We often talk about differences between progressives and conservatives. Sometimes we discuss those differences in terms of policy. Sometimes we look at the moral values that underlie and are reflected in those policies. Beneath those are core beliefs about ourselves and our species that form the basis for moral values. I call these "beliefs" because they are claims that can neither be proved nor disproved; you can find evidence for one and against another, and evidence for another and against the one.
Take trust, for example. We've all experienced trust upheld and trust betrayed. If you highlight examples of trust upheld, the evidence suggests people are generally trustworthy. If you highlight examples of trust betrayed, the evidence suggests the converse. We can't prove either claim in general terms, and even if we could that would not answer the more important question: Can I trust this person or this group in this situation?
More below the fold....
The Need For Trust
Whether we generally trust or distrust each other, and more specifically which individuals and institutions we tend to trust or distrust, profoundly shapes our moral values and our political leanings. None of us should trust everyone always, but neither can we afford to distrust everyone always, because trust is fundamental to a progressive society.
Without trust, we cannot voluntarily cooperate except on actions that can be completed immediately and within our direct observation. Instead we employ less voluntary cooperation: hierarchical power structures, strict procedures, demanding both intermediate and final measurable results set down in exacting detail, backed by systems of reward and punishment for compliance or noncompliance, and perhaps reinforced by constant surveillance to detect noncompliance as soon as possible. I'll call that The System, and without trust we rely on The System and its idealized norms of what problems should exist, what resources should be available to solve them, and what solutions should work. That's a big, smelly, steaming pile of should in a universe where real problems, resources, and solutions rarely match idealized norms. Without trust, our response is often to blame the person whose real life doesn't match the idealized norms for which The System was designed to work ... one of many moral gymnastics we'll employ to protect and preserve The System. Without trust, if The System doesn't work there is only chaos.
With trust, however, we're less constrained by The System. We trust the person or people working a problem to look for a workable solution given the specific challenges and resources actually at hand. They may employ creative problem-solving strategies The System could not have predicted. Solutions may come from surprising sources - often not the people at the top of the hierarchy - and the solutions may surprise us and take time to understand and accept. But if we trust the person or people working the problem, and if they are trustworthy, we often get a better solution than we would have by rigidly adhering to The System.
Not surprisingly, without trust we tend toward conservatism, and with trust we tend toward progressivism. In cognitive linguist (and Kossack) Dr. George Lakoff's frames, without trust we demand a Strict Father to keep our nation-as-family in line, while with trust we enable a Nurturant Parent to help us meet our shared challenges.
What is trust?
In his landmark Foundations of Social Theory, the late James Coleman offered a four-part definition of trust:
- Trust allows cooperative actions that are otherwise impossible, most often because cooperation involves information asymmetry. We trust someone else - a doctor, lawyer, plumber, auto mechanic, etc. - to know something we don't and to use that knowledge on our behalf.
- If the trustee is trustworthy, we benefit by having trusted him/her. If the trustee is untrustworthy, we are harmed by having trusted him/her.
- Trust is active; it involves a voluntary transfer of resources - physical, economic, intellectual, and/or time - to the trustee, without certainty as to his/her trustworthiness.
- There is a time lag between the act of extending trust and the trustee's acting on that trust.
Trust enables concepts like deferred gratification, where we expect and accept that we must often wait to see the resolution of our efforts. Trust also enhances our ambiguity tolerance; we're more willing to accept that while we might not know enough about a situation, others do and they are employing that knowledge wisely. Psychologist Theodor Adorno suggested that inability to accept deferred gratification and intolerance for ambiguity are hallmarks of an authoritarian personality.
While psychoanalyst Erik Erickson proposed that trust is the first stage of psychosocial development, occurring or not in the first two years of life, more recent work like that of ethicist Annette Baier suggests that trust can be built or undermined by social narratives about individuals and institutions. Conservative narratives of distrust for the poor and powerless, and trust for the wealthy and powerful, have dominated the American political dialogue since the 1980s. We see those narratives of trust and mistrust play out in laws that demand the poor and powerless prove their innocence to be eligible for social assistance and document how they use that assistance, while the wealthy and powerful are bailed out with few if any questions asked before or afterward.
How should progressives talk about trust?
Trust in each other and in government is a fundamental premise of progressive moral values and policy. For example, we recognize that we cannot trust corporations to serve the public good, not because corporate officers are personally evil but because U.S. law requires them act as trustees for their shareholders and return maximum profit, even at the expense of the public good. But our system law requires government to act in the public good, so we trust - or should trust - government to defend our interests. That difference is why most progressives favor government-run health insurance, single-payer or at least a robust public option, and why we don't and shouldn't trust for-profit health insurance companies to deal fairly with us when it is more profitable not to. The argument for single-payer or a robust public option makes no sense if we trust government no more than we trust for-profit corporations.
Do we progressives trust our government? Certainly we didn't under the Bush administration, and for good reason; that administration often acted as an agent for corporations, and in other ways that undermined our trust. But what about now? There are supposedly progressive narratives suggesting the Obama administration is almost as much if not equally an corporate agent as was the Bush administration. One common narrative contrasts the "Halliburton administration" of President Bush to the "Goldman-Sachs administration" of President Obama. If progressives believe and advocate that narrative, why should we - or those we seek to convince - support a government-run health plan? Such cynicism narratives undermine the very policies we progressives claim to advocate.
The reasoned counter-argument is that we progressives should not blindly trust any political leader or party, especially not when their policies do not match our expectations. To do so risks being used, relied upon for support during election campaigns, then ignored in the actual practice of governance. At the very least, we have a civic duty to express our policy expectations and our disappointment when those expectations are unmet.
But the narratives we employ to meet that civic duty can either build or undermine trust. If trust is a core premise of progressivism, then we progressives have a civic duty to build trust in the institutions upon which we ask our fellow citizens to rely for help. We progressives have to overcome decades of cultivated cynicism in government before we can hope to convince more Americans of our policy solutions. Invoking government as a problem-solver while undermining trust in government is an unconvincing argument.
Building trust while expressing justified disappointment requires well-chosen narratives, and we'll explore some of those this week.
+++++
Happy Thursday!