Faith, overlooked human quality

Faith is a powerful human force, always at work even without the awareness of its agents. Like reason or creativity, faith is a human quality that shapes the behaviour of individuals and of societies.

In the western world, faith is commonly regarded as irrational, and discarded altogether from social or psychological discourse. Canadian philosopher and humanist John Ralston Saul, in his social critique entitled On Equilibrium, argues that democratic society must progress by balancing the essential human qualities or forces, to reach global justice with individual freedom. The qualities that he cites are: common sense, ethics, imagination, intuition, memory, and reason. He argues that reason has been the predominant quality in the West, leading to the tyranny of that trait at the expense of loss of balance with other qualities. A humanist message indeed.

But nowhere in his analysis is faith mentioned. In fact, the back index does not even contain that word as an entry. Only in the epilogue does the writer hint at the inner confusion of the Western psyche by wondering about higher motives, mentioning love and religions in the passing, but quickly discarding them as ideologies. It is worth noting that this epilog was written on September 2001, right after the New York World Trade Center attack.

The point is that faith must be faced as a human phenomenon, before it can be accepted and properly dealt with. Western faith in science, for example, has only been recently discussed by western philosophers of science as being comparably arbitrary or irrational as religious faith. So far, science has been taken for granted as the sole provider of higher values and motives. But it has not fared equally well on all levels, leaving the proverbial "spiritual void" as a often-cited cause for Western pathologies such as nihilism, modern cult-following or suicide. On the other hand, Arab pathologies such as religious dogmatism have been hysterically denounced, without a hint of awareness towards the faith crises causing the pathologies on both sides.

At the experiental level of existence, I can say that faith provides a renewable source of psychic energy and guidance - through feedback from the environment and the connection with an organizing principle that transcends the highest infinity. In short: credo, ergo sum.