[This is the latest installment in what’s become a 4-part series of posts on scale. You can read the first, second, and third parts, and you might also want to go back to the original “part 1” from a year ago.]
I’m still chugging along on my discussion of synecdoche and scale. Last post, I talked about how we might think of scale both in terms of size and constraint. That is, larger groups tend to require more “levels” of organization, which can be more or less loosely articulated, although the bigger they are, the looser they tend to be. Clarity/unity of purpose and/or strictness of conduct are some of the ways to reduce the friction inherent in moving from one scale to another, but they can also make an organization brittle. (A team that doesn’t feel like it has the support of its ownership might become demoralized and perform poorly, for example.)
I also turned towards the end of the last post to the idea that there’s a disposition characteristic of scale, which I think is what we typically call faith. When we choose to become part of a larger whole, that choice is by necessity an expression of faith. And it is a multi-layered expression. Moving to a new apartment requires faith in the owner/landlord, yes, but we also have faith in utility companies, the corporations that manufacture our appliances, furniture, and possessions, a legal system whose recourse we rely on if our rental contract is violated, and so on. We are deeply enmeshed in all sorts of systems, each of which we’re a part, and each of which requires a certain degree of faith from us. This is a much more everyday sort of faith I’m talking about than that which we typically use the word for, but I think it’s more accurate.
More accurate than what, you might be asking. If you’ve been listening to the discourse at all over the past several years, you’ll be familiar with what Jedediah Britton-Purdy recently called, in an essay for the Atlantic, a “trust collapse.” Trust in the government is at record lows, and the same might be said for the media, as well as our economic, educational, health care, and legal systems. And because we are far more likely to learn about breaches of trust (which are newsworthy) than their opposite, this collapse feels like it’s expanding and accelerating from day to day. Britton-Purdy writes
Destabilizing levels of mistrust feel natural, even morally required, because the world has fractured. As everyone now more or less understands, people get their news from different places, with different facts (or “facts”) and very different moral narratives—crises at the border or concerning the climate, threats from woke universities or from the resurgent extreme right.
I’d argue, though, that there’s an important distinction between trust and faith, a distinction that’s elided throughout much of this essay and elsewhere.
Here’s how I think about it: when I’m deciding whether or not to read a book, or watch a movie or a new show, I’ll sometimes hear about it from a friend. While it’s not necessarily an elaborate or a conscious process, I make some sort of determination about how much I trust their recommendation. My friends have different tastes, not only among each other, but from my own as well. I have a different relationship to reviewers (and book blurbs)—these are people I don’t know, and who don’t know me. Over time, I may develop some sense of their particular tastes, and if they line up with mine, I’ll begin to have faith in their recommendations. The same goes for artists of every stripe. They’re not creating things for me, but if I’ve liked the things they’ve done, I’m more likely to give their new books, stories, shows, music a chance. I’m not trusting them to make something I’ll like; I act upon my personal faith that their work will resonate with me.
I’m not going to go around and police folks’ use of the word trust—it’s a fine-grained distinction that I’m making here, and it may not line up with others’ experience. But I will say that I don’t “trust” the government any more than I do corporations or national media, because I don’t know them well enough to do so. I do, however, place a certain amount of faith in them, as we all do.
Here’s where this connects up with some of the other writing I’ve done over the past year: I’ve been particularly critical of the way that metonymy has worked itself into our discourse in recent years, and you might think, reading those posts, that they are a prelude to nostalgia on my part, a return to the “good old days” before social media wrecked us. But that’s not the case. In many ways, the problems that social media first purported to solve (before they became, in turn, their own suite of problems) were the consequences of a culture heavily weighted towards scale. If scale encourages in us a disposition towards faith, I’d argue that, in parallel fashion, the disposition of metonymy is trust.
Does it really matter if we conflate the two? I think it does. And I think that the context collapse spurred by social media over the last generation has accelerated that conflation, to the detriment of our discourse and our society. Politically, what should be a bi-annual task of selecting the best people to make decisions on behalf of ourselves and our country has deteriorated to thumbs up or down based on a “standard” of likability that renders approval polls worthless (to say nothing of the extent to which it excludes many qualified candidates from public office).
Even to speak of eroding public trust in our institutions places the responsibility on the wrong side of the equation; so many of our elected officials have broken faith with the voters who chose them (or the laws they’ve vowed to uphold). I wrote in my last post that one of the expectations that holds an organization together across scales is loyalty, but that works in both directions. The wealth, power, and control available to those at the very top of the pyramid should come with corresponding responsibility—too often, our culture imagines that, instead, it entails freedom from it. Or to put it in language that is depressingly all too common these days, we dream of private profits and socialized losses (every industry bailout that’s taken place over the past twenty years is sad testimony to this attitude).
Another difference between trust and faith, for me, is that trust comes with a great deal of accountability built in. If a friend violates our trust, the impact on that friendship is immediate and consequential. But loose, large scale organizations, like governments and corporations, often serve to insulate those who are making the big decisions from the consequences if those decisions are bad. There is very little accountability for those who break faith in our culture—there’s an argument to be made that we have gradually allowed things to get to the point where that sort of irresponsibility is in fact encouraged and facilitated. (I think I may add one more post to talk about this in more detail.)
One of the arguments that my project will ultimately make is that context collapse has allowed us to conflate trust and faith, and that one of the results of that is a culture where leaders are increasingly comfortable breaking faith with us (as citizens, consumers, fellow human beings) even as they pour their efforts into getting us to trust them. I’ve written a bit about how parasociality has dominated and transformed the attention economy, but if you’d like a much more direct analysis of this, I recommend Aja Romano’s recent piece for Vox, “If you want to understand modern politics, you have to understand modern fandom.” Celebrities, influencers, politicians, and brand managers have been using the strategies and tools of parasociality to disguise the scale of their activity, by feigning a proximity that’s designed to extract value from the rest of us. Romano talks about how, at a certain level of intensity, it reverts to blind faith, an “idolatry” that overwhelms pesky things like facts, truths, or rational discourse. That we’re all neck-deep in the midst of it should be a lot more chilling than it seems to be for many.
I’d planned on tying up this multi-part post with a quote from J.M.Barrie, who wrote Peter Pan: “All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.” I’ve been holding onto that (admittedly a little cringe) line for a couple of years now, especially since trust and faith entered into my thinking about the tropes. But as I backtracked the quote to verify it, I learned that it was yet another case where it’s actually no quote at all. It’s a fabrication that doesn’t appear in any of Barrie’s work that I was able to find. Best as I can tell, it’s cobbled together from a couple of different lines of dialogue from the original animated Disney film, and was then turned into a meme for people to post to Facebook groups. (It’s also possible that it was a line from Finding Neverland, but it’s not cited that way.)
I have to admit, though, there’s something oddly fitting about ending this series with a “quote” that bears no relation to reality but was wished into existence over the internet. So that’s why I’m still including it. As I mentioned above, there’s one more part of this I want to write about, but I think this is the final chapter of the post that I started last week. Thanks for sticking around.