The Problem of Trust

Rating:
Summary: Trust as a Result of Limits
Review: Selgiman book is a contribution to the issues of 'social capital' and 'civil society' that is much in vogue these days. Seligman attempts to distnguish and clarify the concepts that form the background to these ideas.

Seligman intially shows what has been termed trust by writers such as Fukayama is not trust but a form of familiarity. The trust that Fukayama's social capital is built on is a learned confidence in the behaviour of others. Someone living in a culture can learn that that others can be guaranteed to perform their roles in a predictable manner and so can learn that there is little risk in reliance on their actions.

Seligman contrasts this familairity and confidence with what he terms 'trust.' Seligman shows that participants in modern society play far more roles than they did in the past and that of necessity there will be conflict in the imperatives of these roles. In Western society this has led to the privileging of the concept of an individual who lies behind all of these roles.

With refererence to the work of Enlightment philosophers, Seligman shows that this precludes the use of familiarlity to reduce risk in social itneraction. Interactions cannot be predicted from past behaviour. The indvidual move from being a role filler to an auronomous agent which negotiates behavior that is not controlled by role expecatation. Trust is that property which at the limits where role expectations fail can allow agents to rely on the good faith of others.

Seligman shows how trust is not a necessary result of the process of role multiplication and fragmentation but is an historical fact resulting from the forces in western culture. h He discusses how the current forces of identity politics, political correctness aand the like are attempts to eliminate trust with its acceptance of risk. These are attempts to define and control all apsects of behavior by removing the capability of agency from the individual. The indvidual with them is defined by the external attributes of his/her role.

To Selignam trust is about the acceptance of risk. It can only be found in the beahvior of autonomous agents. It contrasts to familiarity which can be used to learn the actions of role fillers whose actions are determined by the expectations of their roles. Identiy politics is a direct attack on the idea of the individual.