wasting money busting people for MJ. Should they legalize the stronger stuff? That's hard to say. A lot of them have other problems like mental illness and physical injuries. They have been opening a few treatment and recovery places, so maybe a few people can shake off the monkey. They say you can turn your back on a person, but you can't turn your back on a drug, so we'll see.
1) Politics is a contest between "The Left" and "The Right". Questionable. Compare Bryan Caplan's and Robin Hanson's conversation with Hyrum Lewis and Vernan Lewis, authors of "The Myth of Left and Right":
Actually, Arnold's "Three Languages of Politics" typology carves U.S. politics somewhat closer to the joints. Particular issues often become binary because majority rule tends to induce binary coalitions, sometimes a two-party system. But there isn't a general content to 'Left' and 'Right'.
2) Common-sense utilitarianism should guide big-picture policy. Questionable. An alternative tradition recognizes a presumption of natural rights and constitutional principles of individual rights and subsidiarity. Common-sense utilitarianism then is limited to a narrow sphere of majority rule, which is tempered by competition among jurisdictions. (Cf. the 9th and 10th amendments.) It turns out that this alternative tradition has good overall consequences—paradoxically a sort of meta rule-utilitarianism.
3) Liberty willy nilly must entail license, in issues around vice policy. Not necessarily. An alternative approach is (a) to pair liberty with strict enforcement of laws against nuisances, and (b) to refrain from any subsidy (or material enablement) of vice. No panhandling and camps of addicts in cities, no free gear. No excuses.
The underlying causes of vice pathologies are technology shock and permissive culture.
"Chesterton's Fence" is itself a fence conservatives should now abandon and tear down.
Mostly because it no longer functions to fence off anything, as the progressives have their superweapon that is the proverbial ladder one foot taller than the fence.
Chesterton's framing was already half wrong when he came up with the concept, and it's completely wrong today.
Consider, "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.'"
Ok, now think how many times you've heard a contemporary progressive (or libertarian) advocate for some new fence-removing reform while saying, "I have no idea what this does or why this was ever done in the first place." They -always- say they know why it was done and what it does. In general, "Bad people did it for bad reasons and since it's still producing bad outcomes, it needs to go!"
The real trouble is that things have changed since Chesteron's time. He published the expression almost a century ago, in 1929, and the spirit of the old-progressive reformers of his day was different from ours.
Back then, it was about Enlightenment: replacing Tradition with Science. Traditions can sometimes deserve respect, but Science is superior. Science may stumble with unintended consequences, but unforeseen problems simply feed into the virtuous cycle of progress of ever more learning, revision, refinement, and improvement.
Today it is about Purification: replacing Hate with Inclusion. Hate has no rights and must be eradicated as quickly as possible, by any means necessary, ruat caelum. If anything bad happens, it's better than the alternative, and often, those people harmed had it coming to them and deserve it, i.e., 'justice'.
The old progressives would say that the origins of and a tendency to maintain some tradition can often be 'innocent', but unless it can be justified in modern terms, it ought not to forestall reform. "We may not know why something was started or built, but if we try and can't figure out what good it's doing today, and it's standing in the way of progress, then it should come to an end."
This is like when a company is being bought, taken over, or just bringing in consultants and every employee is asked to explain what they do and how they add value to the enterprise, which the assumption being that, if they can't, they are likely disposable. That doesn't always work well, but so far no one says, "Chesterton's Layoffs."
But today it's all about hateful bigotry, and hate is never innocent. New progressive always claim to know -exactly- why something was done, and thus, that it -can't- be justified and must end now.
Back then, their attitude was more in the spirit of "modernization" and elimination of "backward" practices and social patterns that were being perpetuated mostly out of what they attributed to cultural inertia and a kind of reflexive, stubborn, and unreasoned reverence for and adherence to traditional norms and forms.
For them this obviously included a great number of morals and laws based on traditional, socially-conservative religious teachings for which, being mostly agnostics / atheists (and congratulating themselves for being so enlightened and liberated thereby) they had no genuine respect and characterized as mere primitive superstitions, rituals, and taboos which, at best, may have had some reason or utility in some other place and time, but were now clearly obsolete.
For example, a progressive of that age might look at a religious dietary law and posit that some prohibition may not have originally had the character of a divine commandment at all, but instead would have prevented some nasty disease in antiquity. They would say, "The exact origins and reasons are lost to time, however, we know that with modern hygiene, sanitation, processing, and cooking techniques the risk has vanished, thus, so should the prohibition." On the other hand, a commandment for hand-washing before meals had obvious utility both in antiquity and up to the present day, so we can continue to insist that people do that, but we will do so in the name of Science instead of God.
So, in general, in their default 'explanation', assignment of culpability was fairly low. "You only feel you don't want us to change this, because that's human nature for masses of simple folk, however, you haven't really thought any of this through like we have, and so when we do change it, you'll experience the improvement, see the truth in our arguments, and thank us."
And back then, there were plenty of old attitudes and old ways hanging around, and in aggregate they were thought to be holding back the forces of change and reform and thus were annoying and pointless obstacles to 'progress' and the birth of a totally New Society: enlightened, modern, liberated, rational, planned, etc. - with new men educated with new teachings using new technologies and following new rules in a new culture, all the news being better than what came before. Ok, mostly for them this was just the old naive dream of Socialism, but that was the general spirit.
And from that perspective, the "burden of proof" shifts to the defense, to justify the continuation of some old rule or tradition with some kind of articulable explanation. If no one, when forced to carry the burden of proof, could provide a good justification for some tradition, then this would be taken as evidence weighing strongly in favor of that tradition being exactly of the nature of an obsolete superstition.
Chesterton was saying that the burden of proof should not be on the defense to prove usefulness, because humans often copy useful traditions without knowing why. There are a number of cases of traditional cultures handling edible plant matter in some ritualistic fashion that removes dangerous toxins or makes nutrients available. But the members of those societies don't know about the toxins or nutrients, maybe don't know that failing to obey custom could cause illness, because as far as they know everybody does it this way all the time and have done so "forever".
It seems that when maize was first being farmed the nixtamalization happened automatically as a consequence of the people of that time not using fired clay to make their cooking pots but instead carving them out of limestone. When they boiled the grains in those pots, just enough alkali would leach out and dissolve in the solution, which did the trick. Only much later did they learn they could use pots made of different materials, and throw some ground up limestone or ashes into the mix. "Why must we use limestone and not clay?" - "Why must we boil the corn instead of roast it?" - "What happens if we don't?" - They would not have been able to provide any explanation acceptable to a modern mind needing Science, and people being able to "just follow tradition" was essential to their survival.
The old progressives would only go on high culpability mode when criticizing traditions and rules related to capitalism such as laws protecting private property and open markets. These were not just innocent traditions, but the wicked manipulations of wealthy elites to unfairly protect and defend their own unjust positions and capacity for exploitation of the masses.
To the extent the masses could be conned and fooled into actually supporting any of this in the name of 'tradition', that was just the consequence of the tragically effective brainwashing apparatus that installed into them a false consciousness. Once they were educated that they were all taught to worship these harmful lies from birth, they would become enlightened to their real situation and awaken as if from the illusions of a dream. Now people annoying just call this "woke".
And today's progressives are just in this "high culpability mode" all the time, about everything. Every change they want to make is justified by the status quo being Hateful or at the very least Wicked in the sense of wealthy interests manipulating 'the system' and brainwashing half the population into defending their ability to profit from exploitation or pollution or some other socially unjust and harmful activity.
That is, it's not that just that they never say, "I don't see the use of this," it's that they always believe they know a use that isn't so.
And the problem with that in our time is that they've got a step further and have their own system to suppress any other attempts to provide the true, alternative explanations by characterizing them as mere slimy-lawyerly cover stories for Hate, for which, as all right-thinking people know, there is no possible excuse or defense.
This is what I mean by "discourse in the shadow of the guillotine". Progressives move on to their next jihad and dare the opposition to explain why not. But by making the expression of "why not" effectively punishable heresy, they don't get any quality responses, and conclude from the silence (and low-quality ruckus from the undeterrable with little to lose) that there -is- no valid response, and so they are correct in their own explanation: Evil.
This is also what I mean by Bryan Caplan's bad habit of what I call "Pariah Baiting". To his credit, Caplan tends to be orders of magnitude more sincere and reasonable and gentlemanly that the typical progressive advocate. But still, there are often times when he too seems to think he sees the absence of evidence and concludes it's evidence of absence, without acknowledging that our social speech codes make it unwise for any successful person to open his mouth on the subject.
