Ralph Blair

This booklet is based on an address Dr. Blair gave at the eastern and western connECtions96 in the summer of 1996.

Copyright Ó 1996

INTRODUCTION

Tennessee Williams used to say that "at New York cocktail parties, I drink martinis almost as fast as I can snatch them from the tray." He said it was at these parties that he "always had a particularly keen and truly awful sense of impermanence" that, he said, haunts all of us. He called "fear and evasion ... the two little beasts that chase each other’s tails in the revolving wirecage of our nervous world."

Fear and Primal Fear aren’t just Marky Mark and Richard Gere movies. They’re our own home videos, channeled through the little amygdala alarm in our brains. Once that alarm goes off, we experience fear, whether or not there’s any good reason to be afraid. Psychiatrist Karl Menninger said that "fear is probably the first emotion experienced" though he added that it’s "so inextricably fused and regularly associated [with anger] that it is difficult to make useful distinctions" between them. Overcoming such fear becomes our "first spiritual duty," according to philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. Freud called fear "the fundamental phenomenon and the central problem of neurosis." According to the National Institute of Mental Health, more than 23 million Americans suffer from serious anxiety, over twice as many as suffer from depression and other psychiatric disorders.

Cognitively speaking, fears and anxiety can be prompted and sustained by lack of trust. They can also be resolved by trust. Psychologically, trust is an absence of anxiety. Philosopher John Dewey once said: "To me, faith [or trust] means not worrying." Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr defined trust as "the final triumph over incongruity." He went on to say that trust is "the final assertion of the meaningfulness of existence."

In April, Time headlined: "The real issue this year is which candidate has the character to help us deal with THE NEW AGE OF ANXIETY." But this so-called "new age" of anxiety is just Time-ese for age-old anxiety in our own age. It’s the anxiety we feel in the pit of our stomachs instead of the anxiety we only read or hear about that’s in the pits of other stomachs. Time asks: Do we trust Dole or Clinton?

But even as anxiety can be relieved by trust, anxiety can be revived by trust. After all, trusting is a dependency. It places one in a position of risk, whether real or imagined. The trust may be misplaced, and we think we’re in danger all over again, and consequently we feel anxious. Misplaced trust is not only dangerous in itself, but its painful consequences can foster an unnecessarily fearful resistance to trust even wisely.

Robert Louis Stevenson put the mix of distrust, anger and fear in these words: "A grain of anger or a grain of suspicion produces strange acoustical effects, and makes the ear greedy to remark offense. Hence we find those who have once quarreled carry themselves distantly, and are ever ready to break the truce." The psychiatrist who wrote Listening to Prozac asserts that "our capacity for resentment and mistrust seems limitless." [Peter D. Kramer] No wonder only 37 percent of Americans now say that most people can be trusted. That’s down by more than a third in 30 years.

The word "trust" sounds good, doesn’t it? "Trust" is trusted. That’s why the notion of trust sells. Trust even has an 800 number -- at least U. S. Trust does. The word "trust" is incorporated into the names of financial institutions and it appears on our money in connection with God. The money itself is backed by nothing but trust. Appeals to trust push everything from the military-industrial complex to condoms: "Build a World of Trust" with Lockheed and have sex with "Ramses. A trusted companion." Trust can be ambiguous and cynical. Double-talking "ex-gay" pamphlets carry American evangelicalism’s seal of approval called "the Symbol of Trust." Out-of-office politicians warn us that we should not trust all those politicians "inside the Beltway" even while they’re coveting our votes to put themselves inside the Beltway. The so-called Freemen of Montana say government can’t be trusted even as they try to set up their own hoax. We say we can’t trust what we read in all those national tabloids, but we read them in record numbers -- more than any other papers. A college president wrote recently: "We live in what may be the most cynical age in history -- and the most gullible .... We Americans are skeptical about many of the things we should believe, while we blindly accept many of the things we should question." [George Roche]

A few months ago I read an article in the travel section of The New York Times on an international membership network of thousands of hosts who provide free room and board to thousands of member travelers. The writer began by saying that when she first heard about it, "it sounded too good to be true. I was suspicious of an organization founded on trust -- on the implicit understanding that travelers wouldn’t steal the silver, and hosts wouldn’t wield axes in the night." Finding that this system works well, she happily concludes that "Trust is a sound worldwide currency." Indeed, trust is what one social scientist calls "social capital" that’s not unlike financial capital. [Francis Fukuyama] He too, however, warns that the ground for such trust seems to be slipping. All transactions, all relationships, do depend on trust. As another behavioral scientist says: "The only major precondition for dialogue is trust." [James J. Lynch] And such trust, of course, rests in good will and agreed-upon expectations.

But there are people who are unable or unwilling to engage in dialogue because, in fear or in retaliative anger, they can’t or won’t trust another enough to even begin, in good will, to negotiate expectations. They hear only themselves. Someone has said "they listen with their mouths." Some don’t even do that. Over-trusting in their own voices, they’re up for nothing but distrust of others’ voices. Healthy relationship is therefore impossible.

Today, psychological research demonstrates the scientific basis of what’s been known for ages: "Suspicion is a thing very few people can entertain without letting the hypothesis turn, in their minds, into fact." [David Cort] Said an ancient Latin writer: "Suspicion begets suspicion." [Publilius Syrus] Thoreau put it this way: "We are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspected."

But then there are those who are not simply honestly unable or frankly unwilling to dialogue. They are the ones who say they’re ready to "dialogue" but it’s in bad faith and on their terms only. Well, it never has made any sense to give pearls to pigs, as Jesus

said. Pigs don’t appreciate pearls. United Methodist executive (and lesbian) Jeanne Audrey Powers applies this guidance from Jesus to circumstances in which gay and lesbian clergy find themselves up against ecclesiastical homophobia. Trusting homophobes to be homophobes, she urges a "subversive strategy" including "false claims" -- hardly the makings of trust. Powers says that "perhaps there are times when lying, deception, and operating under false pretenses is the most life-giving action, the most faithful response for Christians." What do you think about that? Clouds of witnesses shout "Amen!" -- including biblical characters as well as Augustine, Luther, Joseph Fletcher, Corrie ten Boom, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Barbara Jordan, John Howard Yoder, Virginia Ramey Mollenkott and on and on. They all have known that some people and purposes are not to be trusted with the truth. We dare not ever forget who’s up for what. Well-placed trust is necessary currency for any good relationship, but not everyone is up for that.

