The Fence You Cannot See

There is a certain intellectual posture that has become fashionable, particularly among the educated young. It holds that the structures we’ve inherited—moral codes, family forms, sexual ethics, sacred boundaries, gender itself—are merely “social constructs,” arbitrary impositions of power masquerading as nature or truth. The posture feels liberating. It promises that if we can only unmask these constructs, we can remake ourselves and our world according to reason, or compassion, or justice, or simply desire.

This essay is not addressed to the committed adherent of this view. It is addressed to those who find themselves drawn to it, who sense its appeal but have not yet made it the foundation of their identity. My aim is to offer some reasons for caution before you dismantle the fence.

I. The Fence You Cannot See

G.K. Chesterton once offered a parable. A reformer encounters a fence across a road and declares, “I see no purpose in this. Let us remove it.” The wiser response, Chesterton suggested, is: “If you do not see the purpose, I will not let you remove it. Go away and think. When you can tell me why it was built, I may let you tear it down.”

This parable contains a deep epistemological point. Structures that have persisted across generations typically encode solutions to problems—but the very success of the solution can render the problem invisible. A fence that successfully keeps out wolves will, after enough time, produce descendants who have never seen a wolf, who find the fence an inexplicable obstruction, who can produce sophisticated arguments for its removal.

The irony is cruel and precise: the more successful a protective structure is, the more arbitrary it appears, and thus the more likely it is to be dismantled by those it protects.

Consider sexual ethics. Every civilization we know of has developed elaborate structures around sexuality—taboos, rituals, channeling mechanisms. Why? Not because of arbitrary prudishness, but because sexuality is powerful and dangerous, bound up with reproduction, bonding, jealousy, violence, and the vulnerability of children. The structures were not designed by a committee; they evolved through millennia of trial and error, encoding hard-won wisdom about what arrangements tend toward flourishing and what arrangements tend toward dissolution.

But here is the trouble: that wisdom is not propositional. It is not a thesis you can prove in a seminar. It is distributed across practices, stories, prohibitions, and rituals. It knows what it knows the way your body knows how to balance—not through explicit rules but through an integrated, embodied competence.

When the deconstructionist demands, “Justify this structure rationally or I will tear it down,” the tradition cannot fully comply. Not because it is irrational, but because that is not how it knows what it knows. And so the fence comes down. And then, slowly, the wolves return.

II. Material Comfort as Insulation from Reality

There is a reason this posture flourishes among the prosperous. Wealth and security create a buffer between choices and consequences. You can deny the load-bearing nature of structures while the structures are still holding everything up. The feedback loops are slow enough that you can deny gravity for a generation or two before the edifice visibly cracks.

The young radical who dismisses the family as a bourgeois construct likely grew up in one. The theorist who denies that some ways of living are better than others probably occupies a life arranged according to patterns she did not invent and cannot fully articulate—patterns that protect her health, her sanity, her productivity. She swims in the water of functional structure while writing dissertations on its nonexistence.

This is not hypocrisy, exactly. It is something sadder: blindness born of comfort. The fish does not know it is wet.

Reality, however, is patient. Those who ignore it merely postpone the reckoning. The structures can be denied for a time, but they cannot be escaped. Dismantle the social technology that channels sexuality toward pair bonding and child-rearing, and you do not get liberation; you get loneliness, sterility, and children raised without fathers. Deny the reality of sexual difference, and you do not transcend biology; you simply become confused about it. The postmodernist who insists that truth is merely power will still look both ways before crossing the street.

III. What the Anthropologists Found

The deconstructionist claims that our inherited structures are arbitrary—mere local conventions that could easily have been otherwise. But what happens when we actually look at the ethnographic record? When anthropologists catalog the practices of human societies across the globe, what do they find?

They find universals. Hundreds of them.

In 1991, the anthropologist Donald Brown compiled a list of traits found in every human society ever studied. Brown defined human universals as “those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception.”¹ The list runs to several hundred items, and it reads like a catalogue of everything the constructivists claim is merely local: marriage, kinship nomenclature, incest taboos, sexual restrictions, division of labor by sex, property rights, religious ritual, mourning the dead, concepts of the soul, status differentiation, the propitiation of supernatural beings.

