In Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall,” [1] one line has outlived all the others in the common tongue of the English speaking world, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Each year, as the poem goes, Frost and his neighbor walk the line of the stone wall between their properties, each putting back the stones that have fallen to either’s side.
The opening line, repeated in two places, sets the stage for ready analogy, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Indeed, one of the key pulses of both paganism and humanism is the overriding of all historic and social barriers in the creation of normless Utopia. There, they promise, freed from the restraints of morals, ethics, religion, and cultural expectation, the human soul will fall into perfect harmony with his environment.
This is worldview. It speaks to the source of human problems. It says “people are not the problem, human institutions are the problem, past constructs for doing society are the problem.”
Biblical Worldview, however, values the boundaries set for man by a loving creator for man’s good, revealed through carefully tracked cause-effect structures in a long-game, and through the revelation of Scripture. Biblical worldview relishes the discovery of the path of life and the building of walls in society to lead people down that path.
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” so, every year, gaps large and small appear in the wall. He recounts the causes for the dismantling, some of nature, some of man, some of beast. Frustrated with the demand to do this every year, he questions his neighbor about the need for such a wall. It’s hard work; it’s tricky work; it tires them out, roughs up their hands… why bother?
Sure it makes sense, says Frost, if you have cows or other intrusive things to hem in, but why would Frost and his neighbor need such a wall? He writes, “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know; What I was walling in or walling out; And to whom I was like to give offense.” He says, “There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.”
The neighbor replies, “Good fences make good neighbors.” It is the wisdom of his father and no matter what Frost may think, “He will not go behind his father’s saying, And he likes having thought of it so well; He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
There is an analogy here worth exploring and an extrapolation worth making, but let’s expand the idea of fences for a few minutes first and come back to the analogy later.
In the Farnam Street article, “Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking,” the author adds a tag line, “A core component of making great decisions is understanding the rationale behind previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.”[2]
In few places does this warning come home to roost more than in Marxist ideologies, like Critical Theory. Marxism in all its forms gives a false explanation of every outcome, presents a false hope for future possibilities, and renders its adherents unwilling, first, and then, as a consequence, unable to investigate and discover the truth behind any situation. Their very capacity of rational thought is corroded. We may say of Critical theory devotees, their every remedy is poison, their every road the path of death.
The article begins:
“When we seek to intervene in any system created by someone, it’s not enough to view their decisions and choices simply as the consequences of first-order thinking (the author means… short-sighted and whimsical) because we can inadvertently create serious problems. Before changing anything, we should wonder whether they were using second-order thinking. Their reasons for making certain choices might be more complex than they seem at first. It’s best to assume they knew things we don’t or had experience we can’t fathom, so we don’t go for quick fixes and end up making things worse.”
This is the very long-game evaluations I’ve been promoting to you in this love letter. Don’t just look at immediate cause-effect, anticipate and judge the consequences of consequences. To do this, one needs to understand human nature and how people make decisions. “Free” feels nice up front, for instance… a hungry person isn’t hungry anymore. But “free” has consequences for how people make decisions about resources. “Free” is first, a lie, because someone has to pay, and “free” ongoing undermines essential components of responsible adulthood… the incentive to labor.
To bolster his point, the author turns to G. K. Chesterton’s fence. Chesterton writes:
“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.”[3]
It is summed up in this, “Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”[4] Fences don’t sprout from nature like a tree or weed. People put them up at their own expense and labor, and they put them up for a reason. That reason might remain relevant or no longer be relevant, might be wise or foolish, effective or counter-productive, but, until the matter is fully investigated. be wary, step slowly. There is no room for intellectual laziness in life. Being bothered by the call may irritate, but don’t yield your mind or soul to lazy impulse.
Chesterton takes up the issue earlier in his essay Heretics, saying:
“Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their un-mediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.”[5]
In his warning about “hastily removing fences” Chesterton writes, “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.”[6] Those looking at the world through the lens of Critical Theory Worldview typically have little interest in understanding the rational of past actions, and no fear of unintended consequences in not merely reforming them, but also Chesterton words it, “deforming them.”
Chesterton’s warnings about hastily moving “fences” and being dismissive of those who put up the “fences” and cavalier about potential outcomes from moving them is relevant for many issues confronting the worldview shift away from the Judeo-Christian worldview and toward the atheistic worldview that has grown over the centuries into modern Critical Theory. Two of immediate importance for this discussion: The U.S. Constitution and human sexuality.
[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall
[2] https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/#:~:text=Do%20not%20remove%20a%20fence,during%20a%20fit%20of%20madness. (3/10/2023).
[3] G. K. Chesterton, The Thing: Why I am Catholic, (S&W, London, 1929)
[4] https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence (3/10/2023).
[5] In Introductory Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (John Lane Co: New York, 1909). https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/470/pg470-images.html (3/10/2023).
[6] https://archive.org/stream/G.K.ChestertonTheThing/G.K.Chesterton-The%20Thing_djvu.txt (3/10/2023).