We’re going to look at trust and trustworthiness as these relate to our connections with each other and ourselves as well as with God. Later we’ll discuss the trusting of ideas.

To begin with, let’s notice four general observations. 1. Trust is a psychological ability that varies from person to person. 2. Trust is a social phenomenon that varies from culture to culture. 3. There’s a difference between trust and trustworthiness. 4. Notions of "trust," so-called, can be manipulation.

1. Trust is a psychological ability that varies from person to person. Trust’s harder for some of us than for others. That’s largely because we’ve had different experiences of interpersonal relations and we’ve interpreted these differently. The first year of life is crucial for developing the potential for trust for which we’re biochemically prepared during the nine months in our mothers’ wombs. But stress can rewire our brain circuits before we can know what in the world to think. The development of our abilities to trust depends thereafter on what happens at these critical periods and on our idiosyncratic and subjective sense of stimuli -- touch, sight, and sound between us and our parents, especially in the first 18 months -- and, later, in widening worlds of interpersonal experience. All this involves trillions of neural connections. Fortunately, we’re not entirely at the mercy of either our physiological responses or our so-called formative years. We can cognitively intervene to increase our abilities at rational trusting.

2. Trust is a social phenomenon that varies from culture to culture. Besides biochemical and personal differences, trust seems to be enculturated differently in different societies. Group identity is also an important influence.

According to Rand research, people in the United States, Germany and Japan may be better conditioned to trust those outside their own immediate families than are people in France, Italy and China. This may be so since Americans, Germans and Japanese are more readily joiners than are the others and it’s argued that greater association with others improves the ability to trust. This is a standard view on prejudice, holding that the more interaction one has with others, the less one is likely to stereotype negatively. More experience with others can and should inform our ability to trust. But we can just as easily confirm negative stereotypes with more interaction. We risk seeing only what we’re looking for, what fits with our prejudice. Moreover, "many of the small groups that have formed in America over the last two decades have been thoroughly illiberal in spirit: victims’ groups, ... minority clubs that have Balkanized the campus and the workplace, pseudoreligious cults with violent agendas." [Fareed Zakaria] We’ve pushed a mindset of hyphenated identities, groups within groups that never stop demanding to know "What’s in it for us?" There’s a refusal to see that what we have in common is more important than our differences: "We’re queer, we’re here, get used to it!" "Gay rights = Special rights!" We’ve pushed a hyperindividualism that never stops demanding to know "What’s in it for me?" "I’m different, therefore, I am!" All such fine-tuned in-your-face isolationism breeds distrust. A former president of the leftist SDS of the ‘60s now says: "For too long, too many Americans have busied themselves digging trenches to fortify their cultural borders, lining their trenches with insulation. Enough

bunkers! Enough of the perfection of differences! We ought to be building bridges!" [Todd Gitlin] A British philosopher observes an "intense public concern about the growing fragility of trust in modern society." He notes that "Traditional reasons for trusting and being trustworthy seem in decline ... as an instrumental notion of rationality spreads." He joins other social observers in recognizing that the use of people as means to ends "breeds distrust, erodes the bonds between us and increases the fragility." Or, as he puts it in a less refined way: "The more people come to believe that it is irrational to give a sucker an even break the more rational it becomes not to be a sucker." [Martin Hollis] All this self-centeredness can, of course, be both symptom and seeming solution of mistrust and anxiety -- not to mention, its cause.

3. There’s a difference between trust and trustworthiness. There’s no real connection between the two -- there only seems to be. To trust means to count on, to place confidence in, to rely or depend upon. Trust is dependent on expectations. They may or may not be reasonable expectations. Trust, as an action of confidence, always requires a corresponding object of confidence: that in whom or in what we trust. It makes no sense to speak of trusting without speaking of the object of that trust. There is no free-floating trust, no trust-in-the-abstract. If "to trust" is "to count on," then the question is: "On whom?" or "On what?" It was always silly for Julie Andrews to celebrate "confidence in confidence alone!"

Trustworthiness is independent of expectations of trust. The object of trust may or may not be worthy of trust. So just because you trust someone doesn’t make her trustworthy and just because you don’t trust someone doesn’t make him untrustworthy. Both the trustworthy and the untrustworthy are trusted by someone -- for this or for that -- and both the untrustworthy and the trustworthy are distrusted by someone -- for this or for that. Neither trust nor distrust is validity of trustworthiness.

Trust and distrust can be irrational as well as rational. Both irrational trust as well as irrational distrust can get us into trouble. Therefore, we have responsibilities not only to distrust the untrustworthy but, at times, to distrust our distrust itself.

Trust is the story of the one who trusts, whether or not it’s reasonable trust. Trustworthiness is the story of the one in whom trust is placed.

What we trust determines our experience. What we feel and what we see our way clear to do or not to do depends on what we tell ourselves about the trustworthiness of someone or something. Let me illustrate this with your own experience of the next few moments. I’m going to read just two sentences from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Notice that it’s what you are telling yourself -- notions that you trust -- that will determine your reaction to Dillard’s words. She writes: "To travel from camp to camp in summer, coastal Eskimos ply the open seas in big umiaks paddled by women. They eat fish, goose or duck eggs, fresh meat, and anything else they can get, including fresh ‘salad’ of greens." What’s your reaction so far? It’s fine, right? Now let me read the rest of her sentence, starting over with "They eat fish, goose or duck eggs, fresh meat, and anything else they can get, including fresh ‘salad’ of greens still raw in a killed caribou’s stomach and dressed with the delicate acids of digestion." You see, what we feel or see our way clear to do or not to do does depend on what we’re telling ourselves. The Eskimos trust what they think about the "salad" and we trust what we think about the "salad." So the Eskimos see their way clear to eat it and we don’t. Our mindset sets our trust -- without regard to "objectivity."

