Of Individuals and Societies

In a world of several billion people it can be hard to imagine where the individual finds a place.  When governments and politicians talk of classes and masses each one of us can feel like he or she is left out or, worse, just combined and lost in the mix.

Fortunately in the end we remain individuals in the eyes of God, related in one way or another to each other but separate and individual all the same.  Consider some of the most moving and intimate contacts of God with man.  These were profoundly individual experiences.  God spoke directly with Moses on Mount Sinai.  The laws that He gave to Moses, the Ten Commandments, all govern individual behavior, whether a man or woman’s conduct toward God, or to his or her parents, or to his or her fellow beings.  The Twelve Apostles were each called one by one.  The first word that God the Father spoke to the young Joseph Smith in 1820 was, “Joseph,” just as God had called the young boy, Samuel, by name thousands of years before. 

Even when involved with crowds, the Savior’s attention was readily drawn toward individuals.  The following is but one example of Jesus’ attention to one amidst the pressing multitude, one possessing no particular distinction beyond strong faith in Him and His healing power and her own worth to God:

And a woman having an issue of blood twelve years, which had spent all her living upon physicians, neither could be healed of any, came behind him, and touched the border of his garment: and immediately her issue of blood stanched.  And Jesus said, Who touched me? When all denied, Peter and they that were with him said, Master, the multitude throng thee and press thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me?  And Jesus said, Somebody hath touched me: for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me.  And when the woman saw that she was not hid, she came trembling, and falling down before him, she declared unto him before all the people for what cause she had touched him, and how she was healed immediately.  And he said unto her, Daughter, be of good comfort: thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace.  (Luke 8:43-48)

Doubtless among the multitude were others with ailments and afflictions, but only one sought healing, and that one was healed, and Jesus was aware of her.

On another occasion, in the Americas, Jesus Christ following His resurrection visited with another multitude.  This was a multitude of faithful, not a passing multitude preoccupied with many lesser things.  There were sick among them, too, and the Savior healed them all, “every one as they were brought forth unto him.” (3 Nephi 17:9)  I presume that He could have healed them all at once as a group, but each had faith, each sought healing, and He valued each one as meriting His personal attention.

Earlier that same day, in one of the most moving events in the history of the world, Jesus gave the people, twenty-five hundred in number, a personal and irrefutable witness of His death and resurrection.  He said to them,

Arise and come forth unto me, that ye may thrust your hands into my side, and also that ye may feel the prints of the nails in my hands and in my feet, that ye may know that I am the God of Israel, and the God of the whole earth, and have been slain for the sins of the world.

And it came to pass that the multitude went forth, and thrust their hands into his side, and did feel the prints of the nails in his hands and in his feet; and this they did do, going forth one by one until they had all gone forth, and did see with their eyes and did feel with their hands, and did know of a surety and did bear record, that it was he, of whom it was written by the prophets, that should come. (3 Nephi 11:14, 15)

Those twenty-five hundred personal witnesses are now in force and offered to all the world.

I offer one more example out of many more, this one again from the Old World.  During the Last Supper before the Savior’s atoning sacrifice, Jesus gave important instruction to Peter, the leader of the Twelve:

And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.  (Luke 22:31, 32)

Unaccustomed as we are in modern English to the subtleties of the use of “you” and “thou” we might miss some of the meaning in the Savior’s message.  I admit that I only noticed it when I read the passage in Spanish (where the plural vosotros and singular tú are more obvious).  The Lord was warning Simon Peter that Satan wanted to destroy Peter and his fellows (the plural, “you”) but that Jesus had prayed for Peter (thou) and for his faith.  When Peter was fully converted, then it was his personal assignment to strengthen his brethren.  This is all very personal and very individual, albeit within the context of an organization of individuals, the Twelve Apostles.

Of course we are all members of groups and societies, from families on up to nations and beyond.  All groups and societies are composed of individuals, with individual worth, talents, rights, and virtue.   All just societies—God’s societies included and setting the standard—recognize that they are societies of individuals, for the benefit of the individuals who make them up.  All others are despotisms, for the benefit of the individuals who run them, who wish to sift the society’s members as wheat.

