Trust in a complex world

I think the conclusion to my book, Trust in a Complex World, written almost two years ago, offers some useful context around the daily drumbeat of news and the accompanying emotions:
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"All things considered, the prospects are troubling. The near-term future is likely to be full of conflict and crisis, as the increasingly urgent systemic problems overwhelm our ability to build trusting, collaborative relations. If we can muddle through this, it will be by developing the possibility of a richer kind of community than the abstractly tolerant model of the modern era – a community where people seek to understand each other more deeply, help each other to learn and develop, and face complex common problems together.

Four basic points in conclusion:

First, the profound shift in sensibility – moving from a view of humans as morally stable and independent actors, towards a view that we are essentially social, continuously shaped by our relations. As the range and density of communication has grown over the past century and a half, more people have been drawn from their tight harmonious circles of family and friends into rich communication with many cultures. Increasingly we embrace the value of learning from diverse experiences.

The interactive perspective is complex: there are few solid touchstones for right and wrong. We expect ourselves and others to learn, to understand, to be open, yet also to be reliable. This complexity is, however, necessary in a world one where we deal frequently with people different from ourselves, and where there is great need to work together on systemic problems.

Second, the deep anxiety, disruption, and conflict implied in this shift. The changes I have pointed to – the widening of communication networks, the mixing of races and ethnicities, the changes in gender roles, the demands for multicultural recognition – are disturbing. They lead to uncertainty: we don’t quite know what to expect from others or what we can count on from them in the future. They lead to insecurity: there is less confidence that if one plays one’s part, the community will be supportive. They destabilize identities, as people get conflicting messages about what is valued and rewarded. Expectations of marriage, of friendship, of employment become more fluid; loyalty is weakened. Walls dividing public from private are constantly breached. People find themselves challenged by others who get up in their faces and demand to be respected for who they are, not merely assimilated to some common template.

The resulting uncertainty may cause anomie, a sense of loss of bearings. Many people are attracted to nostalgic images of smaller, simpler, more personal communities, where we knew who we were dealing with. Some react more strongly – pulling back to narrower communities, seeking certainty in established principles, defending their sense of right and virtue. These reactions can polarize societies, and can lead to violence among those who feel most threatened by the emerging moral claims.

Third, the enormous positive potential of these developments. Humans have for millennia trusted each other within circles of thick, stable relations, with a core expectation of unquestioned loyalty to a strong shared moral view of the world. There was little meaningful interaction among these communities: they either remained separated, or they fought. Now, for essentially the first time in history there are is an expanding realm of relations that cross these walls, with many people seeking enthusiastically to experience diverse cultures, food, art, music, ideas – constructing communities on the fly, piecing together a sense of self flexible enough to travel widely, capable of understanding and working with many kinds of people.

Over the last century or more we have enormously increased the range of communication, so that most people have far more knowledge than before of foreign nations and diverse groups; and we have developed much higher capacity for extended collaboration on complex projects. All this is enormously exciting – an excitement coming not from rallying around a flag, but from learning, stretching, doing more. It gives us a glimpse of community that is not thick, but rich.

Fourth, the work needed. There has been much practical learning about how to encourage understanding and collaboration: I have underlined mechanisms of reflection, sharing, deliberate purpose, process management, platforms, and network orchestration. But these are still in their infancy, not generally understood or applied. We are just beginning to learn about creating effective purposes, as opposed to empty slogans; about building successful platforms that draw energy from the diversity of their members; about processes that can organize around complex tasks without relying on fixed rules and hierarchies. My motivation in this book has been to clarify a bit both the basic sensibility and what is needed to make it work in practice.

Communities are extremely complex, built from interwoven expectations among innumerable people, extending far beyond direct personal relations; supported by institutions that spread, socialize, and enforce those expectations; deeply embedded in identities, so that people gain a sense of meaning and virtue from participation in the community. As these patterns are built there are always profound disagreements and reactive movements. The process of working through the implications of a new sensibility is long and contested.

Meanwhile, crises are brewing. Climate change could easily exacerbate conflicts as groups blame each other – there is plenty of that going on already – and thus spiral into a vicious circle of mistrust. Growing inequality is a major threat to community, but there is no agreement within classes or across them on what to do about it; the resulting cynicism could easily produce not a solution, but a withdrawal that would further erode the sense of shared responsibility. The danger of major harm caused by small groups of fanatics leads to wide anxiety; the more security agencies try to gain control of the Internet, the more legions of hackers perfect means of evading them.

There are plenty of solutions to these and other problems. What we lack is a unified vision of which one we want and how to implement it. But after centuries of avoiding value discussions, we are not very good at sober discourse on issues that touch on deep beliefs. There is more shouting than dialogue.

The task of building a unifying and widely inspiring purpose is just beginning. It has to move towards an image of expanded community, with wide and rich global links. The natural reaction to discomfort is to pull back to narrower thick networks of support and agreement; but this reaction – seen in varied forms on both the Left and the Right – divides us further and exacerbates the problems. Rather than separating, we need to connect more, and to develop further the embryonic mechanisms that coordinate those connections into understanding and collaboration. As in the Christmas gathering with which I began, we need to bring the world in around the hearth, and the family out into the world, if we hope to find our way through the complexities we all face.