4. Notions of "trust" so called, can be manipulation. A closer look at popular usage of the term, "trust," reveals that we tend to say we "trust" when really, we mean we are looking to get what we want. We tend to say we "don’t trust" when we mean we don’t expect to get what we want. So trust and distrust can be two sides of the same agenda about getting our way. When some people say they can’t trust you, they’re using what functions as an accusation, as a weapon, in retaliation for not getting their way or as intimidation in order to get their way after all. Either way, they’re up to no good.

Apart from interpersonal manipulation in the name of "trust," there is also institutional and ideological manipulation in the name of "trust." A plane crashes and the media rush to judgment with provocative questions such as: "Can we trust the FAA?" A priest molests an altar boy and the headlines shout: "Can we trust the Catholic Church?" Someone shoots an abortion doctor and the media raise questions about the sanity of the entire pro-life movement. In his new book, Feeding the Beast, the senior White House correspondent for U.S. News and World Report criticizes such manipulation of trust saying that "journalists too often have filtered out the good, embellished the bad and produced a distorted image." He says journalists "have too much attitude ... too often rush to judgment ... and are too negative." [Kenneth Walsh] Most of the religious press, the gay press, and other special interest journalism is no less manipulative of trust.

And if even sincerely held prejudices predetermine the perceived trustworthiness of anyone or anything, imagine what one is up against when one is at the mercy of truly malicious gossip that never gets anything straight. Manipulated half-truths, innuendo, and the "insinuations [that] are the rhetoric of the devil" [Goethe] set limits on trust and perceived trustworthiness that are usually impossible to prevent or overcome since such gossip knows and cares nothing for the fuller truth that never catches up with the powerful impressions left by the gossip.

So what have we said in these four general observations to begin with? We’ve seen that trust is a psychological ability that varies from person to person, that trust is a social phenomenon that can vary from culture to culture and can be influenced by group identity, that trust and trustworthiness are not the same things, and that sometimes so-called "trust" and "distrust" can be interpersonal, institutional and ideological manipulation. Now let’s move on to discuss trusting each other, ourselves and God. Later we’ll examine the trusting of ideas.

TRUSTING EACH OTHER

Who can we trust? We hear all sorts of advice on this. Remember Oscar Wilde’s Lord Illingworth? He was that obnoxious wit who was finally dubbed "a man of no importance" by the one he’d put down as "a woman of no importance." He asserted that "One should never trust a woman who tells one her age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything." And so would Lord Illingworth! And so he did! Back in the 1960s, when some of us were still under 30, we used to say: "Don’t trust anyone over 30." Recently some well-scrubbed midwestern teens heard their New York hotel doorman shorten that warning to "Don’t trust anyone!"

On the one hand, we’re all susceptible to being unduly-distrustful. Such cynicism is cowardice, however. It’s not rational; it’s rash. We’re prone to a xenophobia, an unreasonable fear, contempt or distrust of those we see as "different." It’s "us" versus "them" -- whether put in terms of "pride" (e.g. "the brothers," "people of color," "the Aryan race," "womyn," etc.) or in terms of hateful put-down (e.g. "the kike," "the goy," "the nigger," "the fag," etc.) It’s "us" versus the un-"us" -- interracial, interethnic, intergenerational, interreligious, etc.

On the other hand, we’re all quite susceptible to being unduly trustful. Such gullibility is foolhardy. It’s not rational; it’s rash. Do you know people who trust that those who gossip with them about others won’t gossip with others about them? Do you know people who, before using strangers for sex, make sure to ask them about their HIV status -- as if one can reasonably trust a stranger to tell the truth in such a situation?

How can we overcome our unreasonable distrust that, in effect, reinforces anxiety even while it’s intended to protect against it? How can we become more reasonably trusting and thereby overcome the anxiety that is the source and symptom of distrust? And how can we avoid the hare-brained trusting that not only puts us in immediate danger but also sets us up for a far too hair-triggered suspicion thereafter?

I’d like to recommend that we keep in mind three basic truths of a rational trust. 1. Rational trust keeps perspective. 2. Rational

trust expects imperfection. 3. Rational trust assumes some degree of unawareness.

1. Rational trust keeps perspective. It has a sense of proportion, even a sense of humor. Rational trust makes room for both/and and is suspicious of too much either/or. It resists expectations of all-or-nothing. Rational trust knows how to subsume what is less significant under what is more significant. Rational trust is specific rather than generalized or abstract. It is contextual. It realizes that whatever is taken out of context cannot be trusted as though it’s still in context.

We hear someone complain: "Sharon can’t be trusted." That news can raise some anxiety about Sharon. But then we hear: "She can’t be trusted; she’s always late!" She’s always late? Then Sharon can be trusted to be late. We’d better count on it. We’d better take it into consideration in making plans to meet her for lunch. We’ll take along something to read while waiting for her, or we’ll delay our own arrival to be in sync with Sharon’s predictably late arrival. Nonetheless, her repeated tardiness doesn’t mean that she can’t be trusted to pay her fair share of the bill or be generally pleasant company. Evidence may well indicate that she can be trusted to do this in these circumstances, but that she can be trusted to do that in those circumstances. We’ll miscalculate if we paint her trustworthiness or untrustworthiness with too broad a brush. Trust must be specific and contextual, not abstract and all-or-nothing because trustworthiness is specific and contextual, not abstract and all-or-nothing. Trustworthiness is hardly ever as simple as trust wants it to be.

You’ve heard people caution against trusting a stranger. That’s silly. I trust every stranger -- to be a stranger -- who will get stranger before getting more familiar. You can trust every stranger to be a stranger. You’d better do that, no matter who you might wish her to turn out to be, no matter how cute you think he is. Eventually, through observation and screening, testing -- but not without the distraction of self-interest -- you’ll learn who the person is typically, under these or under those conditions. You’ll then be able to trust this person to be who you’ve learned she or he is.

When we demand that someone be all we want him to be, we’ll be in danger of regarding him to be nothing when we discover he’s not all we want him to be. When the religious right, for example, demands that Presidential candidates be all it wants to count on, inevitably, some flaws will be found. The religious right then complains that "none of the Republican candidates for president is ‘really one of us,"’ that "we’re passing through still another election cycle ... without a serious representative of evangelical thought and action." [Joel Belz] This complaint is the actual wording of an editorial in the religious right press. But this lack of trust on the part of the editor does not mean that several candidates were not, in fact, very conservative Christians.

