All of the blessings of modernity, Ryan Avent argues in a fascinating new book, rest on faith. It is our faith in others, our ability to trust strangers we will never meet, that makes possible the large-scale cooperation that has given us science, modern economic growth, and liberal democracy. But if everything depends on our ability to weave and maintain particular webs of complex meaning, what happens when we allow those webs to weaken and fray? In his book In Good Faith, Avent contends that the dysfunctions and discontents plaguing 21st century democracies reflect such underlying neglect. We have been seduced by what he calls the “Modern Faith” — the belief that good system design and proper incentives are all that is needed to keep society running smoothly. In this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Avent and host Brink Lindsey discuss the Modern Faith’s critical blind spots, explore the interplay of culture and institutions in shaping social change, and ponder whether anything can replace the cultural grounding provided by organized religion.
Transcript
Brink Lindsey: Hello everybody, and welcome to The Permanent Problem Podcast. I’m delighted to have as my guest today Ryan Avent, author of the new book In Good Faith: How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies, just out from Yale University Press. Ryan, welcome to the Permanent Problem.
Ryan Avent: Brink, thank you so much for having me.
Lindsey: It’s great seeing you again. I was just reflecting today on when we first met each other and I had that combination of sensations. The sensation that time accelerates the older you get, the faster time passes. Also, the sensation that I’m old — put those two together. And we’ve known each other for a long time, but it feels like I met you the day before yesterday. It’s been well over 20 years at this point, I think.
Avent: Yeah.
Lindsey: Right around 20 years, right around.
Avent: Right around 20 years is right, yes.
Lindsey: Yeah. So I met you when you were still just a blogger. I don’t think you were even freelancing with The Economist yet, back in the good old days of blogging. But then you were a freelancer at The Economist, then a staff writer for The Economist for many years. And then a few years ago, you decamped for the private sector. But with this book already in mind or already started — at any rate, to finish a book like this while being somebody with a real job in the private sector, that’s a true labor of love. So tell me how the book came about and why did you write it? I have a feeling that it started as one thing and it grew, given the times you were writing in.
Avent: Very much so. Yeah, that’s true. I had started it before I left The Economist, and initially it was really focused on some thinking I’d been doing and writing I’d been doing about blind spots in economic thinking about how institutions work, how people choose to behave, what their motivations are, things like that. And so I had started digging into this and doing reading around it.
Lindsey: You had written a book that came out, I think in 2016, called The Wealth of Humans about our new labor abundance and how that was shaking up the world with the global labor market and what that entailed. And there was a chapter in there, as I recall, that was homing in on this idea of business culture as a big determinant of competitive success. So it was your thinking there about this blind spot in economics, where everything is about design and incentives and not so much about culture. And you wanted to fill in the blanks. But then you had the idea as you were going on that this blank you were filling in had a lot more explanatory power than just this narrow wonkish task — you were explaining why the world was going crazy.
Avent: Absolutely, yeah. So in the 2016 book, there was this chapter on, as you say, how businesses work. And really what I pulled out of economics research, business research, and other things was just how important culture is to guiding these businesses. And people have this code more or less for what it means to be a part of an organization, and they’re intrinsically motivated to abide by that, and that helps generate these good collective outcomes. And I thought on this and realized this applies in many more cases other than just the business world. And if you take seriously the idea of what people’s beliefs are and how they see themselves as identifying with different institutions or different groups, and you think that’s really driving a lot of behavior, then there’s a good reason to think that that is an important part of what holds us all together in aggregate and shapes what we’re capable of as a society. So that’s the direction the book began heading in.
Lindsey: And when you start heading in that direction, you are going against some headwinds, right? The contemporary smart set is allergic to cultural explanations of anything. It’s too mushy to quantify and really get a good analytical, rigorous handle on. And also it’s not actionable — if you don’t get a five-point policy reform to fix the problem, because that’s not how culture works.
So it’s some combination of this being loose, unrigorous thinking, and also, “I don’t care where you dropped the keys, that’s gloomy over there. Right under here, under the streetlight, we can see what’s going on.”
Avent: That’s right, that’s right. Yeah, and for most of my time working in and writing about economics, I shared that view. I was like, it’s unserious people who really think about this fuzzy stuff. And if we really want to fix a social problem, we need to think about it in terms of incentives and adjust the dials just so, and then if we do enough of that, we’ll get to a good place. But that just ended up feeling inadequate. And I think it felt a little inadequate to me before 2020 and everything that’s followed from there.
