Future Faith

The Faithless have crashed markets with a vehemence that WTC bombers would envy.

by Bruce Schimmel

I've been asking all kinds of folks how they're weathering the Great Confidence Crash of 2008. Friends, neighbors, people on line at the Acme.

It should come as no surprise that the more locally people live, the less they're affected by global concerns. But just beneath that distinction is another big cultural fault line — a religious and cultural distinction — dividing those who imagine a future and those who don't.

As a matter of personal faith, I believe in the future. I believe that the world can be restored and sustained, that the impulse to rebuild is imbedded in our genes, and that humans cannot survive without this hope. Call me and my kind "the Hopeful."

Then there are those less optimistic. They believe in a world with a definite end — even that it should end, and soon. Let's call them "the Faithless" — with the irony duly noted — since many such folk believe in an end time as a matter of faith.

You can see the difference between the Hopeful and the Faithless most sharply in how they live. Call it a hunch, but I think it's a fair bet that those who act, buy, do business and take out loans like there's no tomorrow probably don't believe in one.

Now, though, the creed of the Faithless has infected the world — crashing markets with an efficiency that the World Trade Center bombers would envy. Only now the weapon is our own broken belief.

Still, as both Wall Street and Main Street convulse, there are plenty of people happily living on side streets. You know them — the artisans, workers, business owners or professionals — who are full of faith for the future.

My friends, Patrick and Joe, skilled carpenters both, don't fear a downturn. Banks may be locked in dread. But Patrick and Joe trust their customers, and know that tomorrow the sun will rise.

So does Jude, a farmer who grows food without going into debt — either to the bank or the earth. Like her, most good businesspeople don't live on borrowed time. My wife, Kate, for instance, built a nice graphic design company without ever taking a loan to make a payroll. Like many professionals I know, she serves mostly local clients, and has raised rates modestly. In a downturn, the local and the frugal survive.

What all these Hopefuls also have in common is a fundamental belief in ecology — which I'm using in its largest sense to mean any system that's self-sustaining over time. Whether in things economic or environmental, the Hopefuls' horizon is far, and their vision, regenerative.

In contrast, with end time on their minds, the Faithless will mortgage both house and planet to get what they want right away. And why not? In a world at war, with four horsemen rounding the corner, who cares about a future that may never arrive?

I do. I'm hopeful about the future. And if you are too, speak up, because all those Faithless souls need our help. Now.

Get over it, 'cause like it or not, we're all in it together.

Which is even more reason that the Hopeful must envision a future that's big enough to include even the Faithless. Because our spaceship Earth — the planet, and all we do — includes everyone.

A wise woman who lives in a little fishing village that's regularly battered by storms once told me, "You don't have to like your neighbor. But in a storm, you better love your neighbor."

We are all neighbors in this storm. And those who will lead us out must imagine a future wonderful enough to open the eyes of even the Faithless.

(bruce@schimmel.com)