“How do you get money when you’ve got no money?” asks the character played by Robert Mantegna in David Mamet’s movie House of Games (1987). The scene is set in a Western Union waiting room, and Mantegna is playing a conman who is teaching some of his confidence tricks to a psychiatrist and bestselling author character, played by Lindsay Crouse.  When a young man enters the waiting room, he overhears Mantegna complaining that his money has not arrived by wire transfer, and then the young man is also told that his own money has not arrived. The difference is that for Mantegna no money transfer is expected; his task is to show the psychiatrist how easy it would be to get the young man to give him some of his money when it arrives. The conman will have earned the young man’s trust, and not only will he have given the money willingly, he will have felt good about doing something beneficial for his fellow man. The fact that both the conman and the psychiatrist have motives to consider in addition to being an educator and a learner (respectively) is also worth mentioning in this context: it helps to explain that although we might think of trust as a simple concept – a transaction learned from the earliest weeks of life if one’s upbringing is healthy and loving – trust is in fact complicated, and easier to define and to note as an experience when it has been damaged or lost altogether (as in: I don’t trust you).

As the title of the book under review would suggest, Paul Faulkner and Thomas Simpson have taken on the challenge of editing a book about trust and the complex symbioses and transactions involved with and around the subject. At 300 pages in length, and with the book consisting of sixteen substantial chapters, it is fair to say that they have honored their commitment.

There are some fascinating chapters about trust and what it means to us as individuals (“The Empowering Theory of Trust”, “‘But I Was Counting on You!'” “Trusting a Promise and Other Things” and “Deciding to Trust”) and plenty of work on not trusting – or on what means to have one’s trust betrayed (“The Problem of Trust”, “Trust as a Two-Place Relation”, among others). Guy Longworth’s chapter “Faith In Kant” was particularly interesting, as was Katherine Hawley’s “Trustworthy Groups and Organizations”.

What surprised me was the contrast between such good work and the admittedly rare occasions when a more thorough proofread would have augmented the reader’s experience. As early as the very first page we have clumsy phrasing and debatable gobbets such as these:

         …we help remedy the relative neglect that the topic has suffered in Anglophone philosophy. This neglect is especially striking when compared with the quantity of work on concepts of similar significance, such as knowledge, justice, or truth. The neglect is worth remedying because of both the importance of trust and its intrinsic interest.  (p.1)

We have poorly written clauses such as this: “Her central claim is that contract between free persons of roughly equal power and capacities is a poor model for swathes of the moral life” (p.1) or “these relationships are not chosen – often and sometimes usually un-chosen, and by at least one of the parties” (p.2). There also exist other infelicities of expression that shouted out from the page.

It would be fair to say that despite the book’s probing of its core concept, there were times when I lost sight of that very same concept. Very rarely has the cliché about failing to see the woods for the trees seemed more appropriate. I was surrounded by trust. I was drowning in trust. “In ordinary usage, the word ‘trust’ does not always come apart from the word ‘rely'” (p. 15). “…situational influences can make you trust-responsively more durable” (sic, p. 22). “We value trustworthiness where we find it, in friends, colleagues, and strangers. This is because it’s easier to cooperate with trustworthy individuals than with untrustworthy ones, but also because trustworthiness is appreciated for its own sake. Conversely, we resent untrustworthiness when we encounter it…” (p.231). Trust is in the air. All you need is trust. Or perhaps we might consider this longer, representative gobbet from Edward S. Hinchman from Chapter 4, where it is written that “trust distinctively risks not mere disappointment but betrayal” (p. 51). The author continues:

What exactly is it for trust to be betrayed? If the trusted simply fails to do what you’ve trusted her to do, that looks like an occasion for mere disappointment. Though there may be something in your relations with the person that warrants your feeling betrayed, betrayal does not appear to lie in the performative  lapse as such. Where else may it lie? … the risk of betrayal lies at a deeper level: in the risk that her action or inaction – whether disappointing or not – will manifest a failure to engage your needs in the way that you’re trusting her to engage them.

It is not so much that the subject of trust gets boring (although certain overlaps of key ideas in a book of this kind are inevitable): it is more that I experienced a definite numbness from time to time – a numbness that I diagnosed as the process of heuristic familiarity sinking through my consciousness. To put it bluntly, I had had enough of trust. I did not want Trust’s company anymore. I did not trust it. It occurred to me to question whether I had ever completed reading an entire book on a subject of this kind (rather than dip into chapters that would help with my research). I came up with Guilt by Kalu Singh (2000) – but that is a quarter of the size of the book under discussion.

Not unexpectedly (of course) the word trust is mentioned to many times, and is defined and framed, prodded and tickled, in so many ways, that the childish conceit of imagining Nothing forms in one’s mind. Perhaps we all played this. The determination to picture what Nothing might look like is almost infantile: the stoicism borne of an unwillingness to fail. Yet the conceptualization is doomed to failure. In an alternative universe, the game might ask the child to articulate what Trust looks like.  Indeed, “What is Trust?” might have been a title considered for this volume, the problem being precisely the same. With so many voices clashing to define the concept, it almost becomes lost in the noise, and easiest to discern in the chapters where it is used to discuss something else altogether (e.g. Bernd Lahno’s “Trust and Collective Agency” or Katherine Hawley’s “Trustworthy Groups and Organizations”).

If the reader is interested in who contributed to The Philosophy of Trust, the following is offered. Author demographics might seem like a vulgar and inaccurate gauge, but it is noticeable that women authors make considerably fewer contributions to the proceedings than men. Only three out of seventeen names in the contributors’ list are women. Parenthetically it occurred to me to wonder what this had to say about a) academic writing, b) academic writing about the concept of trust, and c) the concept of trust (at the present moment in time).

None of this is meant as a criticism of the authors’ and editors’ work: indeed, within its ontological parameters it is hard to imagine how they could have been more thorough. While I wholeheartedly commend The Philosophy of Trust, and salute the contributors’ dedication, this book is heavy and dense in places; it is slow to digest, and visits to it – rather than residency within its pages – would be my suggestion.

References

House of Games (1987). Directed by David Mamet. USA: Orion Pictures. The three-minute scene is available to watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Riy4God934c. Accessed 13 February 2018. 

Singh, K. (2000). Guilt. Cambridge, UK: Icon Books.

 

© 2017 David Mathew

 

David Mathew works in the Centre for Learning Excellence at the University of Bedfordshire, UK, and as an independent researcher and writer. His wide areas of interest include psychoanalysis, language, linguistics, distance learning, prisons, applications of care and anti-care, anxiety and online anxiety. He is the author of Fragile Learning: The Influence of Anxiety (Karnac Books) and The Care Factory(Cambridge Scholars). A third academic volume, on the subject of lifelong learning, has been commissioned and will be submitted in December 208. He is the author of four full-length works of fiction (three novels and a volume of short stories) and three further books (two novels and a volume of short stories) have been commissioned. In addition to his writing, he edits the Journal of Pedagogic Development, teaches academic writing, and he particularly enjoys lecturing in foreign countries. For leisure, he enjoys time with his wife and dog and listening to music (particularly post-bop, fusion and post-rock). For more information, please select any of the following links:: Fragile Learning; David Mathew’s Books and Amazon Pages; Journal of Pedagogic Development; Centre for Learning Excellence; ResearchGate Profile here.