The Poisoned Offerings of Travel and Trust
Travel is core to my life: for the last six years, I’ve lived as an expat or nomad. Most recently, Bogota, Colombia, has been my home. Before I was 18, I barely left my rural hometown (population: 7000), and then just to live a 90-minute drive away, so I guess I’ve been making up for lost time.
It’s a platitude that travel can teach us about ourselves, but of course that’s true. For me, travel generally reinforces two incompatible realizations at once — or, if not incompatible, then realizations that at least tilt in different directions. For example, for me, travel emphasizes the myriad of lives I could realistically live and the versions of myself I could be. At the same time, it underscores that these will all be versions of myself: as an entity, I’m at least as fixed as I am open.
I read Alphonso Lingis’s reflections on travel, Trust (University of Minnesota Press), in this spirit. Lingis rightly points out that travel highlights that trust is a foundational trait of what it is to be human, though I think it’s worth tempering his enthusiasm for trust by acknowledging some of its more self-serving dimensions. Lingis uses travel as a vehicle for examining trust, and as elsewhere, the insights garnered from travel are puzzling, pointing in two directions at once.
Trust
As I noted in a previous post, Trust is a weird book. Lingis is a (quite quirky) academic philosopher, though Trust is far from a traditional academic text. It makes its argument slowly by gradually unpacking vignettes based on Lingis’s travel experiences. I bought a used copy, and as the previous owner noted (rather unkindly), the prose is quite lofty.
Fittingly, Trust isn’t super clear on its methodological approach, though the reader can discern one. The book isn’t just a collection of anecdotes. For my money, I read Trust as a type of phenomenological investigation. I love the branch of philosophy innovated by Husserl and the like, though I hate the word “phenomenology.” The word refers to a method, but people forget that, and social scientists in particular have a way of treating it as a needlessly fancy synonym for “experience.”
Phenomenology is a philosophical approach that aims to learn about consciousness by systematically investigating it from the inside. There’s been quite a bit of debate about the best way to do that. Heidegger’s Being and Timedemonstrates one approach: it starts by looking at human behavior in action to identify structures in human consciousness. The idea is to start by noting how humans behave before working backward to determine what type of being a human would have to be to demonstrate that behavior.Heidegger’s ultimate aim was broader (to get clear on “Being” more generally), and he ended up jettisoning this path, feeling it was uselessly anthropologized.
But we don’t need to follow him on that, and Lingis certainly doesn’t in Trust.If you start with this method, then you can quickly see how taking ourselves out of our ordinary settings can cast our behavior or thought in a new light that might elucidate something unexpected or unappreciated about our minds. Travel can provide us with a different vantage point that might underscore previously unrecognized or underappreciated structures in human consciousness.
Seen from this perspective, Lingis’s take on travel is that it demonstrates that humans are fundamentally trustingbeings. What is trust? At this point, I probably don’t need to say that the book doesn’t bother with a definition. But what I take from its handling of trust is largely consistent with the general definitions of trust in the scholarly literature: a psychological state in which one accepts a position of vulnerability based on positive expectations regarding others’ intentions or predicted behavior. There’s a kind of leap of faith in trust: when trusting someone, you take a chance and make yourself vulnerable and hope the trusted entity doesn’t leave you hanging.
Types of Trust
Trust specifically calls out at least two levels or types of trust. I wish it had said more about how those relate (maybe something is buried in one of the vignettes). We trust different things in different ways, and I would love to see a more systematic working out of those relationships.
Anyway, Trust gets us started by pointing to at least two types of trust: what I might call interpersonal trust and foundational trust. Interpersonal trust is what we mean when we say we trust a person. In this case, I take the chance of making myself vulnerable with you because I think that you aren’t going to harm me.
Lingis dwells at length on interpersonal trust. He emphasizes the way that trusting someone is a way of pushing past social roles to make a deep statement about the trusted person. On Lingis’s account, trust pierces the quotidian, superficial level of engagement we normally demonstrate when occupying social roles. You may have certain duties or responsibilities by virtue of your social position, but to trust you is a statement on you and your likelihood of carrying them out (at least as Lingis tells it).
