A new book analyzes rules as diverse as those for making pudding, those for regulating traffic, and those governing the movement of matter in the universe.
Rule No. 42, the King says, is that all persons more than a mile high must leave the court. Alice counters that she isn’t a mile high. And, anyway, it isn’t a proper rule, because the King just made it up, then and there. “It’s the oldest rule in the book,” the King counters. But, when Alice points out that if the rule was so old, then it ought to have been rule No. 1, the King shuts the notebook he was reading the rules from and shuffles away in the face of her argument.
These rules are considered “thick” rules. This is not because there are so many of them, but because they require interpretation, and because examples are given, and because they make room for all sorts of exceptions. One might even say that thick rules are like a thicket—with tendrils and tangles of special cases, some specified, others deduced. A sick monk might be granted more than the daily allotted amount of bread. A thick rule need not be long.
But, even when issued repeatedly, with more and more admonitory language, the sumptuary laws were routinely violated, year after year. They were also circumvented, with shifts in fashion not yet regulated. Similar attempts to get Parisians to follow traffic regulations, and not throw their garbage in the street, were also failures. Yet, not far away, Amsterdam’s citizens obeyed rules that led to clean streets and a coherent and functioning traffic system.
This adaptation of a comforting but arguably nonsensical or at least misleading metaphor also resonates with Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece. Carroll was a mathematician, a logician.
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