Lessons in Trust from the Nation of Plants

The following post from Russell C. Powell, CSWR Research Affiliate, is part of an ongoing series from affiliates of the Thinking with Plants and Fungi Initiative.

Turn or log on to any news channel or website today and political pundits will tell you all about what ails American politics. They may even tell you how we can solve our most pressing political problems. Few, if any, will speak of plants as inspiration. 

Take the U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg as an example. In his recent book, Trust: America’s Best Chance, Buttigieg’s argument is that the greatest affliction troubling American politics is a breakdown in trust. While Buttigieg doesn’t consider what we stand to learn from plant life in our endeavor to strengthen political community, the Italian neuroscientist Stefano Mancuso, in The Nation of Plants, argues that plants possess all the wisdom we might need.

Mancuso’s book is a helpful reminder that plant life displays a creativity that could shore up certain troublesome defects in humans’ politics. The prospects of the political help plants might give become clearer, however, when we read books like Mancuso’s alongside books like Buttigieg’s. 

Buttigieg, for his part, contends that mistrust has undermined the function and future of American democracy. Trust is vital to a healthy democracy’s functioning. When we, as citizens, trust elected officials and public institutions, we grant them the authority to govern. And when citizens trust each other, we foster in our polity a sense of unity and cooperation. 

It’s this sort of trust that American politics is decidedly lacking today. Mistrust between political parties and groups has deepened partisan divides, making cooperation less feasible. Social media, fueling mistrust in facts, has eroded the prospects for productive debate. And the diminution of trust in the media, the judiciary, and the electoral process has led to skepticism about democracy’s very legitimacy.

According to Mancuso, we have much to learn from plant life on these grounds, particularly how plants cooperate to share communities and collaborate on strategies for supporting the common good. While Mancuso doesn’t frame his analysis of plants in terms of “trust” as Buttigieg might understand it, plant behavior could be seen as analogous to trust in human social relations. 

So much turns on how plants trust one another in their communication. For example, plants share distress signals when they are under attack by herbivores or suffering from drought. This allows their neighbors to prepare defenses and adjust their resource use. Plants also engage in mutualistic relationships with other species like fungi, Mancuso shows, which help them enhance nutrient exchange systems. Plants trust one another, we might say, to share information in good faith. They provide for each other in times of need. 

It's best not to subject books by politicians to too much theoretical scrutiny; politicians aren’t philosophers. Yet Mancuso’s suggestions for how human societies might learn from the nation of plants can help to fortify some of the philosophical weaknesses of Buttigieg’s account. Even though Buttigieg stresses trust as a collective responsibility, he never departs from the rather Lockean assumption that trust occurs within the context of a social contract governed by individuals’ rational self-interest. Mancuso, on the other hand, engages plants in an effort to expand the foundation of trust far beyond the presumptions of individualism. 

Yet while Mancuso succeeds in highlighting the many lessons the nation of plants imparts to human society, he leaves unanswered the question of how we might practice those lessons in our social relations. Humans differ from plants in profound ways. How might that difference function in a practical politics that also aims at simulating the trust that plants share?

Had Buttigieg relied on the seventeenth-to-eighteenth-century German thinker Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel rather than John Locke (a seventeenth-century English philosopher) in his thinking about trust as a precondition for politics, his perspective may have stood a better chance of aligning with Mancuso’s proposals. Hegel also believed that trust is crucial for enabling individuals to collaborate in society. But unlike Locke, for whom trust is essentially transactional, as in, a means to safeguard individuals’ interests, Hegel argued that we achieve trust through social relationships grounded in mutual recognition. 

Rather than being a rational calculation, trust, according to Hegel, emerges in human communities when we give each other the recognition we deserve. Trust, in this way, isn’t just a means to ensure rights and protect property but a core aspect of how individuals see themselves and participate in community. Put simply, trust isn’t something we have; it’s something we do. 

A chief lesson of plant life that Mancuso wants us to see is that collective well-being depends on effective communication. Trust is enacted through that communication—a communication of which plant life is exemplary. The lesson of Hegel is that effective communication between humans fails to take place where reciprocal recognition and the trust that results therefrom is absent. 

If we are indeed to recover trust in our politics, as Buttigieg rightly believes all Americans should undertake to achieve, plants can help us to see that trust does not merely accrue to us on the basis of our possessing standing as individuals in political community. Trust must be enacted. It’s something we do through communication and reciprocity. This lesson is readily available, as Mancuso implores us to see, if only we take heed of what the nation of plants has to teach. 

Further Reading:

Pete Buttigieg. Trust: America’s Best Chance. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2020. 

Stefano Mancuso. The Nation of Plants: A Radical Manifesto for Humans. Translated by Gregory Conti. London: Profile Books, 2021.

John Locke. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1988 [1689]. 

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated and edited by Terry Pinkard. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2018 [1807].