Trust and Violence

An Essay on a Modern Relationship

Jan Philipp Reemtsma

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781400842346
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

A philosophical investigation into the connections between trust and violence The limiting of violence through state powers is one of the central projects of the modern age. Why then have recent centuries been so bloody? In Trust and Violence, acclaimed German intellectual and public figure Jan Philipp Reemtsma demonstrates that the aim of decreasing and deterring violence has gone hand in hand with the misleading idea that violence is abnormal and beyond comprehension. We would be far better off, Reemtsma argues, if we acknowledged the disturbing fact that violence is normal. At the same time, Reemtsma contends that violence cannot be fully understood without delving into the concept of trust. Not in violence, but in trust, rests the foundation of true power.Reemtsma makes his case with a wide-ranging history of ideas about violence, from ancient philosophy through Shakespeare and Schiller to Michel Foucault, and by considering specific cases of extreme violence from medieval torture to the Holocaust and beyond. In the midst of this gloomy account of human tendencies, Reemtsma shrewdly observes that even dictators have to sleep at night and cannot rely on violence alone to ensure their safety. These authoritarian leaders must trust others while, by means other than violence, they must convince others to trust them. The history of violence is therefore a history of the peculiar relationship between violence and trust, and a recognition of trust's crucial place in humanity.A broad and insightful book that touches on philosophy, sociology, and political theory, Trust and Violence sheds new, and at times disquieting, light on two integral aspects of our society.

CHAPTER 1

Trust and Modernity

How strong and pure the pulse of life is beating!

Dear earth, this night has left you still unshaken,

And at my feet you breathe refreshed; my greeting

To you, ethereal dawn!

—JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, FAUST PART TWO

“I’ve been reading that detective story. It’s about a poor devil who’s arrested one fine morning, all of a sudden. People had been taking an interest in him and he knew nothing about it. They were talking about him in offices, entering his name on card indexes. Now, do you think that’s fair? Do you think people have a right to treat a man like that?”

. . . “Tell me, Doctor. Suppose I fell ill, would you put me in your ward at the hospital?”

“Why not?”

Cottard then inquired if it ever happened that a person in a hospital or a nursing home was arrested. Rieux said it had been known to happen, but all depended on the invalid’s condition.

“You know, Doctor,” Cottard said, “I’ve confidence in you.”

—ALBERT CAMUS, THE PLAGUE

If you cannot rely on someone not to kill you, you can even less rely on him to keep his word.

—BERNARD WILLIAMS, TRUTH AND TRUTHFULNESS

TWO SCENES FROM THOMAS MANN’S CONFESSIONS OF FELIX KRULL

It is a cheery autumn morning and Felix Krull has just boarded a train bound for Paris, where he is to take up the hotel position secured for him by his godfather:

My ticket, of course, was in perfect order, and in my own fashion I relished the fact that it was so irreproachable—that consequently I myself was irreproachable, and when, in the course of the day, the honest conductors in their smart uniforms visited me in my wooden carriage to examine and punch my ticket, they returned it each time with silent official approval. Silent of course and expressionless: that is, with an expression of indifference that was barely animate and bordered on affectation. This prompted me to reflect on the aloofness, the standoffishness, amounting almost to lack of interest, which one human being, especially an official, feels compelled to manifest toward his fellows. This honest man who punched my valid ticket earned his livelihood thereby; somewhere a home awaited him—there was a wedding ring on his finger—he had a wife and children. But I had to behave as though the thought of his human associations could never occur to me, and any question about them, revealing that I did not regard him simply as a convenient marionette, would have been completely out of order. On the other hand, I had my own particular human background about which he might have inquired. But this, for one thing, was not his privilege and, for another, was beneath his dignity. He was concerned only with the validity of the ticket held by a passenger who was no less a marionette. What became of me once the ticket had been used was something he must coldly disregard.