But after that, and going through the wrenching experience of those years — and I guess really beginning around 2016 and then through the next decade — it felt to me like this isn’t a small thing, this isn’t a small detail. This aspect of what holds societies together that we’re ignoring, actually it’s really, really important and maybe becoming ever more important as we move into this post-materialist society, where we don’t have to spend most of our day focusing on how we’re going to put bread on our table. It really ends up mattering a lot more how we feel about ourselves and what we think matters and what we’re trying to achieve in our lives.
Lindsey: And there has been serious, rigorous academic interest in culture and cultural evolution over the past couple of decades that has somewhat weakened the taboo on exploring this terrain, but still. And when you step back and don’t take for granted the conventional wisdom, I mean, human beings are cultural animals — that is our distinctive thing, right? We have a whole repertoire of behaviors that we didn’t come here with instinctually. We learned them from others and then we pass them down to the next generation and they survive us, they predate us and they survive us. And we’re finding little bits of culture in the animal world, but nobody does it like us. The wealth of cultural inventiveness and the sheer crazy variety of things we can believe and organize our lives around and take completely seriously, that’s as close to the core of human identity as anything. So it makes sense it’s an important explanatory variable.
Avent: I mean, I certainly agree. And I think the anthropologists and behavioral scientists who studied this take this idea very seriously, but in economics, and probably just in the lay community as well, I don’t think we have ever really fully appreciated the extent to which our evolution as a species was driven by this, right? That our ability to begin to use culture as a way to coordinate our activities and store knowledge that persists over time, that was really fundamental in driving human evolution forward. And then once we became Homo sapiens, that was the key way that we adapted to new scenarios. We didn’t do it with our genes for the most part, we did it through the evolution of culture. And so it’s been critical all along for our whole existence as a species. But then I feel like we got to this point where we felt like we outgrew that. We’re now modern man and woman, we’re rational, and in this world we don’t need to rely on that anymore. And I think that’s fundamentally wrong.
Lindsey: I’ll get to the “Modern Faith” in a little bit and what has gone wrong. But let’s start with what’s gone right. So we take it for granted this is the world we’re born into, and wonder why isn’t it better. But step back and think about where we are and where we are in relation to just about every other human being who’s part of the story of our species. And we live in extravagantly different circumstances and dramatically, unimaginably better circumstances. First, there are eight billion of us, so there’s a whole lot of us getting to have the human experience. And we live in these enormous collectives relatively peacefully together — that’s astonishing. And we have figured out ways to organize our activities in incredibly intricate divisions of labor and responsibility. We have harnessed magical-seeming technologies, and this is all the handiwork of culture.
So you have a history of how we got here in the book. Do you want to go through that a little bit? The nature of our beliefs determines how big a group we can be in and what the scale of our cooperation can be, and therefore what the scope of our collective capacities can be, and therefore what our opportunities can be. But why don’t you spell that out some?
Avent: Yeah, absolutely. So once we became cultural creatures, we did end up storing more and more information about how to behave and why to behave in that particular way in our culture. And that’s a thing that allowed us to learn new tricks to survive in different niches. But if we think about all the different aspects of culture now, all the different ways that we conceive of behavior with all the different subtleties, all those things had to be discovered or invented or stumbled upon. And the process of stumbling on those things and the stories that we found that allowed those things to make sense to us opened up new capabilities for humankind.
And so in the book, I tried to pick out a few. And one, I think, is as we learned to find new ways to live in larger societies, and a huge part of how we did this was stumbling on religion, we could operate in tribal groups of hundreds rather than bands of a few dozen. And that may not sound like a huge difference, but actually when you’re thinking about trying to accumulate a body of technologies that will allow you to do more, or when you think about trying to cooperate to achieve some larger end, that number makes a huge difference, right? Multiple bands coming together can preserve a discovery that someone stumbled on a lot better. There are more people sharing ideas — “Oh, we’ve figured out how to do this with a fish hook,” that kind of thing.
And so I think that as we learned to do that and became accustomed to larger societies, that was a contributor to accelerating technological development and accelerating growth in our overall capabilities. And this has happened repeatedly throughout our history. If you look at the process of us settling down, living in larger sedentary communities, figuring out how to be successful communities while relying on agriculture, and then figuring out how to live within states, there were bodies of meaning that were evolving all along the way that helped us adapt ourselves.
Lindsey: And somewhere right around there, we figured out writing, too. So we figured out a way to store our culture externally, not just in the noggins of other humans, but somewhere that can survive us. That opened up a huge can of worms.