Of American Exceptionalism and Human Happiness

It is clear to most Americans that America is a unique and extraordinary place, not only unlike anywhere else in the world but in important ways better.  That is not a boast.  It is proven reality that needs to be recognized and understood.  It needs to be understood, because America’s uniquely important position in the world is neither accidental nor imperishable.  We need to know why it is, what made it, so that we can know what we need to do to preserve and promote it.

As one place to start, we have a federal system of government with the central organization founded on a powerful written constitution, inspired of God, focused on the worth of the individual, with a government answerable to the people, restricted in powers and authorities divided among three separate and co-equal and dependent branches.  With some lapses and unhappy seasons, the American people have largely and successfully steered the nation safely and well between the rocks and whirlpools of tyranny and anarchy, however loud and aggressive those forces have been.  The 1930s of the Roosevelt years were an unhappy season of tyranny, while the Civil War was the agonizing response to the challenge of anarchy.

To point out another field of evidence of American exceptionalism, we have a very exceptional military system that has yielded important and valuable results for Americans and for the world.  Unlike anywhere else in modern history or nearly all of ancient history, the American military has always been subject to civilian authority, ensuring that it has been servant to America and the ideals of the American people, never our master.  Historian Victor Davis Hanson described recent American military history in these words:

When we list the rogues’ gallery of thugs and killers that the United States has gone to war against in the last three generations—Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Kim il-Sung, Ho Chi Minh, the Stalinists, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden—while providing postwar aid rather than annexing conquered land, it reminds us that no other country has had either the capability or willingness to take on such burdens.  (Victor Davis Hanson, “Is America Periclean?”, The New Criterion, October 2011, p.12)

Our freedom from oppression by enemies or by our own government has allowed free enterprise and human opportunity to thrive here like nowhere else in the story of mankind.  Our system does not cause these, it merely allows and protects them.  People by nature seek growth, progress, advancement, development, innovation, achievement, and all that goes into creation.  It is part of our divine nature as children of the great Creator, the Father of growth and progress and happiness.  All of these things go into what humans find as happiness.

In my grade school years in south Florida we had a reader, Singing Wheels, that captured this American entrepreneurial spirit.  Recently I was able to find and buy a copy of that reader.  Written by Mabel O’Donnell, the book not only helped teach me to read, but it helped make the American spirit part of my way of seeing my country and the world, a source of inspiration to me as a young child that has not ceased to inspire into manhood.  Here is a brief excerpt, in which the young boy, Tom Hastings, and his father are talking on their hillside above their very new town only recently planted on the Illinois prairie. 

“Yes, Tom,” said Pa . . . , “I guess that’s what we are, Ma and you and I and the rest of us—pioneers.  We have opened up new country and have built new homes.  But the people who follow will turn these rich prairies into farm lands, and towns will spring up. . . We won’t be pioneers long.”

. . . There was a thoughtful, faraway look in Pa’s eyes, as if he were dreaming a dream which he hoped might come true.

“All that hillside is ours, Tom,” he said.  “Bought from the government for only twenty dollars.  Before another year comes round, the cabins will begin to climb the hill.  And there on the very top, there by the two big maples, will be our house, a frame house built from lumber sawed in our own mill. . . .”

Just as quickly as it had come, the thoughtful, faraway look left Pa’s eyes.  “Yes, that is the way it will be, son.  But don’t forget!  It takes hard work to make dreams come true, and there is work aplenty for all of us.”  (Mabel O’Donnell, Singing Wheels, p.82, 83)

For 21^st Century Americans there remains work aplenty for all of us, not the least of which is preserving our heritage of freedom, ever under attack from the ever present advocates of tyranny and anarchy.  The next generation and much of the world depend upon our success.

Of Individual Freedom and the United States Senate

The first lawsuit has been filed.  There will likely be others.  When President Obama, in an action more redolent of hubris than homage to the Constitution, gave recess appointments to four individuals to lead government agencies, even though the Senate was not in recess, he initiated a constitutional crisis that is only beginning to unfold.