These are not Western impositions. They appear in societies that had no contact with the West, in cultures separated by oceans and millennia. The incest taboo, for example, is not a bourgeois European invention; it is universal, appearing in every documented human society. As the anthropologists at Yale’s Human Relations Area Files note: “Across all cultures, there is an incest taboo, a cultural norm that prohibits sexual relations between parents and their offspring.”² Claude Lévi-Strauss argued it represents the foundational social structure—the original distinction between nature and culture, the boundary that makes human society possible at all.

Consider pair-bonding. A comprehensive 2019 review in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution by Schacht and Kramer examined the cross-cultural evidence and concluded: “While there are many ethnographic examples of variation across human societies in terms of marriage patterns, extramarital affairs, the stability of relationships, and the ways in which fathers invest, the pair-bond is a ubiquitous feature of human mating relationships.”³ Data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample—a representative global sample of 186 primarily pre-industrial societies compiled by Murdock and White—shows that while “polygynous marriage is sanctioned in nearly 85% of societies,” nonetheless “within a small-scale polygynous society, the majority of marriages are monogamous.”⁴ This is not cultural accident; it reflects deep features of human reproductive biology and the extended dependency of human children.

Or consider the role of fathers. The deconstructionist may dismiss paternal involvement as a construct of patriarchy, but the empirical literature tells a different story. A 2025 systematic review in the Journal of Lifestyle and SDGs Review synthesizing peer-reviewed research from 2000-2024 found that “father absence negatively impacts child development in multiple ways. Academically, children from father-absent homes exhibit lower school performance... Gendered differences are also evident, with boys more prone to externalizing behaviors and girls experiencing heightened emotional distress.”⁵ A cross-cultural investigation by Draper and Harpending found that father absence shapes children’s reproductive strategies across diverse populations, with “male children born into matrifocal households exhibit[ing] at adolescence a complex of aggression, competition, low male parental investment.”⁶ The structure exists because it works.

The sacred-profane distinction, which Émile Durkheim identified as fundamental to religion, appears in every society anthropologists have studied. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim defined religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden.”⁷ While not every culture uses words that translate directly as “sacred” and “profane,” every culture distinguishes between the ordinary and the set-apart, between the mundane and the numinous, between everyday life and ritual time. As Britannica’s entry on ritual notes: “This classification is taken as a universal feature of religion.”⁸ Some form of religion—understood as collective practices oriented toward sacred things—is found in all human societies.

Even sex differences in the division of labor, a prime target of constructivist denial, show remarkable cross-cultural consistency. George Murdock and Caterina Provost’s 1973 analysis in Ethnology examined 185 societies from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. They found that a “division of labor between the sexes has long been recognized by economists, sociologists, and other behavioral scientists as (1) the original and most basic form of economic specialization and exchange, and as (2) the most fundamental basis of marriage and the family.”⁹ Their data revealed consistent patterns: “Men almost always hunt and trap animals, do work that involves hard materials such as lumbering, mining, quarrying, and making objects from bone, horn, and shell... Women almost always care for infants.”¹⁰ As Yale’s Human Relations Area Files summarizes: “In most societies known to anthropology, there is a division of labor by gender... there are some near-universal cross-cultural patterns.”¹¹ The constructivist may attribute this to cultural conditioning, but the consistency across isolated, unrelated societies suggests something deeper.

A major review in the Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology found that under the topic of sex and gender, “pan-cultural similarities were shown to be greater than cultural differences.”¹² The cross-cultural research is clear: while the specific content of gender roles varies, the existence of gender-differentiated roles is universal.

What should we make of these universals?

One interpretation is that they represent independent solutions to common problems. Perhaps societies everywhere face similar challenges and converge on similar answers by trial and error. But this interpretation concedes the essential point: if every society independently develops marriage, incest taboos, father involvement, religious ritual, and differentiated sex roles, then these are not arbitrary impositions that enlightened moderns can simply abolish. They are recurring patterns that human societies generate spontaneously because they solve real problems. Tear them down, and the problems return.