Avent: Yeah. I mean, all of this did, right? And I think I’ve been struck when reading historical takes and analyses on this, how much people want to attribute the emergence of something like writing or of a particular state to this purposeful behavior by clever people — like, “Oh, writing emerged because it was a way that kings could exercise greater control over their populations.” And I think obviously writing allowed people to have that greater capability, but these things were evolutionary. It had to become more widely accepted that submitting in certain ways to a king was a good thing or a reasonable thing to do — maybe not a good thing, but something that was appropriate for a person to do, or that someone reading into these symbols and saying that they meant this or that was a legitimate thing. And that’s, I think, in a lot of ways, the governor on what a society can be: what do people feel is appropriate?
And certainly that’s something that’s continued up to this modern day. It’s something when I think about the political situation we’re in now — you have these ideas about what’s appropriate that constrain behavior, and then they go away, but we’re getting to that. And then thinking about how we get to modernity, I think there had to be some pretty significant changes to the body of shared meaning, changes in the way we feel about behavior to allow that. And the book talks about that a little bit. It’s a few things. I think part of it is about getting past kinship networks and interacting with others as if they’re all more or less okay to interact with.
Lindsey: And in making that step, you ascribe an important role to Christianity?
Avent: I do, yeah. And I don’t know how people receive this, because if you say that Christendom could become the first industrializing part of the world because of Christianity, I think that can be a difficult thing for a lot of people to swallow. But the point I try to make is that the spread of Christianity throughout Christendom — Western Christendom — and the way that it evolved in interaction with other different forces really led to the displacement of this old moral structure, which really was kin-group based and where you treated people outside your kin groups quite differently and held them to different moral rules than you held internally. That ended up being replaced by this more universal moral code — it didn’t happen overnight by any stretch of the imagination, but as that happened, we became more flexible. We became better able to be a part of many different groups, overlapping groups, and that unlocked a lot of potential for complexity.
Lindsey: You have a nice metaphor — at least nice for a Baby Boomer geezer like me — of saying that we went from a society where you built cultural institutions out of Lincoln Logs to a Lego society, where you’ve got these modular pieces. You can build stuff with Lincoln Logs, but you’re constrained by what you can build, whereas with Lego, you can build anything. So once you get to this universal morality that highlights the free and sovereign individual, that’s your Lego block. And once you’ve got that belief structure in people’s minds, the ways you can combine individuals into new configurations becomes virtually limitless.
Avent: And I think this ends up being incredibly powerful. Because all these little subdivisions within society, the different groups of which people can be a part, have their own little cultures holding them together with particular sets of meaning, and those things can evolve over time as well. And so if you look at something like the development of science and the set of values that goes around with that, this emerged from a subgroup of society. In the West, we would say it’s something like the Republic of Letters that formed the idea among themselves that it was appropriate to express this radical doubt — that you wouldn’t accept things unless evidence could be shown to prove it. And then if you believed something and evidence was shown to you that that wasn’t correct, that you would change your mind.
And so I think you have to think about this shift in the moral sensibilities as opening up the room to develop these important sub-beliefs — like science is good, it’s good to turn a profit, it’s good to try to work hard and develop your own capacities as an individual — all these different things that really contributed to modern economic growth.
Lindsey: So faith is in the title of the book, faith figures prominently in the book. Explain how faith fits into this cultural explanation of what’s happened to us and where we are.
Avent: Sure. Well, I think it’s central. I think we often think of ourselves as being distinct mostly because of our capacity to reason and to work through problems and innovate and come up with solutions to them. And I think that’s actually… I mean, it’s very important that we can do that, but I don’t think that’s the thing that really sets us apart. First of all, apes can do that — not nearly as well as we can, but they’re pretty clever and they’re good problem solvers. But what really unlocked the capacity to use culture to cooperate was faith, right? That we were able to develop this capacity to trust others, even though they weren’t blood relations or close blood relations, that we found ourselves able to believe things and live in a way consistent with those beliefs, even though we didn’t really understand why.
And there’s a lot of interesting anthropological work that makes this point, right? That over time, indigenous groups would develop these incredibly complex procedures for processing food or building housing or fighting wars. And there were tricks embedded in these things that no individual could have come up with. It’s not like someone invented it out of nowhere — there were no research labs or anything like that. And so these things can only work and help us survive and adapt if we continue to do things that on their surface don’t make sense.
If we add lime or ash to our maize to help us access the niacin in the maize, who’s going to just randomly throw ash in their corn? And so it was really faith that allowed us to survive all these hundreds of thousands of years. And I think that if we are honest with ourselves and reflect on how we live today, that’s still just an absolutely critical part of modern society. We walk out our door believing we’re going to be okay, believing that everyone is going to abide by laws and conduct themselves in a way that’s going to allow our lives to work as we expect them to.