In the recent Taiwan presidential election, most Christians did not vote for President Lee Teng-hui even though he is a good Presbyterian in a country that is only 2 percent Christian. Christians complained that he’s not to be trusted. Why? Because he stopped speaking of his Christian faith and attended Buddhist and Taoist temples during his campaign. The erroneous thinking was that if he’s not to be trusted to keep speaking of his Christian faith and avoid campaigning at non-Christian centers, he’s not to be trusted as president. Their irrational thinking is illustrated by an ironic perversion of a signature motto of the Apostle Paul. As one disgruntled Christian put it, Lee "has become all things to all men and is a disappointment to the Christian community."

These two were illustrations of the error of all-or-nothing trust or distrust on the Christian right. Here’s one on the Christian left. In a review of The New Testament of the Inclusive Language Bible, a Christian feminist objects to its retaining the term "Son" in "Son of Humanity," a substitute for "Son of Man." She objects to the capitalizing of "He" and "His" with reference to Jesus. She faults the work for its saying that the disciples saw "a man" instead of "someone" casting out demons. Isn’t it enough that anyone was casting out demons? She complains that all "this is off-putting enough to render the volume useless" and she says she "cannot ... recommend it." It must either be all she wants or it’s "useless!"

The man many consider to have been the greatest theologian of the 20th century -- Karl Barth -- was a very complicated man of both tremendous Christian insight and personal flaws. He was not all-or-nothing. Nobody is. One of his wisest observations was that God’s yes to us is really a nevertheless. We’d all be more wisely prepared for our interpersonal trusting of each other if we’d remember that our yes to each other should really be a nevertheless. However, that’s not often what we do. Our all-or-nothing irrationality awfulizes, personalizes, and otherwise extrapolates the worst as the whole of the story. And this, of course, destroys trust.

In his Virginibus Puerisque, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: "Let but a doubt arise, and alas! all the previous intimacy and confidence is but another charge against the person doubted. ‘What a monstrous dishonesty is this if I have been deceived so long and so completely!’ Let but that thought gain entrance, and you plead before a deaf tribunal. Appeal to the past; why, that is your crime! Make all clear, convince the reason; alas! speciousness is but a proof against you. ‘If you can abuse me now, the more likely that you have abused me from the first.’"

We also can make the mistake of thinking that because someone can be trusted to be a generally good person, all her opinions, for example, are likewise good and can be trusted to be opinions we should adopt. (Or, if the person is generally nasty, we can make the mistake of thinking that none of her opinions is any good at all.) But even a person of integrity can be mistaken at times -- will be mistaken at times. At times we all can behave in ways that confuse or bewilder others as well as ourselves. However, this need not destroy basic trust. Wisdom knows that trust in a person’s basic integrity can override the relatively less important mistakes, poor judgment, and seemingly inexplicable behavior while nonetheless not completely ignoring these.

In one of Thomas Carlyle’s unpublished letters, we have an illustration of such uncommon wisdom. He replies to Mary Rich, a friend who had written with concern about his and his wife’s health. Rich had offered a homeopathic remedy for Carlyle’s sick wife. He writes back: "My wife thanks you much. She will swallow any infinitesimal dose from so kind a Doctor, and be quite sure of benefit from the sound of a friendly voice, from the light of friendly eyes: but as to Homeopathy, she is, I fear, hopelessly skeptical, not to say altogether incredulous." Rich was trusted for her familiar kindness, but her strange remedy was not. The Carlyles had the good sense and the good will to distinguish between their friend’s kindness and her medical recommendation. As William James said, "The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."

Here’s now an example where trust in a person’s basic integrity overrides not only innocent disagreement, as in the Carlyles’ case, but even seemingly inexplicable behavior. Most scholars don’t like the fact that after the Second World War, the German Jewish debunker of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, reconciled with the Nazi-sympathizing philosopher Martin Heidegger, her mentor and ex-lover. A French philosopher wisely notes that "There is a concept that is very important in Hannah Arendt’s thinking. It’s the concept of friendship. When you read her, you get this feeling of friendship, and that’s one of the reasons she is so highly praised .... It’s as if when reading her, we are becoming friends with her. But friendship means trust. So if she decided to reconcile herself with Heidegger, I trust her. I want to know her reasons, but I have confidence in her." He trusted her even against the seeming evidence, even when he didn’t really know her reasons and assumes that he would not approve of them if he did know them. He trusted her.

The fuller context for reasonable trust can be wider and deeper than any alleged "evidence" against trustworthiness, whether that "evidence" is based on malicious gossip or a misconstrued eyewitness experience. Said Stevenson: "Truth to facts is not always truth to sentiment; and part of the truth ... may be the foulest calumny .... The whole tenor of a conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate statement; ... truth in spirit, not truth to letter, is the true veracity." And yet there are those who have destroyed relationship by reducing the whole of a friendship to

their too-trusting reading of one moment torn from the context by personalizing or by gossip or by exaggeration or by plain old miscommunication. C. S. Lewis said: "To love involves trusting the beloved beyond the evidence, even against the evidence. No one is our friend who believes in our good intentions only when they are proved. No one is our friend who will not be very slow to accept evidence against them." Isn’t this what Hannah Arendt did with Martin Heidegger? Isn’t it what her French admirer did with her? Isn’t it what Jesus did with the one who said "Lord, I trust; help my lack of trust?" Isn’t it what Jesus did with Peter when he entrusted this so-humanly both/and apostle with the building of the church?

2. Rational trust expects imperfection. It’s particularly perverse of Christians who recite prayers of confession of sin at each weekly worship service and pray that "Our Father ... forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us" to nonetheless reject and refuse to trust or really forgive those whose lives show that they too are sinners. One would think that Christians would know better than to expect that anyone’s life is other than "wheat and tares together sown." Rational trust expects imperfection in the object of trust as well as in the trusting self. Rational trust expects certain imperfection even in the trusting. Expectations for impossibly "perfect" people and relationships not only destroy people and relationships, but such expectations destroy even the very possibility of covenant or commitment. In reality of course, the so-called perfection of perfectionism is imperfect. It is, itself, flawed because it is a fraud, a fantasy, an illusion. It is not to be trusted as a reflection of any reality. But since we make it all up to look perfect to ourselves, in terms of our own short-sightedness, we will mislead and disappoint ourselves when the fantasy never materializes.

