Faith

The Sins of Our Forebears Give Us Hope

Better trust all, and be deceived,
   And weep that trust, and that deceiving;
Than doubt one heart, that, if believed,
   Had blessed one’s life with true believing.

Oh, in this mocking world, too fast
   The doubting fiend o’ertakes our youth!
Better be cheated to the last,
   Than lose the blessèd hope of truth.

- Fanny Kemble “Faith”

We cannot live on this earth without faith. Faith is such an essential part of our being that we don’t even notice it.

We have faith that when we come to a traffic signal, drivers will stop when a red light tells them to stop, and go when a green light tells them to go. Imagine that: people will be driving along, and will come up to an intersection, and all of a sudden, this light hanging in the air will turn red, and they will stop. And so will everyone else.

Have you ever been out late at night when everyone is at home except you, and you’re driving along, and a traffic light will turn red? And you stop, don’t you? And there is no one there. No one in sight. Just you, in your car, stopped, looking up at a red light, and waiting for it to turn green. Why do we do that? Why not just go? And, yes, from time to time, we do go. We are rebels, for that moment. But in virtually all cases, we wait for the light to change. We do that, I think, because we know we need to contribute to other people’s faith. We do that in order to keep this world running. This crazy thing, sitting at a traffic light in the middle of the night when no one is around contributes to the health and happiness of humanity.

We do this because we do this in rush-hour traffic as well, where if we didn’t stop at a red light people will be hurt or killed. This feeling of obligation to stop at traffic lights gives us hope and allows us to have faith.

I take Fanny Kemble’s words to heart: it is better to trust too greatly than to doubt everything. We can choose to believe the better side of a coin-flip. If some kid come up with a tale of woe about how he had his luggage and wallet stolen and he’s stuck and needs bus money to get home, we can believe one of two things: the story is true and this guy is in real trouble, or it’s a scam. I have a scale of trust in circumstances like this: if he’s asking for a thousand bucks, forget it. But if it’s $10 or $20? Sure, why not help the kid out - even knowing it’s likely a scam. Why? Because it might not be. I choose to believe, knowing I may be wrong. I can survive being wrong.

I believe that we humans are basically good, and that most of us act in good faith and try to contribute our talents for the betterment of our families and communities. And while there is evil and bad actors out there, we outnumber them, and our goodness keeps this world humming. Giving people the benefit of the doubt while also keeping our eyes open is the least we can do, even if it means we get burned from time to time. More often it is to our benefit, and to everyone’s benefit, if we expand our faith in each other.

I. The Sins of Our Forebears

I am an advocate for “living in the now,” but being too much in the now can make us lose perspective on what came before. Each generation that comes up looks at the world with new eyes, sees the problems, and many times thinks that these problems are unique in history. But these problems are never unique in history. Humans have always been crappy to each other, there’s always been corruption, technology has always replaced jobs and industries, and humans have always indulged their vices. The difference is that these problems in the now affect us in the now, whereas historical problems are safely behind us. However, the fact that humanity lived through those times gives me faith and hope that we can deal with our present times. We are cursed to repeat history, but somehow we managed to repeat overcoming history as well.

I love art from all eras because art is the best humanity has to offer. I love movies from from long ago because for the first time in history, we can see and hear people as if they are here now, even though they left us long ago. Literature and histories do that in written form, but movies and recordings let us know what people before us looked and sounded like. Celluloid and lacquer make them immortal. And from this immortality we learn that our forebears had the same problems we have now, and many times worse. I believe that we as humans have progressed. Not perfectly, God knows, but we are progressing into better states of being and existence. One reason I think this is happening is because we are able to experience the past more like the now. I wrote about the Beatles “Get Back” documentary and how it felt we were in the room with the Beatles, and yet it was over fifty years ago. This still astounds me. This ability to stretch out our perception of humanity from everyone who is alive now, to include those who came before us can only make us better, more empathetic, and in my case, more hopeful. In short, the arts give me faith in humanity. That’s the main reason I am doing this newsletter, to highlight our best.

I rewatched the 1940 movie His Girl Friday the other day, staring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. It is a remake of the 1928 play The Front Page, with a few liberties taken, including making Hildy Johnson, played by Rosalind Russell, into a strong female lead instead of a cocky young male reporter. Russell’s the star of this movie, and she plays well against Cary Grant and Ralph Bellamy. The film is about “newspaper men” who would do anything to get a story and sell papers, including inventing yarns and outright lies, and it’s about government corruption that would hang an incompetent man just in time for an election. Oh, and it’s a comedy. It’s well-written and well-acted, and it is damned funny.

The movie gives me perspective. I recommend the film because it’s a great film, but also because it reminds us that we’ve seen corrupt institutions before. It came out over eighty years ago. Somehow, we managed to survive government corruption and overzealous news media in the 1920’s and 1930’s enough for Howard Hawks to make a comedy about it. The good triumphs enough for us to see another decade, another century. We do more things right than we do wrong, and so here we are.

We should have enough faith in ourselves and our institutions to try to make things better and to believe we will succeed, rather than have zero faith in our institutions and our fellow humans and believe we are doomed to failure. If we believe nothing will get better, nothing will. And you know what, things are getting better. History is a record of this. So cheer up: in the words of Lance White, “things have a way of working out; they always do.”