Lindsey: And even modern science rests on unprovable assumptions — that we can trust our senses, that we’re not just brains in a vat being tricked by some demon, that something real is going on that we’re experiencing. The orderliness of the universe, that there are natural, regularly recurring patterns and they are ultimately comprehensible to us. So none of that is a given, but it’s a precondition for getting anywhere. If we’re going to say, “No, we don’t need faith anymore because we’ve got science,” well, we don’t have science without faith.
Avent: That’s right, yeah. And I think the other aspect of faith that the book works through and focuses on as it thinks about the present and where we’re going, is the extent to which faith is necessary really to get through life. Life is difficult, there’s a lot of reason to think that things will go wrong in disastrous ways. And particularly in our modern society where skepticism of things like faith is the marker of being a serious mind, we fail to appreciate how you have to believe that a tomorrow is possible, whether or not there’s any evidence for that, in order for there to be a tomorrow.
Lindsey: And this is a good time to throw in the fact that your book, which has this huge theme of the grand sweep of history, also has autobiographical elements interspersed throughout it. So we’ll get to the crisis of faith that our liberal democratic societies are undergoing right now, but you had a personal crisis of faith, at least partially triggered by this larger societal crisis. So you interweave those stories. You get personal about things.
So, culture starts with belief, belief starts with what’s going on inside one person’s head, so that’s a nice jumping-off point. But you get to gratitude: “There are wonderful things that I get to be privy to because I’m alive and I’m grateful for that. And I don’t want to let those people down, and so I need to get my shit together so that I can live up to them.” And so it was what you’re grateful for, and then your obligations to those people you’re grateful for, that pulled you out of your funk, right? So tell the story a little bit.
Avent: Well, I mean, you’ve done a great job summarizing. The short version is that I, as many people do when they get to midlife, started to question a lot of things. I’d always been prone to depression, and so I was struggling with that as per normal. But as the world developed around me in ways that seemed very ominous, that added to the burden that I felt like I was bearing. And as we got into the pandemic and the aftermath, and the aftermath of January 6th, I really became quite deeply depressed and just didn’t really know what to do with myself after that day.
Lindsey: And it’s fair to point out, a lot of people have had tough times over the past decade, and certainly a lot of people had tough times during COVID, but most people had the luxury of tuning politics out, right? So people with weird jobs, like working at think tanks or working for a political magazine, you don’t have that luxury. So we had to, like poor Malcolm McDowell [in A Clockwork Orange] with his eyeballs propped open while they’re beaming the horrors at him, we couldn’t look away.
Avent: We couldn’t look away, no. And we had to try to think about where it was going, what would lay ahead, and that could often be a bleak thing to contemplate. But I eventually got fed up with myself, and I landed on this personal realization that if I take this incredibly gloomy outlook as my baseline, I’m always going to be miserable, I’m not going to be a good person for the people who love me, I’m not going to be able to work effectively to try to help the situation in whatever ways I can. And I realized that I need to believe that tomorrow can be better, even if I don’t really have a lot of things I can point to that give me strong confidence that this is true.
And I think the reason that ends up making its way into the book is because that shaped my understanding of how we work together as a society, of what ends up being the mode of power that keeps the society going. And it really fed into my understanding of what seems to be going wrong and what we might need to do to fix the problem.
Lindsey: I mean, you’re personally miserable, right? “I’m not happy. I’m not maximizing my utility for being now,” right?
So that project is not going well. So you turn around and you think about a different project, right? The people who matter to me and doing right by them. Being a good person and doing good for the people who matter to me — okay, then I need to shake out of this torpor and I need to have faith that tomorrow could possibly be a better day, so I can do good by the people that matter. So shifting from “I’m a homo economicus and I’m here to maximize utility” to a different mix of meanings — life as an opportunity and an obligation to do good. You’re explicit in planting that flag in the ground in a way that a lot of contemporary liberals are very shy to do, right? That idea, “We don’t want to tell anybody how to live or what’s good. It’s all up to them. We’re just going to set the conditions for them to figure it out on their own.” But you’ve broken from that.
Avent: Yes. And part of the evolution that happened with me was looking around and wanting others to behave better, to behave more responsibly, more conscientiously. Wanting them to do that because that would make the world better or prevent bad things from happening, but also because I felt like it would make it easier for me to be better, right? It’s important that we all hold each other accountable. And so I think looking around at how things have happened over the past few years, it’s been incredibly frustrating the number of people who haven’t hewn to what I would think are the right paths of behavior. They haven’t done what they were supposed to do. They haven’t stuck by the principles that I thought we all took seriously and so on.
And so I think it’s very difficult for me to look around and see that shift in behavior and not think that that’s closely linked to what’s going wrong. It feels like we’ve given ourselves permission to behave incredibly self-interestedly, to not heed the obligation to do right by others. And because that’s so important to keeping society functioning well, that ends up being a key cause of extremism.
