“All You Gotta Do”

My wise mother says as a boy I viewed all problems as easily solvable.

“All you gotta do,” I would say to her and then make the complicated overly simple. The solutions were not even always wrong, just ignorant of the unintended consequences of the change.  Mom taught me that solutions are often worse than the problem. This did not make sense to me. Was Mom saying we should be slow (like Ents?) or ignore our problems? Of course, she was not so foolish. Solutions are good, but solutions come from “problem solvers” and problem solvers are dangerous.

Why? As a problem solver, I am tempted to solve the problem at the expense of people.

I often would rather muddle along with problems than seize the power to solve them quickly. Why? Problems have no rights, but problems are caused by people, not abstractions, and people do have rights and hurts. Decapitating a problem, she showed me, has historically meant decapitating men. Mom pointed out that in her childhood, her home church was disrupted, and the Spirit quenched, by people who meant well, were often right (more or less), but who forgot to bring the people along with their “clever” ideas.

A shepherd could solve the problem of wolves by killing wayward sheep, but that makes the shepherd a more effective wolf than the feral wolf.

Traditional Christian Americans are frustrated. We see our values mocked and our arguments ignored. Temptation rises in such times for revolution . . . a huge reboot of the culture. Like the frustrated owner of a computer tired of problems, we think: “Wipe it all out. Start again. It could not get worse.”History shows it (almost) always gets worse and the few times it did not get worse (the American Revolution, the Glorious Revolution), it is because people were not killed (even kings!) to quickly solve a problem.

“All you gotta do is cut off the King’s head,” Cromwell said and guaranteed that the son of Charles I would sit on the throne of England.

“All you gotta do is sweep away the nobility,” Robespierre said and a very good man became a monstrous man. He sought perfection and humans are never going to be perfect this side of Heaven.

Even worse is the spirit of “all you gotta do” combined with a good man. Pity the organization with the leader inflicted with “all you gotta do” and surety in his vision. He will build the program at the cost of the people. The more virtuous the man, the greater the danger of power combined with “all you gotta do.” A good man with a good plan is hard to oppose lest you seem to be for the problem he seeks to solve!

Perhaps the worst historic case of “all you gotta do” combined with nobility of character was the French Revolutionary leader, Robespierre.  The wise Anthony Trollope describes Robespierre this way:

Honesty, moral conduct, industry, constancy of purpose, temperance in power, courage, and love of country: these virtues all belonged to Robespierre; history confesses it, and to what favoured hero does history assign a fairer catalogue? Whose name does a brighter galaxy adorn?

With such qualities, such attributes, why was he not the Washington of France? Why, instead of the Messiah of freedom, which he believed himself to be, has his name become a bye-word, a reproach, and an enormity? Because he wanted faith! He believed in nothing but himself, and the reasoning faculty with which he felt himself to be endowed. He thought himself perfect in his own human nature, and wishing to make others perfect as he was, he fell into the lowest abyss of crime and misery in which a poor human creature ever wallowed. He seems almost to have been sent into the world to prove the inefficacy of human reason to effect human happiness. He was gifted with a power over common temptation, which belongs to but few. His blood was cool and temperate, and yet his heart was open to all the softer emotions. He had no appetite for luxury; no desire for pomp; no craving for wealth. Among thousands who were revelling in sensuality, he kept himself pure and immaculate.

If any man could have said, I will be virtuous; I, of myself, unaided, trusting to my own power, guarding myself by the light of my own reason; I will walk uprightly through the world, and will shed light from my path upon my brethren, he might have said so. He attempted it, and history shows us the result. He attempted, unassisted, to be perfect among men, and his memory is regarded as that of a loathsome plague, defiling even the unclean age in which he lived.

In Robespierre (as described by Trollope), I see the problem, but I also see a solution. I am not as good as Robespierre, but I might fall into his follies.

“All you gotta do . . .”

No: that is too individualistic and it is the tyrant who stands alone.

All we have to do . . . Robespierre believed he alone was pure enough to save France. The great leader such as George Washington tolerates rivals such as Horatio Gates not because Washington thought Gates was competent but because Gates was part of the Revolutionary team. Washington knew that to start eating up the Revolution would lead to terror and this lesson Robespierre never learned.

Washington prioritized people over politics. He was no great theorist and so would compromise to bring people along with the Revolution. Robespierre placed purity over people. He purged the Revolution. The result was that France executed the genial incompetent Louis XVI and ended in the army of the tyrant the Emperor Napoleon. Washington kept Virginia aristocrats and Massachusetts roundheads in the same movement and it never become a bloody mess. Robespierre saw the American Revolution (rightly) as “half-measures” and got more done in weeks than Americans in years. The work was cut off  with the rapidity of the guillotine.

Mom had it right. The Christian leader is for the people, not the people for the Christian leader. Good ideas help people and do not cause people to serve good ideas. Oh, Mom! How often I still fail at these lessons. I pray as always: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.”