Rules that are meant to be broken, and Broken Windows

I had gone with my children and their cousins for a swim at the Madras Club. My 14 month old nephew was swimming for the first time. I was glad that this rite of passage happened at the Madras Club. My generation of cousins have spent many hours swimming here, accompanied by my father or grandfather. I thoroughly enjoyed the moment, and took a few pictures to remember the occasion by.

By some obscure club by-law taking photos at the poolside is not allowed. I knew about the rule; it’s not a bad rule per se in the age of the internet. I ignored the rule. Nobody objected. A sense of proportion, common sense, prevailed over rigid bureaucracy. Good call.

Except...I have long been a fan of the broken windows theory. This theory maintains that small rule-breaks send out a signal that nobody is in charge, and lead to progressively more severe rule-breaks. For instance, if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, the rest of the windows will soon be broken. A building with many broken windows left unrepaired will soon be looted, and so on. I was delighted to read about experimental evidence confirming this theory.

A sense of proportion and broken windows, do the two thoughts sit together? Apart from the profound truth that rules are great as long as they don’t inconvenience this blogger.

Maybe context matters. My (self-indulgent) interpretation is that in small, personal, closed homogenous groups, when the shadow of the future is a real force, when the stakes are low, broken windows is overkill. At an extreme, broken windows within a family would be pathological. At the other extreme, a sense of proportion is not going to manage millions of fleeting, anonymous interactions on the streets of a city, or in any marketplace. Simple, explicit, rigidly enforced rules are necessary in this context. A private privileged member’s club in my hometown is a lot closer to the family end of that scale.

Bodyline is still so resonant in cricket because that was the point at which the balance tipped. Before bodyline, cricket defined, and was defined by, an implicit gentleman’s code. Douglas Jardine was the man who declared that the game was now too big to be contained within a gentleman’s code.