Suddenly everyone is talking about trust. You can scarcely open the newspaper without seeing the word highlighted: politicians are asking for public trust, so are the police, social workers, schoolteachers and, yes, university teachers. And here is a recent comment by an economic columnist of The Independent, reflecting on Britain’s financial system in the light of Northern Rock and the credit crunch. ‘How does the system work?’ he asks, and he answers, ‘Ultimately, it works through trust. We trust banks to look after our money to ensure that we will always be able to get access to our funds on demand.’

Trust is one of the most pervasive, but also least noticed, features of social life. Whenever I board an aircraft, I assume without checking that it has been properly constructed, repaired and maintained, and that the pilot is properly qualified to fly it. If just one of its parts is not functioning perfectly, the consequences for me could be fatal, so in a way this is irresponsible of me. Yet the idea of doing anything else does not enter my head. I have neither the time nor the specialist knowledge to conduct a serious check. I have to trust the airline—about which, incidentally, I know very little.

Life is full of these more or less routine exercises of trust. Seldom if ever can we obtain all the information we would need in order to take decisions in a fully rational manner. Even when we ponder decisions carefully, at a certain point we have to stop seeking further information, say ‘enough is enough’ and take a decision based on what we know and the way we feel. The way in which we do this is strongly influenced by the society in which we live, its customs and its culture.

We exercise trust in two directions: (i) towards persons and institutions; (ii) towards contingencies or fate. I am not mainly concerned with personal trust (though even that depends partly on social factors), but with its social manifestations: trust in institutions and contingencies.

Much trust in the modern world centres around money. Here is an anecdote which I have heard in both Britain and Russia. One day a man walks into a bank and asks to withdraw his entire deposit in the form of cash and to close his account. So the employees go off to the deposit room and return with hundreds of twenty-pound, fifty-pound and hundred-pound notes, which they place in bundles on the counter in front of him. He unties each bundle, lays out the notes, fingers each one, gazes lovingly at them all, then suddenly says, ‘Thank you very much. Now I’d like to deposit this money and open an account.’ So, rather taken aback and irritated, the clerks tie the bundles up again with rubber bands and carry them off behind the scenes. Then one of them asks the customer ‘Why did you close your account and then open it again?’ He replies, ‘Oh, I just wanted to see that my money was really there!’