Trust

I have quite sure that we will be sorting through the legacy of the great Scottish Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre for centuries. For the moment, let me mention just one of his ideas, elaborated in "Dependent Rational Animals", which points out that no philosophy of Man makes sense unless we recognize that we are deeply dependent on each other in every way, from birth to death. Like many great ideas, it seems obvious at first but it is so easy to forget this, both on an individual level and in our wider investigations.

An example of the "wider investigations" is the project of History. MacIntyre would say (and there are still those who disagree) that history is always told from the social and political point of view of the historian. In other words the "past" is pretty much an allegory of what we presently regard to be the important issues.

Let me leave this point and come back to the individual level and what I believe to be the very life blood of society and therefore of the healthy individual: trust.

Actual human beings spend almost all their time in the company of other human beings. You can't say much interesting about the psychology of one person raised by wolves. What you can say about our lives with others is that the fabric of society is woven out of threads of trust. This fabric is ever-present, like the air we breath.

When we drive, we trust our lives to people going the other way to stay on the other side of the road. The money in our pockets is nothing but a handful of symbols of trust -- trust that others will exchange it for things of value, trust that we were not swindled when others gave us these symbols in exchange for our time, labor and expertise. The ordinary good fortune of babies of all kinds has been to have mothers who can be trusted to provide the necessities of life. As we grow up, if we are lucky, we make bonds of trust with friends, lovers, customers, employers, neighbours. Bonds of trust. To be worthy of trust is a great virtue in all societies in all times.

If you will permit me a whacky aside for the benefit of other MacIntyre disciples, we even trust criminals. How so? An example. A criminal recently gave me over $1000 out of the blue for no reason. MacIntyre would say that such behaviour is not intelligible. It is not the way we expect criminals to behave. Such behaviour is prima face evidence of insanity, which is really nothing more than unintelligible behaviour. People can no longer trust this individual to behave in a way that "makes sense", even in a way that we regard as "wrong". This is a very extreme example of how trust forms the very basis of human relationships, even with those who we would not normally consider trustworthy.

There is another, more devastating kind of insanity. That happens when a person can no longer trust those around him. He cuts himself off from those who are essential for his continued existence as a human being.

Now, I would agree with the great religious thinkers about the central importance of "loving kindness" but, sadly, such a standard of behaviour is beyond the reach of all of us some of the time and some of us  all of the time. From a purely practical point of view, I think we need to lower our sites a bit and focus on trust -- how it is created, sustained and nourished.