To make a leap “from a world of doubting each other to a world of trusting each other”

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation. 

 (Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece) 

 —o0o—

The philosopher Sissela Bok pithily observed that: “Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives” (Lying, New York, Pantheon Books, 1978, p. 31n). Now, obvious caveats aside, I think that most people in the UK would agree with this statement and would, instantly, also strongly feel that in British society today, we have lost a massive amount of trust in many institutions and individual people connected with them upon whom we rely for important services, such as those provided by the Post Office, the privatised water companies, and NHS services connected with blood transfusion, all of which are currently mired in shocking scandals to the point where most of us now completely distrust them. I would add to these examples the loss of trust felt around other, ongoing, scandals, such as the treatment of the Windrush generation and those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire. And to these I would additionally point to a significant collapse of trust in our political system in general, and the current government in particular, thanks to things like the “Partygate” revelations and the many dysfunctional plans attempting to address issues around asylum and immigration and net zero, to name just three of many.

But this painful loss of trust can serve to hide from us an exceptionally important point which is that, in all the matters noted above, and many more besides, trust remains fundamental to any human life, whether that life turns out to be a morally or ethically admirable one, or one wholly immoral and ethically deplorable. We can see that this is the case because, as the twentieth century Danish philosopher and theologian, Knud Ejler Løgstrup (1905–1981) points out,

“Trust and distrust are not two parallel ways of life. Trust is basic; distrust is the absence of trust. This is why we do not normally advance arguments and justifications for trust as we do for distrust. To use a modern philosophical expression, distrust is the ‘deficient form’ of trust” (all quotes from Løgstrup come from his The Ethical Demand, Chapter 1, section 2, in either the translation by Hans Fink and Alasdair MacIntyre or that by Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern).

And, in connection with this point, I also need to add that all the scandals I mentioned above have been able to become so huge and longstanding — stretching back, in the case of the blood transfusion scandal, over 50 years to the 1970s — because those who were involved in them were able to trust that their own political and economic networks and ways of working meant they could be extremely confident their crimes and misdemeanours wouldn’t be found out, but would, in fact, be very effectively covered-up.

This point should serve as a salutary reminder that the presence of trust in our lives does not necessarily play out in ways that most of us would describe as good. Indeed, as Annette Baier notes in her important 1986 paper, “Trust and Antitrust,”  

“. . . not all the things that thrive when there is trust between people, and which matter, are things that should be encouraged to thrive. Exploitation and conspiracy, as much as justice and fellowship, thrive better in an atmosphere of trust. There are immoral as well as moral trust relationships, and trust-busting can be a morally proper goal” (Baier, Annette. “Trust and Antitrust.” Ethics, vol. 96, no. 2, 1986, pp. 231–60. JSTOR. Accessed 24 May 2024).

So, I want to be clear that here I am not going to bemoan the perceived loss of trust within our society because trust simply hasn’t been lost within it. Indeed, as I hope you can now see, it is, in fact, the case that powerful levels of trust are being displayed all the time in our culture within the management of institutions like the Post Office, the water companies and NHS services connected with blood transfusion, as well as, of course, various so-called regulatory bodies, and also departments of national government.

So, instead of worrying today about the loss of trust, I want to alert you to the fact that the problem is not the loss of trust but the fact that, in so many ways, our trust become seriously misplaced and that, therefore, we need to do some serious trust-busting and begin to put our trust back in the right, or at least in a much better, place.

But to do this, it’s important to try to get a better handle on in what trust is all about, how it works. But, it turns out that this is not as easy as it seems, and that when we ask what it is, it turns out, to repurpose a famous point made by St Augustine talking about time, that provided that no one asks us what trust is, we know what it is, but if we want to explain it to an inquirer, we find we do not really know.

Partly this is because, as Løgstrup, realised, “Trust is not of our own making; it is given.” In other words, it’s so fundamental to our lives that, like air (which, of course, is also given), we don’t even think about it until it is seriously polluted and threatens our ability to live a good and healthy life. But what we do quickly discover when we start to look closely at trust is, as Løgstrup also observes, that human life is so constituted that none of us can live without laying ourselves open to another person and putting our life in that person’s hands, either by showing or claiming trust.

Now, sometimes, not a huge amount is at stake in this necessary showing or claiming of trust, think of the countless moments when you have presented your debit card to a card reader, let’s say in a sandwich shop during a busy lunchtime and have trusted that the total amount of money taken from your account was the same as that which was noted on the till. On other occasions, however, a great deal is at stake, think of how many times you have trusted to the skills and competence of the maintenance and flight crews of the aircraft you were about to board, or have handed your life over to an anaesthetist and surgeon. But in all cases — of which there are many dozens of examples, great and small, every day of your life — in each of these trusting encounters with other human beings there is, as Løstrup points out, 

“an unarticulated demand, irrespective of the circumstances in which the encounter takes place and irrespective of the nature of the encounter. Regardless of how varied the communication between persons may be, it always involves the risk of one person daring to lay him or herself open to the other in the hope of a response. This is the essence of communication and it is the fundamental phenomenon of ethical life.”

Given this, Løstrup says,

“Through the trust which a person either shows or asks of another person he or she surrenders something of his or her life to that person. Therefore, our existence demands of us that we protect the life of the person who has placed his or her trust in us.”

And he goes on to say,

“By our mere attitude to one another, we take part in giving shape to each other’s world. Through my attitude to the other person, I play a part in determining the breadth and colour that the other person’s world has for them. I play a part in making it broad or narrow, light or dark, varied or dull — and not least I play a part in making it threatening or secure. This comes about not through theories and views, but through my mere attitude. This is why there is an unspoken, and one might say anonymous, demand on us that we take care of the life that trust puts in our hands.”

Which brings me to my final point today in connection with, not only the forthcoming General Election here in the UK and the individuals and parties contesting it, but also the big public and private institutions, as well as the regulatory bodies and governments, who play such a huge part in our modern lives. Now, without ever forgetting that we need to be asking the same questions of ourselves and the institutions we belong to and support — in my case, the local free and inquiring religious and spiritual community where I am minister — we need to be asking all of them, again and again, whether they are heeding the demand that existence makes of them that they protect the life of those who have placed their trust in them, and how they are determining the breadth and colour of the lives they encounter? We need to be asking them, are the lives they encounter being helped to live more broad, light, varied and secure lives, or are they helping to make them narrower, darker, duller and more threatening?

And, in all this, if we find any of these politicians and public and private institutions, and those regulatory bodies and government, repeatedly ignoring this ethical demand and are untrustworthy, we must be prepared to call them out and bring them to account. But as we display our distrust through some serious trust-busting, we must never forget that this activity is an expression of trust, albeit a deficient form of it. And, when through this activity we truly see again we cannot live without trust, then, and only then, can we begin to see how best to follow the non-sectarian, religious and spiritual teacher and exemplar, Tenko Nishida-san’s advice, and make a leap “from a world of doubting each other to a world of trusting each other” (Selflessness, Saying XLII, < 疑いあう世界から信じあう世界へ飛躍したい。>). 

Make no mistake, the continued well-being of our very democracy depends upon us being able to make precisely this leap.