Three of these illegal appointments were to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).  The NLRB has been pushing a new requirement that all businesses put up posters, designed by the NLRB, encouraging workers to form a union. Businessmen have objected.  Only about 20% of American workers have chosen to form or join unions, which frustrates the Obama Administration, because it relies heavily upon unions for political support and funding.  Without those three appointees the NLRB does not have a quorum to finish its work on this new requirement.  Pretending that it now has a legal quorum, the NLRB resumed action on the rule, and businessmen filed suit, complaining that President Obama did not just break the law; he is trying to break the Constitution.  That is to say, this is not about the Senate; it is about the rights of American citizens, in this case the right to be free from imposed unionization.

Administration advocates would like to trivialize this crisis as a mere political dispute between the President and Republican Senators, yet another partisan spat.  That would be a superficial view, and it would be wrong.  Besides that fact that so far only one Democrat in the Senate has concurred with the President’s assertion that he rather than the Senate decides when the Senate is in recess, the core of the matter affects you and me far more than it affects the Senate. 

We must remember and never forget that the Senate (and the other branches of the United States government) was created by the Constitution to be an instrument for defending the rights of the individuals who make up “We the People.”  The Founders divided the power of the government into three coequal branches specifically so that they could block each other from taking unilateral action.  When the Senate asserted its authority against action of the President, it did so to preserve our freedom, in this case our freedom from being governed by people who are not accountable to the citizens.  During the 1787 debate on ratification of the Constitution Pennsylvanian Samuel Ryan described it this way:

Mr. [John] Adams’s sine qua non of a good government is three balancing powers, whose repelling qualities are to produce an equilibrium of interests, and thereby promote the happiness of the whole community.  (Samuel Bryan, “A Most Daring Attempt to Establish a Despotic Aristocracy”, in The Debate on the Constitution: Part One, p.55)

After all, we do not live in a monarchy where the king appoints his ministers to impose their will on the king’s subjects.  Our ancestors fought a war to get away from monarchy or they fled from lands where lords, ladies, kings, dictators, and other tyrants governed.  The Constitution, first and foremost, was designed to preserve our hard-won freedom and protect us from arbitrary rule.

The Declaration of Independence cited numerous objections against exercises of despotic power by the British king.  Consider these two, relevant to this whole question of whether President Obama, or any American President, should be allowed to appoint whomever he wants as judges or other government leaders without Senate consent:

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance. 

Under the Constitution, people with the power of government were either to be elected or appointed with the consent of people who were elected.  The President can nominate, but he must wait for the Senate to approve the nomination.  That can be inconvenient to those appointed—I had to wait several months before the Senate confirmed my nomination as an executive officer—but it is very convenient for the preservation of freedom.

After President Obama’s unconstitutional appointments his Justice Department—which reports directly to him—rendered its opinion that the boss was right.  The core argument supporting its unsurprising (albeit late) conclusion is that the Senate should not be allowed to block what the President wants to do.  Of course, in our system of government, that is the Senate’s job, insisting that no one be given power to make laws and issue edicts without its consent.  That is not a part of the Constitution that our freedom can allow the President to skip.  

Of Presidential Czars and Constitutional Crises

In this age of crisis, one after another, it would not be surprising if you did not notice that the United States has entered into a constitutional crisis, brought on by recent political moves of President Obama.  The resolution of the crisis will affect the balance of power and authorities in our government, which balance was created by our Founders to protect the freedom of the people.

That balance has worked very well for some 200 years, although elsewhere I have noted that American children no longer seem to use a phrase that was common when I was a child.  In those days not so very long ago a child would commonly defy the intimidation or bullying of another by retorting, “This is a free country.”  Our freedom has been eroding.  It is in serious danger yet again.

Let us pause a moment to reflect upon our written Constitution.  It is a miraculous document, created by people who had only a few years before risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to throw off monarchy and tyranny and create a nation where the rights of the individual were not only respected but guarded.  One of the first acts under the Constitution was to add to it a Bill of Rights, as if the Founders wanted to underline that the Constitution was all about personal liberty and preserving it.  Each and every item in the Bill of Rights, our first ten amendments to the Constitution, is a further limitation on the power of government over the rights of the individual.

