Trust, Self-Interest and the Common Good

• Book: Trust: Self-Interest and The Common Good. Market Kohn. Oxford University Press.

Interview

Interview with Marek Kohn by the journal of the Radical Anthropology Group.

URL = http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/new/Journal_files/journal_02.pdf

"Radical Anthropology: In your new book, Trust: Self-Interest and The Common Good, you discuss the biological origins of trust. Is trust peculiarly human? Or does it have parallels in the animal world?

Marek Kohn: The primatologist Frans de Waal observes that, “We have no trouble recognising the difference between a trustful or distrustful dog, and we know how long it can take to turn the latter into the former.”

If an animal can form expectations about how another will act with respect to itself, we can think of it as being able to trust. But the question gets more difficult and interesting if one understands trust as involving a sense of selves and others: that to trust, one needs to have a sense that others are individuals, with interests and motives of their own. Trusting them is expecting that they will incorporate one’s own interests into theirs. So this is a question about whether nonhuman animals have what’s known as ‘theory of mind’ – which will doubtless be the subject of heated debate among primatologists for years to come!

RA: If trust has parallels in the animal world, and if human life is so characterised by trust, why it is a problem in the first place?

MK: Sure, there’s a lot of trust about, but the particular problem these days is that it doesn’t go very deep. A constantly moving, accelerating world reduces the opportunities for trust to grow through experience, familiarity, habit, and the commitment involved in relationships – personal, intimate or occupational – that are intended to last a long time. This isn’t to say that trust is a peculiarly modern problem, though. It’s a problem in the first place because co-operation is fundamentally problematic between agents whose interests are not identical. To understand how to promote trust and how to place it well, we need to work from first principles to see how interests may be combined into a common good.

RA: And what are those first principles? Are they Darwinian, would you say?

MK: They are; though they can be derived from other kinds of cost-benefit analysis. Differing genetic interests can cause problems of trust, particularly in ‘familial’ societies where families trust each other implicitly and everybody else very little. This often arises when the state is oppressive or dysfunctional, failing to implement laws fairly and inhibiting the development of civil society: under such conditions the family becomes a fortress.

RA: So traditional societies can be too parochial for widespread trust to develop; modern societies too chaotic. But why do you think widespread trust is desirable anyway? Could we not just get by, as Thatcher implied, with individuals and their families?

MK: Another politician, David Trimble, recently observed (in the context of his experience in Northern Ireland) that trust is “over-rated and frequently misplaced”. He has a point.

Trust is not strictly necessary to achieve many forms of co-operation, and to focus on trust, as political commentators often do, can be to concentrate on the icing when what matters is the cake.

However, even in situations where cooperation can be achieved without trust, trust may be needed to sustain the co-operation. Reading accounts of informal truces on the Western Front in the First World War, I was struck by the extent to which trust seemed to arise between soldiers on opposing sides, and how such sentiments may have helped to maintain the truces in situations where violations would inevitably occur. In real life, signals are often noisy – in the trenches literally so, the signals often actually being transmitted by gunfire – and so people need to interpret them according to their understanding of others’ intentions. No ceasefire would have lasted if any shot was interpreted as a deliberate breach. Trust makes cooperation resilient instead of brittle.

Well-placed trust makes relationships work better. It allows people to take advantage of opportunities they would otherwise miss, and makes the colours of social interaction more intense.

RA: In your book you say “capitalism has won the global game of how to make a living”.Marx and others pointed out that capitalism is parasitic on trust.Workers in the factory, in the home and in society generally operate on communist principles – if my colleague asks me to pass the spanner, I don’t charge him for my time; my mum doesn’t put a padlock on the fridge. Yet the profits that accrue from this social trust go into the pockets of a small minority of individuals. Isn’t the global consensus on capitalism more an example of misplaced trust than of deserved success?

MK: It depends on where you think value comes from. By locating the source of value in labour, Marxism proposes that capital is inherently exploitative and implies that workers are wrong to trust in it. Orthodox economics, on the other hand, welcomes capital as a source of value. In Britain, the old labour movement was deeply mistrustful of capital and management, whereas on the Continent, notably in West Germany, relations between capital and labour were structured around an idea of social partnership which implied trust. Indeed I believe they still largely are, to the workers’ benefit."

...

RA: You say that, in modern societies, the “attenuation of traditional authority has created a vacuum in social relations that is being filled by bureaucratic regulation”. Where once there were customs in common, now there are contracts between individuals. Is this development largely good or bad? Is it reversible? What kind of political strategies and real-world projects give us grounds for hope that the future could be more trustful?

MK: You often see signs on buses along the lines of “Please give up this seat for someone who is less able to stand than you”. It’s welcome that public transport providers are concerned to redistribute seats from those with standing ability to those with a need to sit down, but regrettable that passengers should need to be asked. And the further an organisation goes in its efforts to bring about fairness by regulation, the weaker the relations between people become. When they are required to obey rules, individuals are relieved of the responsibility to make their ethical decisions for themselves, and to think about how they should engage with others. French public transport has a tradition of chapter and verse on this – priority in descending order to ‘mutilés de guerre’, blind civilians, industrially disabled people, and so on – which replaces individual judgement, and public spirit, with a bureaucratic code. Doing the right thing becomes doing what is prescribed – and if it’s not prescribed, it probably won’t be done. People’s relationships are with authority rather than with each other.

The question is, though, how would they behave if they weren’t told how to behave? We should bear in mind that a lot of behavioural prescriptions in organisations have been introduced because people couldn’t be trusted not to discriminate against women, ethnic minorities or other groups. Such prejudice has become much less socially acceptable, so by and large people will have become more trustworthy in these respects. At the moment, organisations remain obsessed with achieving standards through detailed bureaucratic prescription, so that will probably continue for the time being. But I can imagine things changing as the costs of such strategies become too tiresome, and as institutions become more confident that their people could be trusted to treat others without prejudice. Trust lowers costs – of lost opportunities as well as of policing behaviour – so organisations should be able to appreciate the value of rediscovering it." (http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/new/Journal_files/journal_02.pdf)