On faith
What do a 1960s era space epic, the Stockdale Paradox, and being human these days all have in common?
In the closing appendices of the legendary novel Dune, a religious figurehead muses that "religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, 'I am not the kind of person I want to be.' It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.” Written by Frank Herbert and published in 1965, Dune was a cultural sensation. It was also a story deeply rooted in faith, both religious and otherwise.
A huge portion of the space-epic’s storyline focuses on the religious worship of Paul Atreides by the Fremen, the native people of the book’s namesake planet, Dune. More subtly though, the Fremen also harbor unwavering faith in a multi-generational commitment to the arid desert planet’s impending terraformation. Despite knowing that no living one of them will live to see the fruits of their labor, they toil on to provide the atmospheric conditions necessary for the planet to grow green and lush with plants and water, all because they believe so deeply in the possibility inherent within their persistence.
Faith lies at the foundation of everything the Fremen are, both religious and otherwise. And in them we can explore how much more nuanced a word faith is than it typically gets credit for, and how relevant it is to us all as humans trying to be, whether we know it or not.
Faith’s primary definition, before any mention of God or religion, is “complete trust or confidence in someone or something”. Complete trust. Words with such a clear stance that one can’t help but feel inspired by them. How rare is complete trust these days. How many can truthfully say that they have complete trust in anything or anyone at all anymore?
The answer is likely, almost nobody.
It’s somehow become fashionable to reject faith, an skepticism has become the overarching value of modern society, to the detriment of us all.
Skepticism or not , faith lies at the center of all that we are. It holds such a ubiquitous place at the heart of the human experience that it inseparable from being human. To have faith is to be human, and to be human means having faith. Its a north star for every decision made by rationale beings. It defines the belief that actions hold value, and that every human has a fighting chance to make something of themselves.
Now while faith is incredibly important to answering the question “what does it mean to be human?”, it does come with a critical condition. It must be realistic, rooted in reality. It cannot be blind to circumstance.
Real faith, the “trust or confidence” that makes us human, is found in balance. It’s found in acceptance of ourselves and our lives so that we can take action to improve them. It’s comfort in where we are at today, so that we can merit that trust and confidence that our actions will take us where we want to be so that we may enjoy the fruits of our labor.
Despite its relevance to our everyday lives, faith has become a bad punch line in a world increasingly ruled by skeptics and cynics. Everywhere we look, the notion that we live in a good world ripe with opportunity is downplayed or outright rejected. According to Gallup’s Faith In Institutions annual research poll, confidence in critical institutions like Congress, organized religion, the police, the military, and the Supreme Court, amongst many others, has fallen in the last three decades. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the last four years in particular have seen a stunningly precipitous decline.
It’s understandable. It’s easy to see how people can come to believe that the world is crumbling around us. Climate change, wars, inflation, aging infrastructure, consumer and government debt ballooning to historic levels; we don’t have to search too hard to see causes for despair everywhere around us.
And yet, underneath it all, we can also see cause for hope. We just have to look for it. Despite modern climate change, the hole in the Earth’s ozone layer is on track to a nearly full recovery in the next 20 years. Although unjust wars continue to rage, they are almost universally met with international condemnation and isolation of the aggressor, with financial, military, and humanitarian support provided to the defendant. Civil infrastructure built in the post World War II world is failing at an alarming rate in countries all around the world, and the problem is particularly bad in the United States. And yet, massive innovations in civil engineering and urban planning are occurring at a record pace, with huge investments from governments being made to advance society and its physical design into the modern world.
Being a faithful human these days isn’t so much naivety as it is a choice to look at the world through a lens of optimism with the belief that we can make things better.
Perhaps one of the best stories of faith practiced as it should be is that of James Stockdale. A combat pilot during the Vietnam War, Stockdale was shot down on the return home from a bombing mission, and after capture in a rural village, was taken to the Hanoi Hilton. Famed for its brutal torture of American POWs, Stockdale would spend the next eight years there leading the American POWs in resistance of their captors.
Years later when he was interviewed by legendary business innovator Jim Collins and asked how he managed to survive when others didn’t, Stockdale spoke to the nature of his faith while in the torturous prison camp. More specifically, he explained that in the practice of faith “you must never ever ever confuse, on the one hand, the need for absolute, unwavering faith that you can prevail despite those constraints with, on the other hand, the need for the discipline to begin by confronting the brutal facts, whatever they are”. Collins appropriately labeled this lesson the Stockadale Paradox, and used it to describe the paradox of faith. We must be faithful but not naive, as pragmatic as we are confident.
The point of faith and its role in being human is not to be blindly optimistic. It is to be an informed optimist. It is to believe in the potential of the future, and then to allow that belief to drive our relentless work towards building it for ourselves.
It’s worth nothing that Stockdale credits his unwavering faith and balanced rationale during his seven year crucible to his passionate study of stoicism, a core philosophy of humanism.
In those closing pages of Dune, Herbet brilliantly captured the aspirational yet realistic balance captured by humanistic faith when his pious spokesman defined his religion as one of aspiration. Bearing in mind the brutal conditions of Dune’s world building, this stated commitment to self improvement as being at the very heart of the matter is clearly important.
The point of faith, whether in a chaotic and war torn fictional universe created in 1965, or in interment at the Hanoi Hilton, or as a human witnessing the chaos of modernity, is not to stumble ahead blindly trusting in the will of a god or the benevolence of the universe to fix things.
The point is to act in ways that merit belief in building a better future.
And to quote Stockdale, to “have absolute, unwavering faith that you can prevail”.