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TRUST was yet another casualty of 2020 -- trust in government, media, science, and even our close friends and colleagues all came under incredible duress, as the difference between 'fact' and 'opinion' was no longer black and white.
Understanding Trust
Political Partisanship and Trust
Being awarded the Milward L. Simpson Fulbright Scholarship was one of the true professional honours of my career. Carrying the ‘Simpson’ name in Wyoming comes with certain expectations and obligations. When you unpack the careers of the many members of the Simpson family who have served the people of Wyoming, one reason the family is so well respected is that they are trusted.
If we use the lens of trust to analyse the rise of partisanship, we come to some insightful conclusions including that the deep political divides we see in places like the United States is driven by a loss of trust in in expert systems by different ‘political tribes’ (a phrase I borrow from More in Common).
Over the last few years, I have been researching this concept of ‘trust’. While many of us use the word unthinkingly, in sociological, political and cultural studies, the theoretical understanding of trust has occupied many scholars. One scholar whose work in trust is ground-breaking is British sociologist, Anthony Giddens. Giddens argues that ‘trust’ is what divides modern and premodern societies. In pre-modern societies, communities and individuals built their own house, attended to their own transport, grew their own food.
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Today, in our modern world, we can only survive by trusting others. Most of us do not grow our own food, few of us build our own houses and barely understand how the things we take for granted work (from air travel, to the cars we drive to the medical technologies that protect our health). We trust the pilot to fly us, the bus driver to get us to work and even trust the stranger to act like a stranger. Giddens’ argument is that our modern society relies on trusting these expert systems and the experts who operate them: the mechanics, pilots, engineers, scientists and the bureaucrats overseeing our political and democratic systems. But what happens when trust breaks down? For Giddens, the opposite of trust in expert systems is not distrust, but a sense of ‘dread.’ That is, we experience a sense of distress, anxiety and even fear.
Since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the rise of populism has been the focus of scholars and commentators alike. Populist leaders create the sense that there is a gap between ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ – offering themselves as the solution to bringing the elites to account. Consequently, people are electing leaders they see will hold faceless expert systems to account because they no longer ‘trust’ them. I am not saying there is a simple causality, but rather that experts and expert systems have been seen as elitist, out of touch and failing many. In Australia, our systematic response to the pandemic has resulted in increasing levels of trust in government and medical experts. This, however, should not create a false sense of security that we have arrested the increasing levels of distrust that has paralysed Australia’s energy policy and response to climate change.
Professor James Arvanitakis is the Pro Vice Chancellor (Research and Graduate Studies) at Western Sydney University where he was the founding Head of The Academy, receiving the 2016 Australian Financial Review higher education excellence award. He is also a lecturer in Humanities and a member of the University’s Institute for Culture and Society. James' Fulbright Scholarship took him to the University of Wyoming, teaaching classes in international relations focused on ‘the politics of outer space’, ‘citizenship’ and ‘data ethics’.