Trust

The water is wide, I cannot get o'er
and neither do I have wings to fly
Give me a boat that can carry two
And both will row, my love and I.
---Elizabethan song.

Anton recently wrote on trust and language (I couldn't understand what she said but I trust it was wise and wonderfully humane). We trust all the time and so I'm a bit suspicious of people who talk about the 'crisis' of language-as if words are only empty words, never getting us to the thing-in-itself, or who harp on about authenticity or the 'real self', as if we could not, should not, trust what other people say. I give you my word. Who says that nowadays?

Well, you might say, we only have degrees of trust (granted, but trust can only be tentative, can only be associated with vulnerability and the lack of guarantees if you think about it). But we don't trust others, you say: expert advice must be treated cautiously-what do they know: teachers, doctors, environmentalists; politicians (dodgy dossiers) and civil servants are, ultimately, only concerned about their own narrow self-interest (and libertarians will add: that is what human beings are like, or that is what human nature is). Why should I trust my brother?
No, only fear and punishment or the State, the law can give me security. Or I trust if it's in my own interest to do so or it only makes sense in an evolutionary perspective. Confession: I don't trust people who want to explain everything under the sun in terms of evolution).

Human beings are scoundrels, cheats, willing to renege on contracts, agreements, commitments all the time. In fact, they thrive on the very possibility that some people are trusting. Give them an inch..

And so we're led to a spiral of mistrust and mutual suspicion. If 'goods' are scarce and rivalrous are we led down the path of disastrous conflict (Girard or Foucault: Society Must be Defended). And if the 'rational' thing to do is to cheat the other then what use morality. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. If that's all philosophy has to teach us then we had better give up thinking. 'My Mercy takes precedence over my wrath' it says in the Qur'an and 'the good' precedes evil...evil exists only as a limitation of the good.

What about love and sympathy (must get back to Smith here), then? Well, you say, they aren't universal: you only love your 'own'. England has no eternal friends or eternal enemies, only eternal interests! In fact, your partiality here actually makes things worse. Us or them said the great natural philosopher. My tribe or yours. Immigrants, Blacks, Jews, Shias*, Punjabis..there's something not quite right about them. Women? How could you forget! Ah, yes..the snake..can they really be trusted. Where's the trust in this relationship? Er..now that you ask...

You look for a sign so that we can trust. How we need to. But didn't the search for it make you a lesser person? Isn't it just there? Or does it have to be nurtured?

It's not about our distrust of our knowledge of the world (I reach out for my tea and trust that by the time my hand gets there it will still be there). Perhaps that radical doubt is the defining aspect of modernity (Hannah). Perhaps we live in a 'risk society'. But what we've got here is something else: a fundamental mistrust in the world as the world, a sort of second gnosticism. Can we once again live without the calculating hand, without the manipulating hand?

*joke: an eminent Shia is on his death bed and tells his best friend that he wants to convert and become a Sunni. The family and friends are utterly distraught. "But why?"
"Well", he replied, "if I'm going to hell I want one of those bastards to suffer"

Could I just add, the motivation for writing this was not something I read (though I am borrowing here to give shape to my feelings); no, it was that whilst driving yesterday I saw a rather rotund woman-poor, no doubt, if one judges by the way her clothes were sticking to her sweaty body- quickly make a dash for it. But there she was, smiling away, as proud as could be, tightly holding the hands of her two children. They were the world to her, and she to them. And there they were, as trusting as lambs. And at that moment I was convinced that no matter what theorists say, no matter how terribly ugly and frighteningly sick some people are, the world is still the world, a tent of scattered stars that love has made.