22
Jul
2009
Bill Burr, of Washington, D.C., doesn’t care much for a recent piece by Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie comparing Obama’s economic policy to Jimmy Carter’s. In a letter appearing in today’s Washington Post, he opines,
Libertarians such as Mr. Welch and Mr. Gillespie may prefer a government that does nothing to reduce the terror of unemployment, but economic and humanitarian imperatives make stimulus packages and related public-sector action unavoidable.
Economic and humanitarian imperatives are heady things and we all ought to be concerned when we encounter them. But simply labeling your preferred policy an imperative doesn’t make it so. Hundreds of economists, including Nobel laureates, signed a petition against the effectiveness–and thus economic imperative–of the stimulus plan. And it scales the heights of disingenuousness to label the plunging future generations into crushing debt as humanitarian intervention. We need to remember that what’s important when judging policy is not motivating intentions but the manifested results.
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- Tags: economics, imperatives, obama
Sans its message, sans its historical significance, sans its ability to turn young people into libertarians, the first thing one picks up on when starting Atlas Shrugged is the poverty of the prose. Ayn Rand, no matter her or her followers’ opinion otherwise, just isn’t a very good writer. The language is plodding, non-lyrical, and often often awkward. For example, in one scene she writes, “He stood slouching against the bar.” To my knowledge, one stands against a bar or one slouches against a bar–but one does not stand slouching. An editor would’ve fixed that, but I was told once–and maybe this is apocryphal–that Rand refused such editing, asking, “Would you edit the Bible” Ignoring that the Bible was, in fact, edited through countless revisions and translations over thousands of years, Atlas Shrugged is not the Bible. It is not scripture, nor does it benefit from the myth of a divine author whose original manuscript is lost in prehistory.
What else comes to mind, a mere 200 pages into this monstrous novel? Well, I can’t imagine wanting to hang out with any of these people. Her good guys are, without exception, awful human beings. They display no compassion and evidence no empathy. A world filled with such super men would be a terrible place, indeed. Her bad guys, on the other hand–her collectivists and leftists and academics–are ugly little toads who snivel and beg from the arch-capitalists we’re all supposed to look up to when we aren’t looking for an excuse to leave. Objectivism, at least as presented in this seminal text, affords no nuance.
None of this precludes the worthiness of Rand’s ideas, however. I have not encountered enough of those in the fist sixth of the book to adequately judge them, so such critique will have to wait until future posts. While I imagine there will be a great deal throughout Atlas Shrugged I disagree with, and a great deal I am sympathetic towards, the fact remains that, except for my knowledge that this is a novel of ideas, one read for its philosophy and arguments and intellectual importance, I’d have put it down long ago.
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- Tags: Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
Fineman begins this chapter making a common mistake. “We live in the richest country in the history of the world,” she writes, “yet at least one out of every five children lives in poverty.” She continues, “Over 10 percent of Americans aged sixty-five and older are classified as poor, as are one-third of adults with disabilities.” {Fineman 2004@8} Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt on the statistics. Does this mean, then, that America, “at least in its political rhetoric and imagination, is seriously incapacitated in dealing with some of the most important social welfare problems facing its citizens today?”
Not necessarily. Poverty is measured in relative terms. For purposes of argument, assume that the poverty line is defined as the lowest quintile of earners. This tells us nothing about how much people in the lowest quintile actually earn or what their quality of life is. For example, if the average salary in the United States might be $50,000/year. The people in the lowest quintile might earn only $10,000/year. And, at these levels, it might be true that one in five children is in a family earning $10,000/year and, thus, are poor. But if incomes tripled—if suddenly everyone in the US could purchase three times as much quality of life as they could before—there would still be a bottom quintile and one-fifth of children would be in it.
What matters, then, is not relative poverty but absolute poverty. To say that one in five children in the United States is poor means something very different for the quality of life of those children than if we were talking about poor kids in Somalia. In fact, almost no “poor” person in the United States would willingly trade his poverty here for a middle class lifestyle in Somalia.
In a sense, Fineman is failing to understand Garrison Keillor’s about joke Lake Wobegon: “All the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” In any even distribution, someone will be at the bottom. We should be concerned with the absolute standard of lifestyle being at the bottom entails, and not point out the mere existence of a bottom as a failure of “political rhetoric and imagination.”
Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism was a random find. I’d returned a handful of books to the library and was looking for something to listen to in the car. The title of this book caught my eye and, at only five CDs in length, I decided to give it a try.
The introduction is intriguing. Keller, a Methodist minister in New York City, sets himself the mission of breeding doubt for both the skeptic and the believer. As he rightly points out, even when doubt doesn’t lead to a renunciation of one’s position, wrestling with it–and understanding the arguments for it–will make that position stronger and more nuanced. In other words, you can often learn more about your own views by reading those who disagree with you.
Unfortunately, Keller’s book, both when he seeks to undermine skeptical arguments and when he tries to buoy Christianity, are thin. No atheist even moderately well versed in the philosophical basis for non-belief will find anything convincing, or even troubling, in The Reason for God.
For example, Keller begins by tackling the objection that the evidence for Christianity (or God–Keller doesn’t often distinguish the two) is lacking and that the burden is on the Christian to prove his claim. Keller’s response is that all statements about what is true are predicated upon underlying assumptions. Thus, the skeptic is as “faithful” in his beliefs as the Christian. It’s just that what they have faith in differs. Keller extends this by defining religion so broadly (it’s any system of belief about how we ought to live our lives) that he can therefore label the skeptic’s views religious. Once the atheist is seen as just another religious believer, how is he to say his religion is better than the Christian’s?
The trouble is, Keller’s radical epistemological move opens him up to “true” meaning anything anyone wants it to. Clearly, as a Christian and as a believer in the infallibility of the Bible, this is unacceptable to him. His escape is to fall into a trap common to liberal Christians: he turns to C.S. Lewis. In arguing against the problem of evil, for instance, Keller quotes Lewis’s claim that, because we seem to have a universal moral sense, there must be a God who gave it to us. This tactic only works–and arguably still doesn’t–when there are no alternative explanations for human morality outside of God. But the mere fact that I can respond, “Nope, it wasn’t God, but evolution that gave us our moral sense,” means Lewis (and, therefore, Keller) fail. The burden is again shifted to Keller to demonstrate why his, and not my, explanation is the legitimate one.
Throughout the book, one gets the sense of Keller as a man who can’t really understand why anyone would reject his belief system. Thus the reasons he gives for such rejection are presented as obviously shallow because, if they had depth, they would mean genuine trouble for his Christian faith. Keller was born into a Christian family, was raised in the Christian faith, and never really deviated from it. Christianity is all he knows, and it is clear he can’t see how that faith looks to the legitimate outsider.
There are stronger arguments for the existence of God and for the truth of Christianity than Keller presents. The Reason for God, then, is at best a friendly book for Christians who want to feel a little better about holding their faith. At worst, it is an example of why American Christianity is so defensive against the weight of the emergent atheist movement.
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- Tags: atheism, christianity, religion
Martha Albertson Fineman’s book, The Autonomy Myth, is not typically the type of thing that would make it on to my reading list. It’s in the category of academic work that I spent a great deal of time studying during the first half of my undergraduate years, but I’ve since moved on, deciding, as Gertrude Stein quipped about Oakland, there’s just no there there.
But this particular book, subtitled “A Theory of Dependency” was recommended to me to fill a perceived gap in my knowledge of the feminist/communitarian critique of classical liberalism. Given my concern primarily with the role of the state, I skipped ahead to the chapter setting out Fineman’s prescriptions for fixing government to better recognize (and enable?) dependency and caregiving.
Feminist Economics?
Unfortunately, my typical critique of leftist academic social theory appears confirmed: Fineman, a law professor at Cornell, appears to have little or no understanding of economics. Furthermore, she accepts without analysis the general idea that we should automatically turn to the state to provide anything we decide is good.
In a section lambasting the Republican Contract with America in the 1990s and its continuing legacy, she writes, “[a] goal of governmental policy is still to address market confidence, as though the market and not the government could be the primary guarantor of general citizen well-being.” She passes off the belief in the power of markets as mere ideology, unencumbered by empirical observation. And, in so doing, she makes a mistake so often found in academic screeds against the market: she sees only the faults without recognizing how much benefit the market has brought to society.
