On Chesterton's Fence and the Imperfect Vision of the Past

I have always had an uneasy relationship with political labels. I find that people who enjoy self-describing as having some kind of political belief (especially if they offer such a label unprompted) usually like the idea of themselves as belonging to a group, or movement, or something larger than themselves. In this view, they are tapping into the aspects of political beliefs that are less about a set of questions about the world that one decides on case by case, and more a kind of tribal affiliation. The people interested in such affiliations are usually, in my experience, quite uninteresting. But the Scylla of not wanting to embrace too much of a dumb label must be balanced against the Charybdis of claiming that one's beliefs are so unique, special and nuanced that it would be impossible to put any kind of a label on them. This, of course, is nearly always false, even if other people might pick a label that one finds unflattering. So to balance these aspects, I find myself sometimes persisting in using these labels just as a shorthand - a kind of crude summary of the main principle components of belief-space. 

Among these labels, it has been a long time since I would have described myself as a Conservative (the capital C version, of the explicit political movement). It is hard to have much stock in that in contemporary America (and, indeed, the reasons are exactly the same as R. L. Dabney identified 150 years ago, in his hilarious skewering of Northern Conservatives). But the difference between small-c conservatism, and reaction, is more nuanced. I lean more towards the latter, but the argument for the former is difficult to dismiss. 

The shorthand way I used to describe the difference between these groups was that a conservative primarily wants to keep things as they are. A reactionary, by contrast, actively wants to move backwards. This is usually said as a joke in polite company, for whom the idea of reversing progress is almost unthinkable. Whig history has become so ingrained that the very label of "progress" blurs the "good things are happening" version with "progressivism", the leftist political movement that communists used to use as a euphemism for themselves. 

Of course, Uncle Ted aside, not many people actually want to turn their back on literally everything about the modern world. Nearly always, what it actually means is identifying the problems of modernity that are actually creations of modern institutions and beliefs, mostly by having reference to a wider set of beliefs and ideas from times long past. Among Moldbug's most powerful intellectual ideas is to contemplate what people of the past might say if they could actually talk back to you. For instance, if a progressive who loves to smear the founding fathers as all being racist had to actually have a conversation with a resurrected George Washington, how do they think it would go? Bear in mind the first thing you'll have to do is define concretely what being "a racist" actually is, since he won't know. Then you'll have to convince him that there is a moral and practical imperative that he stop being racist, when he doesn't feel any moral valence in the term at all. Are you sure you can anticipate his rebuttals and refute them? This may be harder than you imagine - both the convincing of the hypothetical Washington, and even just modeling the hypothetical Washington. You need to read a lot about the person and think a lot, especially if you actually want a faithful version of the historical person, and not just a lazy strawman ( Moldbug did a great version of several figures here).

In this respect, the point of these hypotheticals is to embrace the observation of G. K. Chesterton (one of the great defenders of conservatism). Tradition, he said, is the democracy of the dead. And his idea of deference to their views was not just an ancestor worship notion. It was based on the idea that man's understanding of things is fallible, and existing structures may well be solutions to problems we don't understand: 

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.”

When we phrase it this way, however, we can see that the position of a conservative is an easier one to defend in this respect than that of a reactionary. In particular, Chesterton's Fence is an argument for preserving continuous, living institutions. That is, the fence that is still there, and we just don't want it recklessly torn down. The job of a reactionary, however, in some sense the opposite problem. The fence was torn down 10, or 30, or 60, or 150 years ago. There are now cattle wandering all over the road and getting run over. Some factions say that this is actually a good thing that they get run over, or that it's cruel to fence them in, or that fences never did much to stop the problem anyway. Meanwhile, all the people who built fences or knew how to maintain them died a hundred years ago, so it's hard to ask them how it actually worked. 

