That is a typical thing which men attack, not because they can see through it, but because they cannot see it at all.

One of the blessings of the internet is that we are now able to go to source documents in seconds to verify quotes or to understand a writer's fuller point by reading it in context.

Such is the case with Chesterton's fence. For a couple or three decades I have been aware of and respect G.K. Chesterton's parable of the fence, a call to not change or destroy something without understanding why a thing exists in the first place. Where I first read of Chesterton's fence I do not recall but it has always been in the hands of another writer. Hearsay evidence if you will. Or would that be eyeread evidence? Something known, not directly, but through the mind and words of another.

It turns out that Chesterton's passage is from The Thing: Why I am a Catholic, published in 1929. The Thing is a collection of 35 essays addressing criticisms or misunderstandings about the Catholic Church.

The metaphor of the fence is in the fourth essay, The Drift from Domesticity.

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, or that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion. We might even say that he is seeing things in a nightmare. This principle applies to a thousand things, to trifles as well as true institutions, to convention as well as to conviction. It was exactly the sort of person, like Joan of Arc, who did know why women wore skirts, who was most justified in not wearing one; it was exactly the sort of person, like St. Francis, who did sympathise with the feast and the fireside, who was most entitled to become a beggar on the open road. And when, in the general emancipation of modern society, the Duchess says she does not see why she shouldn't play leapfrog, or the Dean declares that he sees no valid canonical reason why he should not stand on his head, we may say to these persons with patient benevolence: "Defer, therefore, the operation you contemplate until you have realised by ripe reflection what principle or prejudice you are violating. Then play leapfrog and stand on your head and the Lord be with you."

Among the traditions that are being thus attacked, not intelligently but most unintelligently, is the fundamental human creation called the Household or the Home. That is a typical thing which men attack, not because they can see through it, but because they cannot see it at all. They beat at it blindly, in a fashion entirely haphazard and opportunist; and many of them would pull it down with out even pausing to ask why it was ever put up. It is true that only a few of them would have avowed this object in so many words. That only proves how very blind and blundering they are. But they have fallen into a habit of mere drift and gradual detachment from family life; something that is often merely accidental and devoid of any definite theory at all. But though it is accidental it is none the less anarchical. And it is all the more anarchical for not being anarchist. It seems to be largely founded on individual irritation; an irritation which varies with the individual. We are merely told that in this or that case a particular temperament was tormented by a particular environment; but nobody even explained how the evil arose, let alone whether the evil is really escaped. We are told that in this or that family Grandmamma talked a great deal of nonsense, which God knows is true; or that it is very difficult to have intimate intellectual relations with Uncle Gregory without telling him he is a fool, which is indeed the case. But nobody seriously considers the remedy, or even the malady; or whether the existing individualistic dissolution is a remedy at all.

Chesterton's defense of tradition and the importance of knowledge as a predicate to change is very Burkean, much as he reviled Edmund Burke.

That last paragraph has a couple of powerful observations. Though he was writing half a century before the events, Chesterton captures the tragic irony of the overthrow of bourgeoise values in the 1960s and the undermining of social norms by postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s. They chose to see the Household as a constraining, repressive environment and attacked it, directly and indirectly, with hatred and outrage. And with some success. There were indeed many individuals who were freed from some particular tyrannies and blossomed with their new freedoms.

But as we have discovered, the fence of the Household did indeed exist for well-grounded reasons. While some gained by the attacks on the institution of the Household, even more came astray, drifting into violence, illness, madness and poverty. The association between social dysfunction and poverty and the decline of the Household has now been exhaustively documented across the civilized world. The Household family is never perfect but it serves purposes which the youth of the 60s and the anarchists of postmodernism did not understand.

The other observation is a very rich one and which has perplexed me in our modern times. We are surrounded by self-regarding people preaching the anarchistic evils of postmodernism, marxism, multiculturalism, etc. and yet who are not themselves, fairly, to be described as postmodernist or marxist. Regrettably, these poseurs of goodness are strategically placed in universities and the media to propagate their particularly lazy forms of postmodernist nostrums which only procure consternation and destruction. Chesterton captures these cognitively barren bien pensants well.

But they have fallen into a habit of mere drift and gradual detachment from family life; something that is often merely accidental and devoid of any definite theory at all. But though it is accidental it is none the less anarchical. And it is all the more anarchical for not being anarchist.

The flower children of the 1960s and the corrosive postmodernists of the 1980s, in two waves of ignorance and bitterness, tore down the fences of society and we are still paying the price. Indeed, the postmodernists are only now beginning to be confronted for their cultural vandalism.

And Chesterton was describing it all half a century before it occurred.