Foundational trust is a more subtle concept that the text itself handles more subtly. I think Lingis’s point there is that the choice to travel, to leave the comfort of one’s home, is a decision that is fundamentally predicated on an attitude of trust. When you travel, you willingly make yourself vulnerable by going to a place in which you are unfamiliar with the customs and people, and you make that decision based on the assumption that your new setting won’t do you wrong. Seen from that perspective, the choice to travel to a place is a vote of confidence in the people, institutions, and general setting of that unfamiliar location.
This foundational level of trust isn’t specific to any given person; one assumes that there will still be people with poor intentions in the world, and you might think better of trusting the dubious guy staring at you in a dark alley. Foundational trust is a more general stratum of trust regarding a setting in general — and, arguably, the world at large. In this sense, there might even be another, truly foundational level of trust that makes life possible (e.g., trust in the predictability and consistency of the physical world) and is thus epistemologically prior to foundational trust, though I’ll leave such distinctions to the philosophers.
The Dark Side of Trust
The scholarly literature generally treats trust as an unqualified good, and Lingis is similarly effusive in celebrating trust. He writes at length about the joy that trust can engender, the pleasure a trusting form of recognition can yield, and the excitement and invigorating experience that trust can generate.
On a first pass, it’s hard to argue that trust is a bad thing. However, some commentators have pointed out that trust isn’t always benign. How so? Well, the most obvious starting point is that it can be misplaced. It’s not hard to see this one: when experiencing the vulnerability of taking a taxi in a new city, excessive fares are par for the course.
Fair enough, but there’s a deeper point here. Some people have pointed out that trust can be weaponized (or at least the appearance of trust; I’ll leave open the question of when and how we’re dealing with a sincerely trusting relationship as opposed to a simulated one). On this account, the choice to trust someone can be expressed in a way that plays on social norms or social psychology to lead others to feel indebted to you. The trust act can saddle the trusted entity with obligations. This might sound abstract until you think of when a parent or teacher has emphasized “I’m trusting you with this” before sending you out to run an errand or acknowledging the temptation to skirt a rule during recess. Isn’t it amazing how just having that said to you made you feel pressure to act in a certain way (there’s got to be a social psych study on this somewhere)? That’s the type of thing these commentators have in mind. Of itself, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it can actually be a way to bring the best out of yourself and others. Still, it can be a little manipulative, and it’s not hard to see how the sense of obligation or exchange generated by this form of trust could be abused.
Returning to Lingis, it’s easy to see how this could apply to interpersonal trust. Trust is an effective strategy for playing on social conventions to engineer a pleasurable or self-indulgent travel experience. This could take a more material form, or it could be as simple as the pleasure of vulnerability: as Lingis says, “Travel far enough and we find ourselves happily back in the infantile world.” From one perspective, this is a nice opportunity to fully embrace the pleasure of being alive and the support that others can provide. From another perspective, it’s a means of orchestrating a self-indulgent form of infantilization.
Pushing a little further, I’m curious about how this sense of the weaponization of trust relates to foundational trust. A certain type of expat or digital nomad often talks about the sense of joy and release that can come from putting one’s trust in the world. Sometimes, this can take on something of a New Agey, pseudo-spiritual cast: by surrendering oneself to the world and embracing it with full trust, powerful serendipities open that smooth over a path to joy, enlightenment, maybe even material wealth — or whatever it is one is after. One hears this often in the Tulum, Mexico, variety of spirituality.
On the one hand, this can seem to be something of a vote of confidence in the inherent goodness of the universe, god, or whatever. And maybe it is. But it at least houses the danger of being a form of petty metaphysical calculation: by bargaining with whatever rendering of a cosmic order I’ve come up with, the pesos of my trust might lead “the universe” to yield an experience of plenitude that somehow just feels right (right?).
Conclusion
Travel underscores competing phenomenological extremes: trust is about me, trust is about you, trust is selfish, trust is altruistic. Which is it? Both and neither. There’s no sense in tying ourselves into knots trying to unknot ideal types, though the poisoned offerings of trust and travel are certainly worth bearing in mind after we’ve deplaned and forked over our passport.