On Faith

Writers that influenced us in times past, writers like Madison, Lincoln, or Woolf, show an endearing faith in the readers patience for the nuanced unfurling of arguments and ideas.

We used to be more patient.  

Now? The clawing uncertainty, how could any thread emerging quietly from my mind alone be worth attention amid the frothy currents? Can any pure reflection matter that is neither digested by transformer nor tied to some immediate concern?

Not that I am not awash with concerns, solutions, urgent buzzing lists to get done.  Writing feels indulgent, this gently seeking out that kernel driving the rest, without damaging or mutating it in the process. I have identified mine before in glib and mathematical ways as "helping the cooperators win" - the prisoners dilemma as Hofstader wrote it up in Scientific American had a lasting influence since I read it at the age of twelve!  And the people I work closely with, who I perhaps spoke to this morning, who shape themselves in determined hope again and again - I do not like to expose their exact stories without them - but yes there is no choice but to keep going impatient and ashamed as I may feel.

Perhaps if I found the right center, the right balance, and true heft it would become easy to find allies and support for what seem to me blisteringly obvious imperatives. Perhaps I have no faith in the reader's patience because I have none myself.

Yet faith is logical for the impatient. No need for the tedious verification of evidence or argument, faith is a short circuit we make in crisis when logic would tell us of our doom.  Faith may not be the best predictor of outcomes but it may be an effective creator of them - a self-fulfilling prophecy we are grateful to have affect our measurement and change our predictions. 

I did not think when starting this piece that it was about faith; it is not something I often think of. But it turned out to be the logical conclusion after all.