All of that is to say we are no longer in a situation where conservatives reflexively follow traditions without knowing or feeling they -have- to have knowledge of any air-tight explanation of their utility, and where progressives confess equal ignorance regarding the purpose or utility of some traditional institution. Nowadays progressives always think they know, it's just they know a false thing. On the flipside of the coin, the conservatives don't feel ignorant either, and have plenty of good and true explanations they would be happy to argue and articulate. It's just that they'll get cancelled if they do. So they don't.
The left is much more amenable to why nots than the right. Right wing cancel culture is a big thing in the US. The best the right can come up with is "we said so".
If the left is much more amenable to why nots, as you say, please oblige us with 2-3 recent examples of the left being amenable to why nots. This will bolster your credibility as the new token liberal in AK's comments!
Why not provide a universal basic income? Why not stop teaching algebra to dumb kids? (That one I'm against.) Why not raise taxes on billionaires? Why not make cops accountable for their use of deadly force? Why not accept that you're attracted to members of your own sex? Why not wear a skirt on a hot day? Why not grant medical coverage to as many people as possible? Why not let women choose whether they wish to carry a pregnancy to term? Why not talk about the evils of slavery? Why not talk about privilege? Why not force cities to up-zone near mass transit? Why not drive to a state where you can get an abortion?
Not all of the "why nots" have a positive answer, but some of them can cost you your job or worse. Conservatives seek answers in the past. Liberals propose new societal structures, some of them rather awful. Conservatives look back and pick their faves and seek to impose them.Some of them are rather awful, too.
P.S. I suppose you could argue that conservatives have their why nots as well. Why not have the police beat up homosexuals? Why not let people hang uppity blacks from lampposts? Why not reimpose slavery except this time on whites as well as blacks? (OK, that was a progressive conservative joke.)
Good heavens. You can't possibly mean that as a serious argument that the left is better because it is amenable to "why nots". You made a laundry list of "why not *point of leftist program*"! (except for stopping the teaching of algebra to dumb kids, which you say you're against) Everyone is amenable to their own "why nots".
Let's take a list at the conservative why nots. Who is harmed by them as opposed to harmed by liberal why nots and in what ways?
For example, a lot of conservatives are against children knowing about homosexuality and that people can have happy, successful lives even if they are attracted to people of their own sex. Conservatives even push for laws to ban books about this and prevent discussions of it in school. Many of those laws are being passed. Teachers have been sanctioned. There's an obvious why not here. Why not suppress teaching about homosexuality? There, that's a conservative why not. The harm is obvious. We've seen it.
Another example is the conservative desire to make it impossible to get an abortion. Why not force women to carry any fetus, dead or alive, to term? We know the harm that does. Pro-life states already have more women dying giving birth. This is about getting more dead women and more unwanted children.
I agree that there are all sorts of why nots on every side of the line. Liberals have them, too, which was the point of my response.
That's a reasonable description of our current discourse. But the "new Progressives" don't have as much control of the discourse as you (or they) imagine. Or, perhaps they control most of the public discourse, but still don't have the support of the ignorant morlocks they're trying to improve.
There are still people who clearly speak against the new Progressive orthodoxy, and get strong followings. Some of these may be mere hucksters (I'm thinking of Sarah Palin and Tucker Carlson), some may not be as profound as they think, but in this respect they're no worse than the Progressives.
Since the "conventional" media are pretty well dominated by the Progressives, these alternatives need their own channels to reach their audiences, such as YouTube, Substack, and Quillette.
There are certainly areas where the Progressives are so thoroughly in control that they can pretty much do what they want. Mindless pursuit of the most superficial "diversity" in elite universities and large corporations seems pretty firmly established. Performative wasting of resources in the quest for "decarbonization" likewise.
It would be good if we had a high-minded, principled, fact-based discussion on topics of public importance, but I'm not sure we ever had.
I can't tell - are you a true believer liberal, or parodying one?
"Diversity" and "transgender theory" are two obvious areas where the only position that rejects facts and imposes authority is the one that's identified with liberals.
The liberals didn't try to impose diversity or transgender theory as an exercise in authority. (In fact, they never tried to impose transgender theory. They merely tried to make being transgender more acceptable. Liberals see Lynn Conway and Wendy Carlos are proper members of society. Conservatives see them as abominations.) They did so in an attempt to tear down fences that were put up for bad reasons. There were a lot of people suffering because people put up fences for hateful reasons.
Conservatives like those fences. They want to be able to hate and impose sanctions on people for simply existing. Naturally, they argue that not being able to maintain a fence or put up a new fence is a form of authoritarian fence construction. It's like being against lynching. The liberals come out against it and pass a law, and the conservatives argue that this law imposes unacceptable limits on their freedom.
You're changing your terms. You said "arguing from facts is essentially liberal." I responded that diversity and transgender ideology are advanced without support of facts, and supported by authority. In response, you appeal to stereotypes, and merely imply bad motives of your opponents. So: let's take a few examples.
On Diversity, both educational and business organizations justify preferences for admitting, hiring, or promoting Blacks (sometimes also women or Hispanics) on the claim that diversity gives better results for the organization - either better education in universities, or better business outcomes for businesses. There is no factual basis for these claims that I've ever heard of, and few attempts to establish a factual basis. Certainly, neither Harvard, nor Duke, nor any of their friends even attempted to present a factual basis in the recent SFFA cases.
On transgender ideology, I expect most liberals aren't really bought in. However, the Obama education department unilaterally imposed many parts of transgender ideology for public schools, and essentially all colleges and universities, with a "Dear Colleagues" letter that required schools to treat all students as members of their preferred gender. The equity, fairness and privacy issues have been much discussed since then, so I won't list them here. But again, there was no factual basis for adopting this position. It was imposed by avoiding the federal rulemaking process, and largely avoiding public discussion.
Do you know any actual conservatives? Have you ever attempted to understand their positions and reasoning? You sound like a good example of the person Chesterton referred to as "the more modern type of reformer."
The topic of the post is drug discovery and its regulatory environment; you can read that or not. The Chesterton quote is the last quote box beginning "In the matter of reforming things"
I don’t think your understanding of Chesterton’s fence matches the common understanding - maybe my understanding does not match. My understanding is that something should not be dismantled unless you know and understand why it exists. Once you know and understand, you can make an intelligent decision to dismantle or not. The problem with the left today, there is no reasoning- when everything is feelings and context there can be no reason.
It's not just the left. The right likes some fences but wants to tear down a lot of others. There's a reason they have rules as to who can vote in the electoral college, but the right is all for tearing down that fence if it gives them power. You can argue that anyone who wants to claim to be an elector should be allowed to vote in the EC.. After all, the right is the party of freedom except for abortion, being gay, wearing non-gender standard clothes and the like. People on the left think that there's a good reason for a fence around who gets to vote in the EC.
He was talking about traditional American conservatism, not the populist faction within the Republican party. Chesterton's Fence is not a populist concept.
My concern is how often it's "conservatives" that want to tear down Chesterton fences -- destroy the Fed, halt immigrations, create/enlarge deficits with tax cuts, Dobbs, leave policing reform to municipalities, turning over the government to the winner of elections.
I'm perfectly willing to bite the bullet and say that the dysfunctions resulting from drug legalization are 100% worth it in order to quit committing the obvious and horrendous moral crime of arresting people for mere possession and private use of psychoactive substances. And I live in San Francisco, so I have skin in this game.
The argument would benefit from anti-legalizers being clearer on what they think the point of criminalization is and why it can't be served well enough by less authoritarian alternatives. If the idea is to protect the public sphere from the nuisance effects of drug use, we have a very well established model of "time, place, and manner" restrictions on alcohol that achieve that, and which we haven't even yet tried applying to more newly-legalized drugs. If the idea is to protect people from their own bad choices-- well, then, we have a difference of values regarding morally legitimate uses of coercion.
1) Do you really believe that recreational drug use has high value? I'm not convinced. I'm an UMC person that can use at least alcohol recreationally and I don't think it's making the world a better place even for me.
2) If we wanted to control addicts we would need what happened with George Floyd to not cause a moral panic, perhaps even be celebrated. The dude was literally high when he committed his crime(and probably most of his crimes) and helped cause his death .
I just don't see it happening. How do you explain that underclass blacks need a whipping when then get high cause they cause trouble, but not UMC whites? I remember how much people bitched about crack vs cocaine.
Rubbing people's faces in disorder until all say they like it is the preponderance of the point of legalization (as with much else). It's just not the point for you.
Do not be too impressed by the short-run difficulties people will inevitably have in adjusting to a major social change. In the long run these will count for little.
re: "And it seems that legalization has resulted in more enthusiastic marketing and stronger drugs, both of which have affected people who otherwise would not have had their lives ruined by drugs"
The last few months when I've seen comments along those lines, its been about places that have removed penalties for users but *not* for sellers. That is *not* legalization. Its like calling our healthcare system "free market" and blaming the problems on capitalism, rather than as libertarians grasp we have nothing remotely approaching free market healthcare in this country. Its the areas where government interferes that are the problem.
