Dents in the Carpet

The Power of Status Quo and The Burden of Proof

On occasion it’s helpful to know a dead language, and most of us know a little Latin whether we think so or not. We all use the term status quo, which basically means “the way things are,” but it‘s often used negatively by advocates of change to mean “the way things have been for too long.”

I’ll begin with a simple example. How often do you rearrange the furniture in your most static room? [Static is a form of the word status and, in this usage, means the room that changes the least in your house, not the room with the most static electricity.] If you consider why you set that room up the way it is in the first place, you may find the reasons remain compelling through time. If you try to change things around, you may end up putting things right back where they were. (which is easy to do because of the dents in the carpet).

This is not always true, sometimes you can rearrange things in a room, step back, and really like it. [And you put ice chips in the carpet dents to help them bounce back overnight.]

The difference between men and women when it comes to rearranging furniture, is that (typically) men can live with the status quo of any room. They set up a TV room, for instance, and it can stay that way for all eternity. There is a reason for this (beyond the fact that he thought it through the first time): By age forty, the typical man has helped friends move in and out of apartments and homes so often that they forever hate to pick up the phone for fear it's a friend whose wife just bought a piano. Men loath the thought of moving furniture—even if it's within the same room.

This is less true for the ladies, who by the age of forty, have watched guys heft sleeper-sofas up and down flights of stairs, wrestle them through narrow doorways, and levitate them in mid-air while the supervising female decides where it goes. I know I have just offended the many ladies who, like my wife, have done more than their fair share of grunt work when it comes to such things. But I still contend that women get the urge to rearrange rooms more often than do men.

Before getting off the couch to move it, men are far more likely to challenge the idea, because they understand that, while change is not wrong, the burden of proof rests firmly on those who which to change the status quo. Not only do women sometimes forget CHANGE bears the burden of proof, they seem to forget the fundamental rules of furniture inertia: the heavier the piece, the more indelible the dents, the less often it should be moved. Or as the Romans said in Latin, Quieta non movere, meaning "Do not move settled things."

In other words, it is safe to assume that there is a reason for the status quo and CHANGE has the burden of proof that it will indeed be better, if implemented, than the way things are. Some changes are good and long overdue, but this merely eases the burden of proof; it does not eliminate it.

This topic is far more important that this furniture example suggests. It becomes strategic in matters of law, morality, and politics, all of which come into play in the issue of same-sex marriage now “boiling over” in California. This battle in the culture war was created by the liberal courts who, as if by fiat, changed the status quo (and the definition of marriage), thereby shifting the burden of proof, resulting in the current upheaval of the success of Proposition 8, which reclaimed the status quo that was in place for all time until four months ago.

To be continued. The beauty of a blog-essay as opposed to say an op-ed piece in the local paper, is that the writing is not static; it can still develop after post time. If you are new to my blog. Here's how posts typically evolve. First, I write a post. Second, I step away from it for several hours (or I sleep on it overnight). Third, I tweak it, sometimes clarifying or adding points as a result of the discussion in the comments, etc. And finally, I continue to add links to the text as more information becomes available. So if you re-read a post after a week after its date, it will typically be more informative than the first-posted draft. In fact, in this case, the most important part of this topic is yet to come.