The point is a simple one. Since the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism, standards of living have skyrocketed in the United States. The poor of today are, in many ways, far better off than the middle and even upper class of that earlier time. That there are still poor people in 2009 does not mean that capitalism has failed, just as it would be silly to claim that a drug that cures cancer is a failure because it only helps 90% of those who take it. An economic policy that makes almost everyone better off is always desirable over one that does the same for almost no one. By seeing marginal lingering poverty has a fatal flaw in liberalism and capitalism, then, the academic left risks doing away with the very system that is responsible for the dramatic improvements in quality of life over the last several hundred years.
The market is not perfect, but it is a good deal more perfect than the stagnant social democracy advocated by Fineman and her ilk.
To put it another way, when Fineman writes that “[m]issing from mainstream political and public discourse is any strong support for the state to act as a vigorous mediator of market excesses and active guarantor of a more equitable allocation of wealth,” she displays a total lack of recognition that we first need a system that can generate the wealth to be allocated. The state does not generate wealth, it only draws wealth away from the market in the form of taxes.
Fineman’s Vision for the State
Fineman’s critique is a common one: there are things in society that she values (caregiving) that she doesn’t think are adequately compensated–and, thus, facilitated and encouraged–by the market. The solution, then, is to use the power of the state to force compensation for those activities. The same refrain is heard over and over again, whether it’s artist clambering for funding or teachers demanding higher pay.
“This book has been concerned with remedying one obvious point of economic exploitation—that of those in our society who make the essential yet unrecognized contribution of caretaking.” Fineman’s proposed solution to this problem is clear.
Instead of fighting for the shrinking and weakening of a national government progressives should be focusing on articulating appropriate objectives for the state to pursue. Defining the norms and aspirations that should replace the impverished concepts provided by economics would be the place to start. There must be a change in the discourse of politics, with a new paradigm to guide state policy replacing that of the free market, in which there is no collective responsibility but only an exaggerated sense of individual autonomy.
Whether this would work in practice, and whether past experiences speak to its feasibility, is not a given, however.
The Trouble with Unintended Consequences
Absent from Fineman’s worldview is a recognition of incentives and the unintended consequences they lead to. Perhaps this is what she really objects to about economics: economists often take the role of party poopers, pointing out that, no matter how much we may want it not to be, the world we live in is one of scarcity. We cannot simply decree that there will be enough to go around and expect it to be so. As such, subsidizing particular activities will (1) draw resources away from other activities and (2) encourage people to enter the subsidized domain.
Imagine if, next week, the government decided to pay $100,000 per year all stay-at-home parents. First, that hundred grand needs to come from somewhere, most likely from an increase in taxes. The result is that, for every dollar the government transfers to a home-based caregiver, there is one fewer dollar out there to be spent on something else. Second, you can be assured that the number of people who decide to stay home to take care of the kids would jump dramatically. Those people would thus not be out in the economy generating wealth. This does not mean staying at home is not valuable, only that if we pay for it, that pay has to come from somewhere and we need to recognize that people will naturally flock to activities that will pay them. Clearly, our economy could not survive (and thus taxation would fail) if everybody stayed home taking care of kids. Where would the government get the money then to write its $100,000 checks?
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- Tags: communitarianism, economics, feminism
7
Nov
2008
Well, ReasonWorks has launched. Because we launched during a historic week in which America elected the first African-American president, and since it is so de rigueur to do an election post-mortem, it seems that my first post here should do no less.
The morning after the election a good friend of mine in Germany – knowing I am not on the Obama bandwagon – wrote to ask what I think about this historic event. He had attended an election party where over 1000 people had shown up to watch the election returns. Although American elections tend to play large in other countries, Obama has galvanized the rest of the world in the same way he has galvanized America. So now that we have president-elect Obama what is to be said about this long and interesting campaign and the choices America made?
Clearly, there is immense significance in the up-spring of hope and excitement that accompanied this election. Obama’s election is an historical event; first African-American, voter turnout, etc. However, this election has been fueled from day one by directionless emotional fervor. Deconstructing that emotional fervor is probably the best place to start an “election post-mortem” for a think-tank dedicated to explaining why reason works.