To expect imperfection doesn’t mean that we’re settling for imperfection. To settle would mean that we’re making do with something less than an available perfection. But perfection isn’t available. So we’re not settling or lowering our standards. Imperfection is the best any of us can do. There’s actually no lower standard than perfectionism, since the presumed perfection of perfectionism is a delusion.

We do people no favor when we put them up on our god shelf. It’s bad for us and bad for them, for they are not gods. When we weigh them down with ridiculous burdens of perfectionism, they will fall under these unwarranted weights and then -- hurt and anxious and frustrated and angry that they’re mere mortals -- we’ll bitterly denounce them as "untrustworthy." And of course they are "untrustworthy" in that they cannot be trusted to live up to our own unrealistic expectations of perfectionism. But we should know better. Especially as those who are among the people who take the Bible seriously. After all, doesn’t the very first Commandment warn us against trusting in any gods but God? Among the last words the venerable George MacDonald ever wrote was this wise sentence: "The most degrading wrong to ourselves, and the worst eventual wrong to others, is to trust in anything or person but the living God."

Listen to the sobering confessions of Mike Yaconelli, senior editor of The Door, a sort of evangelical Mad magazine. Yaconelli says that "The more time I spent with the people I admired, the more flawed they became. Damn them!" He says that he "was angry -- outraged that yet another ‘extra-ordinary’ person who I’d looked up to turned out to be ‘ordinary.’ Another mentor was flawed ... a lot more flawed than I wanted him to be. Admiration turned to disappointment. Disappointment turned to anger." The anger at a person’s not living up to unreasonably perfectionistic expectations then turns to distrust. Believing that one could be safe only within the other person’s perfection, one suffers anxiety at the "loss" of such "safety." Yaconelli goes on: "How dare they disappoint me! They were supposed to be godly, spiritual, radiant, organized, patient, loving, humble, peaceful, sensitive, caring, pure, wise, kind, simple, secure saints. And many of them did possess those qualities. But at the same time, they were insecure, neurotic, demanding, insensitive, unstable, lonely, depressed, melancholy, dysfunctional, self-absorbed, inconsistent sinners. They were ambiguous! ... Damn them!" He realizes that "What

bothered me about my knowledge of these people was that they were neither saint nor sinner. They were both, damn them! Both!" Of course.

These all-or-nothing expectations are especially tempting when it comes to expectations for those who are in the spiritual or helping vocations. In his book, Married to the Church, an Indiana University English professor observes: "As a culture, we tend to acknowledge the humanity of priests only when it reflects our own best side, our selves stripped of our flaws or failings. We do not readily extend recognition or acceptance to any complex, ambiguous form of behavior in them or to any other trait facilely labeled ‘darker’ -- i.e., we imagine them as free of those aspects of human nature from which we would love to be free, and we get angry when they turn out not to be exempt." He goes on to say that "The cultural assumption that priests are fundamentally ‘other’ thus damages us as much as it damages them; the basic difference we impute to them does not serve to keep alive our idealism so much as it keeps alive in us the illusory possibility of a superhuman immunity we can continue passively to admire or long for. The otherness of the priest has become a psychic utopia, a realm we can visit and admire that ends up rendering us discontent with our own grubby terrain but no better equipped or inclined to till it." [Raymond Hedin]

No wonder the founder of The Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day, used to say: "Don’t call me a saint! I don’t want to be dismissed so easily." There is a cruel naïveté in both the idolization of Mother Teresa and Christopher Hitchens’ trashing of her. Of course Mother Teresa is not a mere saint. Of course Dorothy Day was not a mere saint. They’re both/and -- like everyone else, though perhaps not necessarily in the same proportions.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote critically of those who "have an eye for faults and failures, who take pleasure to find and publish them, and who forget the overveiling virtues and the real success." His spirited defense of Father Damien, the Catholic missionary to the lepers of Molokai, following a Protestant missionary’s mean attack on the priest was written, at considerable risk, to put into perspective the fuller story of one who died in the service of others. (Later, Stevenson felt that he had, himself, been too one-sided about the Protestant missionary.) Stevenson knew that "There are many ... who require their heroes and saints to be infallible" and he wrote that "to these the story [of Damien] will be painful." But, Stevenson wrote, it won’t be painful "to the true lovers, patrons, and servants of mankind" who know better than to assess in all-or-nothing terms. He noted that "ten thousand bad traits cannot make a single good one any the less good." In a later letter to his good friend, Sir Sidney Colvin, Stevenson said that Damien was, indeed, as he’d been maliciously portrayed by the Protestant missionary, "dirty, bigoted, untruthful, unwise, tricky, but [nevertheless also] superb with generosity, residual candour and fundamental good humour .... A man, with all the grime and paltriness of mankind, but a saint and hero all the more for that."

For all Carl Jung could be trusted to make significant contributions to the welfare of his patients and to the emerging field of psychotherapy, he too was a man who was both/and. For example, he continued to have sexual affairs with other women even from the first day of his marriage. He maintained one of these sexual relationships, one with a former patient, for the rest of his life. In her review of a recent Jung biography, Victoria Funk grants that "Jung could be foul-mouthed, abusive and insulting. He was notoriously bullying and authoritarian" but she concludes by stating: "If, in the end, we find it difficult to reconcile Dr. Carl Jung the Great Thinker with Dr. Carl Jung the Great Creep, the problem probably lies in our own need to keep our heroes safely on their pedestals."

A new biography of the late Anglo/Catholic-Evangelical (and homosexual) Bishop of Southwark, the popular pulpit preacher Mervyn Stockwood, sums him up thusly: "Often predictable, he was even more frequently unfathomable. There are few tints or shades. He could be immensely kind and considerate, cruel and rude; by turns funny and exasperating, pompous and humble." A new biography of G. K. Chesterton shows him to have been a man of sadistic rage as well as loving generosity. A new biography of

Bertrand Russell presents him as both a tireless worker for international peace and an egoistical abuser in interpersonal relations.

