Hart's Fence

 

Chesterton's Fence is (or was) a favorite maxim of a certain type of conservative, and there is a degree of wisdom to it. The basic argument goes that anyone who wishes to change a law or custom should first discover the purpose of the custom, and only on that basis conclude that it ought to be done away with. He gives the example of a fence across the road, which a reformer wishes to remove because it appears to serve no purpose:

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.

I will say for starters that this isn't actually the clever defense Chesterton thinks it is. After all, reformers usually know (or think they know) exactly what the purpose is behind societal laws and institutions, so the argument carries no weight against the ideologies which conservatives find most objectionable—Marxism, feminism, Critical Theory, etc. They may think the oppression narratives peddled by these "masters of suspicion" are bogus, but they can't very well accuse them of wanting to tear down a fence (or social institution) without first finding out why it was there. 

Moreover, as a historical argument, Chesterton's Fence applies just as much to those who would rebuild as those who would destroy. Somebody, after all, tore the fence down, and for a reason that seemed good to them. And unless we assume "all [our] fathers" in fact had a monopoly on wisdom, there's no reason to privilege the way things were compared to the way they are. Quite the opposite, in fact, if the argument is applied consistently. A theme in the recent work of theologian and provocateur David Bentley Hart is that those who would restore the glory of Christendom fail to understand that throne-and-altar Christianity collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, and that trying to go back to that form of institutional Christianity is no different than Julian the Apostate trying to restore Roman paganism without having understood why it was replaced by Christianity in the first place. "Disaffection with Christendom," he writes, "was bred by Christendom, not by something else." This is Hart's Fence, a logical correlary of Chesterton's Fence: The counter-reformer has no more right to put a fence back up than a reformer has to tear it down, for the exact same reason: he has failed to understand the fence's own history, and why it needed to come down.

What this means is that, in the 21st century, Chesterton's Fence applies much more readily to counter-revolutionaries than revolutionaries—to those who would attempt to "turn back the clock" without having ever understood why its hands moved forward in the first place. As soon as the fence has been torn down, the burden of proof is on those who would put it up again—that's the logic of Chesterton, whether he acknowledges it or not, just as much as Hart. So, when someone who claims to be conservative announces their decision to (let's keep to hypotheticals) bring back public executions, they have failed to live up to one of their most sacred priciples:

They have rebuilt a fence without even beginning to understand why it was torn down in the first place.