The Importance of Trust—Not Something Created by Taking Courses in Ethics

If we attempt to write a list of the people we really trust and then try to work out why we trust them, it is clearly not explained by level of education, wealth, privilege or oppression.

Ethics | Fall 2023

by John Patrick, MD

If we attempt to write a list of the people we really trust and then try to work out why we trust them, it is clearly not explained by level of education, wealth, privilege or oppression. Although trust can flourish in any sort of life, it is much more a consequence of a well-formed character than the current obsession with feelings. In no way is character to be confused with the narcissistic personality practiced by those hungry for celebrity, changing with every fashionable trend and opportunity of advancement.

What is character? A practical start would be to say that character is seen in what we do when no one is looking. It is the voice behind me saying, “That is not the way…,” or “You ought to do this….” Ultimately that voice comes from God, but proximately it comes from parents and family culture.

How is it generated? Early childhood is critical. The child learns by watching and imitating the major players in life: father, mother, family, friends, childcare professionals and teachers.

Good and bad examples are acted out before children long before those concepts can be easily expressed. Unlike animals that are a collection of instincts and learned behavior unmodified by any abstract sense of good and evil, children have hard-wired moral concepts. Think of how early in life children say, “Not fair!” Two words which imply a sense of justice and much more. Good and evil as the clue to the meaning of the universe is, for good reason, the title of chapter one in C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. Being able to judge between right and wrong is essential, and using an example from children is sheer brilliance. This cannot be dismissed as judgmental.

Judgmentalism is a bad habit, but making no judgment at all is far worse. Even serious Christians are often guilty of quoting, “Judge not, that you be not judged” (Matthew 7:1, NKJV), without considering the rest of the passage that tells us to judge ourselves first. When that is done and we are forgiven, then we are to use our confession of sin to help others who go astray in the same way. When you have been cured of “log in the eye” disease, you can see clearly to help those with “speck in their eye” disease—no pride involved.

Teachers tend to be loved by small children. That was good when we all inhabited the same story of meaning, but the university, and particularly the faculty of education, has lost its way and turned teachers into followers of the zeitgeist of the age. Isaiah’s injunction, to fear when people start calling evil good and good evil, is chilling but incredibly appropriate to our time. Judgment is a necessary part of life; our Lord said, “…by their fruits you will know them” (Matthew 7:20, NKJV). When pride parades feature full frontal nudity and the chant, “we are coming for your children,” we ought to wake up.

Some form of morality is essential to human society, and describing traditional moral judgments as stereotyping is manipulative rhetoric. Those wishing to change our society’s norms toward untrammeled individual libertarianism have gone from asking for tolerance to extreme intolerance in a few decades. This was predicted some time ago by Lee Harris in an insightful essay titled “The Future of Tradition.”[1]

Economist and social commentator Tom Sowell wisely points out that proposals for social change can be extremely bad, but this could be largely avoided by insisting that the new model be compared directly with the old one, considerable effort made to envisage what problems are foreseeable and finally some data sought to back up every new proposal. The normalization of sexual libertarianism obviously leads to less stable relationships, more divorce, more sexually transmitted disease, more emphasis on unrealistic expectations of external appearances, more consequent neurosis and less attention to the long-term needs of the family throughout life. No children have ever enjoyed the divorce of their parents, even if they later realize it was inevitable. Even government statistics show the best outcomes for children are achieved in heterosexual, committed, monogamous families. This remains so even when the enemies of traditional families sneak into the assessment criteria, such items as foreign travel that only the rich can afford, and which bias the results of the assessment against ordinary people. Thus, they try to dismiss the very foundation that made our success possible; yet, we all know ordinary traditional families consistently produce good citizens.

Cultures produce observably different character traits, too. If it were not so, multiculturalism would never have been thinkable. Much similarity exists between cultures, and the differences seem to me to be mainly about ordering. Try the experiment of asking a variety of people from different cultures and of different ages: what matters most, truth or loyalty? Truth is lost when we allow someone to say that everyone has their own truth (easily shown to be false with the simple question, “Including that statement?”). Loyalty through identity politics is the Darwinian norm today. Let me emphasize that I am not saying loyalty is wrong, but it must be under truth. Where loyalty does not bend the knee to truth, corruption is inevitable and declining competence follows. Unfortunately for naïve apologists for Christianity, conversion does not predict trustworthiness. Conversion of personal virtue or character takes generations. Read Deuteronomy 4-6 with this thought in mind. In our own profession, we all know noisy Christians whom we wish would say less and practice better medicine. Remember to compliment your colleagues whose medical practice you admire; ask them where they think that kind of practice came from. In politics, the absence of truth is even more blatant. When I was young, if politicians were caught lying about important issues they resigned. Not so today.

Economics is a key area where morality matters—Adam Smith’s economics only work when Adam Smith’s ethics are the norm. The Jews dominated banking for centuries because they were taught in Deuteronomy that promise-keeping is central to banking. The subprime financial fiasco was not a technical failure but an ethical one. The brilliant British comedians John Bird and John Fortune make this point in less than 10 minutes.[2] Jews have also made the best pianos for centuries. Why do the best carpets come from the Middle East and the best porcelain from China? All these products are craft products; however, for economies to flourish, a higher level of production is necessary. The question can also be posed differently: what made the per capita income in the world move from a few dollars per year in the late 18th century to more than $8,000 today? The obvious but somewhat facile response is technology based on scientific laws.

The Chinese government appears to understand that there must be something more fundamental. They knew that in the early 1400s China had ships five times the size of the Santa Maria; they had cannons and the compass; and they could smelt iron in a blast furnace. However, they also knew that the great Ming Dynasty fell apart in a few decades in the early 17th century. They needed to understand why.

In the early 1990s, even communists in China were beginning to openly speculate that the Christian faith might eventually conquer the Chinese culture, although they thought Christianity might also be absorbed by Chinese culture, but they wanted to understand more. According to one scholar from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences:

“We were asked to investigate what accounted for the pre-eminence of the West all over the world. We thought it was the powerful guns that the West had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next, we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.”

Another Chinese academic wrote:

“Only by accepting this understanding of transcendence as our criterion can we understand the real meaning of such concepts as freedom, human rights, tolerance, equality, justice, democracy, the rule of law, universality and environmental protection.”[3]

Western civilization is less thoughtful and is consequently in danger of collapse. In The Fourth Great Awakening, Robert Fogel (Nobel Laureate in Economics) provides a list of 15 virtues that will be needed to sustain and nourish our culture. I list them here as a reminder of what we have lost and must recover. Note that self-esteem comes last!