FROM THE EDITOR: Finding Our Way Back to Trust in Institutions
We face a crisis of trust locally and nationally. That's damaging on many levels - none more devastating than on our institutions.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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On Friday about 11:30 a.m., we began receiving word suggesting a potentially tragic incident unfolding at Mary Washington Hospital. We weren’t alone, as others began to raise concerns. The source animating the concern? Apparently, a Facebook post.
Our first call was to the communications team at the hospital. They promised to look into it and get back to us. Within five minutes we had our answer — there was no tragedy at the hospital.
By noon, we published a notice making clear that there was no incident.
A simple phone call is all it took to clear up a dangerous piece of misinformation.
It is tempting, and easy, to blame social media for spreading the false information. Social media, I would argue, does need to do more to quell this type of thing — but that’s something beyond the control of most of us in our region to affect.
The more pressing question is why we often instinctively trust, and then spread, what we see on social media or learn by word-of-mouth and bypass reaching out to people well-positioned to know?
There is no simple answer, as circumstances vary. But at core, the frequency with which this happens suggests that we trust our own ability to interpret information more than we trust those associated with institutions or those individuals with expertise.
But left to our own understandings, it is easy to miss important context that makes sense of facts.
Combined properly, facts and context combine to create the understanding on which societies depend for smooth functioning. Combined poorly, the two become a destructive force that undermines our ability to fully understand and appreciate the complexities of our communities.
Distrust of Institutions
Appreciation of and appetite for context appear to be waning if we look at the declining level of trust we have in institutions — the traditional conveyers of contextualized facts.
Gallup is the best source for tracking this decline, as it’s been explicitly asking since 2002 how much people trust institutions. Almost every institution one can name — medical institutions, police, schools, Congress, criminal justice, Big Business, church or organized religion, the military, the U.S. Supreme Court — has realized significant drops in support over the past nearly quarter-century.
This data reflects the decline of trust and by extension our declining trust in contextualized information. But it doesn’t explain why we have abandoned respect for institutions and context as well as those who deliver it.
Enter Jacob Russell and Dennis Patterson, who suggest this declining trust in experts is tied to the ways that experts themselves have handled themselves. In their book The Weaponization of Expertise, the two write:
The claims made by elites about the role of experts versus society in political judgment are disturbing. They are not only undemocratic but also deeply corrosive of expertise. Expertise should rest on humility, doubt, skepticism, and open dialogue, but the elite line of argument turns science into dogmatism. [Emphasis added]
That dogmatism plays out in three unfortunate ways:
Condescension — The emphasis on meritocracy leads intellectually elite people to disparage and openly disrespect “common folk.” A good example was the water experts in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who for years dismissed the concerns of citizens about the quality of their water. The water proved to be high in lead.
Technocratic paternalism — The idea that every argument is over “facts.” Once the facts are known, then a unified policy follows naturally. In the argument over gun control and violence, the discussion is often focused on the highly technical definitions of gun types, which has yet to lead to effective policies that lower gun violence.
Intellectual tyranny — Elites treat doubt as the result of “faulty processes,” allowing them to ignore contrary opinions. A parent without much education may identify an issue with their child’s learning, but have those concerns dismissed because the way they talk about the issue falls outside the ways trained professionals may talk about the problem.
The fault is not with one political pole or the other; it cuts across the spectrum. Regardless of where it comes from, the intellectual dogmatism’s offspring is the same — Populism.
Populists will often fight back by adopting the term “expert” and weaponize it in the same way that the intellectual elites used it against them, effectively rendering the term meaningless.
This leads to opposing sides talking past one another, each clutching to their understanding of “the facts,” each carrying the weight of experts.
Consider the book-banning craze that burned white-hot in Spotsylvania in recent years. The controversy was lit when people acted dismissively of those concerned about the content of books in school libraries. Resting on the intellectual tradition they were grounded in, it became easy to dismiss the opposition as ignorant and backward.
On the other side were the rebuffed who responded with their own so-called experts who argued the law was firmly on their side and that the titles at the center of the maelstrom were “pornographic.” Those who disagreed were quickly labeled as “pedophiles” or worse.
What ensued was a series of endless diatribes devoid of the hallmarks of expertise: humility, doubt, skepticism, and open dialogue.
A similar situation is brewing in Fredericksburg City Schools.
As Adele Uphaus reported last week, the Fredericksburg City School Board is looking to significantly tighten its public comments period, apparently in an effort to at least take the edge off public comments made in recent meetings.
“As we all know, freedom of speech is protected by the Constitution,” Deputy Superintendent Matt Eberhardt said. “So there is considerable opinion and law on the matter, and we needed to make sure this was super clean.”
The proposed changes include requiring that comments “shall be addressed to the entire School Board and not to individual Board members, the Superintendent, staff, or other members of the audience;” that speakers should maintain “civility, decorum and respect;” that “complaints regarding division employees should be directed to the appropriate school division official;” and that “comments that amount to a personal attack against any School Board member … are not allowed.”
The likelihood that this action will increase trust in the School Board, however, is not high.
The opposite is likely to occur, further marginalizing those who already feel unheard and creating fertile ground for more frustration to grow.
The result will be yet another battle between opposing experts who are less concerned with building trust in institutions and more concerned to win a Pyrrhic victory that lasts until the next battle arises.
Finding Our Way Back to Trust
The evidence continues to mount that restoring trust is rarely the point of these public battles. Quite the contrary — populists are working to undermine trust in institutions, while the institutions’ elite dig in, refusing to give an inch to public concerns.
There is no easy path forward, but there are some simple steps we can each take towards rebuilding that which over two-plus decades has been taken apart brick-by-brick.
Measure the experts — There is no shortage of experts in our society. From those we traditionally deem experts (doctors, attorneys, educators) and experts of the self-proclaimed variety (gifting experts, tail-gating experts, and Wordl experts are a few that Russell and Patterson point to so as to demonstrate how loose our use of the term has become). Separating the wheat from the chafe isn’t all that complicated, however. Those who display humility, doubt, skepticism, and promote open dialogue deserve our attention. Those relentlessly advocating for their cause are to be treated with more caution.
Trust the source — As a journalist, I’ve come to appreciate the virtue in a simple rule — trust people until they give you a reason not to trust them. Yes, this trusting can end badly. But it’s a far healthier starting point than doubting each person’s veracity based on some superficial metric — where they work, who funds them, where they went to school, their race, their educational level, and more.
Be honest about one’s limits — When the nation was founded 250 years ago, the idea of the “Renaissance thinker” was real. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin both mastered a range of fields in ways that are simply not possible today. In the 18th century it was possible for Jefferson to be expert in both political science and architecture, and Franklin in electricity and linguistics. It’s much less likely to happen today. There is so much to learn, we talk in terms not of broad expertise, but experts in increasingly narrowing sub-specialties. One wouldn’t visit a cardiologist for a foot problem, or an acoustic scientist for a question about climate change. Appreciating what one doesn’t know and learning to look to others to help fill the gaps is the better way to move forward.
Embracing these steps won’t end conflict. Disagreement isn’t just inevitable, it’s desirable. That’s how learning occurs. Nor will it mean that policy becomes easier to execute. Just the opposite. The more one digs into the intricacies of the problem, the more challenging good policy becomes to create.
What embracing these steps will do, however, is to begin putting us back on the road to trusting one another and, eventually, the institutions we build and need to survive and to thrive.
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