Rebuilding Trust

Roger Berkowitz

Jedediah Britton Purdy writes that democracy depends on trust. It is common today to decry the loss of trust, the rise of mistrust, and the reign of distrust. But all knowledge depends on trust. The problem today is not simply a lack of trust, it is the loss of any commonly held agreement on whom to trust. In the enlightenment, trust in God was replaced with a trust in science. In the 20th century, trust in science was replaced by trust in experts. But the fracturing world of experts and the loss of authority suffered by nearly all institutions means that trust is dispersed, politicized, and weaponized. Like Humpty Dumpty’s wall, the edifice of trustworthy institutions is hard to put back together. Purdy lays out this challenge. Then he asks: How can we rebuild common institutions of trust? His answer: “We need to practice nondefensively meeting serious disagreement—and proceeding to the rest of the human being.” In short, there is no silver bullet that will restore social and political institutional trust. We need to talk to each other in situations and in contexts where we learn to see each other as human beings with opinions and perspectives that are valuable even when we find them to be wrong or even dangerous. I was asked recently during the Arendt Center’s Virtual Reading Group whether talking to each other across partisan divides is even possible anymore. The answer must be yes, but only within institutions that allow for people to encounter each other in their humanity.  Purdy writes:

Democracy places a unique demand on trust. The usual measures of trust, which ask whether we trust other people and institutions to do the right thing, assume a morally static world: We know the right thing to do, and the question is whether a neighbor, stranger, or public official will do it. But democracy matters most, and is most difficult, when citizens decide to change course morally. The New Deal, the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, the revolution in environmental laws in the 1970s—they all succeeded as far as they did because they were democratic choices to live by different values. That kind of progress means putting our futures in one another’s hands.

Destabilizing levels of mistrust feel natural, even morally required, because the world has fractured. As everyone now more or less understands, people get their news from different places, with different facts (or “facts”) and very different moral narratives—crises at the border or concerning the climate, threats from woke universities or from the resurgent extreme right.

Here we get a deeper picture of trust, one that is in some ways even more disturbing. Despite what the statistics about “declining trust” suggest, there is no on–off binary in which we either do or don’t trust. Trust is not like running, or drinking coffee, so that you could say, “I am not trusting today.” It is like breathing. The question is not whether you trust, but where.

Only through trust can anyone ever know much of anything. Almost all of what anyone treats as knowledge is not part of their own experience, but the upshot of a social process—reporting, teaching, research, gossip—that they have decided to trust. I don’t personally know that Antarctica exists, that my vaccine works, or how many votes were cast for each candidate in 2020, and except for Antarctica, which requires only a long journey at great expense to verify, those facts are basically impossible for me to observe. When I say I know them, I mean I trust the way they came to me. I trust those who told me, and I trust how they learned what they say they know.

So democracy today needs people to build a trust that can survive punishing conditions. It’s no good to pine for the pre-internet world (which had plenty of problems), let alone the pre-climate-change world. And, just as tricky, what we need is not more trust exactly, but healthier trust, which, somewhat paradoxically, includes skepticism—skepticism toward those who haven’t earned our trust. Trust and skepticism, if not cynicism, are two sides of a delicate balance. The goal is not some kind of harmonious community, but for citizens of an intensely diverse country to be able to coexist in a time when our problems need political solutions; not to love one another, but to get along enough to wrestle with climate change, immigration, public safety, child care, budget deficits, war—together.

What are steps toward healthier trust? Americans need ways to see one another more charitably and also to see politics more clearly. Every partisan knows the sense of threat that today’s political environment can trigger—seeing a car with a bumper sticker from the other side cut in front of you in traffic, stopping for gas somewhere you suspect everyone is on the hostile team, feeling your way through a first conversation with a dozen political trip wires. Ironically, it is impossible to practice politics if we reduce one another to our partisan identities. We need to practice nondefensively meeting serious disagreement—and proceeding to the rest of the human being.