Which is to say, the reactionary runs into his own version of the George Washington dialogue problem above, where "what would George Washington think" is an easy exercise to state, and a hard one to implement with certainty. That is, the reactionary is trying to reconstruct something from the lessons of the past, but he has only an imperfect understanding of what that past actually was. Even if he gets power (something we're not in great danger of at present), he risks creating a version of the fence that doesn't solve his problems, because it wasn't in important respects the same as the fence that was created in the first place. 

The extent to which this is true depends, of course, on how good the sources are in question. But sources are only ever a tiny snapshot of life - the summation of "who was doing the writing, what they thought was important enough to write down, what parts survived to this day, and which parts you actually read among the many possible sources out there". Sometimes, this will probably be good enough - for understanding major wars, for instance. But other bits you have to work harder to imagine the range of outcomes. 

For instance, consider the question of relations between the sexes. What was the distribution of day-to-day life like for married couples in, say, New York in 1880? In London in 1620? In Rome in 350 A.D.? 

Whig history supplies a ready answer for this. Women existed under "the patriarchy". This was a set of norms that meant that men had enormous power within a marriage to physically assault their wives, to rape them, to make them bear as many children as the man wanted, to prevent them from working or from leaving the home, and to force them to do house work and hard physical labor. It is never quite said that this was the state of all women, but it is usually implied that this was the lot for most of them, for most of history. 

But if this is what modern feminists believe, what do the men's rights / manosphere types believe? Well, at the risk of simplifying the matter, a lot of them seem to agree on nearly all the claims above - they merely want to add at the end "...and that was awesome!!!"

The obvious problem is that very few of them actually made a study of history themselves. Without realizing it, they just took at face value the claims of feminists. Well, do these people strike you as good historians? The first clue that something might be amiss is when all times and places before 1960s America are lumped together as being "basically the same thing". Okay, it's all the patriarchy, fine. Were there any interesting or important variations in that patriarchy across history? Bueller? As Matt Damon said - do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter?

Reader, it is worth considering the possibility, even just as a hypothetical, that even if you restored everything that feminists describe as "the patriarchy", it might make less difference in practice than most people think. 

So we may need to investigate a bit ourselves, once we realize that we can't just trust this received wisdom. You can start with the legal status, obviously. For instance, here's Blackstone's Commentaries from 1770:

By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law[l]: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-french a feme-covert; is said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture. Upon this principle, of an union of person in husband and wife, depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and disabilities, that either of them acquire by the marriage. I speak not at present of the rights of property, but of such as are merely personal. For this reason, a man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her[m]: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant with himself...

Okay, that sounds pretty tough. Bear in mind, though he doesn't say it explicitly, this single personhood meant, among other things, that this tended to preclude the possibility of marital rape. But even here, it's a little murky - Blackstone doesn't go into it in detail himself, and Wikipedia's description is:

Sir Matthew Hale's statement in History of the Pleas of the Crown did not cite a legal precedent for it, though it relied on earlier standards. In a case of Lord Audley's (1593–1631), for instance, Hale cite's the jurist Bracton (c. 1210 – c. 1268) support of this rule, said to have derived from laws of King Æthelstan (r. 927–939) where upon the law holds that even "were the party of no chaste life, but a whore, yet there may be ravishment: but it is a good plea to say she was his concubine".

But even in this seemingly straightforward question, when you actually look up Lord Audley's case, he in fact got executed for (among other things) rape of his wife! In this case, it was for restraining her while some other guy raped her.  (He also sodomized some men, which contributed to the execution too). But it certainly doesn't seem like "do whatever you want to your wife sexually, the law is cool with it" was actually an operating principle of the law in the way you might think. 

