A Common Faith

Academics ignore novelists at their peril. Especially in the case of Marilynne Robinson. Robinson's novels are extraordinary (my favorite is Gilead) but her essays are equally illuminating. Take for instance her most recent offering "A Common Faith" published by Guernica.

One hazards to simplify an essay whose essential thrust is to oppose simplification.  Robinson begins with the common yet startling observation that "the human brain is the most complex object known to exist in the universe." She then proceeds to show how scientists and academics, not to mention columnists and commentators, set out to simplify human life and explain it in accordance with theories such as capitalism and Darwinism.

Both capitalism and Darwinism are examples of what Robinson calls "simple faiths:" truths that we are so attracted to that we hold to their veracity and power even in the face of facts to the contrary. The capitalist, for example, assumes that human beings are driven by a desire for wealth, profit, and efficiency. This in spite of thousands of years of human history filled with examples of altruism and non-capitalist motivations. And Darwinists insist that human beings are essentially animals, adapted for relative advantages in survival. In doing so, they ignore or downplay all those aspects of humanity like art, religion, and the human spirit that seem to have only tenuous contributions to human survival and yet are nevertheless part of human being.

Both capitalism and Darwinism are part of what Robinson calls Simple Faiths, common faiths we embrace with a moralistic devotion even in the face of evidence to the contrary. There is, she writes, an "urge, driven by righteousness and indignation, to conform reality to theory."  Later Robinson adds:

My point is that our civilization has recently chosen to identify itself with a wildly oversimple model of human nature and behavior and then is stymied or infuriated by evidence that the models don't fit.

The demand for a consistent worldview in the face of facts to the contrary is one of the central features of totalitarianism. A mendacious consistency is, in Arendt's telling, a product of the homelessness and loneliness of the modern age and the desire to find meaning in belonging to a movement, an ideology, that gives our lives sense and significance.

If one wants to find examples of the ways that the deep desire for simple coherency continues to operate in our world, reading Marilynne Robinson's "A Common Faith" is a great place to start. As the sun shines and spring springs, print out this essay and make it your weekend read.

-RB