Trust as an Act of Reconciliation

Trust is a concept that seems both to be under suspicion and in short supply. This is a circumstance that recalls the oddity of someone complaining about a restaurant and saying both that the food is bad and that the portions are too small. Is there not a parallel if we bemoan the lack of trust while being unsure if we still believe in it?  

Then there is a further confusion when we are often told that the way to create more trust, both in people and institutions, is through being “ever more transparent.” But the objective is then to avoid any situation where we might need trust—on the basis that trust is only required where there is incomplete transparency. In such a view, optimal transparency will have been achieved only when no trust is needed, such a goal is actually unattainable, and worse, fosters distrust and ultimately a profoundly negative view of what it is to be human. 

Paradoxical as it may seem, being trustworthy is by its very nature contingent upon having the capacity to breach trust. As soon as one has no liberty to fail, the questions of trust and trustworthiness no longer arise. 

What this points to is the clear need for trust to be possible and maximal. We actually do need to be able to rely on people to do what is right when they are not compelled to do so. That this is possible is part of what it means to believe that we humans can do what is good and what is right, and thereby practice and exhibit virtue. Being trustworthy is not about entangling ourselves in constraints and sanctions to the point that whatever we then choose is out of our hands and involuntary, like pre-programmed automata. There is thus a real relationship between trust and freedom, such that a world with no freedom will have no room for trust and a world with no trust is unlikely to be free. 

In 1990, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the “Velvet Revolution”, Vaclav Havel was elected President of Czechoslovakia. He then made a characteristically passionate speech declaring that, in order to reconstruct society in the wake of the communist era, “we have to trust one another.” It was received as a startling request, seeking to undo fifty years of ruthless suppression and exploitation that had resulted in a widespread and disabling distrust and paranoia—a world which Havel had powerfully explored in his own writings, as had the works of Milan Kundera.

At heart, his plea was to rebuild the preconditions necessary to establish a free society, in place of the suffocating state-run one of the past. What Havel understood and needed his countrymen to embrace, was that trust and not fear, cooperation and not control, were the path to a more harmonious, authentic and ultimately prosperous society. 

At present, people seem to feel increasingly uncomfortable talking about trust, except in abstract terms when it always receives polite approbation, before we turn hastily to other things. This reflects a sense that with trust comes risk and danger. And indeed it is true that creating trust does involve taking on elements of risk. Both for institutions and individuals trust entails ceding a degree of control in proportion to the level of autonomy permitted and needful. Thus too, there is in trust some element of power transfer, since power is ceded to the person or institution trusted. And certainly, the degree of trust it is appropriate to have in them should relate to the maturity and capacity for reasoning displayed by the person or institution to be trusted. This does entail that there can be such a thing as too much trust, and that blind trust, without warrant is misplaced trust. 

But the fact remains that while as human beings we can and all too often do fail to do as we ought, this is no reason for abandoning the aim of doing what is right, and still less for denying the possibility that we can. All this holds too for the institutions we are part of and create. Believing in the viability of human commitments is a presupposition of making ourselves and our institutions worthy of trust, and it is the presupposition of trusting as well. 

This means then that we need to focus, not upon trying to create a world of ever more constraints and universal surveillance in the name of transparency, but rather upon the moral foundations and training needed to ensure that we are grounded in the moral and those habits conducive to the practice of virtue. For then, we have reason to trust that our leaders– and indeed all of us– will seek to do what we ought.

The response to instances of failure and lapses, even at the highest levels and when very grave errors have been made, should be to redouble the work of moral education that will allow the rebuilding of trust, not its abandonment. We must remember too that our Christian faith recognizes most profoundly that we are human and that we will err, while always offering a path through honesty and repentance to forgiveness, recovery, reconstruction and redemption. 

In the words of 2 Corinthians 5: 

“If any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” 

The Rev. Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff
Rector