Lindsey: Even talking about the obligation to do good, and the reason we’re on earth is to do good and help make us into better people, that just all sounds cringe by 21st-century standards, right?
Avent: It is very cringe.
Lindsey: So we’re coming up against the “Modern Faith.” Different kinds of faith have brought us to this exalted position. And the story you tell of progress is not a Whig triumphalist story at all, it’s an evolutionary story where people are doing things by accident. And I was looking recently at email correspondence to you right after I read the manuscript, and I said something like, “It’s like just a series of slipping on banana peels until suddenly you find yourself almost at the summit of Mount Olympus,” right?
Avent: That’s right.
Lindsey: But now we’re sliding back down, and why is that? What is the Modern Faith that we have substituted for the faiths that got us to this exalted place?
Avent: I think that if we… The way I tell the story about how we got to modernity, to modern economic growth, it is one where our beliefs and values shifted and those beliefs and values changed our behavior in ways that allowed us to unlock all these new capabilities. We got to a place where it was deemed as being appropriate to try to understand the universe better, to use that understanding to try to make the world better, where it became acceptable to make a profit while doing that, but also where there were ethical obligations that people took very seriously. And if you go back and look at the political economists from the late 18th, early 19th century, they took this for granted. They didn’t think that we were all these isolated particles. Smith understood very well that what allows these economic forces to work as they do is the set of ethical, moral obligations we give ourselves and take seriously.
But as industrialization proceeded and as history proceeded, I think we became very rationalist about how societies function. We came to think of ourselves more as rational engineers rather than moral actors. And also, I think there were many appealing things about that way of thinking about society that allowed them to spread. And I think if you took economic analysis as it developed and became, around the turn of the 20th century, if you took that seriously, then one, it had incredible explanatory power. It ends up being a lot like physics. You can get close to having an equation where you can crank out and predict what’s going to happen in our social world, which is a very tempting thing.
But then also the moral guidance that ends up providing is a very convenient one, where markets are going to turn our behavior into an ideal outcome if we behave in a self-interested way. So really the right thing to do is to behave in a self-interested way. And this was tempered by prevailing moral and ethical views, but over time, I think that story became more dominant and the things that had tempered that story eroded. And so we got to a point where it really feels like everyone has permission to get theirs.
So anyway, the Modern Faith, to answer your question, is this belief that once we land on the correct systems of social organization, like a market economy, that’s the thing — that’s what we’ve gotten to and it doesn’t matter what individuals do or whether or not they’re moral. We’ve engineered the system correctly and so it should work. But that’s mistaken.
Lindsey: Let me back you up here, and then I’ll give you a little bit of pushback.
Avent: All right.
Lindsey: So the modern faith is that everything comes down to system design and incentives, that if we set up the system correctly, then the little human being balls will bounce through the maze of incentives correctly and get to the proper efficient outcomes.
This is one gigantic, classic example of economists assuming the can opener. So the story is an economist and an engineer wash up on a beach after a shipwreck and they’re scrounging around to see if anything turns up that they can use. And they find some canned goods, but no can opener. And the engineer is trying to figure out some way to rig something to whack open the cans. And the economist says, “No, no, no, let’s just assume a can opener.”
So economists, living in this moral economy of people with their heads full of all kinds of beliefs, observed how those citizens of a moral economy responded to incentives, and saw that incentives can be really powerful in shifting behavior — but incentives acting on humans that are enmeshed in a moral economy. And gradually that context just leeches away until you end up with this assumption of homo economicus, this rational utility maximizer that isn’t really like anybody you and I have ever met.
And it occurs to me there’s an interesting example of how this eats away at our moral fiber over time: Milton Friedman, who comes up in your book. Milton Friedman’s line on corporate social responsibility — he famously said that “The only responsibility that corporations have is to make profits while staying within the rules.” So maximize profits while playing within the rules — you have satisfied your corporate social responsibility. Okay, “while playing by the rules” is a codicil that’s assuming a lot, right? But it starts dropping away. Okay, play within the rules, but the rules aren’t fixed for all time, we can change the rules. So we can lobby and make the rules favor us. And there’s a whole lot of that going on — Steve Teles and I wrote a whole book about it called The Captured Economy.
And then beyond that, well, the rules just say that if we violate the law, we get fined. So we’ll pay the fines — that’s the cost of doing business — but we don’t care if it’s right or wrong, because right just is maximizing profits. So you start with a fairly sensible observation — there’s very little a corporate manager is going to do to make the world a better place over and above running his business well, there’s a lot of truth in that. But the context around it just keeps eroding until you end up with just licensed sociopathy.