But surely he could just beat the hell out of her, no? Well, if you scroll further down Blackstone's commentaries, you find other things like this: 

The husband also (by the old law) might give his wife moderate correction[h]. For, as he is to answer for her misbehaviour, the law thought it reasonable to intrust him with this power of restraining her, by domestic chastisement, in the same moderation that a man is allowed to correct his servants or children; for whom the master or parent is also liable in some cases to answer. But this power of correction was confined within reasonable bounds[i]; and the husband was prohibited to use any violence to his wife, aliter quam ad virum, ex causa regiminis et castigationis uxoris suae, licite et rationabiliter pertinet[k]. The civil law gave the husband the same, or a larger, authority over his wife; allowing him, for some misdemesnors, flagellis et fustibus acriter verberare uxorem; for others, only modicam castigationem adhibere[l].-433- But, with us, in the politer reign of Charles the second, this power of correction began to be doubted[m]: and a wife may now have security of the peace against her husband[n]; or, in return, a husband against his wife[o]. Yet the lower rank of people, who were always fond of the old common law, still claim and exert their antient privilege: and the courts of law will still permit a husband to restrain a wife of her liberty, in case of any gross misbehaviour[p].

What does this mean in practice? Great question. It seems almost certain that "moderate correction" as understood in 1770 is a lot more coercive than it would be interpreted as today. But still, what exactly could you do, at what points in time? It's not as simple as it might seem. 

Bear in mind that what you are describing is a question of power. And as I've said before, in some sense, all power is informal power. People face lots of constraints on their behavior, not just being thrown in prison. 

Let's take as given that Sir Matthew Hale is right, which seems likely, and if you decided to rape your wife, the law wouldn't care. Well, were there any other constraints? 

If the average man had the option to rape his wife whenever he felt like, how many times per week, month or year, do you think he'd actually be up for this? If your model of male sexual desire is that what is sought is "penis in vagina, plus orgasm", then the answer is probably quite a bit. But this is an absurdly reductionist model of male desire, as I've argued in the case of strip clubs (where people pay more money to not bang strippers than they would to bang hookers). The alternative view, even in the case of a monarch, is still best summarized by Joseph Heller. As I said previously:

"In his novel, God Knows, Joesph Heller describes the situation of an aging King David. He has his various courtesans, but can no longer get aroused by them. The only woman who still holds his sexual interest is his wife, Bathsheba. But Bathsheba no longer desires him - her only interest is to try to get David to make her own son, Solomon, the next king in place of his elder son, Adonijah, whom he had with another woman.

Heller describes very aptly the paradoxical situation of the absolute monarch who, due to the difficulty of male desire, cannot have what he really wants

Abishag showed him the door and petted my heaving chest until she felt my exasperation abate. Then she washed and dried herself, perfumed her wrists and armpits, and removed her robe to stand before me a moment in all her wonderful virginal nakedness before raising a leg gracefully to enter my bed on one of her biscuit-brown knees to lie down with me again. Naturally, it did no good. I got no heat then, either. I wanted my wife. I want my wife now. Bathsheba does not believe this and would not let it make a difference if she did.

“I don’t do things like that anymore,” Bathsheba responds firmly each time I ask, and, if out of sorts, adds, “I am sick of love.”

She lost her lust when she found her vocations. Her first was to be a queen. Too bad that we had no queens. The next was to be a queen mother, the first in our history, the widowed mother of a reigning sovereign. I refused to trade and I refused to grovel. I could order her into my bed with a single cursory command, of course, and she certainly would be here. But it would be begging, wouldn't it? I am David the king, and I must try not to beg. But God knows that, by one means or another, I am going to lie with her at least one more time before I give up the ghost and bring my fantastic story to an end.

Worldly absolute power does not, alas, extend to making other people actually want you on the terms that you would like."

At the risk of sounding ridiculous or insensitive, it is worth considering all the boring and practical ways that marital rape might not actually be that much fun for most men. There's social aspects like that she might complain to her friends and neighbours, which would embarrass you. Okay, let's assume you can stop this with the generous "physical discipline" exemptions you were also granted by the law. But what if she were just really sad and miserable all the time? What's the plan then - beat her some more until she's happy all the time? How's that going to work? What if, once you start raping her, she's just not very horny for you any more, which is probably what you really wanted in the first place? What if, once you start raping her, rape is now the only way you can bang her at all? Was this ... what you wanted?

