I strongly disagree with the characterization that New York City is “the furthest thing from high trust I can think of“
I have interacted with thousands of strangers there with near perfect shared understanding of basic city etiquette. That etiquette does not include warmth, and in fact the way that we have all learned it is someone being quite rude to us when we break the etiquette, but that the city functions at all suggests they are doing something right.
The United States has only been legally multicultural and non-apartheit since .. the 1970s?
New York is notorious for its historical crime problems, but it also has enough trust to support a global financial centre.
That's only legally; socially, multicultural acceptance was lagging by decades. The majority of Americans disapproved of black/white marriages well into the 1990s[1]
1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-...
Germany today and in the 1800s. You know why we have delivery services (Amazon etc, prior to that catalog companies like Sears etc)? It started as mail order, which started in Germany. Because the society had enough trust that you could mail money to a stranger and expect them to send you the product.
Also, the German post was a marvel of civic engineering. Government run projects at its best.
This is how high trust societies break down: cynicism. By objective standards things are no less than they were at the height of trust, but people's expectations have shifted and so subjectively people feel things are worse and begin withholding their trust.
This is why wealth inequality can create such a dilemma, because even if everybody continues to become better off, if you feel relatively worse off, than from a social cohesion standpoint it's just as bad. As overall wealth increases, because of the power law (or whatever curve), you see an acceleration of absolute differences in wealth as the high end of the curve grows steeper. This dynamic makes for a quite difficult sociological problem, which perhaps can be categorized under the rubric, "mo' money, mo' problems".
I don't believe that nothing has changed, but it's hard to point to individual events that prove how they've changed, because they're small things that lead to changes, which lead to more changes. It's still very different between the cities and the more rural suburbs and fully rural villages, and you can see it very clearly when you watch for the small things, e.g. can you leave your bike outside a small store without locking it up. It is what it is, it's not coming back once it's lost.
Today, crime that abuses the remains of Trust is rampant. Old people are tricked out of money by abusing their trust in authorities and their general trust that when somebody calls and says their daughter had an accident, that their daughter had an accident, because nobody would do such a cruel thing. And yet they do, happily laughing about it on TikTok, killing trust.
It makes sense if you squint hard, and understand that "culture" in such arguments, is being used as a proxy of something else that is no longer acceptable to say out loud in polite company. So it was a bunch of disparate states with different traditions, but the same European "culture" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).
But not saying it out loud, of course. Just "the implications"...
>> I don't understand how that could be a high-trust monocultural society in the 1800s.
And it goes the other way, if you want to play that game.
If what you were saying were true then "whiteness" couldn't possibly refer to things such as purely abstract cultural-norms (either don't exist or is weasel-word according to you). So then what are they referring to?
They hawked a lot of stuff from Germany from that time period; Lots of loanwords, uniforms, civic systems copied. Germany really did lead the way. As did Anglos with the law.
WWII, "the greatest generation", almost all of society knew that if they united for a great purpose, they could achieve great things. Of course there were heros, but it was always the team/the group which mattered.
Are you including the soldiers who rioted in England due to the way black American soldiers were being treated by the host country? (That is, black soldiers were being treated as equals). Meanwhile back in the states, American citizens of Japanese descent were in internment camps.
I guess "all of society" uniting entirely depends on who you define "society"
What purpose do we share?
Democracy has nothing to do with what I've asked. We live in a world of various societies each composed of distinct histories, laws, ideologies, creeds, beliefs, cultures, etc. This is as true today as it was millennia ago, before the existence of modern democracy. None of these societies are or were interchangeable, whether across space or time, and many are mutually irreconcilable with respect to one another. Historically, these differences were "settled" with massacres and revolutions, where the victors stood righteous and the losers denounced as animals, barbarians, deviants, heretics, apostates, reactionaries, terrorists, and other terms of abuse. Today, these battles are waged in parliaments and on Internet forums, where the methods are less bloody the but rhetoric and reasoning (or lack thereof) remain relatively unchanged.
Societies, as they exist in the real world, aren't simply voluntary associations of rational individuals (as much as I would like that). They are, whether by accident or design, sets of historical decisions that have accumulated currency in a sufficiently large or sufficiently powerful group of people. These same people are willing to engage in violence or coercion to defend said decisions with little concern for truth.
Sure we're all just trying to get to our next thing, or home, some happy about it, some sad about it, some just tired. But I don't think you'll find so many ages, religions, languages, classes, reasons or moods shoved into one little moving car as a subway and for the most part people not only use it just fine in trusting ways, but deep down, like being among the crush of just humans being human. At least if it's not 100 degrees and the train is running late again.
But even then sometimes, you suffer together, not because of each other.
Purges, torture, violence prisons and tanks kinda destroy trust, really.
Meanwhile supposedly high trust usa had blows of violence on their own. It was better country overall, sure, but plenty of violence due to unreconcillabke groups.