Avent: Basically, yes, that’s right. I mean, I think you’ve described it well. And I guess just to clarify, I think it can sound like I’m saying that everyone sat down and read Milton Friedman and then came to this decision. And really, it actually functions more along the lines of the broader theory of society I have in the book, which is that we, in response to these attractive ideas, altered our behavior and that shaped others’ perception of what was okay. And this all dispersed outward in a way that’s led us to this place.
Lindsey: So my pushback is I’m not sure how widely shared the Modern Faith is. I think it’s definitely something that’s in the heads of policy elites, people who think about how to rearrange the policies and institutions of society. People who think about society at a macro scale, they’re systems thinkers. But just ordinary Joes, I’m not sure how natural it is to think at this level of abstraction — to think in terms of abstract systems. So I think they’re more just getting it in the water rather than it being an article of faith in their hearts.
So maybe one way to put it is that it’s not that the impersonal systems of markets and bureaucracy — the systems that create the incentives we live by — it’s not that they’ve inspired too much faith. It’s rather that our other faiths, in our personal responsibility and in our face-to-face lives, have withered. So once we step out of being Ryan Avent, Brink Lindsey, participant in the impersonal systems and step into our face-to-face lives, then we’re not thinking so much about utility maximizing. Am I a good husband? Am I a bad husband? Am I a good friend? Am I a bad friend? Am I a good neighbor? Am I a bad neighbor? So that’s moralized in your face-to-face life; it just runs by different rules than impersonal cooperation. And so good faith obviously can’t be dispensed with in dealing face-to-face with others, but our face-to-face relationships have become a lot less important to our lives than they were, at least practically less important.
This is a point I make again and again in my book, The Permanent Problem, that once upon a time, those personal face-to-face relationships were just absolutely crucial to our practical ability to get through the day and get through life. Our spouse was a partner in economic production. Our kids helped out on the farm, they took care of us when we were old. Our neighbors, they helped protect us against bad guys and they were an insurance policy during bad times. So the people with whom we share an obvious explicit moral economy bulked very large in determining the quality of our life — whereas they still bulk very large in determining the long-term quality of our life, the day-to-day practical efficiencies of our life we’ve outsourced a lot of to buying things and to getting services from the government. So as the part of our lives where we think naturally in moral terms has withered, then it’s not too surprising that we carry these habits of life in impersonal systems around and over-apply them. Does that make sense to you?
Avent: It does make sense, yeah. And I think it’s a good pushback. I will say the portion of the book that’s about the Modern Faith skates by a lot of the particular mechanisms that are at work. And it also probably over-represents itself as the monocausal explanation of everything that’s gone on here. I mean, one thing I’ve wrestled with as I wrote it was how much to focus on the shifting beliefs of elites in particular, because I think you’re right that they’re the ones who are maybe dealing more with these particular abstractions, but also I think they occupy critical nodes in society. And so the elites that run our newspapers or our media companies or whatever, or do all sorts of other things, they’re an important way in which people confront the values that guide the world.
I think there’s a lot that’s gone on to contribute to the erosion of those face-to-face interactions, as you note. To some extent, I wonder how much of that is an inevitable outcome of a freewheeling capitalism that is untempered by purposeful action toward preservation of particular ways of life? And so I think there’s a really deep complementarity between the position you take in your book, which is excellent, and what I’m actually saying with this argument, which is that we’ve allowed ourselves to get to a point where things that really matter a lot, we treat as though they don’t matter. And so yeah, I think that the place to focus is on how to make that argument more persuasively to the rest of the world. Does that make sense?
Lindsey: Yep, yep, yep. You say we need a new faith. We need a new big story to resocialize us, remoralize us. So what does that look like? And you describe a faith that’s very similar to one I’ve described in some of my Substack writing, which I call — as opposed to a religious faith that’s derived from some revealed sacred source — just an existential faith that starts with just a sense of gratitude of being here, that everybody who’s alive is a lottery winner. On the night we were conceived, the odds were 100 million to one against us, but we’re here, we get to have this amazing ride. Yes, it’s full of sadness, but it’s also full of joy and wonder, and it’s full of opportunities to tamp down the sadness and build up the joy, to lean into the best parts of life, right? So you start with that, so we should make the best of this.
And then at the macro scale, you start with the fact of progress, the fact that we’re in progressive modernity, and that we are in this incredibly exotic and privileged position relative to the overwhelming bulk of our fellow members of our species who lived before us. And so this should give us hope, that things have gotten a lot better, and therefore things can continue to get better, and therefore it’s our obligation to make them better. Is that the loose syllogism or associational thinking that pulls you from facts about the world to a sense of moral obligation?
