Now for the second main section of my recent manuscript, “On Sleeping through the Night: Ecology, Economy and Ethics of a Vital Human Project.”
2. The Problem of Sleeping through the Night
The peculiarity of sleep as a project is the source of what is most compelling about it as a matter of ethical and environmental concern: animals, who have staked their survival on a strategy based on perception of, responsiveness to, and movement within the world, must periodically suspend that strategy for a time and yield to disconnection from and immobility within a world that nonetheless remains dangerous to them (Lima et al., 2005: 723-24).
I let myself fall asleep with the hope and expectation that I will wake again in the same place and the same general condition, but such hope and expectation may be thwarted in any number of ways while I am disconnected from the world. What I do not know, what never crosses the threshold of awareness, can nonetheless kill me. For our hominin forebears, sleeping on open ground, there was the ever-present risk of predation or some adverse change in the surrounding environment: a storm, a flood, a fire. There was the risk of an attack by a rival band of hominins, or the risk of betrayal from within the group.
If we could remove ourselves from the world to take our rest, sleeping through the night would be no problem at all. But even in a locked room in a house with locked outer doors and windows, within a gated community with private security, located in an affluent part of town with an excellent police force, misfortune may still come upon us in the dark of night.
Hobbes (1996: 88) paints a stark picture of the plight of a would-be sleeper-through-the-night, as an example of the problem of “diffidence” – distrust – in the human condition:
when going to sleep, he locks his dores; when even in his house he lockes his chests; and this when he knows there bee Laws, and publike Officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall bee done him; what opinion he has of his fellow subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow Citizens, when he locks his dores; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests.
Enlisting Leviathan – and perhaps the services of a locksmith duly licensed and monitored by Leviathan – to keep us secure as we sleep may mitigate our vulnerability, but vulnerability cannot be eliminated altogether.
Of course, if we go to our rest worried about our own vulnerability, we may never fall asleep! Disengaging from the world requires some degree of trust – “confidence” rather than “diffidence” – in things (e.g., locks) and people (e.g., family, public officers). That seems also to be the point behind the bedtime prayer and whatever comfort may be taken from a nightly reminder of mortality: if all merely earthly trust were to fail, one may at least entrust the fate of one’s soul to a higher power as a final safeguard against the mischances of the night.
Understood in functional terms, per Niklas Luhmann, trust is a cognitive strategy for coping with the problem posed by the temporal structure of human experience. The world is unimaginably complex, and the horizon of the future is open; we can never have enough information about what might be coming over the horizon of the future to act with assurance, even when we are wide awake.
The function of trust is to reduce complexity and uncertainty. “A complete absence of trust,” writes Luhmann (2017: 5), would prevent a person “from even getting up in the morning. He would be prey to a vague sense of dread, to paralyzing fears.” He continues: “Anything and everything would be possible. Such abrupt confrontation with the complexity of the world at its most extreme is beyond human endurance.” (See also Sheets-Johnstone, 2008: 277)
But if the open horizon of the future is cause for anxiety when we are waking up, how much more acute is the problem when falling asleep, as what is coming over the horizon is a suspension of awareness, the blurring and dissolution of that very horizon? Waking up again is off beyond some further horizon, more a matter of mere hope than of trust.
Luhmann distinguishes two varieties of trust: personal trust and system trust. Personal trust grows out of familiarity with people and circumstances. “In familiar worlds,” writes Luhmann (2017: 22-23), “the past prevails over the present and future. The past does not contain any ‘other possibilities’; complexity is reduced at the outset.” Trust based on familiarity takes the risk of defining the future in terms of a known and settled past: we count on things and people to continue as they have before. Meddis (1977: 15) appealed to something like this sense of personal trust in his account of sleep: “If you think about it, the only people who normally see you sleeping are people who you would trust with your life anyway.”
In more complex social settings, in which it is no longer possible to have an established personal history with those on whom one’s future depends, trust in the familiar gives way to trust in the structure and behavior of social and technological systems: Leviathan, perhaps, and a configuration of walls, doors, locks, and – for some – electronic surveillance which might allow a would-be sleeper to relax enough to drift off. Essential to trust in systems is the assurance that there are “sufficient controls over reliability built into the system” including, perhaps, some means of watching the watchers (Luhmann, 2017: 57-58).
Bear in mind that, as much as it is a condition for functioning in the world, trust remains only a cognitive strategy, a kind of shortcut that allows us to manage complexity and anxiety. It also, as Luhmann (2017: 36-37) reminds us, “rests on an illusion.”
The clues employed to form trust do not eliminate risk; they simply make it less risky. They do not supply complete information about expected behavior of the person to be trusted. They simply serve as the springboard for the leap into a bounded and structured uncertainty.
So, it would seem the problem of sleeping through the night remains unresolved and perhaps irresolvable, however “bounded and structured” our uncertainty and vulnerability may be.
References
Hobbes T (1996) Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lima SL, Rattenborg NC, Lesku JA, et al. (2005) Sleeping Under the Risk of Predation. Animal Behaviour 70: 723-736.
Luhmann N (2017) Trust and Power. Malden, MA: Polity.
Meddis R (1977) The Sleep Instinct. London ; Boston: Routledge & K. Paul.
Sheets-Johnstone M (2008) The Roots of Morality. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
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