Chic Ironic Bitterness

5. Trust, Civil Society, and the Social Contract

chapter five Trust, Civil Society, and the Social Contract p Very concrete and ascendant social problems . . . are behind much of the contemporary feelings of anxiety, despair, and dread. —Christopher Beem, The Necessity of Politics (1999) Bombs are ›ying. People are dying. Children are crying. Politicians are lying, too. Cancer is killing; Texaco’s spilling. The whole world’s gone to hell, but how are you? —I’m suuuuuuuuuper! Thanks for asking!! All things considered I couldn’t be better, I must say! —Big Gay Al, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (1999) The discussion about civic trust brings other concerns with it. It assumes certain values that irony was conceived of as eradicating: trust, sincerity, authenticity, and seriousness. While irony does indeed seem to trump these values, as an attitude it hides what it means under the guise of its opposite. Because of this, initial hints to the tension between the ironist and the serious pundit are revealed when considering the role of the ironic attitude’s assumed polarity—civic trust. As a moral attitude we have toward the strangers that surround us in daily life, trust is the most essential component of modern social cohesion and has been written about voluminously over the past sev147 eral decades. Such a concentration bespeaks trust’s troubled trysts in contemporary social life and its preeminence in the concerns of political scientists, sociologists, and politicians—who need to accumulate trust to win. The concentration of this concern has been evident in the United States and Britain.* For them, maintaining civic trust has become problematic. Premodern societies in the West were based on given, inherited social roles stemming from feudal or familial ties, which while often certain, were con‹ning. Members of modern society saw themselves thrown into a web of strangers bound by abstractions, such as capital or legal relationships. Modernity, for the most part, meant the onset of an urban existence among strangers. The self-regarding feature of individuals makes them, then, in some way, unknowable.1 Trust mediates this estranged situation and forges the sacred bond among society’s members, allowing modern democracies to work. Necessary in this situation —what Emile Durkheim famously called “precontractual solidarity ”—is a trust that emerges at a near-theological level; it is categorized in the realm of the sacred. It requires the proverbial leap of faith. One must ‹rst believe in trust before outwardly acting in a way that evidences it. Trust is something you give. The more outwardly enforced, the less internally believed. As Friedrich Nietzsche Chic Ironic Bitterness 148 *Conversations about civic trust in Germany—due to the state’s lagging performance in ability to provide social services, barely sinking unemployment rate, and widening economic disparity—are beginning to appear. A lecture in October 2006, “Was hält unsere Gesellschaft zusammen?” (What holds our society together?) by historian Paul Nolte, edged closer to questions about social trust and civil society that have been occurring in the United States for the past thirty years. In Germany, at least, this erosion is resulting in a class of people dubbed the prekariat, a sociological term used by politicians that is the equivalent of our “poverty line,” or “poor,” not to be spoken about in a country priding itself on providing, as the outrage by some other parliamentary contingents and media were quick to display. The damaging effects of globalization on social structure and services take time—as well as an eventual compromise of European measures of good statecraft and civic stewardship . Schade. observed, “If someone assiduously seeks to force intimacy with another person, he usually is not sure whether he possesses that person ’s trust. If someone is sure of being trusted, he places little value on intimacy.”2 Civic trust is an intimate matter in the commentaries cited, because without it there is no society; there is but a Hobbesian vision of all clammering for survival, individual against individual, unmediated by the mutually agreed-upon laws—which must be taken seriously because they have consequences—that govern individual and social behavior. It is, to be sure, the image of society often painted by a government cynical of its own power. Many of the pundits mentioned, to their credit, provide a critique that is as anti-Machiavellian as it is anticynical . Both the Machiavellian manipulators and the “Seinfeldian” ironists make for bad company. Recall that Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer were all put in...