Ping Pong 55; A Matter of Trust
How do you and I ever really communicate with each other? Why can we communicate? It is to the later Wittgenstein’s great credit that he understood that this question is far from simple or easy. If Communication cannot be assumed to be a God given right or yet a logical description of the empirical world, one is at a loss to immediately place it. What are we doing when we talk to each other? Here, perhaps Wittgenstein’s real innovation was to insist that it is the others that really matter in such an exchange. A private language is mere gobbledygook. It is in the nature of a language to be shared. That is, a language is something that can both be taught in itself, and once learnt can then be used by an unspecified number of people to describe their world.
Language is therefore as nothing else is, necessarily collective. It is that function of the mind which I am called on to share with others. A sharing which will then actually allow me to build my own mind in the first place. But then what lies at the heart of such a shared experience but trust? Language is quite literally meaningless without a high degree of trust. That is, if you change the meaning of the words all the time then the very essence of language is compromised. To communicate is therefore also to trust. And yet this trust is always likely to be tricky. We might trust each other and yet still use language in different ways and with different emphases. Trust is therefore something that needs to be perpetually negotiated as the use of words changes and evolves, or again as our misuse of them becomes apparent. To run an effective society is therefore caught up with running an effective language (for what society is not a society of communicating individuals?) that is therefore bound up with problems of trust, and problems of the misuse of words. Both these topics will therefore need to be considered in detail in this Rant.
The problem of trust is of course the problem that haunts us all at the moment. A ghost that probably needs to be understood at two levels; that of its own life in the ruins of the ghost of macro economic trust, but also that of micro economic management. Each will need to be looked at in turn. But in both cases the problem will come down to the same basic problem. Communication is all about trust assuredly. And yet the mechanics of this trust are complex. Exactly whom one trusts and when and why actually shifts and changes in time and with circumstance. From which it of course follows that the people one can actually listen to are not themselves constant. I might hear you and your gloomy prophecy one day, and yet things might then change and I cannot understand you, on another. Trust need not be riveted into specific stable blocs. Indeed at both the levels mentioned above it is clear that trust has, over the last ten years been a somewhat volatile commodity.
On the level of the wide scale economy, there has been a dream of continued expansion and growth. This continued expansion is in a sense, the bastard child of the internet. That is, it is clear that the internet has opened up all sorts of avenues and all sorts of new opportunities, opportunities that, the rubric ran, will only grow and evolve in time. Finance therefore assumed (or at least had as its underlying assumption) that this world of vital expansion applied to it too. It claimed the thought that everything was going to always get better all the time. That is, that technology meant that wealth was a one way street.
This claim was then echoed by politicians such as Gordon Brown who wanted easy good news, and were aware that the growth that was occurring appeared unprecedented. How else could he easily explain the fact for example, that the British economy consistently out performed any reasoned model or expectation. Or to put it another way, it appeared on the face of it, that the British economy was running against the rubric of the economist. Their language (that of the economists) appeared to predict that it ought to be doing a whole lot worse than it was! The result was of course that Gordon Brown, and those caught up with the euphoria that this situation created, had no time for the real experts (economic and historical) in the field. Their clarion voices might realize that there must be something wrong somewhere; That this growth was unnatural and that that itself was a problem. - However their words, quite literally, could not be heard. Or if they were heard, appeared to make no real sense. They did not impact upon the trust that the political and media establishments inhabited. The latter rather listened to the high priests of this growth, i.e. the bankers, Or rather those bankers who had nailed their fortunes to the mast of perpetual unreasoned growth.
The trouble of course with such trust, is that it is at once aggressive, but also stupid and unstable. It is necessarily aggressive as trust in the future is only maintained if everyone agrees that a certain future is the one that will occur. A trust that therefore can quite literally brook no opposition. All opposition threatens as it threatens the very means in which the system operates. The result is that no other options can be raised (the system is stupid therefore) and that there must be an undercurrent forcing everyone into the system. And yet it is unlikely that even that will ever be enough. There will come a point when the forces of chaos are just too great, and questions will be asked about where and why the system is operating as it is. However the very fact of one asking this question, destroys the glue of the system itself. That is, to ask this question is to question trust. And if one questions it, one in effect eradicates it. Trust is simply something that one needs to assume. The very wondering therefore about the nature and stability of economic growth was enough to destroy that growth, and do so completely and absolutely. All the fiction of trust on which the economic ‘miracle’ of the last years of pyramid selling and Ponzi schemes is swept away in the blinking of an eye and we are back in crippling recession.
