149. THE LIMBO OF TRUST - Hume, Descartes, Induction, Trust, and a Broken Boiler
It’s been quite the miserable week. I woke up Tuesday morning to a worryingly cold house and noticed, as I tried to run the hot water to wash my hands, that no hot water was forthcoming. As the news was full of headlines about an impending cold snap and snow, I discovered to my dismay that our boiler had broken. The pressure was fine but emergency lights flashed and resets did nothing. Instead of my morning run, I called the people we have boiler repair cover with. Long-story-short: I’m writing this now two days later, the house surrounded in snow, and we are still without heat. The boiler is currently due for repair on Friday…but after the saga of organising that I will believe it when I see it.
Trust is a strange thing. One moment you can have it, and the next moment it is gone. We speak often in philosophy about the problem of induction: how can I know that X will follow Y because it always has done before? That the sun will rise tomorrow, that the hot water tap will work today? David Hume suggests that we can’t. That there is no necessary connection between the two events despite the constant conjunction and appearance of certainty. We trust when we feel certain, and when uncertainty or something completely unexpected occurs, the trust we once possessed disappears. On Friday, hopefully, my boiler will be fixed, but not only can I not entirely trust that this will happen after being told it would be fixed on Tuesday and watching that promise get broken, but even if it is fixed, once my boiler has let me down once, will I ever fully trust that it won’t let me down again someday soon? How long before I turn the hot water tap without uttering a silent prayer that it works?
Rene Descartes believed the fact that our senses have deceived us in the past is reason enough not to fully trust them right now, or ever again. For Descartes, that it happened even once is sufficient reason to be skeptical of a thing forevermore. Because I went to bed one night in a warm house only to wake up the next day in an unexpectedly cold one, must I never quite believe the heat that was on today will be there for me again tomorrow until I wake up and feel it to be there? Can trust, once lost, ever be restored?
I was speaking to my year 9 students about prison abolition the other day, as we discussed the issues surrounding the UK’s prison system in a lesson about justice. One such issue is the unemployment that can lead to crime in the first place, and the way that prisons only make it even harder for someone to get a job once they are out. I asked the class if society’s seeming unwillingness to hire released criminals is evidence that we know the prisons we have don’t work? Surely, I posited, if prisons worked, then someone released from one would be believed to a changed person who had served their time and made amends for their crime? If having been to prison only makes people wary of you, then they cannot have much trust that prison is actually doing what it claims to be doing? What its entire existence is justified on?
Again - the issue is trust. You broke the law that one time, how can I know that you will not break it again? How can I trust you? A prison sentence served gives me no evidence that your inner self has truly changed, even if that is the alleged purpose of the prison. Because former criminals in the past have returned to their old ways once out of jail , I can’t ever fully trust that you won’t do the same too. Which is odd, because such an attitude basically makes the entire theatre and rhetoric of the prison a waste of time: if we cannot learn to trust again, then efforts to regain our trust seem to be pointless.
Trust must be possible to be regain. Isn’t that the whole point of Hume’s caution: that we are too easily trusting? We trust all the time inductive reasoning which shouldn’t be trusted. Even Descartes ended up trusting his senses again, albeit only after their convoluted underwriting was assured by a supremely perfect God. One could look at all this and make a case, instead, that it is distrust which is irrational. That one person’s reoffending rate has no bearing on the likelihood of another reoffending, or on the soundness of the system as a whole. That maybe Descartes was a little too rash to reject all the information of his senses just because once he saw a stick in the water that looked bent when it was not. That despite my recent bad experiences with both my boiler and the people I have a policy with to repair it, I am, perhaps, over-focusing on the recent bad experiences at the expense of the many more good experiences and general reliability I have had with them for the last eleven years since the boiler was first installed.
Or perhaps you could side with Hume and say that it is not the distrust, but the trust, which is the problem in the first place. That the distrust only comes precisely because I made the unjustified and illegitimate decision to trust to begin with? The distrust is merely a symptom of us seeing the world for what it really is and breaking the illusion of a world that we had built up in our minds. I shouldn’t be surprised when the sun doesn’t rise tomorrow because there was no rational basis for being able to say that we ever did know that it would. Boilers break. Frequently. Often in cold weather. And companies disappoint and fail to deliver on their promises all the time. They are selling a product - a story - and that product will more frequently than not underwhelm. To have assumed otherwise and trusted in their dependability was the mistake. Likewise, humans are varied and diverse. To lump a whole group of disparate people into one group - ex-prisoners - and assume a commonality secure enough to base a decision about the employment of any one individual is to be in error and misplace your trust in some undeserved notion of uniformity and probability that never existed. We can be delighted whenever the sun does actually rise, but never disappointed if it doesn’t.
Of course - to refuse to trust is its own form of trust: trusting that one can never trust. A trust that X might not always follow Y and we ought to therefore be cautious. To trust in uncertainty and undependability. For in a world where we can never know for certain that X will follow Y it is just as likely that sometimes X might follow Y than that it will not. That the boiler will bring hot water, that the company will do the thing that has kept them in business all these years, that even the prison - that most failed and objectionable of all public institutions - might, for at least one person, fulfil its justificatory promise of transformative rehabilitation.
To completely trust is irrational, and to completely distrust is irrational. We can only work rationally on the individual, case-by-case, evidences we have of any one thing and make a probabilistic story about the general reliability we experience. Always with the additional caveat that we might be wrong. To be cautious but not pessimistic. Nor to be overly optimistic. Trust in the possibility of disappointment, but trust too in the possibility of everything going as it should.
As I finish writing this post it is now Friday. More snow has fallen but, despite the hazardous roads, the engineer has arrived. They are banging and clanging around the boiler as I type. Part of me hopes this will be the end of this cold and difficult week. Part of me worries that any minute there will be a call from the engineer to tell me that the problem is bigger than we thought and can’t be fixed today. I thought about waiting for the outcome to be known before I finish writing this post, but decided it is better to leave it here. Without knowing. In that place of uncertainty we have to learn to cope with. The limbo of never knowing for sure and the irrationality of hoping for certainty in a world which is too chaotic and unpredictable to be certain. The limbo of trust.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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