Avent: I think so, yeah. I mean, I think the long arc of progress is critical to it. The extent to which that long arc of progress has allowed us to become better people, better societies, who treat each other better is an important part of it. But I think the thing that’s missing is the story that allows us to feel connected to both the past and the future, and which helps us understand why it matters that we are the bridge. And the overriding notion that we’re here to satisfy our preferences just doesn’t do it. And we are seeing the limits of what that can do in terms of driving society forward. I wish I had a very clear idea of what the correct story is that’s going to bring it all together for everyone.
Lindsey: But you’re refreshingly self-deflating, right? You say, “I’m not a prophet. This isn’t my job to do this.”
Avent: Yeah.
Lindsey: But still, there’s an obvious candidate or set of candidates, which is organized religion. So you’ve written a book about faith, you’re arguing that our problems are from a loss of faith, and you’re telling your own story as you wind that into the narrative of the book. You talk about how you were raised in a fairly fervently Christian community and how you lost that religious faith. But anyway, tell the story… And losing your faith you felt fairly self-congratulatory about, but you came over time to feel a little bit more wistful about it.
Avent: Yeah, yeah. And I think when I was growing up in the church and then grappling with what I really believed, I overwhelmingly treated the inner dialogue as one that really was just about me and God, that whatever I believed, for me, it mattered for my soul, and that if I decided to stop believing, I was the one who was affected and nobody else. And I think what I came to realize was that actually this is the foundation of collective purpose in a lot of ways, collective interaction. It matters because of what it does for all of us, and the extent to which we get personal benefits from believing is very much tied up in what it does for the society around us, because it gives us all that obligation to look out for others and they look out for us.
Thinking about that lesson for me and thinking about the place I go with it, which is that we need these new stories, it does raise some difficult questions, I think, for someone with liberal commitments. Because first of all, I’m certainly not of the view that we need to try to convert everyone to any story. That’s not going to work, that’s not appropriate. And then second of all, what do we really think about assigning ourselves the obligation to do right by others simply because we feel like that leads to a better overall collective outcome? I think we haven’t given ourselves the tools to really work through that yet, and it’s something I’m continuing to think about.
Lindsey: So you walk right up to, “I’ve got this sense of profound gratitude and it feels like it makes sense to direct that gratitude towards something. Towards the author of whatever it is — if it’s an impersonal principle or law or force or whatever, but there is some ground of all being that is the reason why there’s something rather than nothing and that something has the nature that it has. And boy, I’m glad that it exists, and I’m glad that I exist and I’m glad that I’m a creature of this reality.” And you say, “We could just call that God,” but you step back and you don’t want to do that. So why don’t you want to do that?
Avent: I don’t know if it’s right to call it God. I don’t know if that is an honest way to label it. It’d be easy enough to just not worry about it and say that that’s God, but I feel like I’m not sure enough about that to run with it. You know what I mean?
Lindsey: Yeah. I feel like you and I are in a very similar boat of seeing the value of religion and religious community, and it just shows up in social science. There’s Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone, who says that “Praying together beats bowling together and praying alone” in terms of binding communities together.
Avent: That’s right.
Lindsey: So it works, and it works better than anything else, which suggests there’s something going on there that’s important. So we resist because the religious story of Christianity is typically presented as a factually true story and we don’t believe that it really happened. So you say, “Yeah, I don’t want to be a pretend Christian.” And so this seems to me like a spiritual plight peculiar to post-Christendom, which is that I live in a Buddhist country where… So Thailand — Theravada Buddhism is really anchored in the life and teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, the original historical Buddha. But many Buddhists in the Mahayana tradition are completely different — they don’t care that much about that historical figure at all. And nobody in Theravada Buddhism is obsessing about the historicity of Siddhartha Gautama or pinning much of anything on that. And when you get back to his teachings, all the supernatural stuff is take-it-or-leave-it. His message is, “Life is full of suffering. I’ve got a spiritual technology to address it. If you’ll follow me, you’ll be better off.”
So Judaism — the metaphysics are very latitudinarian. You just have to follow the rules. So you can be a good observant Jew just by following the rules. You don’t have to believe anything you don’t want to believe. You just have to conform to the practices of the group. So it seems like it would be easier in some religious traditions to make this leap to a scientific worldview where you’re just not going to accept miraculous occurrences, and yet recognize that there really is something that transcends us — that yes, we’re the cleverest critters on this planet, but imagining that these overachieving apes can grasp ultimate truth is only slightly more preposterous than imagining that a beetle or a mole rat could figure it all out, right?