There is a lot less wrong with the parable of Chesterson's Fence than is wrong with the paraphrases parodies and strawman perversions of the original parable.
"Never tear down our forefathers' fences" is such a perversion.
The reference to redlining is too casual and incomplete. Although the writer don't acknowledge it, the practice was imposed by the federal government in the 1930s, well before the Brown case. The linked article points this out.
As far as I can tell, it was not intended to impose racial segregation, but to protect the soundness of mortgage lenders. The Federal Housing Administration became a major player in home mortgages, and was required by law to carefully assess risks of mortgages. It developed an underwriting manual for lenders. The purpose was to protect lenders' principal. Mortgages used the mortgaged property as collateral for the loans - if the borrower couldn't make payments, the lender could take the property and sell it, thus recovering its money. If the value of the property was less than the loan amount, the lender's principal was at risk. So, lenders were generally not allowed to lend for properties likely to decrease in value. Racial composition of a neighborhood was one characteristic in this calculation, but there were others, including number of immigrants. These requirements remained FHA policy until the Fair Housing Act of 1968, even though there was by then a significant Black middle and professional class that wanted, and could afford, good quality housing.
In the 1930s, the factors that contributed to decreases in value were difficult to identify and harder to measure, but it seemed that house prices declined in areas where Blacks or immigrants moved in. I think a modern view would say that, for the early 20th century, both Blacks and immigrants moving into northern cities tended to be poor. They moved into neighborhoods where rents were low. And rents were low in areas with low property values. So, I think today we'd say that low property values were a cause, not an effect, of poor people moving in.
In terms of Chesterton's Fence, I'd say that the reasons for "Redlining" had become bad, although there's a reasonable argument that they were bad from the beginning. But it was not a reaction to the Civil Rights movement, as Mr. Kling seems to imply.
The practice was a compromise by the Democrats under FDR. They had a coalition that included southern Democrats who had opposed the Civil War. The New Deal had to include a lot of nasty racist stuff to get passed.
Roosevelt and congressional Democrats had no input in starting redlining; the underwriting standards were developed by economists (principally Homer Hoyt) at the FHA.
They were formally put on paper as a result of the New Deal's restructuring of the home mortgage industry. There was no direct input, but the New Deal provided the framework for formalizing it lest Federal guarantees support Black home ownership.
How about Rothstein's The Color of Law? The FHA would not insure mortgages in areas denoted by red lines on the map. That meant no home loans for property in those areas. The red lines were drawn locally, but the policy that controlled the access to credit was federal and part of the New Deal.
OK - perhaps I wasn't clear. Your factual claims, as far as I can tell, mirror my own.
So: if I understood your post, and the previous one, the objective of the FHA's underwriting standards was to advance the cause of Southern Democrats, who wanted to keep Black people from buying homes - this was the primary motive for the FHA's underwriting standards. Do I misrepresent you?
My claim was that economists in the FHA identified factors that were likely to endanger the collateral of mortgage loans, and tried to avoid writing such loans. One of the factors used in this determination was the racial makeup, or changes in the racial makeup, of the neighborhood of the property. To whatever extent this policy had good economic basis, that basis was obsolete before the 1968 Fair Housing Act abolished it.
The issue between us, as far as I can tell, is not facts: there was redlining, which essentially blocked mortgage loans for properties in areas considered "undesirable." The issue is about motivations: you claim that racism was the objective, imposed by racist Southern Democrats, for the purpose of hurting Black citizens. I claim that protection of collateral and avoiding bank insolvencies was the objective, devised by the economists in the FHA, based on the best academic research available at the time.
I think we can agree that the effects were unjust. But your claim was about motivations.
Others has made the same point already, but Arnold is just repeating the actual argument of Chesterton’s fence. Hence there is no “trouble” with Chesterton’s fence, only with how some conservatives might be applying the argument in a less nuanced way than it’s original formulation. (I haven’t come across any such arguments: Is Arnold “too online”?) Arnold appears to be attacking a straw man here.
Simply put, the formulation is incomplete. "tearing down _someone else's_ fence" is an important statement that puts a fine point on it. You may tear down your own fence and realize that your grandfather had built it for a good reason; and regret it. But if you go tear down someone else's fence without understanding, then you are making two errors of arrogance.
I happen to disagree with a number of assertions about what is an isn't 'better' and 'wrong', but fundamentally, abrogating freedom of association and changing state or local laws from the federal level is about tearing down someone else's fence.
Good point but that's literally in the original formulation. You just have to know why the fence was there before you consider whether to remove it. "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."
That was my first point, but you put it well. I'd quote further.
"This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in 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. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served."
To apply this to racial segregation, I think we can say the purposes were bad.
People segregate from blacks to protect their families from black dysfunction. It's a very positive and noble emotion. I've met progressives stupid enough to try living in the ghetto and it ends badly.
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/hood.htm
-----
"Results
The probabilities calculated below refer to a one-year period. Figure 1 traces the evolution of black-on-white violent crime as a neighborhood transforms racially. The probability, ΦB, that John is victimized at least once in a year is plotted versus the black fraction of the neighborhood. Beginning insidiously, the preying of black upon white is barely noticeable until the community is about 20 percent black. At that point, the probability of John being attacked by a black is still only 0.02. However, the probability that at least one member of John's family will be attacked by a black is about 8 percent. When the black population grows to 50 percent, the likelihood that John will be attacked by a black rises to 8 percent, and the chances are 29 percent that someone in John's family will be attacked within the year. For most whites, this threat crosses the threshold of intolerability, but those more hardy or less able will remain. As blacks begin to predominate, the situation for whites grows worse rapidly. If John hangs on until his neighborhood is 65 percent black, the risk of victimization will be 15 percent for him and 53 percent for his family. Should John be among the most foolhardy hangers on, when the black population reaches 90 percent, John will have a 54 percent chance of being victimized by blacks, with the chances of someone in his family becoming a victim being better than 95 percent -- a virtual certainty. "
---
Segregation as policy protects the middle class broadly, rather than a particular family as an individual. By making segregation a public good it allows the middle class to participate in it as a whole, rather than it being a privilege of the upper middle class and above.
Segregation attenuated by income turns being able to offload underclass black dysfunction onto others into a zero sum bidding war. They have to be somebodies problem, so we all just keep increasing house prices until those without enough money get stuck with them.
Many people, both liberal and conservative, seem to think that "Black", "urban" and "poor" all mean the same thing - that all Blacks are poor living in big cities, that all people living in big cities are poor and Black, and that all poor people are Black and live in big cities. If you put it this way, of course, almost no one actually believes that, and it's not even close to true. Nevertheless, many people speak or write as if they think it. In fact, most poor, dysfunctional underclass people are not Black, and presenting it as a racial issue is both inaccurate and unhelpful.
You talk about urban crime as if it's a primary consideration for most people. I don't think that's true - most Americans don't live in big cities. As of 2023, only 28% of US population lives in the 300 largest cities (population over 105,000), and not all of those live in high-crime areas.
Suburban segregation is driven by two things:
1. Habit, where people generally tend to move to, or stay in, neighborhoods where they don't feel too out of place.
2. Zoning, where towns with high desirability enact building and development policies to maintain high property values. Since wealth and income are still correlated with race, this enhances racial segregation, but it keeps out poor and working class people of all races and ethnicities.
You are partly correct in identifying housing prices as a component of the problem, but it's not primarily a racial problem, even if many people perceive it that way.
I know how a bell curve works, I know you enjoy being around the top 10% of blacks so long as the rest stay away.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/ESTIMATED-US-CURRENT-AND-EX-FELONS-BY-YEAR-AND-RACE_tbl1_237530575
33% of all adult black males have a felony conviction. Obviously many more either got away with it or have misdemeanors (many bargained down from felony charges). And the worst felonies (violent crime, murder) are bigger racial disparities.
That's staggering. By the time you include cousins and nephews you are likely to have a felon around.
What this means is that even when you let in those top 10% middle class acting Bill Cosby blacks...they are only one or two degrees removed from a felon. People tend to want to live where people like them live. The friends and family of those well behaving blacks are often not well behaving, and their friends and family even less well behaved.
That's why when you start with a core of middle class blacks, once it reaches a certain critical mass (urban, suburban, doesn't matter) you no longer have just well behaved blacks anymore. The bad moves in next to the good. The whites that see this happening try to flee for their own safety and because they know what will happen to the most valuable asset they own. The changeover excelerates. Once you hit 20%, it's almost impossible not to swing to 80%.