In our greedy and angrily litigious society, it’s rare to hear such gracious good sense as that which was recently expressed in a Newsweek "My Turn" essay by Alden Blodget. He tells of his responses following his father’s bleeding to death after elective knee surgery. The doctors gave his father too large a dose of an anticoagulant. As Blodget met with these doctors, he says that he realized that they were not the "gods or magicians" we want them to be. "They were men -- imperfect and fallible -- frightened to appear so in a society that expects perfection and infallibility from its professionals, especially its doctors." He goes on to say that "These men were just like the rest of us. ... They’d made mistakes that they could see only in hindsight, the perspective from which society makes its judgments. In hindsight, everything is obvious." Blodget concludes by saying that "to sue someone for failing to be the god we wanted strikes me as wrong. Why is it that we know so little ourselves yet expect so much from others? We refuse to recognize the flimsy curtain that separates the intention from the result."

All these living examples illustrate the caution of one Christian spiritual director who states: "Mature trust has open eyes; it is not naive .... At times others will betray our trust; we will betray theirs, and perhaps even our very own." Perfection is not what’s "the essence of being human." [George Orwell] We must trust that we’re all mixed bags. We all make mistakes. Who’d want to be a stone saint? Who’d want anyone else to be a stone saint? Robert Frost put it in these words: "To err is human, not to, animal." "You will always do wrong," said Stevenson, "You must try to get used to that .... Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits." We must trust all others to be our failing fellows. Stevenson knew that we’re all both Jekyll and Hyde. His Dr. Jekyll said of his Mr. Hyde: "This, too, was myself." Commenting on Jekyll and Hyde, Chesterton observed: "The real stab of the story is not in the discovery that one man is two men; but in the discovery that the two men are one man."

3. Rational trust assumes some degree of unawareness. In any case that calls for trust, we should know that we don’t know it all. We don’t know everything we might think we do. We don’t know all we might wish to know. And we should know that we’re not without our own agenda. Much of it, too, escapes our clear understanding if not our awareness altogether. There are times when we have only misinformation. But we don’t realize this because what we have to go on is even disinformation, the rotten fruit of malicious gossip, half-truths, or innuendo. We mistakenly trust this to be "the whole truth and nothing but the truth." Even when we’re aware that we probably don’t have all the information -- and perhaps especially when we know we don’t -- a habituated distrust can take over all reason. The books of Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate, Prizzi’s Honor, etc.) are all so dark and conspiratorial that one reviewer coined what’s now called Condon’s Law: "When you don’t know the whole truth, the worst you can imagine is bound to be close." Do we too readily resort to such a poor approach in our own interpersonal relations?

Whatever we see or hear, it’s never the whole story. That’s true of what we see or hear that we don’t like as well as of what we don’t see or hear but wouldn’t like if we did. That’s true of what we see or hear that we like as well as of what we don’t see or hear but would like if we did.

After seven hours on the set for ABC’s coverage of the recent national election, newsman David Brinkley was evidently unaware he was still on the air when he told his colleagues that Americans were in for four more years of "god-damned nonsense" from the President. The veteran commentator went on to denounce Clinton by saying that he "has not a creative bone in his body" and "therefore he is a bore and always will be a bore." Two days later, at the beginning of a previously-scheduled interview with the President, Brinkley apologized for what he termed his "impolite and unfair" comments. President Clinton smiled and observed wisely: "I always believe you have to judge people on their whole

work, and if you get judged based on your whole work, you come out way ahead." Most of us -- as well as our friends and foes -- are not in danger of speaking into an open microphone on national television. We all know, though, that we do say unflattering things about others. We should trust that things are said about us that we wouldn’t find flattering. It’s true, too, that we say nice things about others who never hear what we say. We may also trust that nice things are said about us and we never hear about them. We just never know what all is being said. Trusting that much of all kinds is being said -- unless nothing at all is being said -- we move on. We shouldn’t trip ourselves up over everything we do know about because there’s plenty we don’t know about and we get on just the same. Even negative comments about us -- of which we know so little -- are made by those who wouldn’t necessarily see them as representative of their basic view of us, any more than we believe that what negative remarks we may make about them represent our basic view of them. At any rate, Pascal was undoubtedly right when he said that "If everyone knew what each said of the other, there would not be four friends in the world."

Well then, what is the relevance for trusting someone’s good will to us after we hear that he said something unflattering about us outside our hearing? Probably not much, perhaps zero. Sadly, though, we probably won’t act on that.

Rational trust that must assume some unawareness can be put in Christian perspective when we recall that François Mauriac mused prayerfully: "There would be no idiots and no bores for us if we could see far enough into this part of them, the part which You know and where You are."

Another way in which awareness of unawareness must be factored into rational interpersonal trust is to realize that relationships of trust rest upon implicit as well as explicit expectations. We make the mistake of thinking that what’s said covers all expectations. It does not. Besides the fact that what one means to say must be what is heard -- and that is not always the case -- research shows that "the essential core of all dialogue ... remains nonverbal." [James J. Lynch] Our own internal "contractual" monologues are so immediately experiential to us that we fail to realize that they may remain, nonetheless, one-sided contracts that are not readily, if at all, apparent to others. The seeming mutuality of such "contracts" is an assumed mutuality, not necessarily an actual mutuality. We’re all then caught off guard when these unspoken and unnegotiated expectations don’t get fulfilled.

Gabriel Marcel has said that "To believe in someone" or "to place confidence in him, is to say ‘I am sure that you will not betray my hope, that you will respond to it, that you will fulfill it.’" And that, at first glance, seems quite a reasonable idea of trust. But not so fast. There may be unexamined expectations here, unspecified predictions in the mind of the one who is placing trust. Just what is the content of Marcel’s "hope?" Notice that he refers to it as "my hope." Just what is the "it" to which response is expected? Here’s the self-talk of the one who places trust, but it remains to be seen whether it’s clearly communicated or agreed upon by the one who is expected to fulfill the trust. Is the person in whom trust is placed for this or for that "hope" responsible to fulfill that hope? And if that one does not do so, is he or she betraying trust? Is he or she untrustworthy unless the hope is realized? The answer too often is a naive yes. Unfortunately, relationships can be destroyed through disappointment, fear, and anger arising from just such failures to adequately appreciate the impact of the implicit expectations of one party in a relationship.

