Faith, Hope, and the Perils of a Fiat Economy
As said in the previously-quoted bit on theology and philosophy, to have faith is to have faith in something. And as the ol’ Bible itself says, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1…a beautiful line perhaps worth more as poetry than explication, but it illuminates the nature of faith as a sort of solidified hope very well.) Faith, then, is transitive; it takes an object. Faithiness, or generalized faith, or faith in just, you know, stuff, doesn’t really work.
Our entire economy in this country runs on a system known as fiat, or faith-based, currency - the dollar is worth a dollar because we have faith in it being so. (In reality, as I’ve said in more bitter moments, it’s worth exactly kindling.) More deeply, our economy runs on fiat in another way: Things work in America (and democracies in general, perhaps) because people have hope that if they work hard, they can improve their lives, and leave good beginnings for their children to build on. When that hope is screwed up, we see it as something being fundamentally wrong with the system: when people are prevented from bettering themselves because of racial or other discrimination; when corporations use their power to shackle workers or customers into unfair deals; when the right of the people to at least feel like they can express themselves freely, and affect the course of the government, is effed with; etc.
It’s hard to have faith in the economy lately, especially if you’re in the thick of it. Where I live, in Michigan, people cannot get loans, even if they would normally easily qualify for them, and need them to save their houses or businesses. There are several types of loan that brokers are telling me “simply can’t be gotten in Michigan…if you lived in another state, you could…”; and our nearly 10% unemployement rate plus universal at-will employment means that people are getting fired left and right simply for not wanting to work for minimum wage. (The argument goes, lots of people want your job, so you should be willing to take whatever pay cut is necessary to “beat their offer”, or lose your job. Rather than make difficult sacrifices to protect their employees, many, especially larger, employers are simply cutting and swapping employees like crazy, taking advantage of the glut of applications to protect the cushy wages on top. I’ve never figured out why “at will” employment isn’t illegal, to be honest.) Employers having no loyalty means employees don’t either, and theft is through the ceiling while customer service is through the floor. Families that are already struggling are having to take in boarders as other people lose their homes, and all the while foreclosed homes sit empty to the point where there are literally blocks of nothing but empty houses - and I’m not talking about in Detroit, either.
In short, I don’t think I’m exaggerating or being inappropriate when I use the word “clusterfuck” to describe the situation here.
It’s at times like these - and certainly not just times like these, but notably anyway - that it’s necessary to redefine faith in order to avoid losing hope. If what kept us going (through the litany of decline and difficulty that has been southeast Michigan for quite some time, really) was faith in the economy, then we’d have none left by now for certain, and giving up would be justified. But it’s not, and the reason why is that we didn’t really have faith in the economy to begin with, even if we thought we did: We really had faith in each other, in the people in this region, whom we know as mostly hard-working, nature-loving types ready to get creative and do whatever needs doing in order to support their families and neighborhoods. It only looked like fiat currency, while we were distant from each other enough to trade it; now that it’s at risk, those of us who believe in hope on principle are in a position to realize it was never about the currency, or the economy, to begin with. And there are some really awesome revelations set to come out of that, visible already in the community gardens, barter groups, and words like “You know we’ve always got your back”, which I’m hearing so often lately.
In short, maybe the problem with faith is that it limits itself to things which you always run the risk of experiencing a shortage of, lending itself to crises. Faith in [insert conceptualized thing here] is so fragile, and in fact the more “clear” your concept of what you have faith in is, the more fragile it is too, because it’s so easy for reality to fail to conform to what you envision. Maybe hope isn’t really something that ought to be crystallized into a substance after all.
Hope itself isn’t transitive - you don’t have hope in something; you just have hope. Hope lets you look around to find something else to hang it on, if what you were hanging it on before goes shit-up and starts kicking grandmothers out on the street. Or to say it better than I ever could in a million blogposts:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.
Now if we could just get faith to loosen the hell up and hope to peck the eyes out of a few banking executives, we’d have it made, eh?
Originally published at *Transcendental *Logic. You can comment here or there.