Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying’s A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life is basically a nerdy version of my book Paleo Family: Raising Natural Kids in an Unnatural World so obviously, I was excited to read it.
Just like our book, the authors survey various aspects of our hyper-novel life, from sex to diet to parenting and pharmaceutical drugs, and show us how underappreciating our nature can be harmful to us.
They touch on the progress paradox that has been explored before but apply a concept I had never heard before: Chesterton’s fence, a heuristic about decision-making. It goes something like this: in order to make good decisions, we must understand the rationale behind previous decisions. Chesterton wrote:
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.”
I would change it up a bit. Let’s say a man finds himself at a park but there’s a fence keeping him from a beautiful area not 20 feet away, so he removes the fence only to learn in a tragic irony he was in a zoo and the fence was holding back a hungry tiger.
When applied to modern life, it means basically let’s not succumb to scientific hubris and do things that may have unintended consequences (the concept of frontal lobotomies come to mind).
The entire book is a warning against tearing down the Cherterton’s fences of nature (eg don’t cut out organs that you don’t fully understand).
Chesterton’s fence is a brilliant concept and I am disappointed I didn’t use it for Paleo Family.
The authors bring up some great points including the idea that kids seeing so many animated human figures that don’t respond like humans may be contributing to the autism epidemic. They also offer a healthy amount of skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry, which I appreciate, and pointed out the likelihood that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab.
But in the last chapter, the authors make a seeming about face and ironically advocate for tearing down a Chesterton’s fence. They claim that humanity’s innate desire for growth is unsustainable and will lead to collapse. They then associate society’s apparent natural inclination to seek short term gains over long term benefits (evolutionary senescence?) with the free market and call the defense of that the “naturalistic fallacy,” which is the fallacy of believing that because it exists in nature, it’s good. They may make some good points in this last section but without a full understanding of the concepts, they basically contradict what I took to be the main thesis of the book.
The authors pit justice and freedom against each other, claiming that a society can’t have both. But this is a false dichotomy because there is a system that maximizes justice and freedom as I’ve explored elsewhere. The closer a society gets to maximizing individual freedom, the more justice there is. They go hand in hand; they don’t oppose each other. Of course, this relies on the inherent limitations of the libertarian non-aggression principle: you are free to do whatever you want as long as it does not infringe on the same right of others; your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose. This is the system that maximizes freedom and justice and leads to the most human flourishing.
This also applies to the negative externalities of business in a free market system, which the authors criticize. If the freedom of the businesses to produce ends at the destruction of others’ property then we have maximized freedom and justice. That’s where regulation must stop.
But the authors likely don’t want to limit regulation to simply preventing harm. While unsaid, they likely seek to prevent people from going without healthcare or food in order to serve justice. When that happens, it certainly does pit justice against freedom.
The authors rightly point out the negative externalities of businesses and corporations, but they don’t mention the negative externalities of government. And those tend to be much worse as we’ve seen the last couple years with the lockdowns and medical tyranny. It is government overreach beyond its only legitimate role of protecting the negative rights of citizens that is the worst form of hubris and Chesterton’s fence destruction.
Weinstein and Heying alluded to that hubris in pointing out the origin of SARS-CoV-2 but failed to mention it in the insane reaction to the disease, which was the geopolitical equivalent of a frontal lobotomy to cure a headache. It is government regulation that is the greatest threat to all of society’s Chesterton’s fences and what we need to be skeptical of most.
Beware Chesterton’s fence indeed.