Unshakable American Faith

Americans, famously, are a people of faith. We believe in many things, but we're in our present straits because we believed in debt - unlimited debt. The mass of us trusted that we could have what we wanted when we wanted it by borrowing to get it. Since we always wanted more, we always borrowed more. The wise among us - at least those in our leadership - made no attempt to dispel the people's faith in debt because they shared it. To be sure, like any priestly class, they testified to their faith with sophistication and nuance, in the liturgical language of financial engineering. But whether our faith was expressed through a deck of credit cards and an interest-only mortgage or through collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, the fundamental belief that prosperity depended on debt was the same.

Wealth through debt is just one of our colorful faith-based initiatives. There are others and they continue apace. We believe in unlimited resources. We believe in unlimited power. We believe in unlimited growth. And we have more than a mustard seed of faith that whatever bumps we may encounter on the road to more will be smoothed by our unlimited ingenuity.

Our childlike faith in limitlessness is encouraged as a matter of official policy. We equate prosperity with growth, measuring our society's health by its increase in gross economic output, without bothering to ask about the quality of the output or the sustainability of the growth. The quality leaves much to be desired and the sustainability is not only doubtful, it is impossible. But we treat these facts as heresies and so in the unshakable spirit of true believers, we rebuke any who recite them and collectively cling ever more tightly to The American Way of Life.

We continue to believe in suburban expansion. We yearn for a new boom in housing starts, in new office parks, in new retail complexes, and in the highways and byways that connect them. We believe in suburban expansion because we consider home ownership the essence of the American Dream, the sine qua non of responsible adulthood.

Consistent with our belief in suburban expansion, we believe in unlimited resources. First, we believe in unlimited land. We have faith there will always be land for new houses and that if the land we need for lawns and swimming pools displaces land for crops and animals, we do not fret, because our faith in unlimited land spills into our faith in unlimited food.

We believe in unlimited energy. We have faith that fossil fuels will serve our energy needs until they are gone, at which point we will seamlessly shift to a new energy source that will heat our homes, run our gadgets, and fuel our cars.

Declining asset values, including that fortress of wealth, the suburban home; rising unemployment; and economic anxiety have, perhaps, shaken our belief in unlimited debt. But they show no signs of weakening our conviction that American life is fundamentally limitless.