The Consequences of Modernity

TRUST AND MODERNITY Two people approach and pass one another on a city sidewalk. What could be more trivial and uninteresting? Such an event may happen millions of times a day even within a single urban area. Yet something is going on here which links apparently minor aspects of bodily management to some of the most pervasive features of modernity. The “inattention” displayed is not indifference. Rather it is a carefully monitored demonstration of what might be called polite estrangement. As the two people approach one another, each rapidly scans the face of the other, looking away as they pass – Goffman calls this a mutual “dimming of the lights.” The glance accords recognition of the other as an agent and as a potential acquaintance. Holding the gaze of the other only briefly, then looking ahead as each passes the other couples such an attitude with an implicit reassurance of lack of hostile intent.

The maintenance of civil inattention seems to be a very general presupposition of the trust presumed in regular encounters with strangers in public places. How important this is can easily be seen in circumstances where it is absent of fractured. The “hate stare,” for instance, which, as Goffman notes, whites in the southern United States have been known in the past to give to blacks to participate in some orthodox forms of day-to-day interaction with whites. In a somewhat contrary example, a person walking through a tough neighbourhood may walk fast, looking straight ahead the whole time, or furtively, in both cases avoiding any eye contact with other passersby. A lack of elementary trust in the possible intentions of others leads the individual to avoid catching their gaze, which might precipitate a potentially hostile engagement. TRUST IN ABSTRACT SYSTEMS It will be a basic part of my argument that the nature of modern institutions is deeply bound up with the mechanisms of trust in abstract systems, especially trust in expert systems. In conditions of modernity, the future is always open, nor just in terms of the ordinary contingency of things, but in terms of the reflexivity of knowledge in relation to which social practices are organized. This counterfactual, future-oriented character of modernity is largely structured by trust vested in abstract systems – which by its very nature is filtered by the trustworthiness of established expertise. It is extremely important to be clear about what this involves. The reliance placed by lay actors upon expert systems is not just a matter – as was normally the case in the pre-modern world – f generating a sense of security about an independently given universe of events. Its is a matter of the calculation of benefit and risk in circumstances where expert knowledge does not just provide that calculus but actually creates (or reproduces) the universe of events, as a result of the continual reflexive implementation of that very knowledge.