Trust

 The Guardian re-released Why we stopped trusting elites. This seems still relevant:

At times when public institutions – including the media, government departments and professions – command widespread trust, we rarely question how they achieve this. And yet at the heart of successful liberal democracies lies a remarkable collective leap of faith: that when public officials, reporters, experts and politicians share a piece of information, they are presumed to be doing so in an honest fashion.

The notion that public figures and professionals are basically trustworthy has been integral to the health of representative democracies. After all, the very core of liberal democracy is the idea that a small group of people – politicians – can represent millions of others. If this system is to work, there must be a basic modicum of trust that the small group will act on behalf of the much larger one, at least some of the time. As the past decade has made clear, nothing turns voters against liberalism more rapidly than the appearance of corruption: the suspicion, valid or otherwise, that politicians are exploiting their power for their own private interest.

Trump and the MAGA crowd were knocking experts 5 years ago and still do so. But corrupt politicians have been around forever. Go watch Preston Sturges The Great McGinty, or read Hammett's The Glass Key. Muncie used to be called Little Chicago for its political shenanigans. When I was much, much younger we had a problem of ghost employment in Indiana government. I cannot recall the title of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan book where he extolled the public benefits of graft. Oh, yeah, when I first started practicing law there was a Democrat on the county council or the county commissioners who made sure that snow plows cleared roads with Democrats first. Corruption was winked at because it benefitted the politician's constituency. I would think the problem identified in the Guardian article is corruption that benefits only the politician.

There is, I think, another problem - not of the politician but of the citizen. My friends KH, DM and I have been discussing this year how Trump has conned the numbers of people that he has. We have come down to a lack of critical thinking. Which may also be a sign of an undereducated population. Not just book learning, but practical experience of the world. We have those learned in books who have the minds of small children thinking that all is sunny and nothing tarnishes their idealism because they have been isolated from the vicissitudes of real life. I grew up with people who came to age during World War I and then lived through the Great Depression. They had no great trust in politicians as anything but a necessary tool. Like I just wrote, watch The Great McGinty.

So much for politics and thoughtless acceptance.

This isn’t just about politics. In fact, much of what we believe to be true about the world is actually taken on trust, via newspapers, experts, officials and broadcasters. While each of us sometimes witnesses events with our own eyes, there are plenty of apparently reasonable truths that we all accept without seeing. In order to believe that the economy has grown by 1%, or to find out about latest medical advances, we take various things on trust; we don’t automatically doubt the moral character of the researchers or reporters involved.

 It is that last sentence that bothers me most. How do we go from facts to morality? Grifting. On the other hand, Nietzsche taught us to look at the persons who advocated ideas. I do not recall his suggesting a moral failing, but something more like intellectual bias. 

Lou Reed was right about us needing a busload of faith to get by. We take it on faith that the sun will rise tomorrow. Most people give me a queer look when I say that to them. They have not taken a serious look at what they take on faith. Most people think faith is restricted to religious matters. Nope. That our next breath is not our last is a matter of faith. Yes, the probabilities are that the sun will not go nova today, or that I am not to die in the next few moments. We need to start thinking more critically, not less. 

In the following, I see only the result of gullibility, of blind faith, running up against the fallibility of humanity:

The problem today is that, across a number of crucial areas of public life, the basic intuitions of populists have been repeatedly verified. One of the main contributors to this has been the spread of digital technology, creating vast data trails with the latent potential to contradict public statements, and even undermine entire public institutions. Whereas it is impossible to conclusively prove that a politician is morally innocent or that a news report is undistorted, it is far easier to demonstrate the opposite. Scandals, leaks, whistleblowing and revelations of fraud all serve to confirm our worst suspicions. While trust relies on a leap of faith, distrust is supported by ever-mounting piles of evidence. And in Britain, this pile has been expanding much faster than many of us have been prepared to admit.

What we have is the disappointment of those who think only in terms of absolutes.

As Ronald Reagan said, trust but verify. Verification requires looking to see. Then enough experience to judge what we see. Judgment requires experience, or as David Hume put it:

...Afterwards experience comes in play to persuade us that two bodies, situated in the manner above-describ'd, have really such a capacity of receiving body betwixt them, and that there is no obstacle to the conversion of the invisible and intangible distance into one that is visible and tangible. However natural that conversion may seem, we cannot be sure it is practicable, before we have had experience of it.

I would also point everyone to philosophical Pragmatism.

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that – very broadly – understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it. This general idea has attracted a remarkably rich and at times contrary range of interpretations, including: that all philosophical concepts should be tested via scientific experimentation, that a claim is true if and only if it is useful (relatedly: if a philosophical theory does not contribute directly to social progress then it is not worth much), that experience consists in transacting with rather than representing nature, that articulate language rests on a deep bed of shared human practices that can never be fully ‘made explicit’.

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Peirce made this canonical statement of his Pragmatic Maxim in ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’:

Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (EP1: 132)

This offers a distinctive method for becoming clear about the meaning of concepts and the hypotheses which contain them. We clarify a hypothesis by identifying the practical consequences we should expect if it is true. This raises some questions. First: what, exactly is the content of this maxim? What sort of thing does it recognize as a practical consequence? Second, what use does such a maxim have? Peirce’s first simple illustrative example urges that what we mean by calling something hard is that ‘it will not be scratched by many other substances.’ In this way, then, I can use the concept hard in certain contexts when I am wondering what to do, and absent such contexts, the concept is empty. The principle has something of a verificationist character: ‘our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects’ (EP1: 132). However the use of the phrase ‘practical consequences’ suggests that these are to be understood as having implications for what we will or should do.

I think we can have probabilities, not absolute certainties. 

The original article goes on to discuss the political implications of this loss of trust.

If a world where everyone has their own truth-tellers sounds dangerously like relativism, that’s because it is. But the roots of this new and often unsettling “regime of truth” don’t only lie with the rise of populism or the age of big data. Elites have largely failed to understand that this crisis is about trust rather than facts – which may be why they did not detect the rapid erosion of their own credibility.

Unless liberal institutions and their defenders are willing to reckon with their own inability to sustain trust, the events of the past decade will remain opaque to them. And unless those institutions can rediscover aspects of the original liberal impulse – to keep different domains of power separate, and put the disinterested pursuit of knowledge before the pursuit of profit – then the present trends will only intensify, and no quantity of facts will be sufficient to resist. Power and authority will accrue to a combination of decreasingly liberal states and digital platforms – interrupted only by the occasional outcry as whistles are blown and outrages exposed.

My initial response is more democracy. I believe that was the response of the Progressives over a century ago with their referenda and recalls. Indiana bypassed all those and has long been a Republican fiefdom. 

Socially seems more of a problem. Elon Musk converted Twitter to X since the Guardian published its article. Musk has been purveying ever more right-wing rants. Riots rise up in England based on disinformation. Trump retains a large following in this country. 

Change will start with us. We all need to improve our thinking so that we can improve our consumption of facts. Living outside of reality - which is why we need a handle on facts - means destruction. That is the way it has been since our forebears roamed African savannas, needing to know what was a predator and what was prey.

sch 8/10