Americans of various religious faiths, including those who disavow the existence of God, have over the last two centuries recognized the inspired nature and deep wisdom of the Constitution.  Many see and acknowledge even the hand of God directly manifested in its inspiration and promotion (see Doctrine and Covenants 101:80).

The Constitution is based upon the dread, born of painful experience, of entrusting men and women with the power of government over the rest of us.  It takes little historical research to find endless examples of how that power has been abused in nearly all times and places of the world.  Yet anarchy is no less a curse, one with which our Founders were also acquainted.

To balance and counter the two dangers, of tyranny and anarchy, the Founders relied upon a system of government that divided power.  No one would have a monopoly or even a predominance of power.   To begin with, the power of government overall would be strictly limited (and the Bill of Rights limited it even more), all but essential government powers remaining with the citizenry.  Then government power was divided between State and Federal authorities.  The power of the Federal government was further divided between three separate and equal branches of government.

The Founders did not believe in efficient government.  Rather, they believed that an inefficient government was needed as an efficient means of preserving the rights of the citizens.  While dividing authority among three branches, it was intended that neither branch could operate without the eventual cooperation of the others.  As had been seen in the English battles between king and parliament, tyranny and oppression resulted when either branch was able to rule without the consent of the other.

The United States has similarly suffered when weakness of president or congress allowed the other branch of government to operate without adequate check or balance.  The weakness of President Andrew Johnson allowed the tyranny of carpetbaggers with Congressional approval to oppress the people of the broken South following the Civil War, promoting poverty and racial hatred that lasted there for a hundred years.  The tyranny of the Franklin Roosevelt administration turned a deep recession into a Depression that lasted for a decade, disappointing people all around the world in the value of democracy and encouraging the dictators in Italy, Japan, Germany, and the Soviet Union who brought us World War II.

The first two years of the Obama Administration witnessed another period of weakened Congressional power, with a Congress all too ready to do the bidding of the President.  A willing Congress passed on to the executive branch control over the healthcare system, the financial system, and added trillions of dollars to government debt, only narrowly refusing to give bureaucrats authority to control the carbon dioxide that all humans exhale.

In the elections of 2010 the electorate voted to restore the balance by electing a congress that would object to the excesses of the executive branch.  That is precisely what the new members of Congress, with uneven success, have been trying to do over the past year.

President Obama is getting frustrated with the situation.  With the new year he has announced that he is going to try to govern without the Congress.  At a speech in the wealthy Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, President Obama said the following, “when Congress refuses to act, and as a result, hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, then I have an obligation as President to do what I can without them.”  Then to emphasize that he means what he says, he announced the appointment of Richard Cordray, the former Attorney General of Ohio, who was defeated in the last election, to be a new federal financial consumer czar, without Senate confirmation.  The Senate has refused to confirm Cordray, but President Obama plans to install him in office anyway.

The appointment confirmation process was one of the protections of the Constitution to limit the power of the President.  The Constitution carefully and explicitly divided the power to give government authority to unelected officials, placing with the President the ability to nominate but requiring that Senate approval be gained before the nominee could take office.  As I can testify from personal experience, it is a frustrating process.  The Founders must have assumed that the Senate would from time to time refuse to consent to some nominees, in which case the President could not proceed, the authority of the government would not be extended to that man or woman.

The Founders were also practical people.  They knew that there would be times when government posts needed to be filled when the Senate was not in session.  So the Constitution allows the President to make temporary appointments without Senate confirmation, but only when the Senate is in recess.  This practical element of the Constitution was not intended to get around the normal procedure requiring in effect President and Senate to agree before giving powers of government to unelected officials unaccountable to the people whom they would govern.

The problem for President Obama is that the Senate has refused to approve the nomination, but they also refuse to go into a recess.  What to do?  President Obama’s solution is to declare on his own that the Senate is in recess and appoint Cordray anyway. 

Hence, our constitutional crisis.  Can the President give governmental power over the people to anyone that he wants without Senate consent?  The Constitution says no, and the President says yes.  Normally, we would all take comfort in the reassurance that the courts will enforce the Constitution, but court decisions of recent decades have shaken confidence.  This presidential act of hubris is surely headed for the courts.  If the justices fail to do their duty, then the powers of unelected federal bureaucrats (unaccountable to people or Congress) will grow, and individual liberty will be significantly eroded.  For now, I am pinning my hopes on the judicial branch rising to the emergency.

