Rules about cows
I walk to work through fields and parks, some of which have cattle and horses grazing in them. There are gates to go through, paths to follow and offerings to avoid. For the sake of the city-dwellers amongst us, let's recap the the unwritten Rule of walking in the country: "Thou shalt leave a gate as thou foundeth it," (or something). But every time I wonder whether closing or leaving the gate open is the right thing to do. Sure, I myself can follow the rule, but what happens if the person before me broke it, and now I'm leaving a gate open that should be closed? Or closing a gate that some well-intentioned city-dweller shut when the farmer is really about to drive his stock through it? The success of the Rule hangs in every single person obeying it, at every single instance in time. (I do realise that in this particular example, two wrongs do make a right, but we're not going to go there today).
The Rule in this example can at best only maintain; it cannot correct or improve on the status quo. For correction to come, more information is required: we need to know what the farmer actually intends, and then we can use our gate manipulation abilities in accordance with that intention. This made me think about rules in general; they do really only work when everyone follows them all the time. In sixth form in NZ, you don't sit a national exam, it is entirely internally assessed. Each subject is given a certain number of each grade to award based on the previous year's school certificate results, and these are then allocated based a student's relative standing within the class. The top three students in biology get 1s, the next eight get 2s etc. Before very long we realised that the quality or work we did in that 6th form year wasn't going to change the grades that were given out: if we none of us did any work, there would be the same number of 1s and 2s awarded as if we all worked like crazy. So we discussed the theory of all of us not working, thus getting an easy year at no lasting expense. Of course it doesn't work like that - all someone has to do then is a little bit more work that the others, and they secure themselves a fantastic grade that they perhaps don't deserve. These kind of ideas can only work when everyone follows them all the time. As Yossarian says:
- Posted by flyingkiwi on 18/07/2006.
- flyingkiwi's site
Please sign in or join etribes to add comments.
