“Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.” So wrote Sissela Bok in what is surely one of the great footnotes in the history of moral philosophy. Her point is that trust is the condition of possibility for other aspects of healthy and just human relationships — indeed, aspects that are constitutive of political community as such: that another person will treat me fairly, that they have my interests are heart, that they will do me no harm. “But if I do not trust your word”, Bok asks, “can I have genuine trust in the first three? If there is no confidence in the truthfulness of others, is there any way to assess their fairness, their intentions to help or harm?”
Because it is sustained by nothing more substantial than a fabric of trusted institutions, shared habits and moral commitments — each of which needs daily reaffirmation and continual renewal — democratic political orders are highly susceptible to the corrosive or fraying effects of distrust, contempt and mutual intimidation. The perpetual temptation has been to attempt to solve the inherent complexity of adhering to principles of equality and practices of patient deliberation by curtailing “politics-as-usual”, by simplifying who it is that constitutes “the people” (or “the majority”) through the dismissal of a treasonous “minority”, or by means of political violence for the sake of a higher “Cause”. As we discussed last week, this is one of the reasons that conspiratorial fantasies and outright paranoia have gone hand-in-hand with democracy itself.
It is little wonder, then, that pervasive distrust is destroying the conditions of possibility of democracy itself. It’s not so much that we no longer trust anything, but rather our objects of trust are discrete, exclusionary, based on forms of ideological faith, not shared sight. The philosopher Hannah Arendt pointed to the importance of public objects around which people can gather and speak — objects which function precisely not to be the object of attention, but rather to mediate interpersonal or democratic attentiveness whereby people come to deliberate and cooperate. These public objects could be a common store of facts about the world, or spaces and institutions through which we encounter one another as participants in a shared political project.
Tocqueville hoped that the popular press could function as a kind of flame toward which citizens, like moths, could be drawn together for common purpose. Instead, the media seems to drive us inexorably apart into a wasteland of epistemic ruin. Politics, the courts, and universities have all become objects of popular distrust. Where can we look to begin rebuilding the habits and commitments that might sustain us?
As Jedediah Purdy has recently written:
“We need to shake off the idea that democracy should come naturally. This is a superstition of the enlightened, and it serves us very badly in a time of democratic crisis. As perceptive observers have always understood, democracy is extremely demanding. It requires the qualities of mind and character that sustain a healthy and balanced political trust, such as the willingness to listen to others and to doubt one’s own side. It also requires the commitment to build a world of citizens, not just consumers or spectators or even protesters, but people who expect to exercise power and responsibility together. We will need to take control of our own future before it becomes a present we cannot stand to trust.”
Guest: Jedediah Purdy is the Raphael Lemkin Distinguished Professor of Law at Duke University. He is the author of Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening — and Our Best Hope, and editor of The Norton Library edition of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Other Writings. He has also written an important essay for The Atlantic, “We’ve Been Thinking About America’s Trust Collapse All Wrong”.