A research psychologist correctly states that "If either person becomes unpredictable in areas of behavior crucial to the other person then trust is placed in jeopardy. This can happen if both components of the contract, the implicit commitments and the explicit commitments, are not adhered to." [Lynch] He explains that "even in the most clear-cut types of human interactions, there are implicit commitments ... which the parties themselves may not even be aware of." Social psychologist David Myers agrees, saying: "to a striking degree, the misperceptions of those in conflict are mutual." He adds: "Each party’s misperception triggers behavior that reinforces the misperception, creating a

vicious circle of conflict." He says that "such diabolical images tend to be self-confirming" -- hardly conducive to the trust that either party has had in mind.

All of this applies as well to matters of intentions or motives -- so often associated with matters of trust and distrust -- but so often these motives and intentions are matters of unawareness. We trust that we know our own intentions. We may know some of them. We don’t know them all. But, with Aristotle, we do know that "All that we do is done with an eye to something else." And motives are not only mixed. Motives are complex. Said Coleridge: "No one does anything from a single motive." Moreover, no matter what mixed and multiple motives we may have, our actions may produce indirect or even contrary results. As Chesterton reminds us, we’re "not only bad from good motives, but also good from bad motives." For example, trying to meet our needs for sexual intimacy, there are times when we’ve all misbehaved. And at other times, we’ve all refrained from such misbehavior largely out of a fear of rejection.

We also trust that we know another person’s intentions. We may know some of them and we may not. But we don’t know them all. What is more, we may not know the other’s most significant motives -- though we may trust erroneously that we do. Our own agendas, our own experience and expectations, and our ignorance of the other’s, our confusing him or her with someone else -- all these and more factors may blind us to the other’s major motives. At any rate, all that person’s motives are also mixed and multiple. Furthermore, someone has cautioned that "We are not more ingenious in searching out bad motives for good actions when performed by others, than good motives for bad actions when performed by ourselves." [Charles Caleb Colton] So we need to keep all this in mind in matters of trust and distrust. All these observations -- of ourselves and of others -- add up to circumstances of serious ignorance or unawareness. Rational trust at least must be aware of the inevitability of unawareness, even if unaware of particulars.

Clearly, too much attention is too often paid to motives. In H. L. Mencken’s view, "The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate." In her novel, Middlemarch, George Eliot pens these lines: "We must not inquire too curiously into motives. ... They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light." After all, whatever the intentions, whatever mixed and complex motives are discovered or not -- how much can we really know? Besides, whatever motives there may be, they do not account for all the unintended effects.

The unawareness assumed in rational trust includes the common unawareness of our being wrong this time and of another’s being right. We need to be open to an awareness that, by definition, we’re unaware of our own mistaken perceptions. But let’s get into the habit of granting that we might be wrong this time and he or she might be right. Trust, and therefore relationship, suffers when we’re wrong and don’t realize it and when the other’s right and we don’t realize it. Usually there are ways in which we’re both wrong and we’re both right. At the end of his long life, Mauriac penned these wise words: " ... it is to the degree that we admit not only that the enemy may be right, partially from his viewpoint, but to the willingness we also admit that we ourselves are capable of error, that we will move in his direction and that he will consent to move toward us." But a blind, self-righteous cocksureness knows nothing of such a spirit and so will not move into a fuller awareness of the truth and the re-establishment of trust for relationship.

All of these observations on rational trust of each other -- the specific contexts of trust, the imperfections that must be expected and the unawarenesses that must be assumed -- lead us to conclude that rational trust is trust within limits. Rational trust is trust within the limits of circumstances, experience, abilities, knowledge, wisdom, communication, and even limitations of good will. These many limits result in a basic limit on control. Since trusting is an effort at controlling outcomes for one’s perceived benefit, an effort to overcome the fear that we’re otherwise in

danger, trust within limits is less than we want to trust trust to be. Trust within limits is hardly the unconditional trust we think we need to be able to place in another person and think another person needs to be able to place in us. However, trust within limits better be what we need, and it better be what that other person needs, for interpersonal trust within limits is the only trust that’s possible in this world. Trust within limits is trust within reality. Trust without limits is trust without reality. If we place ourselves out of touch with reality, however difficult and obscure that reality may be, we thus place ourselves out of touch with each other. But if we trust within these limits, we’ll be able to place ourselves in touch with each other. To be realistically in touch with each other is, after all, what trusting each other is all about.

TRUSTING ONESELF

If I were to ask you if you trust yourself, what would your answer be? Do you trust you? Yes? No? You don’t know? You’re not sure? Sometimes? Most of the time? All the time? Do you realize that you’re trusting yourself even as you try to answer this question? It may be surprising for you to think of it this way but each of you trusts yourself all the time. You can’t help it. We trust ourselves when we trust other people and ideas, for we trust them. We trust ourselves even when we distrust other people and ideas, for we distrust them. We’re always trusting ourselves. How can we not?

Psychiatrist Robert Coles says that he’s found, in the testimonies of disillusioned former Catholic seminarians, "a way of thinking [that] promotes a ... skepticism of anyone and anything except its own validity." I read of a Fuller Seminary professor who is frustrated with his first-year students who confront him with a know-it-all attitude that knows nothing of the history of Christian theology before the time of their own brand of fundamentalism. [Miroslav Volf] Mennonite New Testament scholar Reta Finger reports that at Messiah College, she "run[s] into problems with some of the conservative students who may not know what’s in the Bible any more than students to the Left of them." She says "They think they do, but with the sort of literalism with which they approach [the Bible] they do very little contextualizing .... They say, this is the word of God without any error -- but then they also assume that the way they interpret it is without any error. This kind of view leads to the attitude that ‘We’re right, and if you don’t think the way we think, you’re wrong.’" A Duke University theology professor says that his liberal students combine a "radical suspicion of historic, institutionally embodied faith with a naive faith in [their own] ability to think for [them]selves." [William H. Willimon] Robert Louis Stevenson once put it in these words: "Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort." Of course. When all is said and done, we all trust ourselves -- always and in all ways.

But is this wise? Dare we put such trust in our ability to think for ourselves, to judge for ourselves? Is our sense of anything really trustworthy? If it isn’t, how can we hope to answer these questions?

