In Defense of Unseen Evidence

“Bad faith changes everything”

I’m fond of saying this. But the moment I lifted this pen to explain what this “bad faith” actually is, the words became altogether alien in my hands.

I repeat this a lot because it feels like a meaningful warning to me. I still feel that way despite this strangeness that now presents itself to me. But even with the phrase’s importance to me, its meaning lives more in my bones than my mind.

The “bad faith” critique is usually deployed against an opponent deemed to be instrumentalizing the conversation, knowingly using his counterpart’s natural biases against him in service of convincing him of something—usually by way of arguments by which the speaker himself would not be persuaded.

This accusation has a certain value. Whether or not a man can be trusted to give you his own best reasons for believing is a fork-in-the-road question. To treat a ‘yes’ type of man like a ‘no’ type of man is the worst of bad taste. The answer changes everything, and we still ought to remember that.

Of course our respect goes to “yes” men. But the moments we meet a “no” man are just as exciting as they are vexing. Spotting this “bad faith” is exhilarating in the way that noticing an opportunity to act out our antisocial instincts is. We imagine that any person acting with such disregard toward our intellectual dignity is a fitting target for our rhetorical turrets. Better still, any audience is more likely to join forces in burning the heretic with us than to condemn us for the aggression.

If this is what we mean, both words of the phrase are strange choices. What would it mean for a man to have “bad” faith? To actually have—rather than lack—faith, but for it to be of an inferior quality?

Starting at the “faith” end of the road is even worse, because I can barely find any anchor at all for the word’s meaning, even in its more common uses. I’ll throw my hands up and defer to our favorite Pharisee, accepting it as no more than “the evidence of things unseen.”

Problematically, it would appear that “things unseen” are—categorically, in fact—a bit short on the evidence front. So “faith” becomes a very odd thing to hold and an even stranger thing to demand. If the concept is itself so incoherent, what concern is it of ours what kind of “faith” is brought to a discussion—good or bad?

But just that fast, I notice I’ve written too quickly. Sitting with this for a moment, I’m recognizing that such a paradoxical trait may still be the sort of thing we should demand.

Any time spent inside a history book quickly reveals a core tragedy of the human project: we are going to have to either loosen our grip on any romantic conceptions of “human dignity” or at least be careful never to look too closely at those conceptions.

We know this because we know that we’d rather not spend too much time asking about what the Belgians were up to in the Congo. We don’t ask because the answers are both disturbing and unremarkable. People are fond of wondering aloud in groups about how anyone could ever do such a thing—an example of “bad faith” in its original sense, deployed publicly to signal one’s own ethical purity and distance from the perpetrators. I wonder if anyone ever returns to that question in solitude. I suspect it goes missing, because really—there’s no mystery here.

“It’s just like humans to do that,” we think, and then we move on with our day. I am just like humans. I also have no way of avoiding scores of them every day. I’m not surprised by this quality of theirs, and I’d rather not sit in a dark room with it all night just the same.

One would do well to flip through the journal of that one Columbine kid—the ringleader, not the idiot—to see what it looks like when someone frees himself from these pretty but mendacious beliefs the world claims to hold about the goodness and dignity of mankind; to see what it looks like to reject them as mendacious and to really mean it.

I suppose noticing a social lie is just good sense, but good sense has a way of nourishing bad fruit when used where it doesn’t belong. Good sense is plenty good for plenty of things, but a bit of bad sense may still be preferable from time to time. It may embarrass our empiricist natures, but there’s something to be said for treating a man as though he’s better than he is. Better than he’ll ever turn out to be. He probably won’t ever justify that treatment. But when he leaves and returns to his debasement of choice, he may say “enough...” a moment or two sooner than he would have otherwise.

It’s the best a man can hope for without abandoning all intellectual dignity. Without that hope, this sentence isn’t worth completing. It wouldn’t stand up to any rational inquiry, but rational inquiry may do us no good here. Regardless of our logical impulses, it may turn out that our religious devotion to the goodness of man is load-bearing. Our worlds—not just our political ones, but the world we build with our fathers and mothers and lovers and daughters—survive on placing a bit of unseen evidence on the scale when weighing our judgments of humanity.

We may have taken our friend Paul too simplistically earlier. After all, his organization had a hand in killing a man, he claimed to have a change of heart, and then he successfully demanded that the dead man’s friends accept him as that man’s most devoted disciple. Then he convinced his enemies, who coincidentally also had a hand in killing the dead man, to give up their colosseums and defang themselves out of respect for the dead man’s wishes. An amusing example of bad faith, actually. He’s a lot, but he’s no fool. Perhaps “the evidence of things unseen” was a definition deliberately chosen specifically because of its paradoxical nature rather than in spite of it.

I can now imagine him knowing full well that faith was the sort of thing no self-respecting man should be able to claim, but realizing it was still the most necessary thing despite that.

We say someone is in “bad faith” when we notice: hold on now, you’re not trying to give me reasons that you would believe; you’re just trying to play on my human biases to convert me to your own uses. And really, who can blame him? Taking our natures seriously, that is exactly how we should be approached. As a member of the human team, I don’t have much of a leg to stand on in fighting this. We are motivated by unconscious desires, by equal parts self-pity and delusions of grandeur, by our stomachs, by our ugly organs, by our mothers, by our mayors, by our sports teams. We’re just as likely to reason our way into the virgin birth as we are to reason our way into blood libel. It makes sense to dispense with giving any of our “reasons” sincere consideration, since they don’t seem to be doing much work in our belief generation.

And yet we don’t. Not because we have good reason to give ourselves that respect, but because we do have a certain kind of evidence—evidence of what comes after the moment we do away with that respect. Considering this, faith begins to look less like a virtue and more like a practice. There’s no moral heroism in being born an excellent driver, and there’s no moral sin in being born terrible at it, as most of us are. Driving is just a skill one can choose to improve through practice. But if a man can’t become a great driver, he had better at least not remain a terrible one. We’ve all seen what a ten-car pileup looks like.

After a bit of living, we will all develop bad faith. It’s the natural reaction to this place. There’s no reason to ever decide that good faith makes more sense. It’s not that sort of thing; it’s not an insight to arrive at.

But it may be a craft we have to hone. A bit like a trade. Woodworking. I can’t say I can make an argument for woodworking’s epistemic value, but I suspect the world would be a lot less inviting without it.