Of Resolutions and Getting Past Frustration

Not to discourage you from making New Year’s resolutions, but how are your 2012 resolutions coming?  Are you still on track?  Given up on them?  Thinking about it?  They can drive you nuts.

The problem is not so much with making resolutions at the start of the year.  Psychologically, a new beginning that is tied to a new beginning of the calendar can be a good motivator, particularly to get started.  Neither is there a problem with choosing to change something or do something for the better.  Given a minute or less, every honest person can identify a habit in need of change or a practice in need of adoption.  The problem is usually not even that the aim is too high, the goal too unrealistic, the resolution too ambitious. 

If anything, the real problem is that the resolution is too narrow, too small, too unimportant, particularly if taken without a greater context.  Each of us should be self aware enough to recognize plenty of material to work with to create a depressingly long “needs improvement” list.  The question of where to begin—if we persist—may soon be overwhelmed by the question, where does it end?  There are too many for any one to hold our attention.  We need to look beyond the individual sin or foible, on to why we are willing to sin.

Martin Luther was in large measure driven away from the Catholic Church because of its emphasis on specifically repenting of each and every sin, correcting every personal flaw, large and small, with particularity.  There was no apparent end in this life to the correcting, no bottom to the list of sins, especially with a list being added to each day.  Repenting of each and every sin, he never made enough progress on his own list.

Fortunately for Luther and for everyone else, the God of Heaven has never called upon us to repent of each of our sins seriatim.  Neither have His prophets.   That is a man-made idea, and one that is sure to lead to deep moral frustration.

To be sure, God cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance (Doctrine and Covenants 1:31).  Heaven is the ultimate “white room;” not a speck of evil can be tolerated there, no room for anything unclean in the least degree (see 3 Nephi 27:19).

God does not require us to repent of each sin.  He requires that we repent of all sins.  There is a difference, all of the difference in the world.  The first suggests that we can repent of sins in some kind of order, working on some sins while still playing with some of our favorites, even if only temporarily.  The true doctrine is more demanding and more liberating:  God wants us to give up sinning, the willingness to do evil.  The focus on individual sins is misplaced, as if the source of the problem is in the act itself, what we do, whereas the real source is found in why we do what we do.  God wants us to change our hearts (and will help us to do so), knowing that with the change in their nature of our actions will then take care of themselves.

Carefully search all Christian scriptures, ancient and modern, and you will find God consistently calling upon His children to repent of all of their sins.  He does not ask for or condone a selective repentance that focuses on this or that individual sin or ever ask us to work down our personal list of evil.  He asks us to give it up, all of it.  What the Lord requires of His children to be acceptable to live with Him again is a change of life.  The ancient American prophet Alma described this repentance, this change of heart, as a man who has “desired righteousness until the end of his days” (Alma 41:6).  John, the Apostle of ancient times, referred to this change as walking “in the light” (see 1 John 1:5-10).

This change of heart comes from belief in Christ, a powerful wholehearted belief that manifests itself in our actions.  Another ancient American prophet, Samuel, declared it with these words:

And if ye believe on his [Christ’s] name ye will repent of all your sins, that thereby ye may have a remission of them through his merits.  (Helaman 14:13)

Notice that it is true, vitalizing belief that brings about the change of action.  A modern prophet, Spencer W. Kimball, explained true repentance in this way:

In connection with repentance, the scriptures use the phrase, ‘with all his heart’ . . . Obviously, this rules out any reservations.  Repentance must involve an all-out, total surrender to the program of the Lord. (Spencer W. Kimball, The Miracle of Forgiveness, p.203)

One last point:  note that perfection is not required to enter into the light.  As the Apostle John taught, those who enter into the light are in the process of making themselves pure (1 John 3:3), Christ giving them the power to do so through the soul-enriching influence of the Holy Spirit.

Make your resolutions and do them now, but put them in the context of changing your heart and thereby your whole life.  Aim for the highest of all.  Then we know where to begin and where it all ends.  And keep in mind, Christ allows you to start over when you slip up.