The State of Love and Trust is Mostly a Failed State
Religious deconversion, social cohesion, and empathy decline? It's all related.
Last week, we looked a good bit at empathy and why it has fallen off a cliff. But the decline in empathy—the ability to “be in the shoes of another”—goes hand in hand not only with the experience of being in contact with others and having some kind of basis to recognize the experience of others. It does no good to be in contact with others if we do not ultimately trust that what comes from the mouth of others isn’t something to be understood and considered.
John Paul II, in his letter on faith and reason, writes that
Who, for instance, could assess critically the countless scientific findings upon which modern life is based? Who could personally examine the flow of information which comes day after day from all parts of the world and which is generally accepted as true? Who in the end could forge anew the paths of experience and thought which have yielded the treasures of human wisdom and religion? This means that the human being—the one who seeks the truth—is also the one who lives by belief (Fides et Ratio, 31).
Writing on the relationship between faith and reason, John Paul II is primarily interested in the ways in which my understanding of the world isn’t one which I construct from the ground up, but one which I am led into: I encounter and understand the world by trusting a billion different things which I don’t have time or expertise to look into. Sometimes, these things turn out to be untrue in relatively minor ways, but sometimes, these things which we trust end up being untrue in major ways, and in part because we just didn’t know or have the expertise to know otherwise. Sometimes, the truth of thing is hidden out of malice, but sometimes, the truth of things is obscured from us by genuine ignorance.
The problem is, I think, that we default to thinking that every mistake is one of malice. And if every mistruth is one of malice, we have every reason to revisit every foundation of our beliefs about the world, about God, about ourselves.
This past few years has been a great example of this, though: people doing vaccine “research” online, the rise of conspiracy theories which easily explain away complex questions, and the never-ending stream of gotcha journalism come to mind. All of these begin from the presumption that you should do precisely the opposite of what John Paul II says is the normal way of proceeding into the world: questioning everything, even that which you have absolutely no way of verifying one way or another.
It's no surprise, then, that the rise of skepticism and the loss of social trust has also come packaged together with a decline in religious participation: we don’t trust religious authorities any more than we trust medical or political ones. Convinced that we must begin digging from the sources, we exhaust ourselves looking for answers, without being able to sort out what the answers might even look like. In this world, it’s no surprise then that deconstruction of faith becomes such a hot topic: it fits in perfectly, and will end in as despairing and fragmented way as other forms of skepticism, and fits a world in which we are condemned to providing our own answers to every conceivable question about how to order our lives.
I’m not advocating here for unquestioning submission to authority’s answers, or uncritically adopting the regimes of knowledge put out by everyone with a title. But I am saying that the decline of empathy comes from this root: a decline in trust which makes everyone assume that everyone is acting out of malice, and that I must find out the answers for myself.
That, friends, is exhausting, and also untrue.
From the beginning, we are given the world through the hands of others, and it will always be this way. We are given into a world which God makes and not one which we make ourselves. To be sure, some deal with this state by staking out a place to stand, and then selling everyone else on that vision, but a better way is one of mutual trust and exchange: none of us is given an Archimedean place to stand, and all of us are made to be creatures of trust. To wish to be otherwise is to wish for another world, in which I am God, singular and ultimately, alone in my knowledge.