A Good Fence Makes Good Sense

Visiting divided, Cold War Berlin in 1987, President Ronald Reagan famously commanded “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” If he’d wanted the job completed more quickly and efficiently, he should have called out Mr. Patel to do it instead.

Some incredibly depressing footage went viral across the UK this month, taken in the countryside around the village of Lower Darwen, near the northern town of Blackburn. Here could be observed a remarkably stupid young man who, when confronted by a small wall blocking his path towards a nearby hill, decided the best way to proceed would not be to walk towards the gate, nor even to climb over the feeble obstacle, but instead to stand there laboriously demolishing it with his bare hands, stone by heavy stone, until there was a hole large enough for him to slink through. A local man, Paul Walker, approached the apparent teenager, calling him a “little scrote” (besides various other good old Anglo-Saxon terms), and asking what exactly he thought he was doing. But the youth did not appear to really know.

Spitting on the fence

The Blackburn area was one of the first regions of England colonised by subcontinental incomers during the 1960s, and the brown-skinned vandal was clearly the clueless descendent of one of them. Although of probable Pakistani origin, he spoke English (of a sort) with a clear Lancashire accent. Yet, despite presumably being born and bred in England, he did not appear to have taken in and absorbed absolutely all the quaint local customs, such as the concept of private property and not destroying it, or, indeed, the simple notion of what a wall was.

Accosted by Mr. Walker, once the boy finally deigned to remove his inevitable headphones and listen to all the swear-words coming his way, he appeared totally nonplussed by the negative reaction to his efforts, displaying the blank, dead-eyed incomprehension of a shrimp confronted with a particularly complex passage from Wittgenstein. 

But then, viewing his antics online, most genuinely native English observers couldn’t understand his own attitude here, either. If there was no nearby gate, why didn’t he just climb over the wall? It was only shoulder-height, designed for keeping in sheep, not keeping out Muslims, and would have been infinitely less effort than standing there taking it all apart. 

In this short moment of mutual East-West incomprehension, Kipling’s old line about how never the twain shall meet was proven to be absolutely true in microcosm. Despite most likely having been brought up here, the teen’s ancestral oriental modes of cognition remained entirely alien to his occidental hosts’, and his hosts’ to him. To actually paraphrase Wittgenstein, “Even if a lion could speak, we still could not understand it.” Substitute the word ‘Pakistani’ for the word ‘lion’ there, and the sentiment remains every bit as true. 

Bewailing walls

Once the video of this charming encounter spread, conservative online commentators began drawing other literary parallels. Some recited the famous quote from Jean Raspail’s great anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints, to the effect that “Your universe has no meaning to them [the illegal incomers]. They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak doors.” And a pile of rubble with your attractive drystone walls, too, Raspail might have added.     

Others recalled the idea of ‘Chesterton’s Fence’, named after the Catholic philosopher GK Chesterton’s ideas about the innate wisdom of not removing age-old social customs or laws without thinking very carefully about the matter first:

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.’

The rash pulling down of Britain’s own supposedly ‘outmoded’ border defences first happened in and around the Blackburn area when exploitative local mill-owners, short of employees, were granted governmental permission to import cheap Third World immigrant labour for their textile factories during the 1960s. This may have produced some limited economic benefit in the short term, but proved a long term burden to the area once all the mills eventually collapsed anyway, and all the place was left with was thousands of unemployed and unassimilable Pakistanis. 

When Britain’s economists nodded through the 1960s disassembly of local visa limitations, did they really anticipate that, seven decades later, it would lead to the kinds of occasions of complete and total cultural dysfunction between host and permanent guest that Mr. Walker so helpfully captured on camera for us all to see earlier this month? No, because, unlike Chesterton, all the short-sighted moderns in Whitehall saw was an unnecessary obstacle to be removed, not a potentially necessary barricade protecting us all from complete civilisational disaster. If an incorrigible optimist takes away a flood barrier from a river just because the weather has been dry one year, then that’s a pretty big bet upon it never raining again in the future, isn’t it?

Frost damage

The quotes from Chesterton and Raspail approached events in Lower Darwen only from our own camp’s fence-loving perspective, however. What about literature written and read from the alternative viewpoint, that of the liberal fence-hater? The obvious text to cite to this end would be the American poet Robert Frost’s 1914 piece ‘Mending Wall,’ which popularised the classic aphorism that “Good fences make good neighbours.”

That sounds exactly the kind of wise old proverb Chesterton would have happily believed himself. Yet Frost’s verse, which imagines the poet engaging in dialogue with his New England neighbour over the shared mending of a weather-crumbling drystone wall separating their two farms, is an extended argument for taking walls down, not throwing them up. To open his poem, Frost explains how it is Mother Nature herself, with her actions of wind, rain, and ice, who has caused the wall to disintegrate, thereby implying all such man-made obstacles towards freedom of movement for man and cattle alike are wholly artificial:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

Yet still, continues Frost, “We keep the wall between us as we go,” with each farmer repairing it on his own property’s side. Frost sees no need for this safe distance to be maintained, and questions his neighbour on the need to uphold the wall at all, only to be met with constant refrains of the traditional, wall-maintaining proverb in response:

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.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’

This crude, regurgitated mantra, thinks Frost, makes the farmer seem like a primitive, stone-wielding caveman—or, in contemporary UK liberal terms, a troglodyte Brexit voter: 

I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

Frost’s philosophy is very much that of Chesterton’s Fence in reverse. Rather than asking why walls should remain, he prefers to query why they should ever be built in the first place: 

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.

The immigration-friendly UK liberals of today would seem to agree. For example, Frost’s poem is used as the opening preface to a 2016 book (the year of both Brexit and the first election of that aspirant builder of big, beautiful walls Donald Trump) by British moral philosopher Onora O’Neill, called Justice Across Boundaries: Whose Obligations?, to which the provided answer, I would strongly imagine, is ‘Your obligations, if you’re a First World white Westerner.’

Last year, a lengthy discussion of Frost’s poem appeared in leading left-wing London broadsheet The Guardian, readers being invited to answer the question of whether good fences making good neighbours was really true. This being The Guardian, most readers said it was not. Responses included the following: “[Frost’s saying] is about the opposite of barriers. It is about sharing and engaging with your community”; “Fences are typically used to divide rather than to include, and thus to be a ‘good neighbour’ is more pejorative than prescriptive”; and, most bizarrely, “The cost of solar panels has fallen so dramatically in mainland Europe that building fences out of solar panels is now as cost-effective as buying fence panels. So good fences make cheap electricity!” (as I say, this was The Guardian).

The most blithely optimistic response was as follows: “If you have reasonable people as neighbours, you’ll find a way no matter the fence.” That sounds like what Robert Frost thought. But what if, like Israel with Hamas, or Paul Walker with his own alien antagonist, you do not have “reasonable people as neighbours”? Then, no matter what left-wing poets and newspapers may think, you probably need to start building a very large wall indeed.

It’s all very well for the likes of Robert Frost to argue otherwise. But I do note that Frost himself died in 1963, two years before the Hart-Celler Act demolished America’s own external border walls with the Third World forever. Given this, I’m pretty sure his neighbour was at this point not yet a Pakistani.