The Spirit of the Age is a Loss of Faith

What Happened Here? #1

People have lost faith in institutions. This is not just a statistical reality. It is the spirit of our age—a loss of faith. It’s in our laws. It’s in our social movements.

It’s in the air. It’s in the water. It’s in your bread and wine. It’s in your vaccine jab. It’s in the newsprint ink. It’s in the zeroes and ones. It’s in our own personal stories.

I feel it every time I read a news article and think, “What’s the other side of the story here?” I feel it every time I hear a government official speak and wonder, “What is their ulterior motive?” I feel it every time I read a work of scholarship and ask, “What data did they judiciously ignore, hide, or downplay in this study?” I just presume these institutions are not giving me the whole story. I have lost faith that they will.

This is truly a horrible way to live. Because so much hinges on faith. We need faith in elections to ensure that those who rule us do, in fact, rule us by our consent. We need faith in our government to ensure that we live in a just and fair society. We need faith in our currencies to ensure that the trades we make for goods, services, and labor are fair and predictable. We need faith in journalism and the academy to ensure that we make choices based on accurate information. And when we lose faith in these institutions, we no longer have confidence that we will be able to secure the good that these institutions provide.

These institutions are a kind of social insurance; they ensure that we will able to live peaceful, prosperous, and productive lives in the 21st century. They were built to insure us against tyranny, fraud, and rumor. Instead, our hope is deferred and ever hounded by reasonable doubts that their policies will pay out.

But what has warranted such loss of faith? Corruption. Our institutions are corrupt and full of the corrupt. Not every member, and not every institution, but enough of each that few of us look at the cynic anymore as a curmudgeon. Many of us have a lot of sympathy with the cynics. We find it harder to dispute their pronouncements.

Understanding the Problem

We know there is a problem. But it is a hard problem to articulate. Our predicament is similar to Chesterton’s when prompted to defend “civilization”:

If one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, "Why do you prefer civilization...?" he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, "Why, there is that bookcase . . . and pianos . . . and policemen." The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex. It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.

And yet, we must reply. We cannot afford to be silent. Because we can lose even more than our faith. We can lose the stability that our institutions provide. We can lose progress that people gave their lives for. We can sink into an age of darkness, where the spirit of the age might be far worse than a loss of faith.

Lost faith can be found, but only if we find something or someone worthy of faith. But where can we put our faith?

I think a natural place to put our faith is in each other. In our local communities. In our family and friends. In our colleagues. And I think this can sustain us. I think putting our faith in our local communities can lead to happy and productive lives.

But I am not prepared to abandon all hope in institutions. Because I think they have done a great deal of good, and they can be reformed. But we cannot solve problems that we do not understand. And Chesterton’s wild gesturing at everything is inadequate to the task. What exactly do we mean by an institution? And how and why have so many of them lost our faith?

That’s what I am hoping to explain in this part of this ongoing series.

What Happened Here?

Welcome to What Happened Here?, a series whose premise is illustrated well by a scene in the sitcom Community where Donald Glover’s character steps out from a party to pick up a pizza. When he returns to the gathering, he finds this:

In the next few posts in this series, I want to try to answer the questions: “What happened to our institutions? How did it get this bad?” I do not have any kind of expert status on these questions. But I have been reading a lot of expert analysis on this topic, and I want to share what I've learned.

The analysis and narrative I am going to offer will largely be a synthesis of two books I read in the past few years: After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre and The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch¹. Both of these books have informed this post and its characterization of the problem. And I have hope that by understanding the problem better, we can start thinking more productively about solutions.

1. The inspiration for doing a synthesis of these books came from the example of Brittany Polat’s Substack, Stoicism for Humans, where she is summarizing a recent work of academic philosophy, Chris Gill’s Learning to Live Naturally. I think that those of us with the time and training to work through long and difficult academic works, like Learning to Live Naturally or After Virtue, have something of a responsibility to, when occassion calls for it, use our talents to share the useful ideas from these books with a wider audience.