… trust. For much of today, she’s been working up some remarks.
She was asked to structure her remarks around a work of literature, and she chose John Updike’s short story, “Trust Me,” a man’s recollection of his father having failed (for a few terrifying moments) to catch him as he – three or four years old – jumped for the first time into a swimming pool. “Trust me,” the father had said, and the child trusted him, but because the father in fact was not able to catch him right away, he came who knows how close to drowning.
Years later the narrator realizes that despite this abject failure of trustworthiness, and despite his mother (who was sitting nearby during the incident) having flown into so intense a rage that she violently slapped her husband’s face as he helped his son recover (her anger, writes the narrator, “seemed directed at him as much as at his father”), it’s his father he ended up trusting all his life. “It was his mother he distrusted, her swift sure-handed anger.”
The rest of the story recounts later failures of trusting and being trusted in the man’s life: He assures his girlfriend she can ski on a slope that’s in fact too challenging for her, and she falls apart – the two of them have to walk down the long icy run. His seventeen year old son assures him some hash brownies friends made for the son’s birthday “won’t do anything” to him, so the narrator eats one and becomes seriously and hilariously high as he tries to take the subway back to his apartment. He’s on a pleasant comfortable jet leaving Rome, and as he’s settling in for the flight the plane runs into bad trouble and has to return to the airport.
In most of the recalled incidents, the trauma involves a menacing uncontrollable world of water, ice, and snow: the “lapping agitation” of the swimming pool; the Atlantic ocean which “visually interlocked with the calm silver edge of the [airplane’s] wing: Olympian surfaces serenely oblivious of the immense tension between them;” the snowy woods that circled the man and his terrified girlfriend as they made their way down the mountain:
[T]he woods around them, perceived at so unusually slow a speed, wore a magical frozen strangeness, the ironical calm of airplane rivets.
Ironical because those rivets too, the narrator muses, say “Trust me, [yet] in his heart [he] refused, and this refusal in him formed a hollow space terror could always flood.”
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He expresses no anger at his son for feeding him drugs, but when the narrator calls his girlfriend and tells her what’s happened, she flies into a rage (“Oh, that’s disgusting!”) and hangs up on him.
The story ends with him once again musing.
The click [of the phone] sounded like a slap, the same echoing slap that had once exploded next to his ear. Except that his father had become his son, and his mother was his girl friend. This much remained true: it had not been his fault, and in surviving he was somehow blamed.
It seems not so much the fact of survival, though, as his lack of “sure-handed anger,” his failure to believe that when you get right down to it life is a risk almost not worth taking, that makes the narrator an object of blame. The narrator is more willing to assume the risks of life, more willing to be vulnerable in the ways you’re vulnerable when you trust someone, than some of the other people he encounters. (His ex-wife, for instance, has a fear of flying.)
Despite everyone’s inclination toward terror when they realize (as the narrator did, age three) their frailty in relation to a betraying human and a menacing natural world, the point is to persist in trusting, to resist one’s tendency to be “flooded” with terror. “There are few fates worse than sustained, self-protective, self-paralyzing, generalized distrust of one’s human environment,” writes the philosopher Annette Baier. “The worst pathology of trust is a life-poisoning reaction to any betrayal of trust.” The various rages against the narrator disclose, perhaps, elements of this pathology, and he rightly shrinks from them.
And when absence of trust becomes not just personal, but social?
Where a society has degenerated to the point that there are few institutions of trust, it is hard to see how things may be transformed so as to let trust in. Consider the society, for example, where trust is only found in small family groups: where there are few other examples of loyalty-based trust and few or no examples of trust based on habits of expecting virtue or prudence. Consider a society, in other words, where civic engagement is at an absolute minimum and utter cynicism prevails: where there is little of what James Coleman describes as social capital. In such a society, trust is likely to lack any dynamic and it may require dramatic developments or interventions if things are to be turned around.
January 31st, 2015 at 5:28PM
In connection with this theme and literature it is good to remember (as you probably do) that those in Dante’s worst (ninth) circle of hell, were all involved in some sort of betrayal of trust.
February 1st, 2015 at 3:13AM
Thanks, UD and Greg. I had to look up one of those “Inferno” charts.
FWIW-I read Fukuyama’s “Trust” years ago. If my memory’s okay, the U. S. ranked as a “high-trust” nation. I was–and still am–perplexed by his judgment.
February 1st, 2015 at 4:31AM
Jack/OH: Compared to almost everyone else, we look pretty good. Most of us, for instance, trust that the IRS commissioner is not taking our tax money and depositing it in a private account in the Caymans. So we pay our taxes.
February 1st, 2015 at 10:48AM
The erosion of the Enlightenment — loss of trust in science and reliance on evidence an reasoning — is one of the most serious current examples of loss of trust. (Think of the lack of response to global warming, though apathy and short-term greedy conflict of interest are also major, separate factors.) The anti vaxxers offer another example.
February 1st, 2015 at 10:56AM
Yes, Greg, self-interest and self-deception matter, but that’s against a backdrop of “science” and “evidence” being mere social constructs, possibly systems of power that need to be interrogated. The rot might have base and modest causes, or it might be abetted by high concept thinkers.
February 1st, 2015 at 11:34AM
SK –
I had to read your post carefully to be as sure as I could of where irony was intended (I’m intending none in this sentence) and concluded from the scare quotes that the first is ironic and the last is not. Hope I got it right. And I’m guessing you’ll agree with the next paragraph or two. But truly I am not sure and interested.
The science I read (mainly high-level pop particle physics) suggests to me that most real scientists would not take Rorty or Kuhn seriously except as sociological phenomena. It’s hard to imagine Richard Feynman spending real time contemplating that stuff. There may be some genuine scientific cultural relativity around the edges of scientific practice, but generally speaking science works and that is my pragmatic standard. Perhaps that is the one good thing about harnessing* atomic power — that it dramatically said to more ordinary people that there are parts of the world that can be understood only by experts and those parts matter greatly. Of course then the problems become identifying the experts and keeping firmly in mind that understanding difficult facts about the world is not the same as moral evaluation of their proper use.
Sometimes (all to often) it is hard to sort out the real scientists from the charlatans and to identify the self- deluding, financially-conflicted wishful-thinking producers of studies. But that doesn’t mean that scientific practices aren’t, in successive approximations, getting closer to a reality, that will probably always elude their efforts to some degree.
*On rereading, I realized that it is risible to say that atomic power was “harnessed.” But you know roughly what I mean.
February 1st, 2015 at 11:35AM
Oops I meant to say not sure BUT interested.
February 1st, 2015 at 2:01PM
Greg, yes, both understanding difficult facts and moral evaluation of their use require a coherent way of thinking about them. I have no problem with referring to the harnessing of atomic power.
February 1st, 2015 at 4:23PM
UD: We’re not a Third World thug-ocracy, but there’s plenty of room for improvement. Here are two examples of shaken trust taken from memory of published accounts.
#1. In 1984 or ’88, a well-known Ohioan ran for the Democrat presidential nomination. He took out an uncollateralized signature loan from an Ohio bank for campaign expenses. His campaign failed. His loan was forgiven.
#2. Following the federal prosecution of a large number of public officials, a onetime local mayor talked about how the local Mob sent a bag man to put the touch on him. The former mayor declined the offer. He had a remote starter installed in his car in case the Mob retaliated with a bomb. The bag man was the priest who’d officiated at his wedding.
February 1st, 2015 at 7:33PM
Just for the record, Thomas Kuhn never said that science or evidence were “mere social constructs.” He did say, however: “I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.” Anyone thinking otherwise has I suspect not read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions thoroughly enough.