The Week in Populism
The British philosopher G.K. Chesterton is most famous for his mystery series featuring Father Brown, a Catholic priest who moonlights as a detective. But geeks also rightly honor his anti-populist defense of time-honored principles neatly summed up in what we’ve come to call Chesterton’s Fence. Chesterton (1874–1936) put it this way: if you’re walking through a forest and come upon a fence for which you can see no purpose, you might be inclined to tear it down — to free the wilderness, perhaps, to eliminate a blemish on the land. But it would be better if you first learned why the fence was there in the first place.
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