BELIEF

by Kevin Carey

G21 Staff Writer

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Kevin Carey

There is a kind of belief without which society as we know it could not function. At its simplest level we call it trust. We order goods and pay in advance and trust that the goods will arrive. If they do not we trust that there will be a fair system of compensation.

When we go to court we trust the judge to be fair and the jury ... well, no, at that point because we can't label them we don't trust the first 12 good people and true that march into court. We vet juries scrupulously in order to get one as close to our point of view as we can.

So what we actually believe in at this level isn't a universal kind of naiveté, it's a kind of brand loyalty. As individuals we have different loyalties so some people irrationally trust the police while others irrationally fear unfair treatment. We tend to generalise from a tiny sliver of the particular but, in spite of that, we are remarkably constant in our trust.

Without it, as we have found -- to our economic and social cost -- everything becomes more complex and expensive.

Because our laissez faire politicians in the 1980s were greedy and callous they came to assume that the rest of their fellows shared these shortcomings; thus the audit culture, the excessive checking of expenses claims, the establishment of silly benchmarks and milestones, the checks and balances and more checks.

At a deeper level, however, we think of ourselves as at least sceptical if not downright cynical. Yet our gullibility is astonishing. We really believe that stuff on the back of breakfast cereal packets and slimming preparations. It is not all bad; we also know from experiments using placebos how much belief in a substance can make us better whether we take it or not.

In such matters it is my estimate that we are immensely talented at altering our beliefs to suit our wishes, needs and circumstances; as Benjamin Franklin once remarked, the great benefit of being intelligent is that you can find a good reason for doing anything. This is why we tend to believe and disbelieve what we are told according to how it fits with our own agenda. No matter what facts we are given, if we are told that the person we like is good we will believe it; if we are told she is bad, we won't.

At a deeper level still we have a profound cultural respect for scientific method and achievement in spite of its history as a series of disposable paradigms. There are even some brave intellects that think that scientific method is the only way of understanding anything and that there is nothing to be found that it does not find. It is the intellectual equivalent of going to a golf course with nothing under your arm but a 9-iron. It will get the ball a long way down the fairway but a hole in one is rare.

Most of us, however, are much more apt to file our insurance policies with the supernatural in case it turns out to be a force to be reckoned with now and ever after.

My own brand is Christian but I know people who put bits of crystal down their socks and know how to read my aura. I think of them as silly but when they hear what I think about the relationship between my God and bread and wine they probably think I am silly, too, but the conventions do not allow them such freedom with their ironies. You can make all the fun you like of the new agers but Christians and other followers of traditional religions expect some immunity from that kind of dismissal.

Brought down to its essentials, however, Christianity shares a great deal with other belief systems. It has a narrative, partly comprehensible but partly Delphic, so that there is some logic and some mystery. It has a set of rituals which are both challenging and comforting. It has a moral outlook which is apparently severe but also forgiving. It is part of everyday life but it does not lower; it can be invoked but given the slip. It has angels and devils, literally; and, above all, it helps to give shape to life and hope of something better to follow. Even for the sworn atheist there is enough generic merit in these attributes to command respect.

To those who say they believe in nothing I can only reply that they are unnecessarily unhappy; there are quite enough reasons in this world to be unhappy without self inflicted pain. Not to believe is a dynamic form of cynicism, it is corrosive of the human spirit. Well, almost. There are a few remarkable people who genuinely live according to the precept that virtue is its own reward but belief has been designed for us, individually and collectively, because we recognise that we do not have such strength, that our altruism is at best sporadic.

There was a time when the march of science and Marxism was seen as the harbinger of the death of belief to which the revival of Christianity in Eastern Europe, new age lifestyles and the music of Gorecki must provide a serious counter weight.

Apart from those exceptions, it seems to me that belief is roughly proportionate to self belief. It is a myth that those who believe in something supernatural do so to fill a personal vacuum, to meet some kind of deep seated inadequacy. My experience points the opposite way.

People do not turn to belief because they are desperate, it is an integral part of self belief.

This is not, a Catch 22 nor a chicken-and-egg conundrum, it is a fundamentally organic symbiosis.

Naturally I would argue that this symbiosis thrives best under the conditions of my own belief but there isn't any point having a belief if you think it is not at least as good as any other you have encountered. This is why the argument that belief is a fundamentally private phenomenon detached from public action and discourse is a nonsense. This is no argument for a theocracy, nor even for legislating personal morality into publicly enforced codes, but, rather, it is a legitimate defence by those who require their beliefs to be a key consideration in the way they are allowed to lead their individual and collective lives according to conscience and, for that matter, temperament.

I should neither like to live under the tyranny of the Ayatolla Khomeini nor Professor Richard Dawkins. Every time we wipe a tear from our eye at the end of a piece of music we know that the reductive method is not the only way to experience everything that being alive has to offer.

Next week it will be time to sum up, so this is the last thought of this series. If you have been to an even vaguely Christian wedding, the chances are that you will have heard the part of the Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians which, to use the common if now dated argot, deals with Faith, Hope and Charity. Of these, Paul famously says in a judgment fatally misunderstood in such an erotic age, the greatest of these attributes is charity. Not for the first time I disagree with Paul. For all but the few, the few, as I have said, who can lead charitable lives without faith, the greatest of these is faith.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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