This is what happened in the suburbs of west Baltimore. They used to be white, but the second they hit 20% the switch happened. Now you drive through and its beautiful houses in disrepair and public schools where they have brawls at graduation. You can find plaques of how Civil Rights law desegregated these all white suburban schools, only to have them turn into all black ghetto schools.
The only way to prevent this from happening (without segregation) is to FORBID affordable housing. If blacks in general and poor blacks especially can't find any housing nearby then you can arrest this transformation. Hence zoning. I think of this less as an attempt to make an asset more valuable and more as an attempt not to ruin where you live and watch your housing value crash.
"33% of all adult black males have a felony conviction."
Well, I'm appalled. For the moment, I'm taken aback. I'm reading the paper this chart came from, and trying to figure out what to think about it. Especially trying to think of something that's not really ugly.
Suburban segregation is driven by Hispanics, Asians, and blacks wanting to live among people of their own race. Sometimes whites, too, but in high immigration areas that's often not a choice.
People made the same argument about the Irish.
I agree, you don't want to live in a dangerous neighborhood. Neither do most Blacks. They just weren't allowed to buy homes in safer neighborhoods or get loans to do so. They were often the victims of racial pogroms. The first city ever bombed from the air was a relatively prosperous Black neighborhood, and, no, they got no aid, no one was prosecuted and they never quite recovered.
𝘐𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘩...
Not an equivalency.
[𝘉𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘴] 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯'𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘶𝘺 𝘩𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘴𝘢𝘧𝘦𝘳 𝘯𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘣𝘰𝘳𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘥𝘴...
I suspect that if you re-ran history with that allowance, we'd still have the world of today.
𝘤𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘣𝘰𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘪𝘳
Universally considered a bad thing; mentioned often. But if we are keeping score, the Black crime differential has swamped that damage by geometric proportions.
You dismiss the legacy of slavery rather lightly. It wasn't just about housing. Blacks were denied political rights, education, employment, even the right to stay overnight in many towns. if you want an idea of how Blacks would have faired in a US without those institutions, look at modern immigrants from Africa. In NYC, their children are among those with the highest grades and test scores. Seattle has lots of small businesses run by African - Congolese, Somali & Ethiopian - immigrants. They still run into racial prejudice, but it's a much easier road than the folks kidnapped and brought to the US as slaves.
The Black crime differential in northern cities was about southerners moving north. Southerners are much more violent than northerners even now. They brought a lot of that crap north. Throw in the fact that it was policy for the police to ignore Black on Black crime, and you have a recipe for lawlessness. Harlem was explicitly declared a no-enforcement zone in the 1930s.
In NYC, they built the police HQ on Five Points, a neighborhood notorious for crime and full of European immigrants. The Irish gangs especially were notoriously dangerous and Five Points was the most dangerous neighborhood around. When the Irish rioted during the Civil War, the whole city was in turmoil. If you keep score, the Irish were much more dangerous than the Blacks who kept to their own neighborhood. The Irish criminals were much more ambitious and much more ruthless. Slamming police HQ on top of the old crime nexus was a major symbolic act.
There are risks for middle class people moving into any low income area, whatever the ethnic mix. Progressives claim that poverty causes crime. A case can be made that crime causes poverty. Either way, more prosperous people become targets. It’s especially bad the more they stand out from their neighbors.
In Baltimore I had a black neighborhood on one side and a “white trash” neighborhood on the other. Both were poor, but the black neighborhood was a lot worse. All of the crime that leaked over into our neighborhood was from blacks, even though we were more physically separated from them.
When gentrification came it came to the white trash area. It was just safer. And the local elementary school was the only on not rated 1/10 in the city outside of the rich part of town. The black area was untouchable.
This is statistically true in general. Poor whites are simply nowhere near as violent or I’ll behaved as blacks. Even controlling for income, blacks are a lot worse.
I lived near a Black neighborhood. I even attended an integrated school there. The Black kids were just fine. It was the asshole parochial school kids, all white, who were the street toughs that it was wise to avoid. (At least they were easy to spot in their uniforms.)
I lived in Baltimore for a bit in the 80s. What you say seems possible or even probable but I also remember there were many areas where it was very black along the main roads yet there'd be large single family homes of the wealthy in the white neighborhoods off the main roads. I can remember there was a stretch of Greenmount Ave like this but there were others too. This would seem impossible for many reasons besides what you described yet there it was.
The problem wasn't crime. The problem was that a lot of white people would do anything to avoid having to treat Black people fairly. The reason employers wouldn't hire Blacks was that the whites would quit or riot. (Until the 1960s, race riots were white people clobbering Blacks.) The reason middle class Blacks weren't allowed to buy homes in white neighborhoods had nothing to do with their likelihood to commit crimes. The reason Blacks weren't allowed to attend the same schools as whites had nothing to do with their likely criminal behavior. Jim Crow laws weren't passed because Blacks were committing crimes.
Don't try to rationalize simple racial hatred.
You seem to know a great deal about the motivations of the people who moved out.
I would suggest that racial tensions are a special case of ethnic tensions. We should not treat them as anything special. The same remedies apply, if modified for the fact that some ethnicities are easier to spot.
I think that the Great Society programs are a bigger factor in the dysfunction of our lower classes. They have changed everyone’s behavior, in different ways, by changing the incentives. Some people will only hold themselves together well enough to survive. The easier that survival becomes, the less they hold it together. When we remove the need for male providers we remove the women’s checks on male behavior.
I think that these days anyone able and motivated to get out of a bad neighborhood can. Not everyone has the talents to do so. This is not Lake Woebegone; all the children are not above average.The crappy conditions, especially in the schools, don’t help.
I think it is entirely reasonable to insist on certain standards of behavior from everyone. It does no good to make excuses for people.
I got to watch the transition. The suburbs were heavily subsidized but only for white people. The big move to the suburbs started in the 1940s but really picked up steam in the 1960s. I got to watch the realtors in the 1960s. When a middle class Negro moved into a middle class white neighborhood, everyone in the area was bombarded with warnings to sell now or get stuck in a poor, crime ridden neighborhood. The suburbs beckoned. The Negroes couldn't follow. That was the big selling point.
I assume you are talking about the Great Society's AFDC and its no adult male household member rule and not, let's say Medicare or the moon landing. The Great Society covered a lot of ground. You make an interesting statement, "The easier that survival becomes, the less they hold it together." That sounds like an argument against inherited wealth because it weakens moral fiber, and a lot of Americans made that argument until fairly recently. Some liberals have been making that argument again. They argue that we had much higher economic growth and rising living standards back when we had ruinous inheritance taxes.
Clinton reversed that policy ages ago, and we haven't seen much in the way of societal improvement. If anything, the general decline in living standards across the lower bulk of the economy has made things worse. I live in an area with lots of poor white folks, so I know that the problems cross racial lines just fine. Men aren't going to marry without some income stability and, ideally, prospects. Despite the lack of marriageable men, some women are going to want children that they can't afford or that they can afford until private equity buys out their firm or they get sick.
Moving into safe housing isn't that simple. Most jobs in the US don't pay very well and for the bottom 50%, at least, pay and conditions have been getting worse. Meanwhile, housing costs have kept rising, and they rose most in places where one could get a job. People stuck in bad neighborhoods also have another tradeoff. They usually have a support structure in that neighborhood, family and friends they can borrow money from, have take care of their kids, get a ride from when their car is being repaired and so on. Unless they manage to pull off a major change like getting a degree or certificate, they're stuck. I've watched enough local people struggle with these tradeoffs. There used to be a tier of mid-level jobs with better pay, especially in cities, that let people crawl uphill, but those have been vanishing. The game has changed over the years.
You may think it is reasonable to hold people to certain standards, but you want to choose those standards. I can't blame you, but most of the big arguments of the day have been exactly about those standards. A lot of the politics of the last 40 years has been about lowering the standards we place on the wealthy and powerful while raising the standards we place on everyone else. Take a good look at the dystopian age of government overreach, the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s. A surprising number of conservatives and liberals find that era attractive but for different reasons. The liberals like the progressive economics and high standards for the wealthy. Conservatives like the sense of societal order and high standards imposed on everyone else. People claim that politics is about principles, but most of it is about whose ox is gored.
The argument was never that you never tear down the fence. The argument was always precisely what you are saying here. Look carefully and make sure you know what you are doing, and figure out why it’s there, before you tear it down.
There's another important aspect. It's how hard it is to put up a new fence or solve the fence problem another way. You can often tell because different kinds of fences are built for different purposes. If you take down a fence and some unwanted cows wander in, then you can just put another fence. If you take down a fence and all of your citizens flee to the other side, you have another problem and might not be able to put up a new Berlin Wall and get everyone to come back.