In a sense, we have no choice. Little by little, ever since our first year of life, we’ve been conditioned to trust in our own perceptions of anything. We’re in an ever reinforcing but closed circuit of interpreted experience after interpreted experience in which we trust. And we not only trust our perceptions but we universalize our perceptions so that we make no distinction between our experience and what we call "reality." Our subjective experience is not perceived as different from what we may think of as "objectivity." We extrapolate from our versions of ourselves and everything else and irrationally assume that our versions are the same as others’ versions.

Social psychological studies show that "we are never in an intellectual vacuum, thinking free of the control of prior thought. Our basic belief system ... shapes our interpretation of everything else ... In every area of human thinking our prior beliefs bias our perceptions, interpretations, and memories." [David Myers] But we’re so easily unaware of both the connections and the disconnections. A Nobel-winning psychologist explains that we "construct a simplified model of the real situation in order to deal

with it." Even when we behave in an understandable way relative to this constructed model, our behavior, he says, "is not even approximately optimal with respect to the real world." [Herbert Simon] Freud himself warned that even psychoanalysis gives us an untrustworthy sense of certainty because it relies on what is, after all, only a reconstruction -- what someone has called "the foxed narration" -- of the past. And though some who don’t know better think that hypnosis can "recover memory," the truth is that hypnosis is particularly efficacious in creating false memory. Moreover, the more we "give verbal or written witness to something," no matter how much we may be in doubt at first, the more we’ll "generally begin to believe" what we’re saying. [David Myers] So it’s not a bit funny when one observer points out with some wit that "she who remembers the past is condemned to repeat it." [Verlyn Klinkerborg] Klinkerborg reminds us that "some of the most hideous acts of this century have been committed in the name of memory, and the past, as Orwell knew, is as pliable in its uses as the future."

Mark Twain, who wrote a number of memoirs, acknowledged to William Dean Howells that "autobiography ... inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth" and went on to say that autobiography is nonetheless "the truest of all books!" He said that the truth is there "between the lines." But we don’t write between the lines and those who read between the lines are, themselves, their own authors. In a reappraisal of retrospective reports, published recently in the Psychological Bulletin, researchers conclude that autobiographical memory involves a "constant process of selection, revision, and reinterpretation." In other words, we’re not to be trusted to be as fair, objective, generous, sensitive to others as we think we are. But it’s worse than even this.

Psychological experiments on illusory thinking reveal that an even "artificially constructed belief about reality feels much like an objectively correct belief." We find it difficult, even impossible, to tell the difference. Researchers from Harvard and the University of Arizona report in the journal Neuron that people cannot tell the difference between an accurate memory and a mistaken memory. They feel the same. But PET scans reveal temporal lobe activity in true memories and an absence of such activity in false memory. Research subjects believed that they could trust their memories in every situation "remembered" even though 58 percent of the time what they "remembered" was demonstrably false. The line between the truly remembered and the merely imagined is both complicated and fragile and it is quickly dissolved in the brain.

The 16th century Carmelite mystic, Teresa of Avila, did not have to wait for confirmation from PET scans to have the good sense to caution that we "consider the memory no better than a mad man, and leave it alone with its folly, for God alone can check its extravagances."

Today, there are those who urge us to listen to what they all-too-confidently assure us is our "inner child." But we do well to ask: Just whose voice do we hear? Nobody was ever more companioned through life by both the joy and the pain of his childhood than was Robert Louis Stevenson: "I always have some childishness on hand." But the poet knew what "inner child" promoters seem to miss. In one of his "Songs of Travel," he wrote: "Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, / Say, could that lad be I? ... Give me the eyes, give me the soul, / Give me the lad that’s gone!" But alas, says he: "All that was good, all that was fair, / All that was me is gone." All that was me is gone. Of course, not all; but, yes, all that was. And in his "Envoys" he wrote "To Any Reader," a postscript poem usually printed at the end of any collection of his poetry. He pictures himself as the child he was, at play in his parents’ garden in Edinburgh. But he warns: " ... do not think you can at all, / By knocking on the window, call / That child to hear you .... He does not hear; he will not look, / Nor yet be lured out of this book. / For long ago, the truth to say, / He has grown up and gone away, / And it is but a child of air / that lingers in the garden there." In Memories and Portraits, Stevenson writes of "Memories of childhood and youth ... the face of what was once myself ... my own young face (which is a face of the dead)." And in another

work, RLS lamented the loss of "that little, beautiful brother whom we once all had, and whom we have all lost and mourned: the man we ought to have been, the man we hoped to be." One’s childhood is lost, even if childishness and childlikeness remain, as he said elsewhere: "when [one] is already old and honoured, and Lord Chancellor of England."

The other day I was reading a mental health journal and I came across a statement that’s right on target -- almost. (That’s not bad for a mental health journal these days.) The author -- founder and medical director of a mental health clinic -- went on to make some cogent observations as well. Here’s that first statement: "I am convinced," he wrote, "that all pathologic behavior that is not the result of a physiologic imbalance can be traced to one central cause: an unwarranted feeling of negativity and inferiority." [Abraham J. Twerski] He tells us that his staff says: "There’s no use asking Abe to evaluate a patient, ... his response will be, ‘Patient suffers from low self-esteem.’" On the basis of my own experience doing counseling for over 27 years, I think he’s right about the experiencing of a sense of inferiority that underpins so much psychopathology and problems of adjustment. But I don’t think we should call it "low self-esteem." I’d call it a misuse of one’s too self-confident sense of self. That’s why I say that calls for increased self-confidence cannot remedy so-called low self-esteem. One’s sense of inferiority vis a vis others makes its self-sabotaging case in an already all too self-confident extrapolating from the self’s own version of the self. We trust our sense of ourselves inordinately, albeit naively. Instead of increasing trust in one’s self-perceptions, judgments and extrapolations therefrom, one would be more realistic to humbly decrease trust in one’s self-perception, judgments and extrapolations.

But getting back to our clinic director. He points out that "One of the defense mechanisms to overcoming ... psychological pain ... is to exert control and to wield power." We see many expressions of this in all sorts of everyday posturing and put-down. He says that it all "reaches its zenith i