Another interpretation is evolutionary. These patterns appear universally because they are grounded in human nature itself—in the biology of reproduction, the demands of child-rearing, the cognitive architecture of the human mind. On this view, the structures are not just useful but necessary, arising from the interaction of our evolved psychology with the challenges of living together.

Either way, the constructivist position becomes untenable. If these structures are arbitrary cultural constructs, why do they appear in every culture? If they are merely the residue of power and domination, why do societies that overthrow them keep reinventing them? The anthropological record suggests that the fences our ancestors built were not random barriers thrown up for no reason. They were responses to recurring human problems—and the problems have not gone away.

Notes for Section III:

1. Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991). Steven Pinker reproduces Brown’s full list in the appendix of The Blank Slate (2002).

2. OpenStax, Introduction to Anthropology, Chapter 11.4: “Marriage and Families across Cultures.”

3. Ryan Schacht and Karen L. Kramer, “Are We Monogamous? A Review of the Evolution of Pair-Bonding in Humans and Its Contemporary Variation Cross-Culturally,” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 7 (2019): 230.

4. George P. Murdock and Douglas R. White, “Standard Cross-Cultural Sample,” Ethnology 8 (1969): 329-369; discussed in Schacht and Kramer (2019).

5. “Review of the Research Literature on the Impact of Father Absence on Child Development in Alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals,” Journal of Lifestyle and SDGs Review (2025).

6. Patricia Draper and Henry Harpending, “Father Absence and Reproductive Strategy: An Evolutionary Perspective,” Journal of Anthropological Research 38, no. 3 (1982): 255-273.

7. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 44.

8. Hans H. Penner, “Ritual,” Encyclopædia Britannica.

9. George P. Murdock and Caterina Provost, “Factors in the Division of Labor by Sex: A Cross-Cultural Analysis,” Ethnology 12 (1973): 203-225.

10. Human Relations Area Files, Yale University, “Gender” and “Hunter-Gatherers” summaries, summarizing Murdock and Provost (1973).

11. Ibid.

12. Williams and Best (1990), discussed in “Cross-cultural psychology,” Wikipedia, citing the Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology.

IV. A Religion That Does Not Know Itself

Here is a peculiar thing about the deconstructionist project: it has all the features of a religion while denying that it is one.

It has a creation myth: humans in some pristine state, corrupted by the emergence of oppressive structures—property, patriarchy, heteronormativity, whiteness. It has original sin: privilege, which taints the fortunate from birth regardless of their individual actions. It has confession and absolution: the ritualized acknowledgment of one’s privilege, the public declaration of allyship. It has heresy and excommunication: the “problematic” person who is cast out of polite society for wrong belief. It has saints and martyrs, sacred texts, and above all, a vision of salvation: the liberation that will come when all the oppressive constructs are finally dismantled.

What it does not have is self-awareness about any of this.

This matters because the deconstructionist believes she has escaped religion, transcended it, seen through its illusions. In fact, she has merely exchanged one faith for another—and the new faith is worse, because it does not know it is a faith. It claims the authority of pure reason while running on the fuel of meaning, community, identity, and moral purpose that every religion provides.

The traditional religions, whatever their flaws, were at least honest about what they were. They named their gods, specified their demands, acknowledged their mysteries. The new faith hides from itself. It dresses its absolutes in the language of critique, its dogmas in the language of questioning, its priests in the garb of professors. This is not enlightenment. It is self-deception.

V. The Epistemology of Ressentiment

Nietzsche identified a particular spiritual posture he called ressentiment—a French word he used deliberately for its connotations of festering, unacknowledged hostility. It is the stance of one who cannot achieve power directly and so redefines power itself as evil, making weakness into virtue.