Surely if one wants to nuance Chesterton's Fence, the first place to look is Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France - a book which, as well as being the foundational text of modern conservativism, is brimful of reflections on "finding out that fences may have served useful purposes"? https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
Given how much we talk about Civil Rights law here its worth revisiting how integration failed.
Brown v Board ended school segregation, but most private individuals (north and south) wanted segregation for the most part. The attempt to end run around this desire, like school busing, were abject failures. Modern attempts like adjusting school zone lines to achieve racial balance or ending skills tracking cause similar uproar.
Attempts to end housing discrimination lead to exclusive zoning to recreate the same thing. This ties in with school zoning as well. The result was to recreate most of the effects of segregation but with everyone paying a lot more for housing.
It seems to me that the assumption behind Civil Rights law is that private individuals were "wrong" or "evil" and that once the government forced them to stop being "irrational" we would achieve equality. That is what I was taught growing up in school. That's a pretty big leap to make when you describe it like that.
Civil Rights law is its own Chesterton's fence. It's such a part of our civil religion and now over fifty years of legal precedent that there is nothing "conservative" about trying to fundamentally alter it.
"most private individuals (north and south) wanted segregation for the most part."
What is your basis for this claim? Perhaps I was unusually fortunate, but I grew up in a town where no one, as far as I could tell, wanted segregation in schools. The town had a few Black neighborhoods, literally stretched along "the wrong side of the railroad track." Before about 1955, the Black neighborhoods were served by a neighborhood elementary school whose neighborhood boundaries matched the boundaries of the Black neighborhoods. Around 1955, the town decided that the existing elementary schools needed to be replaced with three new ones. The town, recognizing social trends, deliberately drew the boundaries for the new schools to include some of the Black neighborhoods in each of the new schools. There was, as far as I know, no significant opposition. Certainly, by the time I attended elementary school in 1965, it was completely normal that the schools and classrooms were integrated.
Data on racial segregation shows that it either remained the same or increased after civil rights in the north. The huge upswell in black violence and dysfunction that accompanied civil rights made what integration there was often untenable.
There is even a term "white flight" for the process. The emptying of the cities and the flight to the suburbs was driven in large part by white flight.
You can see it pretty clearly on the map:
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.htmlwebmap=30d2e10d4d694b3eb4dc4d2e58dbb5a5
My own school growing up was mostly white, while there was a school in the next town over that was mostly black. Real estate values reflected this phenomenon. I've seen it replicated every single place I've lived. People aren't paying several multiples for housing a couple blocks away for any reason other then separation from blacks.
Before civil rights made it illegal there were many "whites only" HOAs in the north that were extremely popular, and even when not explicitly whites only they were often unofficially whites only. Segregation passed "the market test".
What a lot of people mean by "integration" is "we have a couple of middle class blacks around that act like us, but not too many."
I think that the story of desegregation perfectly illustrates the limits of the progressive and reactionary worldview. The reactionary wanted to maintain a world of unequal justice and unequal rights; the progressives wanted to manufacture a world in which the injustices of the past were eliminated through top-down control. The liberal solution-- stop imposing penalties on the basis of race, and let people sort themselves out over time-- was never really tried.
If we let people sort themselves out over time they would have made the "wrong" choices.
Left to their own devices people choose things like Levittown's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown
And of course some goods are public goods (schools) so of course people were going to fight over the provision of those public goods.
See Schelling's model of segregation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schelling%27s_model_of_segregation
In environments with few blacks there is less risk of "the deluge". When the friend and family (and their friends and family) of those middle class blacks move in and cause rapid neighborhood shifts. There is no Schelling point between 20%< and >80% black.
When there are a lot of blacks around, letting in even a few good ones is likely to let in a lot of bad ones.
People who aren't at risk of "the deluge" can't understand why one would resist letting nice middle class blacks move in.
In the south and many industrial northern cities there are a lot of blacks. In Vermont, not so much.
I think there was a lack of understanding of the local conditions that led to people acting the way they did.
Having not actually solved "the deluge" problem, people turned to zoning and other measures to accomplish the same thing.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/race-real-estate-oak-park-chicago/
I think you're reading in more than you can support with respect to motivations. It's true that "white flight" was a thing, but it didn't only affect whites. Going again to my town's history, there were significant numbers of middle class and professional Blacks who moved to town (or built new houses) in the 1960s and 1970s.
I'm not aware of any evidence that flight from the cities had anything to do with segregation. It was certainly driven by increased mobility, which meant that workers could drive to jobs, so they didn't need to live near their places of employment. Cities tended to have more environmental problems than suburbs and rural areas. Home ownership became more attainable after WWII, largely because of government programs, and lots of savings driven by high wages and low spending during the war years. Recently, housing prices seem driven largely by school district boundaries - I had a friend in the next town who had a house larger, newer, and more attractive than mine, yet it was worth considerably less than mine, because my town has a reputation for extraordinary schools, while his has a reputation as a hard-luck ex-industrial town beset by a lot of poverty, even though it's still mostly white.
I tried to look at your map link, but the link doesn't work.
Try this I guess.
https://all-of-us.benschmidt.org/
You could also try this:
https://www.justicemap.org/
I'm aware that people are OK with the top 10% of blacks being up to 20% of their neighborhood/school. Once you pass 20% you tend to get rapid white flight. Also, 90% of blacks aren't the top 10%.
As to flight from cities, one can see it explode after the racial riots of the 60s and the increase in crime. In 1950 Detroit was 16.2% black. In 1970 44%. In 1990 75%.
Many of the cities in the north went through a similar transformation.
I spent a lot of time in Baltimore, which on all the maps you can notice the "White L". There is an especially strong divide running right down the center where the left side of the highway is white and expensive and the right side is black and cheap. School district lines are divided by that line.
Good schools = schools without too many blacks.
P.S. Middle class blacks also flee underclass blacks once segregation ended, such that blacks remaining behind in the city are even worse.
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/city.htm
Imo it's worth linking Devin's work reviewing data and first-hand accounts of the flight from the cities etc.:
https://devinhelton.com/busing-in-boston
https://devinhelton.com/lost-world-of-west-philadelphia
https://devinhelton.com/why-urban-decay
Another book I was linked to, a first-hand account not by a resident but by a liberal social science professor involved in community organizing, is Left Behind in Rosedale by Scott Cummings. It's a truly appalling book to read, both because of what it describes and because of the author's attitude to what it describes. What sort of person does one have to be to describe grandmas being robbed and beaten up in their retirement houses with the phrase "Crime transforms the lives of the elderly found in its path and alters their enthusiasm for daily life"?
I quite latterly became aware that the neighborhood my father grew up in was a semi-famous sort of "case study" of white flight. There was even a documentary about it.
To set the scene: the development was in a very beautiful area - within a not-so-beautiful city. A little relief is very striking amid flatness. The children had a big ravine in the middle of the main boulevard, in which to play; and of course the streets were theirs as well then.
There was a fancier section which contained the fine homes of many successful Jewish businessmen (but not solely Jewish, others as well) denied the opportunity to move to the city's most exclusive neighborhoods. Then there was a more modest section. There was a synagogue and school in process of being built though ultimately abandoned. My father was not Jewish nor in the fancy section but friends were in both and he had a truly enormous paper route encompassing all, for which he also had to collect the $. (He would pick up the pile of papers dumped nearby early in the morning; roll or if rainy, wrap them; eventually at fourteen he bought a car to make the job easier.) There were a variety of ethnicities all hustling to succeed in the boomtown but there were no blacks within the neighborhood apart from domestic workers (and sometimes their children - my father mentioned that he knew a later-famous jazz musician whose mother lived-in with one of the wealthy families). However: developers also built a black neighborhood directly across the bayou, where my father recalls watching group baptisms. There's separateness and there's separateness.
And: my grandmother's longtime housekeeper (even long after they moved away) was hired on during this period because they met in the grocery store where people shopped together regardless of race. He also mentioned that the races amicably frequented the same music clubs and pool halls (he, like many kids then, was smoking and drinking from childhood).
This goes to the point that laws can change - and yet - the past can have seen more mixing if incomplete mixing, than now. Whatever virtue is conferred or signified by the ability to get along with others - the law, or even support for the law, does not "earn" that for you.
He never spoke about any of this but in piecing it together I asked him about a porch-bombing (no injuries) that occurred when the first black family moved in. He didn't seem to remember it. But it was front page news! So that seemed weird being as he delivered the news. There was a massive police turnout, and it was a big scandal. This was not countenanced, in other words.
Candidly, everything I have tried to find out about that, has made me feel - not alone in the idea - that it was possibly a false flag operation, and that the VIPs covered that up so as to avoid inflaming people. Nobody was caught or tried.