There is something strangely unnatural and downright artificial in this behaviour, though one must admit that to abandon it would be going too far for various reasons—indeed, even slight departures usually result in embarrassment. This time, in fact, toward evening, when the conductor, lantern at waist, returned my ticket, he accompanied it with a prolonged glance and a smile that was obviously inspired by my youth. “You’re going to Paris?” he asked, though my destination was clear to see.

“Yes, inspector,” I replied, nodding cordially. “That’s where I’m bound.”

“What are you planning to do there?” he took the further liberty of asking.

“Just imagine!” I replied. “Thanks to a recommendation, I am going into the hotel business.”

“Think of that!” he said. “Well, lots of luck!”

“Good luck to you, too, chief inspector,” I replied. “Please give my regards to your wife and children.”

“Yes, thanks—well, what do you know!” He laughed in embarrassment, mixing his words up oddly, and hastened to leave. But on his way out he tripped over a nonexistent obstacle, so completely had this human touch upset him.¹

Even in third class, modernity’s code of behavior prevails. Sociologists call it functional differentiation; agents of radical social critique call it alienation. Those familiar with the terrain know what to expect when paths cross. The code provides a sense of trust—the belief that people will adhere to their socially assigned roles—and in this sense, trust in the general project of modernity is no different from trust in the train service. That things can nevertheless skid off the rails is shown by the conductor’s stumble after his cordial exchange with Krull. The lesson: fulfilling a role also means confining oneself to it. Confinement to a role ensures proper behavior, but it also communicates awareness that people are more than the roles they play. This combination of strict adherence to roles and the knowledge that those roles are only skin deep constitutes a uniquely modern form of social interaction.

Later in the novel, the protagonist embarks on another train trip. This time he’s no longer Krull, the aspiring hotel clerk, but Marquis de Venosta, an aristocrat traveling the world:

The train had left Paris at six o’clock. Twilight fell, the lights went on, and my private abode seemed even more elegant than before. The conductor, a man well advanced in years, knocked softly on the door and raised his hand to the visor of his cap as he entered; returning my ticket, he repeated the salutation. Loyalty and conservatism were to be read in that honest man’s face; as he went through the train in the course of his lawful occasions, he came in contact with all strata of society, including the questionable elements, and it was a visible pleasure for him to behold in me wealth and distinction, the fine flower of the social order whose very sight raised and refreshed his spirits. About my well-being once I had ceased to be his passenger, he assuredly need have no concern. For my part, in place of any kindly questions about his family life, I gave him a gracious smile and a nod de hat en bas that assuredly confirmed him in his conservative principles to the point where he would gladly have fought and bled for them.²

In this scene the characters keep to their assigned roles. The conductor provides service befitting first class—he salutes, he bows, he says, “Mr. Marquis,” he receives a tip—while the first-class passenger is made to forget that he’s paying for it. The scene recalls earlier times when such behavior was more about representing one’s social pedigree than fulfilling an outward role. The phony marquis and the conductor perform a ritual that communicates—and, in doing so, produces—trust in each other and in the social structure. They affirm the distance between them while forming an allegiance against those “questionable elements.” As in the previous scene, the social expectations are clear to all.

In premodern and modern periods both, social stability rests on mutual expectations that allow society to presume its own stability as given. The difference is that premodern social stability was secured by representing one’s social class while modern social stability is secured by minimizing one’s horizon of expectations. The former was about what one did; the latter is about what one doesn’t do.

TRUST

Until recently sociology gave little attention to that elementary fact of social life we call trust. In 1968 Niklas Luhmann lamented the paucity of research with trust as its main subject.³ By 2001 Martin Hartmann spoke of “the flood of publications . . . that shows no signs of stopping.”⁴ Today most essays and books on trust, including this one, are able to review only part of the vast mountain of literature on the subject.⁵ Generally, those who write about trust share the view that it is one of the most basic elements of social cohesion, if not the most basic of all. Luhmann writes:

In many situations . . . one can choose in certain respects whether or not to bestow trust. But a complete absence of trust would prevent him even from getting up in the morning. He would be prey to a vague sense of dread, to paralysing fears. . . . Anything and everything would be possible. Such abrupt confrontation with the complexity of the world at its most extreme is beyond human endurance.⁶

Despite the apparent intuitiveness of this description, there is much disagreement about the phenomena trust comprises. For instance Claus Offe rejects the idea of trust in institutions, while Anthony Giddens believes that “the nature of modern institutions is deeply bound up with the mechanisms of trust in abstract systems.”⁷ Another view insists that trust is purely interpersonal, entirely graspable with the tools of rational choice theory.⁸ Still another understands trust as something like the social equivalent of ether in early modern physics: a hard-to-define universal medium.