On a more micro level, the last twenty years has seen the burgeoning of personal finance. Individuals have therefore been forced into new and ever expanding relations of trust. This trust is highly problematic, as it is deliberately made hard to resist it. That is, the system is arranged such that those who want to remain cautious about their finances are discriminated against. One could save one’s money in a single account or hide it under the bed, but if one does, the claim runs, that in effect one loses value on it (as inflation nudges up). An entire system was therefore generated to oblige wide chunks of the population, to trust a number of relatively few financial advisors. The trouble was of course that these advisors were locked within their own little worlds. That is, they inhabited the world of advisors and the profits and rumours that sweep this world. The advice they gave was therefore was almost invariably merely the ‘rumour’ or gossip which they had heard down problematic and shifting grapevines. As actual advice on which to plan long term economic futures therefore, it was in effect as near to useless as makes no odds. Or even if it were not actually useless, it was so caught up within a world in which the actual investor played almost no part, that it was of relatively little value.
The position of trust therefore that investors found themselves within was highly problematic and asymmetric. On the one hand there was a system that obliged individuals to use these investment advisors, and which opened up therefore a huge burden of trust and responsibility for these individuals. On the other, there was the world they themselves lived within, with its sliding values and constant rumours, a world that was simply ‘not worthy’ of all this trust. It was no wonder therefore, that the entire system was unstable. Nor is there any great surprise that when faced with that ruin, the community with all the power, the community of investment managers, should reverse the reality of the situation. In reality it was of course they who proved unable to be trusted. However faced with their own untrustworthiness (and the failure of the system) they then concluded that the only way to make the system as it is work, was to ensure that the individuals to whom they loaned money were absolutely in themselves trustworthy. They inverted therefore the problem and imposed on the would-be borrowers impossible criteria to prove their worth. The logic being that traders can only learn to trust each other, if they are sure that the currency which they use, the individual to whom they have lent money, are absolutely trustworthy.
The second problem mentioned above was the problem of how one ensured that one’s words continued to be trustworthy. This problem is as Wittgenstein realized, a deep one. Words are inexact currency. It is therefore very easy to conjoin under a single word, a whole variety of different elements and topics. This fact will of course make the use of the word rather tricky. One speaks and others hear and think they understand, but exactly what one means is not clear: It is subject to a category error. That is, one is labelling the wrong thing and holding together ideas that really ought to remain separate. Even worse of course, it is often in the interests of both politicians and the media to use language rather loosely and inexactly. Gordon Brown is therefore adept at claiming one thing while actually meaning something else and many ‘commentators’ frequently rely on the laziest of language in order to avoid real thought or actual commentary.
There appears therefore a real role for those who would claim to keep language free and keep words having their meaning. And yet here one hits an immediate contradiction. On the one hand it is the logic of the Wittgenstein system that language is based upon trust, and not sense. It therefore does not really matter that you and I are talking utter rubbish so long as we are using language in the correct way to foster our delusion. On the other, there is always a temptation to lead individuals though language to other places and other ways of labelling the world. One might therefore look to language and its correct use by the population for whatever vices one assumes that it has. The purity of language will then become the rallying cry or at least an excuse for not having a more expensive (and even more divisive) policy.
Moreover this double headed approach on the behalf of those that would purify language is made all the more complex because it is unlikely that any language at any time could lack ambiguity and creative inexactness. In a sense this point at which trust breaks down or comes under strain is itself a feature of the very language that it appears to betray. The hope therefore that one could simply clarify the whole is to mistake the value of the error or at least the potential value of the error in challenging the world. However of course here one needs so much caution. What might appear to me to be a productive misuse of language might to others be a flagrant abuse which create ripples elsewhere and in other communities. My creativity is eventually your oppression (Art is full of such problems). What is more, these problems or tensions will create within one society different provinces of language use. Creative elements in one province will disturb others or perplex them or simply be absolutely incomprehensible to them, and will necessarily be so. The entire very ‘adult’ faith then that language itself can be used to explain things to a population is problematic. That is, the idea that there is a correct use and that we can all as adults agree to that use is itself flawed. I.e. it might exist for one community, one set of trusting individuals and not for another. It is therefore cheap or merely the product of an assumed elite to insist that one’s own particular speech pattern is the norm that others ought to follow.
The ultimate irony is therefore that far from leading to a single dominant and highly correct use of language, the apostles of correct language use have been forced to open the Pandora’s Box of myriad languages and myriad points or invitations to trust. The trouble is that if in this confusion of voices one cannot devise a single simple language to understand everyone, then what will one do? That is to say, how can one create the kind of trust needed for a society to function and be just (which surely assumes just such trust) to operate if the very way in which we communicate and label things is so radically different? Where is the justice in any one of our acts in a multi-cultural world? This problem is one that haunts not just the poor little ‘pure Wittgensteinians’ with their nice little dream that everyone ought to talk as they do, but also that has become one of the deep problems of our time. The problems of allowing others within one’s world. A problem to which the next of these Rants will turn.
