Lux Lucet

In a recent piece, I commented on an article in Time by Joe Klein. For a mainstream media writer, I thought Klein was reasonably fair to Ron Paul, and was in fact more open to Paul’s free market ideas than many leading conservatives. I also mentioned that the article had a number of errors in it as well. I dealt with one of those already: Klein’s conflation of popularity and constitutionality. For Klein, it seems, if legislation is passed by Congress and is popular with the people, it must be constitutional. It was on this basis that he defended Social Security. This, of course, is fallacious. A law is constitutional if it is in agreement with the Constitution; it is unconstitutional if it is not. This has nothing to do with popularity.

There is another common, mistaken idea in Klein’s article based on the unstated assumption that complexity is good and simplicity is bad. Klein wrote, “This is a complicated society, undergoing an ever more rapid transformation in the midst of a potentially long economic slump…It’s these sorts of times that raise up people with simple answers: ideologues and demagogues. Paul is an ideologue and – we’re lucky – an entirely honorable one.” Klein, like many people, assumes complexity is good and normal, simplicity is not.

Perhaps this cult of complexity stems from the latent Darwinism that underlies so much contemporary thought. Darwinism views simplicity as primitive and complexity as sign of advancement. The Bible, on the other hand, has no problem with simplicity. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “But I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ” (2 Cor. 11:3). Christ’s teaching was simple, understandable, and astonishing to his listeners. But the false teachers of his day and ours love complexity, for complexity makes it easier to pull the wool over people’s eyes. This is true in matters of both Christian doctrine and politics.

When Klein calls Ron Paul and ideologue, he is saying by this that Paul’s platform of limited, constitutional government just can’t handle the problems of our sophisticated 21st century society. The problem, he argues, lies in the Constitution, not the nation.

What doesn’t occur to Klein and others who make this argument is that the reality may well be the opposite. It is not that our 18th century Constitution is unfit to govern 21st century America, it is that 21st century America as a result of sinful, foolish decisions by the American people over the past 100 years has made itself unfit to be governed by the Constitution. That is to say the problem is lies not in the Constitution, but in ourselves.

These days people are more concerned about the economy than perhaps any other issue. This is not unreasonable. Many people don’t have work, and those who do are often underemployed and underpaid relative to their skill set. But what is to blame for this? The complexity of modern life? Perhaps one could make this case, but his analysis would be superficial if it stopped there. It is imperative to continue the analysis by asking, How did things get so complex in the first place? The US has the world’s most complex tax code, a byzantine monetary system ruled by the mysterious and arrogant Federal Reserve System, and tens of thousands of pages worth of federal regulations that crush the life out of individual initiative. None of this complexity just happened on its own. It is the result of Americans abandoning simple principles such as personal responsibility, honesty and the rule of law – i.e. the sort of thing Ron Paul advocates – and substituting for these a sense of entitlement, graft and the worship of lawless government power.

If Americans are to have any hope of restoring their lost freedom and prosperity, they will do so by embracing the simple truths taught in Scripture about honesty, thrift and personal responsibility, the sort of things Americans believed at the time our nation was founded. Were they to do so, they would find that many of the apparent insoluble complexities of the modern world would be shown to be the self-inflicted absurdities they are.