COMPLEXISM | 2006-01-13
The greatest weapon in the arsenal of respectable conservatism is the word "Simplistic."
When you point out that they are legitimizing liberals whose every proposal has always been disastrous, liberals who have lied regularly, by taking them seriously, The William Buckleys of the world will telll you you are being "simplistic."
Respectable cosnervatives use the word "simplistic" in exactly the same way that a magic act uses the saying, "Things are not as they appear."
There is plenty of disagreement between creationist and evolutionists. But on one item they are agree:
If most things were not as they appear, neither God nor evolution would have given us two eyes.
When I think of Communism I do not think of the endless theological criticisms that National Review dedicated to the deep errors in Communist thought.
When I think of Communism I see the Berlin Wall, I see the thousands of miles borders I crossed into Communist territory, every one of which had guards with orders to shoot anyone trying to get out and mine fields.
This was evil. This was wrong. And I did not need to quote Papal Encyclicals or the Old Testament to explain WHY this was wrong. I told NR staff many times that they should have a cover with another part of the walls of the Communist prison and the word "Why?" and nothing else, on most of their covers.
Guess what their reply was?
This would be Simplistic.
The errors that made the twentieth century such a disaster were none of them complicated. When Lenin was up there shouting that he and his fellow "intellectuals, none of whom had ever earned a living in the real world, should take over the whole world's economy, they were not saying soomething that involved some sort of subtle theoretical error.
The very idea is infantile. But it took over a hundred million lives to overcome it.
When World War I ended up being a two-year slaughter in immovable trenches, the Allies declared that they were in The War to End All Wars. They also announced that they were fighting The War to Save Civilization.
There is no way to approach that sort of thing reasonably.
You either say, "That's a load of crap!" or you wipe out a whole generation of young men.
There is such a thing as being wrong because you are too simplistic. But you are at least equally wrong when you say that something that is simple is actually complex.
Complexism killed hundreds of millions of people in the twentieth century. Making a simple point complex is a fundamental and classic error.
In fact, Western science is based on exactly that rule.
It is called Occam's Razor.