And this is even while treating the women as mostly passive in this equation - having no options other than just being sad. What if there's a risk she might poison you (which definitely happened)? What if she's just well experienced at manipulating you into doing what she wants? 

To put all this in stark terms - what fraction of married men in, say, 1700, above age 40 or 50 or whatever, who had been married for some extended period of time, had vaguely unsatisfied sex lives where they didn't bang their wives as much as they wanted, or didn't bang very often, or just didn't bang at all, lax marital rape laws notwithstanding?

I genuinely don't know. I suspect it was higher than most people think, though probably lower than today, but that you should probably have quite wide confidence intervals over this question. What historical sources would we turn to to answer this question? It's tough. What man is likely to commit to paper words to the effect of "Wife still won't bang me, I'm still annoyed at this fact" given the costs of publishing at the time, not to mention the embarrassment involved in the admission?

Among the many things you could read, let me point you to just one snapshot to ponder - not for this question specifically, but the related question of daily marriage dynamics. This comes from one of Australia's great poets, Henry Lawson. It's from 1897. If you prefer song form to poems, Slim Dusty wrote an excellent song from it

Written Afterwards 

So the days of my tramping are over,
And the days of my riding are done
I’m about as content as a rover
Will ever be under the sun;
I write, after reading your letter
My pipe with old memories rife
And I feel in a mood that had better
Not meet the true eyes of the wife. 

You must never admit a suggestion
That old things are good to recall;
You must never consider the question:
‘Was I happier then, after all?’
You must banish the old hope and sorrow
That make the sad pleasures of life,
You must live for To-day and To-morrow
If you want to be just to the wife. 

I have changed since the first day I kissed her.
Which is due Heaven bless her! to her;
I’m respected and trusted I’m ‘Mister,’
Addressed by the children as ‘Sir.’
And I feel the respect without feigning
But you’d laugh the great laugh of your life
If you only saw me entertaining
An old lady friend of the wife. 

By-the-way, when you’re writing, remember
That you never went drinking with me,
And forget our last night of December,
Lest our sev’ral accounts disagree.
And, for my sake, old man, you had better
Avoid the old language of strife,
For the technical terms of your letter
May be misunderstood by the wife. 

Never hint of the girls appertaining
To the past (when you’re writing again),
For they take such a lot of explaining,
And you know how I hate to explain.
There are some things, we know to our sorrow,
That cut to the heart like a knife,
And your past is To-day and To-morrow
If you want to be true to the wife. 

I believe that the creed we were chums in
Was grand, but too abstract and bold,
And the knowledge of life only comes in
When you’re married and fathered and old.
And it’s well. You may travel as few men,
You may stick to a mistress for life;
But the world, as it is, born of woman
Must be seen through the eyes of the wife. 

No doubt you are dreaming as I did
And going the careless old pace,
While my future grows dull and decided,
And the world narrows down to the Place.
Let it be. If my ‘treason’s’ resented,
You may do worse, old man, in your life;
Let me dream, too, that I am contented

For the sake of a true little wife.

I find this poem wonderful, hilarious, and above all, utterly credible. It fits the observation I remember from Ben Folds that writing about a character can be a way of writing about oneself without it being lewd. At 130 years old, it still reads as quite fresh - the main things that give away its age are technological references - they ride horses, rather than drive cars, and they write letters, rather than phone or send emails.

But count the themes that you might not have expected from Australia in the 19th century. 