One could come to the opposite interpretation, of course; and there's a third possibility that some hate-filled outsider sociopath took advantage of the situation. What is true is that the home was purchased in the name of 3rd party activists and the move was done in a middle of night way the neighbors found odd. And then the immediate effect of the bombing was the opposite of its putative intent. And the good liberal Jewish neighbors seem to have been shocked by this event, rather than be its orchestrators. (I mean, does a pipe bomb seem good for property values?)
Over time the neighborhood became an all-black neighborhood. I can tell you that my father would not in the least begrudge blacks having the neighborhood. What makes him sad is that the housing stock and the yards went so far downhill. It looks depressing, far from his childhood Eden, though in recent years there are finally a few signs of reviving "gentrification" including by blacks themselves. (There is an HBU nearby as well.) That's his only observation. He plainly doesn't feel his family was owed that neighborhood forever. He never mentioned any of this episode at all, in fact, until I drew him out.
(I am also suspicious that this changeover was not worked in a smoky back room somewhere in order to make the neighborhood easier to plow a freeway through. Roads and real estate are ripe for corruption down here.)
(The freeway's effect was typically and only disastrous, no matter your race.)
It also bears noting that in the many documentary interviews I don't remember anyone saying they moved for racial reasons. Maybe they *wouldn't* say that, though it was filmed in a more candid time.
They all seemed to principally blame the realtors, for stirring folks up, for knocking on doors all the time, for causing the sell-off and spiral of property devaluation. They repeatedly mentioned - we didn't want to lose our home - but we couldn't afford to lose our asset.
And they mostly seemed a little bewildered.
The neighborhood where I lived in suburban St. Louis until age 10 went through the same blockbusting and is today all black (it was all white when I lived there). As far as I know, no documentary was made, although the novel White Palace gives a description (the movie supposedly based on the novel ignores the social history).
A less remarked-upon implication of Chesterton's fence is that poorly understood institutions serve some purpose that it is hard to articulate because that purpose is a very harsh and ugly one.
In the case of drug legalization, I think that it is quite easy to state that "substance abuse affects the quality of life for many people who do not themselves take drugs". Likewise that people have conflicting impulses, and that prohibition aids long term goals over short term impulses.
An uglier rationale, harder to defend, is that prohibition makes it easier to police undesirables. Some people have low impulse control. We suspect they are up to no good - or will be. It may be hard to catch them in the act of a harmful crime, or we may not care to wait until they hurt somebody. It is much easier to police them for the tell-tale signs of their low impulse control.
If we attempted to truly understand the purpose of a Chesterton's fence (and not just for drug legalization), we would need to wrestle with these uglier rationales for these institutions, not just the easily defensible justifications. Conversely, when somebody claims society doesn't really appreciate the benefit of an institution, we may harbor some suspicion whether they have shared a fully candid view as to the purpose for that institution.
They legalized marijuana in my state. They're no worse than the places selling alcohol or cigarettes. The serious users go for stronger stuff like meth, oxy, or heroin. At least we're not wasting money busting people for MJ. Should they legalize the stronger stuff? That's hard to say. A lot of them have other problems like mental illness and physical injuries. They have been opening a few treatment and recovery places, so maybe a few people can shake off the monkey. They say you can turn your back on a person, but you can't turn your back on a drug, so we'll see.
The essay has three questionable premises:
1) Politics is a contest between "The Left" and "The Right". Questionable. Compare Bryan Caplan's and Robin Hanson's conversation with Hyrum Lewis and Vernan Lewis, authors of "The Myth of Left and Right":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIS4UWVEuJc
Actually, Arnold's "Three Languages of Politics" typology carves U.S. politics somewhat closer to the joints. Particular issues often become binary because majority rule tends to induce binary coalitions, sometimes a two-party system. But there isn't a general content to 'Left' and 'Right'.
2) Common-sense utilitarianism should guide big-picture policy. Questionable. An alternative tradition recognizes a presumption of natural rights and constitutional principles of individual rights and subsidiarity. Common-sense utilitarianism then is limited to a narrow sphere of majority rule, which is tempered by competition among jurisdictions. (Cf. the 9th and 10th amendments.) It turns out that this alternative tradition has good overall consequences—paradoxically a sort of meta rule-utilitarianism.
3) Liberty willy nilly must entail license, in issues around vice policy. Not necessarily. An alternative approach is (a) to pair liberty with strict enforcement of laws against nuisances, and (b) to refrain from any subsidy (or material enablement) of vice. No panhandling and camps of addicts in cities, no free gear. No excuses.
The underlying causes of vice pathologies are technology shock and permissive culture.
"underlying causes of vice pathologies are technology shock and permissive culture."
Right. It's not so much the moral and cognitive elite of the left driving the tearing down of Chesterton's fence so much as *business* people.
(Part 1 of 2, "Because Substack")
"Chesterton's Fence" is itself a fence conservatives should now abandon and tear down.
Mostly because it no longer functions to fence off anything, as the progressives have their superweapon that is the proverbial ladder one foot taller than the fence.
Chesterton's framing was already half wrong when he came up with the concept, and it's completely wrong today.
Consider, "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.'"
Ok, now think how many times you've heard a contemporary progressive (or libertarian) advocate for some new fence-removing reform while saying, "I have no idea what this does or why this was ever done in the first place." They -always- say they know why it was done and what it does. In general, "Bad people did it for bad reasons and since it's still producing bad outcomes, it needs to go!"
The real trouble is that things have changed since Chesteron's time. He published the expression almost a century ago, in 1929, and the spirit of the old-progressive reformers of his day was different from ours.
Back then, it was about Enlightenment: replacing Tradition with Science. Traditions can sometimes deserve respect, but Science is superior. Science may stumble with unintended consequences, but unforeseen problems simply feed into the virtuous cycle of progress of ever more learning, revision, refinement, and improvement.
Today it is about Purification: replacing Hate with Inclusion. Hate has no rights and must be eradicated as quickly as possible, by any means necessary, ruat caelum. If anything bad happens, it's better than the alternative, and often, those people harmed had it coming to them and deserve it, i.e., 'justice'.
The old progressives would say that the origins of and a tendency to maintain some tradition can often be 'innocent', but unless it can be justified in modern terms, it ought not to forestall reform. "We may not know why something was started or built, but if we try and can't figure out what good it's doing today, and it's standing in the way of progress, then it should come to an end."
This is like when a company is being bought, taken over, or just bringing in consultants and every employee is asked to explain what they do and how they add value to the enterprise, which the assumption being that, if they can't, they are likely disposable. That doesn't always work well, but so far no one says, "Chesterton's Layoffs."
But today it's all about hateful bigotry, and hate is never innocent. New progressive always claim to know -exactly- why something was done, and thus, that it -can't- be justified and must end now.
Back then, their attitude was more in the spirit of "modernization" and elimination of "backward" practices and social patterns that were being perpetuated mostly out of what they attributed to cultural inertia and a kind of reflexive, stubborn, and unreasoned reverence for and adherence to traditional norms and forms.
For them this obviously included a great number of morals and laws based on traditional, socially-conservative religious teachings for which, being mostly agnostics / atheists (and congratulating themselves for being so enlightened and liberated thereby) they had no genuine respect and characterized as mere primitive superstitions, rituals, and taboos which, at best, may have had some reason or utility in some other place and time, but were now clearly obsolete.
For example, a progressive of that age might look at a religious dietary law and posit that some prohibition may not have originally had the character of a divine commandment at all, but instead would have prevented some nasty disease in antiquity. They would say, "The exact origins and reasons are lost to time, however, we know that with modern hygiene, sanitation, processing, and cooking techniques the risk has vanished, thus, so should the prohibition." On the other hand, a commandment for hand-washing before meals had obvious utility both in antiquity and up to the present day, so we can continue to insist that people do that, but we will do so in the name of Science instead of God.
So, in general, in their default 'explanation', assignment of culpability was fairly low. "You only feel you don't want us to change this, because that's human nature for masses of simple folk, however, you haven't really thought any of this through like we have, and so when we do change it, you'll experience the improvement, see the truth in our arguments, and thank us."
And back then, there were plenty of old attitudes and old ways hanging around, and in aggregate they were thought to be holding back the forces of change and reform and thus were annoying and pointless obstacles to 'progress' and the birth of a totally New Society: enlightened, modern, liberated, rational, planned, etc. - with new men educated with new teachings using new technologies and following new rules in a new culture, all the news being better than what came before. Ok, mostly for them this was just the old naive dream of Socialism, but that was the general spirit.
