EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Personally I would say that misses the point. Instead, it is doing the exact reverse: criticizing unthinking "reform." Consider, for example, the relatively recent total failure of the farming "reform" undertaken by Sri Lanka, and contrast it with the successful reform undertaken by one of the states of India, Sikkim.
Sri Lanka has many, many problems and it would be impossible to disentangle them from decades or centuries of history, colonization, civil war, economic depredation, government mismanagement, etc., etc. The simplified story is, for a lot of reasons not entirely under their control, the government ran out of foreign currency, which made doing any kind of international business extremely expensive. The government was looking for a way out, and settled on eliminating artificial, nitrogen-based fertilizers. The government had long had a policy of heavy subsidies for artificial fertilizer, so stopping that and switching to healthier, organic fertilizer had the potential to not only improve health and welfare, but would save the government hundreds of millions of dollars on import costs.
Unfortunately, these reformers failed to apply Chesterton's Fence productively. They banned all artificial fertilizers effectively overnight, and did nothing whatsoever to assist farmers in the switch-over process. The net result, when combined with other government monetary and infrastructure problems, was a massive loss of yield, which induced the government to import food from other countries...totalling more than the amount saved by the ban. The disaster was so complete, they ended up having to repeal the ban in less than six months.
Note, however, that I contrasted this with Sikkim. In that Indian state, they had a highly successful ban on artificial nitrogen-based fertilizers, because they did apply Chesterton's Fence correctly. They asked what purposes the old way fulfilled, what was needed to make the transition happen, and how to help the farmers in the interim period where the old was being removed but the new had not yet become the norm. Instead of a nearly instant ban, they phased the artificial stuff out over three years; instead of unceremoniously dumping the farmers, they invested in training and cooperative efforts to get the farmers ready to make productive choices on their own, and they tapered off artificial fertilizer subsidies while immediately implementing organic subsidies. Now, Sikkim is 100% free of such chemicals, without any sign of failure or breakdown, because organic fertilizer can replace artificial, it just has to be done wisely.
That is the essence of Chesterton's Fence. "I genuinely have no idea why this is here, so we should remove it now" is a dangerous, foolhardy approach that really does lead to much misery. That doesn't mean "only if you can explain in exhaustive detail why every single part of this is the case will I let you change even one thing about it." It means that reform conducted in ignorance is a crap shoot and often toying with the lives of others for little more reason than "because I don't like the look of it."
I hope the above example, contrasting terribly botched reform (one that has had serious negative consequences, and that now acts as a wonderful bad-faith argument against critically necessary environmental reform by pernicious conservative pundits!) with highly successful reform shows that there really is value here. As with any maxim, it can be abused in its own way, and we must respond to its invocation with wisdom rather than mere deference or denial. But used properly, it is a very important reminder that unthinking reform is like unthinking diagnosis and treatment: unreliable, dangerous, and unsound.
