The last of the kindness virtues is faith. I define faith as believing in something you cannot know from experience. Usually this is applied to God, or something that transcends the material realm. We can experience things that transcend us, but such experiences are deeply spiritual and personal and we cannot share the meaning with others as we can with material experiences.
Faith also applies to our social lives. You never know for certain based on past experience the future direction of a society. To have faith in someone, a community or in humanity means believing in, but not knowing, their potential based on past experiences.
When I give presentations on kindness and community I wear a shirt that says “Believe in Humanity.” I have such faith in humanity for two reasons. Natural small band societies, autonomous communities, are tremendously diverse. Some of these societies we might abhor. Yet only in intimate communities with a large measure of autonomy is there universal access to the necessities of housing, food and health care. Genuine kindness resides in the context of a small community, not a large nation state. Experiential evidence based on what is natural for humans bolsters my faith. Civilized, large mass societies never have provided such evidence of adequately caring for all. There is much irony in what we view as “civilized” or “civility.”
The other reason is the reality that we tend to live up or down to expectations. Forget what is natural. If we believe the Enlightenment philosophers, modern economists or mass media that we naturally are bad, if we instead have faith in civilization when history reveals throughout the inhumanity of civilizations, we will live down to those base expectations with the forever unfulfilled hope that civilization will save us from ourselves. We work hardest for the causes we believe in. We must believe in ourselves, our intimate communities, to realize the kindness in us that makes the world a better place.