-The narrator had affairs with women when he was young and single

-These sounded less like "relationships" and more like "getting boozed with your friends and picking up women" 

Parenthetically, it's also worth wondering who these women were - they might have been prostitutes, but also might just be ordinary girls. Remember, there's an adding up constraint that makes the average number of sexual partners equal at all times. So "men having sex before marriage" has to map to either "regular non-prostitute women also having sex before marriage", "married women having affairs with single men" or "a lot more prostitutes, with these being the only option for single men". For reference here, some estimates are that a third of rural New England brides in the 1780s and 1790s were pregnant at the time of marriage, and even the low estimates at that time are around 10%.

-He is now married, and while overall grateful for this fact, finds it less exciting than single life in some respects, and feels himself somewhat whipped and constrained

-He endeavors to conceal all of the above from his wife, out of consideration for her feelings. 

The last part is especially worth pondering. He wants to protect her from finding out about his past dalliances because it will make her sad, and he loves her. This is described, over and over, as a constraint on what he can say and do. It doesn't carry any force of law, but it doesn't need to. Power is messy and complicated. Does he have the power to make his wife miserable? Well, sort of, in principle, but don't we all? He's probably not worried about being divorced, but it still doesn't seem like much fun. 

Now, I'm not saying that "this is just like modernity!", or that if we could see their day-to-day lives, we'd think them the same as ours (for one small snapshot, his children refer to him as "sir"). But this is obvious - the ways in which the past was totally different in sex relations are taken for granted. The ways in which they might be basically the same are much harder to see.

To take one final example that's a good test of patriarchal authority. Let's define the minimum set of conditions that we can all agree a patriarch would want. If you love your wife, and control her sexually, and can threaten her with violence for misbehaving, what is the minimum thing you probably want to prevent?

You would want to prevent her from flagrantly banging many other men against your wishes.

Surely this would go triply so if you were a man of wealth, strength and power. Surely, surely, this would apply if you were the most powerful man in Europe, and probably the world?

Like, say, Napoleon Bonaparte?

Read this amazing twitter thread. Some especially choice parts:

In 1796 Napoleon wrote:

“You do not write me at all, you do not love your husband; you know the pleasure that your letters afford him, and you do not write him six lines of even haphazard scribble.”

Joséphine had the GALL to come visit Napoleon with the man she was cheating on him with. And when Napoleon came for her, she was nowhere to be seen:

“I arrive at Milan, I rush into your apartment, I have left everything to see you, to press you in my arms…you were not there”

How much power did Napoleon Bonaparte have over Josephine? How much did the patriarchy help him here? Lest you think this is an isolated example, King George IV was not able to divorce his wife Queen Caroline despite the long rumors of her infidelity. Which is to say, at a bare minimum he was not able to prevent her acting in ways that generated persistent rumors of her being unfaithful to him, even though this annoyed him greatly, and he was the King! You can find similar rumors (though disputed) about Marcus Aurelius' wife. Obviously, this model doesn't apply to all men either, or even most men either (the model that "all wives could cheat on their husbands with impunity" as applied to several hundred years ago is surely a worse model than "zero wives could cheat on their husbands with impunity"). But these examples are telling you that the reality was considerably more complex than either of these.  

The narrow lesson here is that we don't actually know how much the things we call "the patriarchy" actually constrained day-to-day life for most married couples. It definitely would do some things, maybe even a lot (birthrates were certainly very different, but contraception was probably also a lot less reliable. Divorce rates were enormously different). But there are reasons to think it might matter less in many day-to-day aspects than most people (certainly most feminists) imagine. Even Augustus, with all his power, was unable to substantially reform Rome's sexual morality. 

But the broader lesson is worth pondering - power is often informal, and so the officially written down rules may not always affect things on the ground in the same way. Pushing on "laws" and "policies" may not solve as many things as we think it will. Laws are nearly always buttressed by social aspects whose actual application and level of enforcement in day to day life may be hard to know. If we implement our best idea of what things used to be like long ago, they may work in different ways than we think, or may not work at all. 

Or as the great Samuel Johnson put it:

How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!
Still to ourselves in every place consign’d,
Our own felicity we make or find.