The Future of Trust (eBook)

Ros Taylor (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
160 Seiten
Melville House UK (Verlag)
978-1-911545-68-2 (ISBN)

Infos

A revealing exploration into how trust defines our lives, how it can be won and lost, and what its future might look like, in this fascinating addition to Melville House UK's new FUTURES series. In a society battered by economic, political, cultural and ecological collapse, where do we place our trust, now that it is more vital than ever for our survival? How has that trust - in our laws, our media, our governments - been lost, and how can it be won back? Examining the police, the rule of law, artificial intelligence, the 21st century city and social media, Ros Taylor imagines what life might be like in years to come if trust continues to erode. Have conspiracy theories permanently damaged our society? Will technological advances, which require more and more of our human selves, ultimately be rejected by future generations? And in a world fast approaching irreversible levels of ecological damage, how can we trust the custodians of these institutions to do the right thing - even as humanity faces catastrophe?

Ros Taylor is a journalist and contributing editor at Podmasters, where she presents the podcasts Oh God, What Now?, The Bunker, and Jam Tomorrow. She is also a freelance editor for Open Society Foundations and has worked for the BBC. Previously she was a senior journalist at The Guardian, research manager for the Truth, Trust & Technology Commission at the London School of Economics & Political Science, the co-editor and co-author of The 2018 Democratic Audit, and edited LSE research on COVID-19 and Brexit. The Future of Trust is her first book.

Textauszug

A Brief History of Trust

People may let you down, but God never did. ‘Me have trust to God’s help,’ wrote a monk a thousand years ago, in one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded uses of the word. And again: ‘Blessed is the man, that maketh the Lord his trust.’ Islam has a word, tawakkul, which roughly means ‘perfect trust in God’. Trust was the test of faith: the willingness to believe in what could not be seen.

It is difficult, nowadays, to conjure up what it was like to live in a society where trust in God was implicit in daily life. The trust He deserved was ineffable and unquestionable. ‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding,’ say the Proverbs. The Bible makes it clear that trust in God was greatly to be preferred to any trust in government. The book of Isaiah warns that trusting in Pharaoh was like leaning on a staff made of a broken reed: if you leant on it, it would splinter in your hand. ‘You can’t depend on anyone, not even a great leader,’ says a modern version of Psalm 146 baldly.4

When it first emerged, Christianity was an insurgent religion whose followers were persecuted, so it made sense to warn Christians that people in authority were not to be trusted. But soon the Church created its own leaders, whom they declared the ultimate source of authority. Frustrated by the Pope’s intransigence over his marriage, Henry VIII solved the problem to his own satisfaction by rejecting papal authority and creating a state religion, the Church of England.

The idea that a king ruled by divine right lingered. But as democracies emerged, they increasingly sought to draw a line between the church and the state, making belief a private matter and a citizen’s obligations to their government quite independent of any God they might believe in. The idea of the social contract, in which citizens obeyed the law in exchange for security, became the norm. As John Locke put it in 1689:

Political power is that power, which every man having in the state of nature, has given up into the hands of the society, and therein to the governors, whom the society hath set over itself, with this express or tacit trust, that it shall be employed for their good, and the preservation of their property.5

Institutional trust became – in theory, at least – reciprocal. It gave people the confidence to obtain the life they wanted. Interpersonal trust made us human. Institutional trust makes us citizens. To put it another way, interpersonal trust gives you the confidence to step onto the zebra crossing when a car is approaching. Institutional trust means that if the car runs you over, you know that an ambulance will take you to hospital and the driver will be punished. Only when the institutional trust is there would many of us dare to step into the path of an oncoming SUV.

Indeed, by the time Locke was writing, people had already begun to put their trust in institutions other than the Church. Banking as we now understand it had begun in the late fourteenth century with three wealthy Italian families, including the Medici. Gradually, as companies were able to borrow more and trade across borders, it became possible for a company to operate in different countries. Then banking opened up to more and more people. By 1975, even women could open a bank account in their own names in the UK. Today, some of my financial data is handled by corporations based thousands of miles away. These digitised acts of trust are now so routine that they barely touch our consciousness. Yet even a century ago, most of them would have been profoundly strange. How can you be so trusting? The answer is a shrug. Because I must; because not to do so would be to cut myself off from much of modern life.