There is a general feeling in this country (and the world) that Bush sucks. But, with this general feeling of distaste for Bush is a distressing inability to explain precisely why Bush sucks. Despite all the reasons that may be feasible to list – and I can list plenty – the issue has simply come down to image. From day one of the Bush presidency the word was put out that he was an idiot. Many remember the Saturday Night Live skit about the Bush/Gore debates in which Bush sums up his campaign with the word “strategery.” I have met many who believe Bush actually used this word. Fiction has been blurred with reality, mantras have been confused for insight, and Bush’s emerging image of “evil” was combined with notoriety as an idiot to produce a truly distasteful reputation.
These ideas were so continually hammered into our daily life that it was easy to find oneself slowly beginning to believe it. There were, of course, those who always had and always would believe it; the committed Democrats into whose biases the “idiot” and the “evil” image fit perfectly. There were also those who would never believe it; the committed Republicans for the same reason. But, these are just the “wingnuts” who make up the base of both parties’ constituencies. Both sides can relate endless reasons for their opinion of Bush. Rather than being directionless emotional fervor it is decidedly directed emotional fervor. But, as with all elections, the question of why the committed party members voted is both uninteresting and irrelevant. “Swing votes” – people who can be convinced otherwise – are always the deciders of elections.
Swing voters were the most significant segment of the population that underwent this slow and imperceptible change of attitude toward Bush. Eventually, the 20% of moderate, right-leaning Bush supporters could do nothing but acquiesce to the belligerent shouting of the crowd around them. Maintaining one’s mental ground against an onslaught of naysayers – in other words, holding your own while more and more people (people you care about) change their minds – is always a difficult task. It becomes extremely difficult when the onslaught includes moral judgments and invectives. In other words, enough people saying “if you continue to support Bush then you are a bad person” gets a little difficult to withstand. At some point a tipping point is crossed and one can safely assume – say upon encountering a new group of people at an after-work happy-hour – that no Bush supporters are there and that Bush-bashing can freely cross the table without fear of offense. Those that do support Bush are too out-numbered to voice dissent and they will just laugh along with the group while quietly skulking over their beers. These small social interactions are like geological change; they eventually take their toll.
This is the subtle force that pushed those 20% of people who liked Bush as late as 2004 into the anti-Bush camp by 2008. My math is as follows; 50% – about how much of the vote he got in 2004 – minus 20-25% equals his current approval rating; 25-30%. This is the “headwind” that hit so many Republicans. Guilt by association became the watchword. McCain was probably the best the Republicans had to counter a headwind that became a tornado; a nearly perfect storm of opposition. Not only is it incredibly hard for a party to win a third term (it has happened only a few times in US history) but that difficulty is compounded by an incumbent with a 25% approval rating and a massive economic downturn (which are always blamed on sitting presidents).
But, we need to look at the facts too. Many will respond that Bush’s support sunk so low because he is an objectively bad president. Well, objectivity has very little (almost nothing) to do with political opinion; particularly political opinion en masse. How bad is Bush actually? I am not a Bush fan; but I am not a Bush hater. When all is said and done, I see Bush as a third quartile president (from the top [best] down). In other words, he is between the 22nd-33rd best president ever. Not good, but not the worst. Two important pluses can be mentioned for Bush that – when history clears away the anti-Bush paraphernalia that’s been cluttering its desk for eight years – I hope will be backed with more information: 1) that we weren’t attacked again and 2) that a relatively stable economy was maintained despite beginning his presidency with an immense economic downturn and an appalling attack on the country. Furthermore, history will finish the tale on Iraq. It is a tale that increasingly looks like it will have a happy ending.
However, how bad Bush actually is is pretty irrelevant. My point is to recall the old political golden rule; that perception is reality. There was an emotional downturn that hit Bush after 2004, striking the 20% of middle-of-the-road Bush supporters the hardest. This is the emotional void that Obama came into and filled with his message of hope and change. What was so astounding at the beginning of the campaign – and is still astounding – was how empty this message was from day one. I would sit and watch dumbfounded as people took up this message like a mantra; “hope, change, hope, change.” I am not being totally facetious when I say that Mussolini and Hitler ran on the same platform. Let me be clear; Obama is NOT like Mussolini or Hitler. “Hope and change,” however, is not a political platform; it is – always has been and always will be – a smokescreen for a political platform. Your first impulse when encountering such rhetoric should be extreme skepticism; no matter which side it is coming from.