So we’re in this little tiny bubble of this enormous mystery all around us. And we know regularities in nature to an astonishing degree, but we don’t know why they’re that way. So we’re just surrounded by mystery and unfathomable mystery towards which I think the correct emotion is wonder and awe and also a sense of gratitude. Wonder and awe and gratitude towards things that surpass human understanding — and doing that in a community where we’re all organized that way, to think about the most important things there are to think about, get past the bullshit of this work week and get together and have communion about the most important things there are. It does really feel like there’s no substitute for that.
But in our culture, the religion on offer is a creedal religion — we believe these things. And of course, liberal Protestantism wandered way off into believing things in a symbolic way, but never explicitly. The ministers wouldn’t confess their lack of belief in the resurrection to the flock, because they don’t want to harsh anybody’s buzz. And so you have these communities of liberal Protestantism where they’re all reciting the Apostles’ Creed, but some of them mean one thing and some of them mean another, and they’re not talking to each other honestly about it.
So it feels like there is a missing Christianity that could have existed but never has — that’s explicitly mythological, that says, “Look, there are truths about the nature of existence and about the human condition that can be better expressed in myth, which is like art, than they can be in just prose — through symbolism and by indirection. And the myth of the Christian story, that God came and participated in our suffering and that he came not as a king, but as a poor kid born in an animal trough, that’s just an amazing story with amazing spiritual truths inside of it.” So it would be awesome to be able to tap into that cultural power of that myth, but that’s not how things evolved. It’s not really an option on the table.
Avent: No, it doesn’t seem so. And we’re probably particularly hardheaded about it in part because of the cultural legacy of Christianity that led us down this path toward modernity. At the same time, views about Christianity have evolved dramatically since Christ, and there’s nothing to say this isn’t out of reach. I think the thing that makes me a little uncomfortable about turning Christianity appreciation into something that’s mostly about stories, is just that I don’t want people who believe other things to feel pressured. And when you say this story is the answer, it necessarily implies that other stories aren’t, and that makes me a little uncomfortable — but it’s possible I’m just overthinking this in a lot of different ways. I guess the add-on to my individual perspective about this is that, and you alluded to this…
Lindsey: But my feeling is, I live in a Buddhist country, so I could do that. It wouldn’t be… But I’ve felt there’s… I’m almost embarrassed — I don’t want to be a parody of myself, so that’s why I didn’t buy a Porsche in my 40s. And the searching Western intellectual who ends up becoming a Buddhist just feels to me a little try-hard, right?
Avent: Yeah.
Lindsey: So we are born into cultures, we didn’t choose them, but you and I were born in the West, our cultural matrix is Christian. So it doesn’t feel to me like it’s forcing it on other people to say, “Oh, this is what we’re born in.” So if we’re going to find a religious story to rally around, a Christian one makes a whole lot of sense because that’s our culture.
Avent: I think one thing the book works through is, as we talked about earlier, the extent to which new forms of belief enabled new collective capacities, capabilities. And when I muse at the end on how we can find new stories, I think part of what’s feeding into that is that there’s so much more to discover about the universe, and discovering those things is going to happen in parallel with us uncovering new ways of conceiving why we’re here and what we’re meant to be and what to do. And so I think in some sense, we need to embrace the idea that the stories we have inherited from the past are not going to be the ones that carry us to the future.
And maybe that’s thinking too far ahead. And if we’re just dealing with the next 20 years, that’s good enough. But ultimately, we ought to be open to the idea that we can achieve greater understanding and that we will come to appreciate things about the way the universe works, the ways that our society develops, that are new and better. And that can be a very hard thing to imagine. And it’s a case where it’d be super helpful if I were a prophet and could say, “Here it is,” but it’s a thing that we have to grope our way toward collectively, I think.
Lindsey: Yeah. And let me just… I don’t want to leave the impression that I am criticizing Westerners who have turned to Buddhism and find value there. The problem is all on me, right? It’s just my sense of self-consciousness, not that that isn’t a perfectly fine thing to do. So yeah, so maybe the story that’s going to pull us out of this jam has not been written yet. But maybe there’s some little prophet out there right now who’s tapping into our spiritual angst and he’ll save the day — or she’ll save the day. But until then we have to keep the faith, right?
Avent: We do. We have to realize it matters. I’m hopeful that we will.
Lindsey: That’s right. So even without any terribly firm ground to rest on, the faith that we’ve made it this far and that there are real possibilities to make things even better than they are today, that ought to be good enough, at least for now. But we’ve gone over our hour, Ryan. I think we’ll wrap it up here. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Great talking to you and best of luck with the book.
Avent: Thank you so much, Brink. It’s always great to talk to you. And I appreciate you having me on.
