The Faithful and Hopeful Economic Agent
Deirdre N. McCloskey[1]
The theological virtues are above the nature of man, whereas the intellectual and moral virtues belong to the nature of man. . . . Therefore the theological virtues should be distinguished . . . . The intellectual and moral virtues perfect the human intellect and appetite in proportion to human nature, but the theological virtues do so supernaturally.
Thomas Aquinas, SummaTheologiae Ia IIae., q. 62, art. 2.
Man doth seek a triple perfection: first a sensual . . . . then an intellectual. . . . Man doth not seem to rest satisfied . . . but doth further covet . . . somewhat divine and heavenly, which with hidden exultation. . . [such desire] rather surmiseth than conceiveth. . . . For although the beauties, riches, honors, sciences, virtues, and perfections of all men living, were in the present possession of one; yet somewhat beyond and above all this there would still be sought and earnestly thirsted for.
Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593),
First Book, XI, 4 (pp. 205-206.)
I wrote a book on ethics recently, and in it defended a sturdy little model of the virtues in which hope and faith and the rest are not reduced to prudence.[2] Hope and faith and a love of something beyond the profane are instead to be viewed as the transcendent goals that make a human life truly human. The self-regarding virtues are Prudence, Temperance, and sometimes Courage—since the courage sometimes is directed to self-preservation. And the other-regarding virtues, which philosophers after and against Adam Smith have taken to be the very definition of goodness, are Love, Justice, and sometimes Courage, the courage sometimes being on the behalf of others. Let's be quantitative about it. The individual and the social virtues are by this reckoning 2 ½ + 2 ½ = 5. To do the sum the other way, they are the pagan 4 of Courage, Temperance, Justice, and Prudence, with the Christian virtue of Love added to them, reaching up to the transcendent, making 5. Splendid: it’s Adam Smith’s view of ethics.[3]
But something's missing. In the analysis of Aquinas and of other Western ethical thinking before Kant, and now sometimes in the revival of virtue ethics, there are seven: 5 + 2 = 7, the pagan four plus the human half of Love, eros, philia, . . . and 2 ½ more: Faith and Hope, virtues six and seven, with the transcendent half of Love,agape. “Faith, hope, and love, these three abide.” They complete the traditional ethical psychology of humans. Hope and faith and agape are the transcendent. "They have God not only for their end, but for their object."[4] Here then is the model, with the missing virtues supplied:
The Seven Primary Virtues
In spiritual terms Faith, as St. Paul said in part, is “the argument for things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). St. Thomas Aquinas wrote a hymn defining Faith:
Quod non capis, quod non vides, What you do not grasp, not see,
Animosa firmat fides A lively faith affirms,
Praeter rerum ordinem. Beyond the order of [material] things.[5]
Even to look at nature one must affirm an order beyond the mere things. Facts without precepts are blind, a blooming, buzzing confusion. “No argument,” the political philosopher J. Budziszewski notes, “can be so completely drawn as to eliminate its dependence, conscious or unconscious, on undemonstrable first premises.”[6]
The discovery in the 19th century of non-Euclidian geometries and in the 20th of undecidable propositions should have taught the most scientific among us that faith grounds observation. The mathematicians Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh note that "underlying both mathematics and religion there must be a foundation of faith which the individual must himself supply." Mathematicians, they observe, are practicing Neo-Platonists and followers of Spinoza. Their worship of mathematics parallels the worship of God. Both God and the Pythagorean Theorem, for example, are believed to exist independent of the physical world; and both give it meaning.[7] Faith in what Aquinas called the "eternal" law is nonetheless a faith. Admittedly the faith of the Christian has more. It comes from the grace of God.[8] But who is to say that scientific faith is not also God's grace in action?
The physicist Stephen Barr puts it this way: "Even the atheist. . . asks questions about reality in the expectation that these questions will have answers . . . . It is not because he already has the answers. . . . [I]f he [did]. . . he would not be seeking them. Yet he has the conviction. . . . This is a faith."[9] And a great faithman, Thomas Merton, once wrote that "Faith is first of all an intellectual assent. But the assent of faith is not based on the intrinsic evidence of a visible object. . . . The statements which demand the assent of faith are simply neutral to reason. . . . Faith brings together the known and the unknown so that they overlap: or rather, so that we are aware of their overlap. . . . The function of faith is not to reduce mystery to rational clarity, but to integrate the unknown and the known together into a living whole.”[10]
Faith is not an attack on Science or a turn to superstition. But like the assent to the enterprise of Science as a whole, as against particular scientific propositions embedded in the enterprise, it is not based on the visible. Physicists affirm that ”God is a mathematician” or “God does not play dice.” Such faiths are not against rationality, but complete it.