For anyone living and working in a town or city, trust takes thousands of forms every day. Most of this trust is not based on confidence in individuals. Banks play a role in it, but not an exclusive one. It’s vested in a company, a government or an organisation, not a person, and nowadays it is overwhelmingly digital. Checks are made and permission is granted. In the morning, I board a train carrying several hundred people who have all established their right to travel by buying a ticket. No physical money changed hands when I paid my fare, but I trust that the train company – or is it another institution acting for the train company? I don’t really know, and it doesn’t seem to matter – they will shift the right digits from my account to theirs.

I buy a salad for lunch from a popular sandwich chain; I have no idea where it was grown, or who handled it; but I trust that it contains 679 calories, because one institution (the government) has made a law compelling another institution (the sandwich chain) to publish how much energy it contains. That law, in turn, recognises that restaurants are good at hiding how unhealthy their food can be, and removes the need for me to trust my own judgment about how fattening the sandwich will be. The government is offering me a cognitive shortcut, a trust-substitute, that it thinks will help me make better decisions. Sometimes I would rather it didn’t. The salad accounts for quite a lot more than the 378 calories that my watch tells me I’ve burnt moving around today, but my doctor and the authorities haven’t yet asked me to share this information, so I hope that the tech company that manufactured it won’t abuse my trust by doing so anyway.

I take a bus home and a CCTV camera films me. What happens to that footage? I trust that it will be deleted eventually and only used if a crime is reported. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. The Metropolitan Police recently began to scan people’s faces on the street and compare them to a database of wanted criminals.6 This is happening even though only 42 per cent of Londoners trust the Met, according to YouGov.7

In China, where the government has introduced facial recognition technology to monitor people’s movements more closely and reward or punish them accordingly, there is less need for the authorities to invoke the threat of crime as a justification for surveillance. In an authoritarian state, technology is introduced without consulting people, and the pandemic offered another excuse to expand it. But perhaps, with a different understanding of what the state should do, I would trust the government to use it for the benefit of society, and to knock me into line if I was undermining the collective good.

Sitting in a traffic jam, I’m listening to a podcast. Zero trust, boasts an ad for an online security service. This is initially confusing, but I eventually grasp that the message is that the company doesn’t trust anyone, so I should know that I can trust it. It’s another way that institutional trust overcomes the challenge of living in a city and negotiating thousands of online connections: there are just too many people for me to trust them all.

Institutional trust, with its checks and built-in scepticism, is very different from the intangible bundle of faith, hope and confidence that we now call interpersonal trust. Interpersonal trust is also a fairly recent phenomenon. Before humans began to gather in towns and trade things regularly with strangers, trust was based on personal acquaintance. Most people knew a few dozen others, and had an informed opinion, based on their experience of their behaviour, of whether they could trust them. (Dunbar’s number, which is an estimate of how many people with whom we can maintain stable social relationships without the need for laws and restrictions, is thought to be around 150.) This is the trust that we still have in most of our family, friends and close neighbours. It’s unquantifiable, and it has a quality that actively resists interrogation. Indeed, it breaks down if we try to scrutinise it too closely. We can’t fully understand it, and that’s the whole point. Perfect knowledge would make it redundant.

I don’t trust that I have ten fingers; I can see them in front of me. I trust my husband, my bank and my kids to tell me the truth. I can’t verify any of these things. I don’t even think that I would want to. As soon as I began to read their WhatsApp messages or open their bank statements, I would have tacitly admitted that I didn’t trust them, and if they found out they would be able, justifiably, to say: You don’t trust me. Something in our relationship would have been lost.

Trust in your family is usually the most powerful kind, because it is understood to have specific obligations. Almost all of us trusted a parent once – which is probably why the killing of a child by their mother or father has a special power to horrify us. Far more than the end of a romance or the failure of a friend to repay a debt, it represents the ultimate betrayal of trust. We trust before we have any notion of what trust is, or whether someone is worthy of it.

Quite a bit of what we call adolescence amounts to working out who is trustworthy, how to deal with people who let us down, and how much you can safely share with other people. Later, adulthood means learning how...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.2.2024
• Reihe/Serie: The FUTURES Series
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Schlagworte: Cities • Future • Government • Law • Politics • Society • Trust
• ISBN-10: 1-911545-68-X / 191154568X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-911545-68-2 / 9781911545682