As we stand now, Obama is still radically unknown. We elected a 47 year old president with almost no political experience who has spent his entire political career gunning for the presidency because he was able to get up and tell us – in his undeniable eloquence – that he would make things better. We traded one vacuous, ill-defined emotion – Bush hatred – for another vacuous, ill-defined emotion; Obama hope. As there are a huge amount of people who hate Bush and don’t really seem to know why (“he just sucks”); there are now a huge amount of people who love (and I mean really LOVE) Obama and don’t really seem to know why (“he’ll make it better”). The crowd pushes and it pushes all of us. The happy-hour crowd was shouting over beer-nuts and Steppenwolf; “if you support Bush you’re a bad person” and “how can you not support someone as inspiring as Obama? What, do you not want things to be better?!?” I’m not saying that peer pressure caused weak-minded people to surrender their thoughts to the crowd. I’m saying that the power of the crowd to effect all of us is often underestimated and when your mind is capable of changing – when you are a swing voter – it can often tip the scales. While this election does give me hope that America can, in fact, elect a black man whose ancestors – just 50 years ago, in my parents’ lifetimes – were not allowed to attend the same schools as whites, it also reiterates and makes me re-fear what I have always known; that politics runs on emotion and not reason.
Do I think Obama will ruin this country? No. I would have been pretty happy with Obama as president and a Republican congress. Obama’s ability to inspire confidence is undeniable and, sometimes, this is one of the most important traits a president can have. A unilateral government, however, is always something to fear. A unilateral government with a economic crisis is very dangerous; particularly when that government is controlled by an ideology that wants to fore-go economic reality for utopian ideals. Economic crises are usually created by governments fostering incentives that disconnect people’s choices from reality. This is a bad idea all the time but the absolute worst time to do it is during a shaky economy. FDR’s utopian vision for America in the face of needed economic realism, his anti-business and anti-rich attitude, and the unpredictability of his policies all helped contribute to the severity of the depression. Although FDR managed to inspire hope in people he also helped perpetuate the poverty that made them require hope in the first place. Obama seems distressingly similar. In my mind, an Obama to inspire confidence and a congress to check his impulses would be preferable to an aligned government.
But, I don’t know. Obama is such a profound unknown that no one can accurately predict how he will govern. He played two sides in the campaign – going far left in the primaries and repudiating those positions in the general election. While this is a common political maneuver, Obama showed what I would describe as spinelessness; flipping on Iraq, domestic surveillance, off-shore oil drilling, and campaign finance. Ironically enough, I hope he is spineless or at least willing to make concessions (the positive spin of “spineless”). Nothing is more dangerous than the true-believer. As we go into a profound economic downturn Obama has promised $4.3 trillion(!) in entitlements over the next ten years. He promised this from a government that, without action, will go bankrupt in a decade from the combined weight of existing entitlements (social security, medicare, medicaid). This is an unbelievable amount of redistribution that has not been rivaled since LBJ and FDR. With new economic realities settling in we know that tax-receipts will be down, investment will be down, and that capital gains will be essentially non-existent. For fiscal year 2008 the government will run nearly a trillion dollars in deficit. There is simply no way that anyone has yet figured out that he can pay for this. In his nomination speech he promised he had every dollar accounted for (by soaking the rich, of course). This is far from the truth. (Here is a good account.) I hope he doesn’t have the spine to stick to his promises. I hope he just used those promises to buy people’s votes and doesn’t intend to actually stick to them. Alas, I fear I am wrong.
One thing I think I can guarantee is that people will be disappointed. I don’t know how disappointed but there will be some; primarily in that 20% I keep mentioning. This messiah worship stuff can only sustain itself for so long. As Jesus has proved, the only way for a Messiah to keep people happy is to never return. That way there is always a “maybe tomorrow” to keep them going. Much like the last episode of Seinfeld or Star Wars Episode 1 – there is no way you can’t be disappointed. No one can solve all your problems. The first person who should learn this lesson is president-elect Obama.
Colorado’s Amendment 46, the Civil Rights Initiative, looks to be on its way to a narrow defeat. ”With 91 percent of precincts reporting,” writes the Denver Post, “Amendment 46 was failing 50.4 percent to 49.6 percent, or by a margin of 14,038 votes.”