The faith, in other words, need not be faith in God. Many secular folk believe in a transcendent without God, though approaching Him. "I think all poets are sending religious messages," declared Richard Wilbur, "because poetry is, in such great part, the comparison of one thing to another; or the saying, as in metaphor, that one thing is another. And to insist, as all poets do, that all things are related to each other, comparable to each other, is to go toward making an assertion of the unity of all things."[11]
But why then is faith a virtue? Why isn’t it sheer epistemology, a matter of how we Know, though concerning things not seen, such as a faith in the orderliness of the universe or in the power of reason or in a God of love? Because, C. S. Lewis explains, faith is a kind of spiritual courage, a willed steadfastness against the times when “a mere mood rises up against it.” Faithfulness is necessary for epistemology, "thinking with the giving of assent," as Augustine put it. "Belief" in Germanic origin is cognate with "beloved," from Indo-European *leubh-, whence "love." It connoted faithfulness, and only later acquired the meaning of giving credence to a proposition. A physicist who was, as Lewis says, “just a creature dithering to and fro” about whether in designing the universe God, figuratively speaking, is a mathematician would be a poor physicist. An historian who has nothing of “the art of holding on to things [her] reason has once accepted, in spite of [her] changing moods” is going to dither to and fro about whether or not history is caused (figuratively speaking) by the class struggle or by a horseshoe nail. She will not really have tested the class struggle or the horseshoe nail. As a historical scientist she will not be wholly virtuous, because as Lewis observes, she will change her mind unreasonably.[12]
Faith is a backward-looking virtue. It concerns who we are; or, rather, italicized, who we are, "the mystic chords of memory." In personal and modern terms it is called "integrity" or "identity." "If we create a society that our descendants will want to hold on to," writes Kwame Anthony Appiah, "our personal and political values will survive in them."[13] The faith needs to be instilled, "because children do not begin with values of their own." Though Appiah does not attach his notion of "identity" to religious "faith," perhaps he should. In social and ancient terms it is the virtue of insisting on belonging to a community, such as a polis or a church. As Tillich put it, faith is “the courage to be a part of,” to share a social purpose. “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith,” says the Christian, and does keep the faith steadfastly against many contrary moods.
The political scientist James Q. Wilson uses “duty” instead of faith, though he speaks of duty also as “fidelity,” from of course fides, faith.[14] That is: adhere to one’s commitments, do your duty in the face of temptations to take a free ride. As Wilson says, and Lewis said, faithful duty is akin to courage.[15] Indeed all the virtues require courage in the face of attack. But all courage requires faith, in turn, so that the courage is exercised for something enduring. Wilson’s leading example is Admiral James Stockdale’s leadership of the American POWs in the hands of North Vietnamese torturers. But he notes that the signs of faith lie all about. Faith is the who-you-are that finds you contributing to public radio, conserving water in a drought when no inspector will spot a defection, turning up to vote against George W. Bush when your vote was after all of no consequence.
Wilson adopts the view of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Aristotelian tradition before it, that ethics is a matter of habit and character, not continuous decisions under a rule of Reason. Like other virtues, he argues, faith is behaviorally instilled, working in tandem with genetic predispositions. Once instilled it is a feeling, a complaining conscience, what Smith called the Impartial Spectator. That is why Hutcheson and Hume and Smith in 18th-century Scotland claimed that virtues arose from “moral sentiments”: virtues are matters of a prepared feeling rather than a decision on the spot.
You begin, though, with a decision to cultivate the moral sentiments. You enroll with a free will at Annapolis and train your ethical muscles. Like a body trained to a sport, the present performance is both forward and backward looking, hopeful and faithful, both. The rule of reason, by contrast, insists on disowning the past, extracting you from your history. Utilitarianism insists on faithlessness.
Fides was the term by which the Romans described their relationship with allies. In the Roman wars against Carthage, Inc.—so bourgeois as to distribute annually the “profits” of the state to its citizens, in the style of Alaska with its oil revenues—the rule of Faith repeatedly overcame a rule of mere Prudence. In the last stages of the first of three Punic Wars, for instance, the prudent Carthaginians decided to economize on their navy, in the very years in which the extraordinarily faithful if previously not very nautical Romans built and staffed additional war galleys to the number of two hundred. In the Second Punic War the Romans were defeated again and again in Italy by Hannibal, losing 50,000 dead in a few hours at Cannae. But they never ransomed captives, nor hesitated to free slaves to staff fresh legions. They kept the faith at Rome.
