A Voice from the Past - Chesterton

But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, or that they have since become bad purposes,or that they are purposes which  are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity, that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.

G. K. Chesterton, 1874-1936, The Drift from Domesticity, (Dodo Press, 1929, p.18).

Is this true? How can we learn to make a judgment on things based on understanding them?