The range of what is understood under the notion of trust opens the door to conflicting views but also constitutes its theoretical charm and intellectual appeal. More to the point is the fact that attempts to reduce trust either to the abstract or to the interpersonal are unconvincing.⁹ Trust in society does not arise from the belief that we could theoretically verify the trustworthiness of its every member. Nor is it plausible to think that interpersonal trust gives rise to social trust as it moves from the intimate to the institutional. David Hume disputed that a continuum existed between the two, pointing out that trust in people is different in kind from trust in political systems.¹⁰ (To see the truth of this, consider how distrusting others differs from distrusting institutions. I will say more about the difference below.) The absence of a continuum does not mean that there is nothing connecting the abstract with the interpersonal, however. There can be no trust in institutions or society in general without a relationship to the individual. It wouldn’t make sense to speak of social trust if we didn’t assume it affected our behavioral expectations of others.

I want to address this relationship not on its own but as it pertains to conditions of social cohesion. One might argue that sociologists must presume the precariousness of social stability in order to discover what prevents its disintegration, whereas members of society, even if sociologists by training, must presume the robustness of social stability in order to act at all—at least until this presumption is palpably refuted. Even then, if they outlive the period of instability they’ll try to go on with their lives by regarding it as an exception, or by henceforth expecting the unexpected.¹¹

Thomas Hobbes is the first thinker to see trust as a cornerstone of social stability, and the first to build an entire political philosophy around it. This became possible only after forms of premodern trust became obsolete—in other words, only after interpersonal and local-level trust ceased to provide sufficient certainty about others’ behavior.¹² Hobbes developed his concept of state sovereignty as an answer to a universal problem: how to keep ourselves safe from others. Hobbes is notorious for his belief that the state of nature is “a war of all against everyone,” a condition of permanent insecurity, “continual fear, and danger of violent death.”¹³ According to Giddens, the existential anxiety that characterizes this world represents the absolute antithesis of trust.¹⁴

In Leviathan the “continual fear” that “anything is possible” is subject to a threefold temporalization. It is that which was before, that which looms in the future, and that which is still the case elsewhere:

It may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time nor condition of war as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world.

But someone may say: there has never been a war of all against all. What! Did not Cain out of envy kill his brother Abel, a crime so great he would not have dared it if there had at that time been a common power which could have punished him? Aren’t there many places where they live so now? For the savage people in many places of America (except the government of small families, the concord whereof dependeth on natural lust) have no government at all, and live at this day in that brutish manner as I said before. Howsoever, it may be perceived what manner of life there would be where there were no common power to fear, by the manner of life which men that have formerly lived under a peaceful government use to degenerate into, in a civil war.¹⁵

Hobbes used the concept of “war of all against all” to describe what would happen if the institutions designed to restrict violence failed. A state such as this, where no one trusts anyone, never really existed—Hume made that clear in his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals—yet the idea is more than theoretical. Hobbes’s belief that a violent state of nature necessitates state sovereignty marked a historical caesura. The onset of modernity brought with it a transformation of trust as a means of social cohesion.

Let’s turn again to the general notion of trust. Since its meaning is disputed, I would like to propose my own definition. The everyday sense of the word is a good place to start. What does it mean to be trustworthy? We are trustworthy when we keep our promises, the implicit as well as the explicit. But this is only half the story. We wouldn’t call someone trustworthy who threatens to hurt us and then makes good on it. Reliability al...