The Dutch have a heavy word expressing the tug of the past through faith, lotsverbondenheid, solidarity. It means the sharing with solidarity of a common fate, those bonden, bonds, to the lots—compare English “lot,” as in "your lot in life." Aristotle's phrase for it is “another self.” Such friendship is a combination of love and faith directed here below. Love without faithfulness would be called “inauthentic” or “phony” or at best "inconstant, flighty," the crushes of adolescents or the serial polygamy of adults. In some families Faith without love would be called "having relatives."[16] Friends of mere use or amusement, Aristotle’s first two types, do not have lotsverbondenheid: “such friendships . . . are easily dissolved if the parties become different; for if they are no longer pleasant or useful they cease loving each other.”[17]
Friends of the third type, who care for one another as for themselves, do have a bonded lot. The Dutch university students portrayed in Paul Verhoeven's movie Soldier of Orange (1979) go through the Second World War in different ways, one dying as a Nazi officer on the Eastern Front, another shirking peacefully at home and passing his exams to become a lawyer, another escaping to England and becoming an RAF pilot, while several others die in the Resistance to the German occupation. The hero of the movie, played by Rutger Hauer, keeps faith with them all, even with the Nazi and the shirker, embodying lotsverbondenheid. In a scene on the beach at Scheveningen, for example, the others walk away from the fellow student who has traitorously joined the German army. The Hauer character, although himself by then leaning towards the Resistance, will not abandon him. Later the two verbonden friends, even though they have taken politically opposite paths, exchange postcards. Their lots are bound. You go to your high-school reunion. You say to yourself, "I have nothing in common with these people." But you do, if you are a person, theologically speaking. You have Faith.
Lotsverbondenheid is made evident in the technique of psychological intervention called family-constellation therapy. The participants play roles of mother or son or cousin or dead grandfather or anyone else bound by life's lottery to the person who is the main subject of the therapy. Even someone who murdered a former spouse may have a place in the constellation. It is not a drama viewed in detachment. Faith is called upon, performing a sort of public oath. The exercise of one's will towards lotsverbondenheid is Faith, Geloof.
* * * *
Adam Smith, supposedly the inventor of a theory conserving on love, emphatically did not follow with such a theory in his work or in his life. Smith and his friends thought of sympathy as creating a trusting society as by an invisible hand, in the way that Prudence created an efficient one, an argument stressed by the economist Jerry Evensky.[18] As Daniel G. Arce M. put it, citing Evensky, "It is the coevolution of individual and societal ethics that leads to the stability of classical liberal society."[19] The sociologist of friendship Ray Pahl concludes that "sometime in the eighteenth century friendship appeared as one of a new set of benevolent social bonds."[20] It was not in modern times but in the olden times that the life of man was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
This is no paradox. When a poor man can buy as much for his penny as a rich man, though he have fewer pennies, he is not required to doff his hat to get his daily bread. He does not need to pretend to be an ally of the butcher or the baker. This frees him when the occasion arises to be a real friend, an equal. Allan Silver notes that "the intense loyalties, coexisting with the frank expectation of reward, found in codes and cultures of honor before commercial society" were not nice and were not good for real, that is, bourgeois, friendship. Samuel Johnson described an aristocratic "patron" in his Dictionary as "a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid in flattery," in the fashion of Lord Chesterfield. Johnson found the relationship with his paying bourgeois readers more satisfactory: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
In a world governed by honor one makes friends to keep from being assaulted, Cicero's "protection and aid." In a world governed by markets one buys protection, one hopes, anonymously with taxes or with fees to ones condominium association, and then is at leisure to make friends for the sake of real friendship. Modern capitalism—though we must not suppose, as many people do, that markets did not "exist" before 1800—was supported by, and supported in turn, a trust in strangers that still distinguishes prosperous from poor economies. The division of labor in the modern world, as the economist Paul Seabright has emphasized, is achieved through "honorary friends."[21]
Trust and friendship, further, make possible speculative bubbles, from the tulip mania of the 1630s to the real estate of the 2000s. The very fact of capitalism's speculative instability, therefore, argues for an entirely new prevalence of belief in strangers. "Credit" is from creditus, "believed." A business cycle based on pyramids of credit was impossible in the distrustful 16th century. The macro-economy could in earlier times rise and fall, of course, but from harvest booms and busts, not from credit booms and busts. In those pre-modern-capitalist days God's hand, not human beliefs, made for aggregate ups and downs. Medieval and early modern people trusted only allies, and had wise doubts even concerning some of them: “How smooth and even they do bear themselves!/ As if allegiance in their bosoms sat,/ Crowned with faith and constant loyalty.”[22] Pre-moderns had to keep faith with God and with their lords temporal. Late moderns keep faith with the market and with their friends.
On this theory the episodes of disorder and unemployment in capitalism from the 1630s in Holland and from 1720 in Northern Europe arose from the virtues of capitalism, not from its vices, from its trustworthiness, not from its greed. To be more exact: the business cycle arose from trustworthiness breaking down suddenly in an environment of quite normal human greed for abnormal gain, the auri sacra fames which has characterized humans since the Fall. What is novel in capitalism is the faithful trust, lotsverbondenheid writ large.