Consider the contemporary doctrine of “lived experience.” On its surface, it sounds humble: “I can only speak from my position. I cannot make universal claims.” But watch how it functions. In practice, it makes certain speakers unquestionable and certain claims unfalsifiable. If you have not experienced oppression, your analysis is invalidated by your privilege. If you have experienced oppression, your testimony is unassailable precisely because it is yours.

This is not epistemological humility. It is an inversion of the hierarchy of knowledge that denies it is a hierarchy at all. It is the will to power in victim’s clothing. The weak do not cease to seek power; they simply redefine power as illegitimate, except when exercised by themselves.

Nietzsche saw this dynamic in Christianity, but he would have recognized it even more clearly in its secular descendants. The deconstructionist who tears down every standard, every norm, every claim to truth, does not thereby escape the will to power. She merely exercises it through negation, defining herself as the arbiter of what is “merely constructed” and therefore dismissable.

The honest person asks: “Am I seeking truth, or am I seeking a justification for my resentments?” The deconstructionist project makes this question nearly impossible to ask, because it has defined truth itself as a construct of power. There is no outside standpoint from which to evaluate one’s own motives. There is only the endless game of unmasking everyone else.

VI. The Sunk Costs of Dissolution

There is a final reason people cling to the deconstructionist project even as its inadequacy becomes apparent: they have invested too much to turn back.

If you have built your entire identity around liberation from oppressive constructs—if you have defined yourself as the brave critic who sees through the illusions that blind others—then admitting that those constructs might point at something real is not merely being wrong. It is having wasted yourself. It is discovering that the heroic rebellion was tilting at windmills.

This is why conversion of the committed is so difficult and why prevention matters more. The person who has organized their life, their relationships, their sense of meaning around the project of deconstruction has enormous psychological incentives to continue. Every additional investment makes turning back more costly. The sunk costs accumulate.

But those who have not yet made these investments are free. They can look at the evidence with fresh eyes. They can notice that the structures, so confidently dismissed as arbitrary, keep reasserting themselves. They can observe that the promised liberation seems to produce not flourishing but confusion, loneliness, and new forms of tyranny. They can ask whether there might be wisdom in what they were so eager to discard.

VII. The Pieces Fall Back

Postmodernism won, in a sense. It conquered the universities, the media, the professional classes. It convinced a generation that everything solid could be dissolved into discourse, that every boundary was oppression, that every tradition was merely power hiding behind legitimacy.

And then something strange happened. The pieces started falling back into place.

Not everywhere. Not completely. The damage is real and ongoing. But the radical attempt to remake human nature has run into the obdurate fact that human nature exists. Men and women are different, and the differences matter. Children need fathers. Communities need sacred boundaries. Meaning requires hierarchy. Sexuality must be channeled or it becomes destructive. These are not arbitrary impositions. They are discoveries—things our ancestors learned at great cost and encoded in structures we inherited.

The postmodernists flipped over the tables of a historic, painstakingly constructed civilization, expecting to find only power and domination underneath. Instead, they found the outlines of reality itself. The structures were not arbitrary; they were load-bearing. Tear them down, and you do not get a blank slate on which to write utopia. You get rubble.

Conclusion: Before You Tear Down the Fence

If you find yourself drawn to the deconstructionist posture—and it is understandable that you might, for it flatters the intellect and promises liberation—I would ask you to pause.

Ask yourself: Do I understand why this fence was built? Have I truly reckoned with the possibility that it encodes wisdom I cannot articulate? Am I prepared to accept the consequences if I am wrong?

Ask yourself: Am I rejecting this structure because I have found something better, or because I resent its demands on me? Is my critique motivated by truth-seeking or by the desire to escape judgment?

Ask yourself: What will I put in its place? The deconstructionist is skilled at tearing down but notoriously silent about building up. If you dissolve the old structures, what will bind people together? What will channel their energies toward flourishing? What will protect the vulnerable?

The fence may look arbitrary. It may feel constraining. The people who built it may seem unsophisticated compared to your professors. But they knew things—things learned through suffering, encoded in practices, passed down at great cost. Before you tear down the fence, make sure you understand what it was keeping out.

The wolves are patient. They can wait.