If it had succeeded, 46 would have ended racial and gender preferences and discrimination by the state in contracting, employment, and education. It would have shifted the focus of affirmative action programs from stereotyping based on sex and skin color and towards lending help based upon class and socioeconomic status. That Amendment 46 appears to have lost is not a victory for compassion, but a defeat. It is not an embrace of liberalism, but a rejection of equality.
By granting set asides–in education, in contracting, in hiring–to women and racial minorities, we turn on its head the campaign slogan of the first black man elected president. ”No you can’t,” we say to young girls struggling with math and science. ”No you can’t,” we tell black kids trying to climb out of poverty–at least, “no you can’t” without special favors from those in power, without white male America making the rules a little easier for you. Women and minorities, say the proponents of preferences and discrimination, aren’t good enough and aren’t smart enough to play the game with everyone else.
Every other state where a similar ballot measure has been brought recognized this. Colorado is the first state in which such an amendment has failed. It will appear again on the ballot during the next election, giving Coloradans another opportunity to do the right thing, to see preferences for what they are: racism and sexism masquerading as compassion, and defeatism trumping hope.
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- Tags: affirmative action, race
Barring recounts, Proposition 8, the California ballot issue that would outlaw gay marriage, appears to have passed. This is a terrible loss for gays and lesbians not just in that state but also across the country and around the world. The basic civil right–to marry the one they love–denied them on Tuesday is even more disheartening in the face of Obama’s shattering of the last, long standing racial barrier for African-Americans.
Particularly ironic is the thought that, without the increased black voter turnout brought on by Obama’s exciting candidacy, gays in California would still have the rights they boasted on Monday. As Andrew Sullivan points out,
[e]very ethnic group supported marriage equality, except African-Americans, who voted overwhelmingly against extending to gay people the civil rights once denied them: a staggering 69 – 31 percent African-American margin against marriage equality.
Allied with black Californians against marriage equality was the LDS Church. The Mormon organization donated millions of dollars to support Proposition 8 and, in so doing, alienated many of its members. While it’s true that a coming together of blacks and Mormons–a church that, until 1978, was officially racist–is on the surface odd, it makes a great deal of sense in light of their single common factor: strong religious faith.
Religiosity in the black community is significantly higher that among other ethnic and racial groups. American blacks tend to be strongly God-fearing folk and that religious conservatism manifested in the profound homophobia displayed in the exit polls in California yesterday.
Likewise, the Mormon faith teaches that homosexuality is an awful sin, so it is only reasonable that the LDS Church would spend considerable sums to prevent this ungodly behavior from further spreading–and being legitimated–throughout California.
In effect, marriage equality was banished yesterday in the nation’s most populous state because it flies in the face of certain brands of religion. This is not, strictly speaking, a violation of the establishment or free exercise clauses of the constitution, but it is certainly an instance of religious morality being written into law. It doesn’t matter if two gay men–who love each other deeply and want to express that love through marriage–are atheists and, thus, fear no commandments from God against their act. California will now hold them to the bigoted preachings of black churches and the LDS temple in Salt Lake City. Because gay marriage is offensive to one conception of the divine, it must not be allowed anywhere.
When the new atheists speak of the damage wrought by religious faith, of the harm adherence by some to scriptural texts causes to us all, this is but one example. The Mormon Church ought to be ashamed of its egotism and California’s blacks, rightly basking in the victory for racial equality they enjoyed yesterday, should feel only disgust at the civil rights they stripped from another minority.
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- Tags: gay marriage, religion
ReasonWorks Bloggers
Aaron Ross Powell a novelist and staff writer at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
Trevor Burrus is a law student and intern at the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Categories
- Blog (8)
Archives
- Mistaking Obama’s Policies for Imperatives
- Atlas Shrugged: Initial Impressions
- The Trouble with Poverty (The Autonomy Myth, Chapter 1)
- “The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism” by Timothy Keller
- “The Autonomy Myth” by Martha Albertson Fineman: Chapter 10: The Tenable State
- I’ll Trade My “Bush Sucks” for Your “Obama Hope” and an Entitlement to be Named Later; An Election Post-Mortem
- Colorado’s Defeat of Racial and Gender Equality
- Proposition 8, Sexual Equality, and the Role of Faith