Mend, Don’t Raze

Edmund Burke, an Irish-born member of the British Parliament, watched the French Revolution with alarm. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), he argued that rebuilding a society from abstract principles throws away knowledge no single generation could recreate.

For Burke a society is a partnership between the living, the dead and those not yet born. Its customs hold lessons nobody wrote down. That did not mean nothing should change. A state that cannot change, he wrote, cannot preserve itself. But change should fix the faulty part, not dissolve the whole.

Thomas Paine replied that the dead should not govern the living. The habit worth keeping from both: before tearing something down, ask what it was doing.

The four o’clock tasting

When Rhea takes over her late aunt’s restaurant, she wants to scrap the whole menu along with odd old routines, such as tasting every sauce at four in the afternoon.

A cook explains that the four o’clock tasting catches sauces that turned in the afternoon heat. Rhea keeps it, replaces the two dishes nobody orders and changes one thing at a time, so she can see what each change does.

Try this today Before you scrap a rule or routine today, find out what problem it was solving.