Faith in the Commons and Francis Fukuyama's Social Capital

Faith is the currency of civilization. Without it, civilization breaks down into waring factions—where the faction is the least common denominator of faith. Faithfulness is what I pay to be part of family, an organization, or of society. And Faith is the return payment, or my stock value, as it were, in the society at large. While the same relationship works with my Self (not my ego, but my whole Jungian Self), this relationship between faithfulness and faith is best understood as it applies to society—or actually, the commons. It is within the commons, or society, that the interaction of faith and faithfulness works its synergistic magic to build community out of parts.

I have struggled for months to find words to express this notion of faith as the fuel or glue of society, to myself—and even more so to others. Recently I found a work by sociologist Francis Fukuyama that has helped considerably, and I'd like to share some quotations with you from his book titled Trust: The Social Virtues & The Creation Of Prosperity. Bear in mind that my comments are my own, and aren't a summary of Fukuyama's ideas.

Trust is the expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative behavior, based on commonly shared norms, on the part of other members of that community. Those norms can be about deep “value” questions like the nature of God or justice, but they also encompass secular norms like professional standards and codes of behavior. That is, we trust a doctor not to do us deliberate injury because we expect him or her to live by the Hippocratic oath and the standards of the medical profession.¹

Remember that faith means trust or trustworthiness. The definition of faith, and its meaning both to and in society, has actually been quite complex over the past two thousand years. Something I plan to discuss later. Faith denotes the honor/shame and patronage relationships of antiquity, as well as the vassalage relationships of the feudal Middle Ages. It defines the relationships between parents and children, too. And it defines the relationships between customer and supplier that makes trade work. It is the currency of social relationships—of social capital.

Social capital is a capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of it. It can be embodied in the smallest and most basic social group, the family, as well as the largest of all groups, the nation, and in all the other groups in between. Social capital differs from other forms of human capital insofar as it is usually created and transmitted through cultural mechanisms like religion, tradition, or historical habit. Economists typically argue that the formation of social groups can be explained as the result of voluntary contract between individuals who have made the rational calculation that cooperation is in their long-term self-interest. By this account, trust is not necessary for cooperation: enlightened self-interest, together with legal mechanisms like contracts, can compensate for an absence of trust and allow strangers jointly to create an organization that will work for a common purpose. Groups can be formed at any time based on self-interest, and group formation is not culture-dependent.

But while contract and self-interest are important sources of association, the most effective organizations are based on communities of shared ethical values. These communities do not require extensive contract and legal regulation of their relations because prior moral consensus gives members of the group a basis for mutual trust.

The social capital needed to create this kind of moral community cannot be acquired, as in the case of other forms of human capital, through a rational investment decision. That is, an individual can decide to “invest” in conventional human capital like a college education, or training to become a machinist or computer programmer, simply by going to the appropriate school. Acquisition of social capital, by contrast, requires habituation to the norms of a community and, in its context, the acquisition of virtues like loyalty, honest, and dependability. The group, moreover, has to adopt commons norms as a whole before trust can become generalized among its members. In others words, social capital cannot be acquired simply by individuals acting on their own, It is based on the prevalence of social, rather than individual virtues. The proclivity for sociability is much harder to acquire than other forms of human capital, but because it is based on ethical habit, it is also harder to modify or destroy.²

What Fukuyama is calling social capital, is what I would call the cumulative value of faith in a commons. Not that I disagree with his terminology—I think it's fine—but I'm pointing out that his “social capital” is really close to what I've been imagining, yet unable to put into words for months now.

Each of us likely participates in more than one commons or community of trust: family, workplace, neighborhood, etc. With each of these societies typically prizing different values, as well as sharing some. For example: trustworthiness is a very common value, but creativity or punctuality might be high on the list of one community's list of values and low on another's. The most important point is that community cannot exist without trust; where there is trust, there is community; we cannot merely define the rules and make it appear, because faith or trust is built through faithfulness and trustworthiness.

Fukuyama's thesis is that organizations and cultures with high trust levels are more efficient economically because they are free to be creative and because they have little need to enforce trust. On the other hand, communities with low trust levels, or low levels of social capital, must spend money, time, effort and talent on lawyers and law enforcement to make up for their lack of natural trust. These communities, cultures or nations with low social capital are less creative because creativity is a risk and risks are not taken in low trust environments.

I hope to bring you more on social capital, and on another concept I've been reading about lately: cosmopolitanism, from a book by Kwame Appiah that I found in the book store at the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York, recently. Cosmopolitanism preaches tolerance for all cultures and ideas, except for intolerance itself, and certain inhumane acts that are generally banned in most cultures. The past month has been good for me, in that I've stumbled across books and ideas, and had some inspiring experiences, that have helped to bring together some of the jumbled information that has been floating around irretrievable in my brain for the past six months. It's not that I consider these two authors (nor the others I've read recently) to have all the answers. But their words help me to put my own ideas into words. Phil Cousineau, in his book on myth, helped me understand that we humans think in images, not words. And those images are more than visual. They include sounds, smells and feelings about places and people, and about ourselves. Language is merely a way to transfer ideas between people. But art does it, too. We are not merely rational beings. Therefore, the words of another writer, or of a friend in conversation, may create resonate images that help us to recognize thoughts that were previously hidden amongst many other inexpressible ideas. Myths resonate with human ideas that cannot be expressed in language. It is not the stories themselves, that we “believe in”, or put our faith in—but the myths resonate; they harmonize with our images of humanness, the images that paint pictures of faithfulness as understood within community. We know a good story, or a poignant song, by its fit; its resonance; its in-tune-ness with our community faith that builds our social capital. This is the stuff of faith in the commons.

Notes

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