And from that perspective, the "burden of proof" shifts to the defense, to justify the continuation of some old rule or tradition with some kind of articulable explanation. If no one, when forced to carry the burden of proof, could provide a good justification for some tradition, then this would be taken as evidence weighing strongly in favor of that tradition being exactly of the nature of an obsolete superstition.
Chesterton was saying that the burden of proof should not be on the defense to prove usefulness, because humans often copy useful traditions without knowing why. There are a number of cases of traditional cultures handling edible plant matter in some ritualistic fashion that removes dangerous toxins or makes nutrients available. But the members of those societies don't know about the toxins or nutrients, maybe don't know that failing to obey custom could cause illness, because as far as they know everybody does it this way all the time and have done so "forever".
It seems that when maize was first being farmed the nixtamalization happened automatically as a consequence of the people of that time not using fired clay to make their cooking pots but instead carving them out of limestone. When they boiled the grains in those pots, just enough alkali would leach out and dissolve in the solution, which did the trick. Only much later did they learn they could use pots made of different materials, and throw some ground up limestone or ashes into the mix. "Why must we use limestone and not clay?" - "Why must we boil the corn instead of roast it?" - "What happens if we don't?" - They would not have been able to provide any explanation acceptable to a modern mind needing Science, and people being able to "just follow tradition" was essential to their survival.
The old progressives would only go on high culpability mode when criticizing traditions and rules related to capitalism such as laws protecting private property and open markets. These were not just innocent traditions, but the wicked manipulations of wealthy elites to unfairly protect and defend their own unjust positions and capacity for exploitation of the masses.
To the extent the masses could be conned and fooled into actually supporting any of this in the name of 'tradition', that was just the consequence of the tragically effective brainwashing apparatus that installed into them a false consciousness. Once they were educated that they were all taught to worship these harmful lies from birth, they would become enlightened to their real situation and awaken as if from the illusions of a dream. Now people annoying just call this "woke".
And today's progressives are just in this "high culpability mode" all the time, about everything. Every change they want to make is justified by the status quo being Hateful or at the very least Wicked in the sense of wealthy interests manipulating 'the system' and brainwashing half the population into defending their ability to profit from exploitation or pollution or some other socially unjust and harmful activity.
That is, it's not that just that they never say, "I don't see the use of this," it's that they always believe they know a use that isn't so.
And the problem with that in our time is that they've got a step further and have their own system to suppress any other attempts to provide the true, alternative explanations by characterizing them as mere slimy-lawyerly cover stories for Hate, for which, as all right-thinking people know, there is no possible excuse or defense.
(Part 2 of 2, Because Substack)
This is what I mean by "discourse in the shadow of the guillotine". Progressives move on to their next jihad and dare the opposition to explain why not. But by making the expression of "why not" effectively punishable heresy, they don't get any quality responses, and conclude from the silence (and low-quality ruckus from the undeterrable with little to lose) that there -is- no valid response, and so they are correct in their own explanation: Evil.
This is also what I mean by Bryan Caplan's bad habit of what I call "Pariah Baiting". To his credit, Caplan tends to be orders of magnitude more sincere and reasonable and gentlemanly that the typical progressive advocate. But still, there are often times when he too seems to think he sees the absence of evidence and concludes it's evidence of absence, without acknowledging that our social speech codes make it unwise for any successful person to open his mouth on the subject.
All of that is to say we are no longer in a situation where conservatives reflexively follow traditions without knowing or feeling they -have- to have knowledge of any air-tight explanation of their utility, and where progressives confess equal ignorance regarding the purpose or utility of some traditional institution. Nowadays progressives always think they know, it's just they know a false thing. On the flipside of the coin, the conservatives don't feel ignorant either, and have plenty of good and true explanations they would be happy to argue and articulate. It's just that they'll get cancelled if they do. So they don't.
The left is much more amenable to why nots than the right. Right wing cancel culture is a big thing in the US. The best the right can come up with is "we said so".
If the left is much more amenable to why nots, as you say, please oblige us with 2-3 recent examples of the left being amenable to why nots. This will bolster your credibility as the new token liberal in AK's comments!
Why not provide a universal basic income? Why not stop teaching algebra to dumb kids? (That one I'm against.) Why not raise taxes on billionaires? Why not make cops accountable for their use of deadly force? Why not accept that you're attracted to members of your own sex? Why not wear a skirt on a hot day? Why not grant medical coverage to as many people as possible? Why not let women choose whether they wish to carry a pregnancy to term? Why not talk about the evils of slavery? Why not talk about privilege? Why not force cities to up-zone near mass transit? Why not drive to a state where you can get an abortion?
Not all of the "why nots" have a positive answer, but some of them can cost you your job or worse. Conservatives seek answers in the past. Liberals propose new societal structures, some of them rather awful. Conservatives look back and pick their faves and seek to impose them.Some of them are rather awful, too.
P.S. I suppose you could argue that conservatives have their why nots as well. Why not have the police beat up homosexuals? Why not let people hang uppity blacks from lampposts? Why not reimpose slavery except this time on whites as well as blacks? (OK, that was a progressive conservative joke.)
Good heavens. You can't possibly mean that as a serious argument that the left is better because it is amenable to "why nots". You made a laundry list of "why not *point of leftist program*"! (except for stopping the teaching of algebra to dumb kids, which you say you're against) Everyone is amenable to their own "why nots".
Let's take a list at the conservative why nots. Who is harmed by them as opposed to harmed by liberal why nots and in what ways?
For example, a lot of conservatives are against children knowing about homosexuality and that people can have happy, successful lives even if they are attracted to people of their own sex. Conservatives even push for laws to ban books about this and prevent discussions of it in school. Many of those laws are being passed. Teachers have been sanctioned. There's an obvious why not here. Why not suppress teaching about homosexuality? There, that's a conservative why not. The harm is obvious. We've seen it.
Another example is the conservative desire to make it impossible to get an abortion. Why not force women to carry any fetus, dead or alive, to term? We know the harm that does. Pro-life states already have more women dying giving birth. This is about getting more dead women and more unwanted children.
I agree that there are all sorts of why nots on every side of the line. Liberals have them, too, which was the point of my response.
That's a reasonable description of our current discourse. But the "new Progressives" don't have as much control of the discourse as you (or they) imagine. Or, perhaps they control most of the public discourse, but still don't have the support of the ignorant morlocks they're trying to improve.
There are still people who clearly speak against the new Progressive orthodoxy, and get strong followings. Some of these may be mere hucksters (I'm thinking of Sarah Palin and Tucker Carlson), some may not be as profound as they think, but in this respect they're no worse than the Progressives.
Since the "conventional" media are pretty well dominated by the Progressives, these alternatives need their own channels to reach their audiences, such as YouTube, Substack, and Quillette.
There are certainly areas where the Progressives are so thoroughly in control that they can pretty much do what they want. Mindless pursuit of the most superficial "diversity" in elite universities and large corporations seems pretty firmly established. Performative wasting of resources in the quest for "decarbonization" likewise.
It would be good if we had a high-minded, principled, fact-based discussion on topics of public importance, but I'm not sure we ever had.
The whole idea of arguing from facts is essentially liberal. Conservatives prefer to argue from authority.
I can't tell - are you a true believer liberal, or parodying one?
"Diversity" and "transgender theory" are two obvious areas where the only position that rejects facts and imposes authority is the one that's identified with liberals.
The liberals didn't try to impose diversity or transgender theory as an exercise in authority. (In fact, they never tried to impose transgender theory. They merely tried to make being transgender more acceptable. Liberals see Lynn Conway and Wendy Carlos are proper members of society. Conservatives see them as abominations.) They did so in an attempt to tear down fences that were put up for bad reasons. There were a lot of people suffering because people put up fences for hateful reasons.
Conservatives like those fences. They want to be able to hate and impose sanctions on people for simply existing. Naturally, they argue that not being able to maintain a fence or put up a new fence is a form of authoritarian fence construction. It's like being against lynching. The liberals come out against it and pass a law, and the conservatives argue that this law imposes unacceptable limits on their freedom.
You're changing your terms. You said "arguing from facts is essentially liberal." I responded that diversity and transgender ideology are advanced without support of facts, and supported by authority. In response, you appeal to stereotypes, and merely imply bad motives of your opponents. So: let's take a few examples.
On Diversity, both educational and business organizations justify preferences for admitting, hiring, or promoting Blacks (sometimes also women or Hispanics) on the claim that diversity gives better results for the organization - either better education in universities, or better business outcomes for businesses. There is no factual basis for these claims that I've ever heard of, and few attempts to establish a factual basis. Certainly, neither Harvard, nor Duke, nor any of their friends even attempted to present a factual basis in the recent SFFA cases.
