The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Good Faith

(2018)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Good Faith

People don’t hitchhike anymore. The crime rate is lower now than it was in the 50s, when it was considered rather normal to share rides with strangers, but a sort of suburban stigma has settled over the topic. We are told not to hitchhike because the drivers will be murderers; we are told not to pick up hitchhikers because they, too, will be murderers. This mentality of fear towards fellow citizens is a relatively new phenomenon, although it has been normalized. It reflects our general political attitude. Americans do not trust one another as they once did. This lack of camaraderie between individuals has enormous consequences for democracy, a political project which is based upon shared responsibility for the nation. The beating heart of democracy is discourse, the process by which we each take our subjectively limited, fallible knowledge of the “facts” and work together towards a mutual understanding of the best way to proceed as a group. This mutual molding of truth takes place on the floors of Congress as an extension of similar conversations supposedly taking place in taverns, classrooms, and kitchens. We’ve seen how Congress has failed at this in recent years, but we are perhaps less attuned to the way in which we have largely failed in our individual responsibilities to each other and to the democratic project as a whole. Americans have stopped listening to one another.

A year ago, against the whispers of culture and the wishes of my parents, I decided to put my faith in Americans. After months of research and saving, I set out last summer to hitchhike all around the country, the only concrete goal being to experience as much of “America” as possible before looping back to Tennessee for the solar eclipse. Along the way I spoke with many people, for hundreds of hours, from somewhere north of 170 passenger seats, as well as on sidewalks and in the homes of particularly kind strangers. Conversation can be hard because, as I learned, listening is hard. But like anything, it improves with practice. Good discussions require good listening and good speaking, and these depend on the authentic moral dispositions of each participating subject in relation to one another and to the collective of which they are both part. In short, it all depends on an individual’s good faith.

What is good faith? I will try to share what I have learned about it, but you must understand that we’re both inherently underinformed and imperfect. While you’re here in my passenger seat, please treat everything I say as if I mean it from the sincerest depths of my soul, but feel free to doubt. By no means take my ideas as definitive. But do give them their fair shake, in good faith. This requires a disposition of openness to let the ideas of others in as well as openness to dropping or reforming your own ideas in response to honestly processed new information. Good faith also requires the will to believe, which, along with openness, is an essential aspect of the great William James’ philosophy of American pragmatism. When you learn something new, the best way to test whether it is true is to temporarily act, honestly, as if it were. Acting sincerely as if something is true is sometimes the only way anyone can discover if it really is true; belief is sometimes a precondition of discovery. I did this with hitchhiking; as Hemingway said, “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

This open pragmatic attitude towards discussion effectively brings us all closer to “truth.” Every American who values freedom ought to read John Stuart Mill’s famous essay “On Liberty.” In it, he argues for freedom of expression as a universal good due to human fallibility: every one of us is flawed, so we can’t assume we know the full truth about any given subject; but, because of the diversity of experiences and perspectives, we can at least get closer towards the “truth” by absorbing, combining, and refining as many partial-truths as we can get from others. Even if they’re totally wrong, you still benefit by engaging them since the adversity serves to strengthen your existing ideas. The way we refine our flawed ideas, individually and societally, is by smashing them against each other as much as we can. But effective use of free speech doesn’t happen effortlessly; it takes courage, cognizance of differences in platforms and power, and the development of a culture that embraces and engages dissent.

But of course, these discussions must be entered in good faith, and this demands a certain level of responsibility. A key to this is recognizing that freedom/power/knowledge come with equivalent responsibility. Our ability to participate in the democratic project in various ways is a great power as well as a great responsibility, and when we shirk it, we are not acting in good faith. We are taking without giving. Everyone in the nation is interconnected and dependent on everyone else, across time, and thus responsible for the wellbeing of the nation as a whole, today and in all times. We must individually take stock of our attitudes and goals towards the whole; are you engaging in politics as sport, as partisan antagonism, as expression of ego and tribal identity, as some entertainment to watch and talk about? Or are you engaging in politics as discussion, as an effort towards mutual understanding, as a mediation between partial-truths with the end goal being action optimally benefiting everyone? The latter is in good faith, since it aligns the ideal purpose of democracy with the individual’s purpose. Misalignments between ends and means, between professed beliefs and daily actions, between universal interdependence and partial loyalty, and especially between freedom and responsibility are all indicative of bad faith.

An indispensable quality of good faith is genuine curiosity. Curiosity is a way of life that we know naturally as children— we want to explore all the options, play in new ways, learn everything interesting, and ask “why?” to everything because we desire knowledge for its own sake. We often forget curiosity as we age because we get comfortable thinking we “know” things, but practicing curiosity will show you how little you actually know. This is a good thing, because curiosity drives you to learn more as you get invigorated by interesting ideas and new people and unique events. It may seem silly now, but try opening your eyes a little wider, and you’ll realize not only how fun it is to constantly learn and change, but also how awesomely full the world is of meaning, depth, complexity, and connections. Our small and flawed lives are the site of the most exciting and mysterious adventure there ever was, and we get to be the explorers! 

Being a good explorer takes the ability to appreciate things as fully as possible, since anything could be a clue. It also takes a large dose of intellectual humility. Acknowledging our own fallibility is essential to avoid the all-too-human pitfalls of self-deceit, false beliefs, and hubris. Conversely, being real about one’s own intellectual limitations also reveals the value of collective human knowledge, in books and in voices, as a resource for improving understanding.
 
The final, unifying force behind good faith is love. Authentic compassion for others means that we will treat them considerately, as subjects of equal validity to ourselves. Jesus’ great teaching is to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” and truly following this commandment means actual changes in one’s daily actions. This love is not trite; the same self-preserving urgency we feel towards ourselves must be extended to everyone around us, and we must act as if their feelings are as valuable as ours. This means swallowing our pride and listening; this means feeling responsible “for all men and for all men’s sins,” as Father Zosima preached; this means understanding that those we disagree with also have good intentions, flawed as they may be; this means assuming that we are all on the same team, succeeding and failing together; this also means, demandingly, that we must love our fellow citizens enough to try, earnestly and subserviently, to show them the light if they are in misguided or misinformed darkness. We cannot be apathetic towards each others’ beliefs; we cannot let the forces of big business, hostile governments, partisan politics, and propagandic media divide us or make us ignorant of problems that we must solve together. It will not be easy to fix the issues afflicting our nation, but changing individual attitudes by practicing social virtues is an important way we can set progress into motion on higher structural levels. I have faith that we can rise to the challenge.