On transgender ideology, I expect most liberals aren't really bought in. However, the Obama education department unilaterally imposed many parts of transgender ideology for public schools, and essentially all colleges and universities, with a "Dear Colleagues" letter that required schools to treat all students as members of their preferred gender. The equity, fairness and privacy issues have been much discussed since then, so I won't list them here. But again, there was no factual basis for adopting this position. It was imposed by avoiding the federal rulemaking process, and largely avoiding public discussion.
Do you know any actual conservatives? Have you ever attempted to understand their positions and reasoning? You sound like a good example of the person Chesterton referred to as "the more modern type of reformer."
You might benefit from reading the full story of Chesterton's Fence. You can find it here: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/finding-good-drugs-is-harder-than-it-sounds/239408/
The topic of the post is drug discovery and its regulatory environment; you can read that or not. The Chesterton quote is the last quote box beginning "In the matter of reforming things"
I don’t think your understanding of Chesterton’s fence matches the common understanding - maybe my understanding does not match. My understanding is that something should not be dismantled unless you know and understand why it exists. Once you know and understand, you can make an intelligent decision to dismantle or not. The problem with the left today, there is no reasoning- when everything is feelings and context there can be no reason.
It's not just the left. The right likes some fences but wants to tear down a lot of others. There's a reason they have rules as to who can vote in the electoral college, but the right is all for tearing down that fence if it gives them power. You can argue that anyone who wants to claim to be an elector should be allowed to vote in the EC.. After all, the right is the party of freedom except for abortion, being gay, wearing non-gender standard clothes and the like. People on the left think that there's a good reason for a fence around who gets to vote in the EC.
He was talking about traditional American conservatism, not the populist faction within the Republican party. Chesterton's Fence is not a populist concept.
My concern is how often it's "conservatives" that want to tear down Chesterton fences -- destroy the Fed, halt immigrations, create/enlarge deficits with tax cuts, Dobbs, leave policing reform to municipalities, turning over the government to the winner of elections.
I'm perfectly willing to bite the bullet and say that the dysfunctions resulting from drug legalization are 100% worth it in order to quit committing the obvious and horrendous moral crime of arresting people for mere possession and private use of psychoactive substances. And I live in San Francisco, so I have skin in this game.
The argument would benefit from anti-legalizers being clearer on what they think the point of criminalization is and why it can't be served well enough by less authoritarian alternatives. If the idea is to protect the public sphere from the nuisance effects of drug use, we have a very well established model of "time, place, and manner" restrictions on alcohol that achieve that, and which we haven't even yet tried applying to more newly-legalized drugs. If the idea is to protect people from their own bad choices-- well, then, we have a difference of values regarding morally legitimate uses of coercion.
1) Do you really believe that recreational drug use has high value? I'm not convinced. I'm an UMC person that can use at least alcohol recreationally and I don't think it's making the world a better place even for me.
2) If we wanted to control addicts we would need what happened with George Floyd to not cause a moral panic, perhaps even be celebrated. The dude was literally high when he committed his crime(and probably most of his crimes) and helped cause his death .
I just don't see it happening. How do you explain that underclass blacks need a whipping when then get high cause they cause trouble, but not UMC whites? I remember how much people bitched about crack vs cocaine.
I get it, death penalty for being high.
Works really well in Singapore.
Rubbing people's faces in disorder until all say they like it is the preponderance of the point of legalization (as with much else). It's just not the point for you.
And: it would be an ill wind, etc.
Do not be too impressed by the short-run difficulties people will inevitably have in adjusting to a major social change. In the long run these will count for little.
Is there any evidence that could invalidate desegregation? And if there isn't, is it really a counterargument to Chesterton's fence?
re: "And it seems that legalization has resulted in more enthusiastic marketing and stronger drugs, both of which have affected people who otherwise would not have had their lives ruined by drugs"
The last few months when I've seen comments along those lines, its been about places that have removed penalties for users but *not* for sellers. That is *not* legalization. Its like calling our healthcare system "free market" and blaming the problems on capitalism, rather than as libertarians grasp we have nothing remotely approaching free market healthcare in this country. Its the areas where government interferes that are the problem.
There is a lot less wrong with the parable of Chesterson's Fence than is wrong with the paraphrases parodies and strawman perversions of the original parable.
"Never tear down our forefathers' fences" is such a perversion.
The reference to redlining is too casual and incomplete. Although the writer don't acknowledge it, the practice was imposed by the federal government in the 1930s, well before the Brown case. The linked article points this out.
As far as I can tell, it was not intended to impose racial segregation, but to protect the soundness of mortgage lenders. The Federal Housing Administration became a major player in home mortgages, and was required by law to carefully assess risks of mortgages. It developed an underwriting manual for lenders. The purpose was to protect lenders' principal. Mortgages used the mortgaged property as collateral for the loans - if the borrower couldn't make payments, the lender could take the property and sell it, thus recovering its money. If the value of the property was less than the loan amount, the lender's principal was at risk. So, lenders were generally not allowed to lend for properties likely to decrease in value. Racial composition of a neighborhood was one characteristic in this calculation, but there were others, including number of immigrants. These requirements remained FHA policy until the Fair Housing Act of 1968, even though there was by then a significant Black middle and professional class that wanted, and could afford, good quality housing.
In the 1930s, the factors that contributed to decreases in value were difficult to identify and harder to measure, but it seemed that house prices declined in areas where Blacks or immigrants moved in. I think a modern view would say that, for the early 20th century, both Blacks and immigrants moving into northern cities tended to be poor. They moved into neighborhoods where rents were low. And rents were low in areas with low property values. So, I think today we'd say that low property values were a cause, not an effect, of poor people moving in.
In terms of Chesterton's Fence, I'd say that the reasons for "Redlining" had become bad, although there's a reasonable argument that they were bad from the beginning. But it was not a reaction to the Civil Rights movement, as Mr. Kling seems to imply.
The practice was a compromise by the Democrats under FDR. They had a coalition that included southern Democrats who had opposed the Civil War. The New Deal had to include a lot of nasty racist stuff to get passed.
Roosevelt and congressional Democrats had no input in starting redlining; the underwriting standards were developed by economists (principally Homer Hoyt) at the FHA.
https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/redlining#:~:text=The%20FHA%20began%20redlining%20at,20%2Dyear%20loans%20they%20were
http://hoytgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Homer-Hoyt-Bio-Grant-and-Steve-Final-1-29-2019.pdf
They were formally put on paper as a result of the New Deal's restructuring of the home mortgage industry. There was no direct input, but the New Deal provided the framework for formalizing it lest Federal guarantees support Black home ownership.
That's a pretty strong claim. Do you have any support for it? Anything at all?
How about Rothstein's The Color of Law? The FHA would not insure mortgages in areas denoted by red lines on the map. That meant no home loans for property in those areas. The red lines were drawn locally, but the policy that controlled the access to credit was federal and part of the New Deal.
https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-americaRo
OK - perhaps I wasn't clear. Your factual claims, as far as I can tell, mirror my own.
So: if I understood your post, and the previous one, the objective of the FHA's underwriting standards was to advance the cause of Southern Democrats, who wanted to keep Black people from buying homes - this was the primary motive for the FHA's underwriting standards. Do I misrepresent you?
My claim was that economists in the FHA identified factors that were likely to endanger the collateral of mortgage loans, and tried to avoid writing such loans. One of the factors used in this determination was the racial makeup, or changes in the racial makeup, of the neighborhood of the property. To whatever extent this policy had good economic basis, that basis was obsolete before the 1968 Fair Housing Act abolished it.
The issue between us, as far as I can tell, is not facts: there was redlining, which essentially blocked mortgage loans for properties in areas considered "undesirable." The issue is about motivations: you claim that racism was the objective, imposed by racist Southern Democrats, for the purpose of hurting Black citizens. I claim that protection of collateral and avoiding bank insolvencies was the objective, devised by the economists in the FHA, based on the best academic research available at the time.
I think we can agree that the effects were unjust. But your claim was about motivations.
Others has made the same point already, but Arnold is just repeating the actual argument of Chesterton’s fence. Hence there is no “trouble” with Chesterton’s fence, only with how some conservatives might be applying the argument in a less nuanced way than it’s original formulation. (I haven’t come across any such arguments: Is Arnold “too online”?) Arnold appears to be attacking a straw man here.
Simply put, the formulation is incomplete. "tearing down _someone else's_ fence" is an important statement that puts a fine point on it. You may tear down your own fence and realize that your grandfather had built it for a good reason; and regret it. But if you go tear down someone else's fence without understanding, then you are making two errors of arrogance.
I happen to disagree with a number of assertions about what is an isn't 'better' and 'wrong', but fundamentally, abrogating freedom of association and changing state or local laws from the federal level is about tearing down someone else's fence.