Walter Lippmann

From Philosopedia

Lippmann, Walter (23 September 1889 - 14 December 1974)

An eminent journalist, once secretary to muckraker Lincoln Steffans, Lippmann was a founder of New Republic. A syndicated columnist, he was also author of A Preface to Politics (1913) and A Preface to Morals (1929). Lippmann wrote Warren Allen Smith concerning humanism:

• The only way I can answer your question [about the connotations of humanism] is to tell you that Professor Mercier’s comments [in American Humanism and the New Age, in which he stated that Lippmann had given up his naturalistic humanism in favor of theistic humanism] are based entirely on my published work and constitute, as I understand it, his interpretation of what I wrote in The Good Society, a book published about nine or ten years after A Preface to Morals. I should like to add that if there is any implication in your letter that I have recently changed my views profoundly, that is not the case. I delivered recently at the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an address which in substance was prepared as part of a manuscript of a book which I plan to publish as a sequel to A Preface to Morals. In my view it marks the evolution of some of the ideas of A Preface to Morals but not a change in any fundamental sense.

In the above-mentioned address, Lippmann included the following:

There are those who, if they had to describe their own religious condition, might say what Alexis de Tocqueville said of his friend Jean Jacques Ampere, the son of the great French physicist and mathematician. It was that his friend was not “a good Christian by belief,” but that he was one, as de Tocqueville put it, “by intention, by taste, and, if I may so put it, by temperament.” This would describe a great multitude in our western society today. They are those, you will recall, whom Dante placed in Limbo, reserving for them a special tenderness and compassion. . . .

As long as the preacher expounds the law, he will be most successful if he is literal and concrete. He will be talking, as politicians and journalists do, to the old Adam in the language that the old Adam understands. But if the preacher is to go beyond this in an attempt to induce a transformation of the will, he will find that the very style of his discourse must be changed. He must go beyond the prosaic language of commonsense to metaphors and poetic parables. He is entering a realm where nothing can be made completely articulate or easily communicable. His words can convey only approximately, only by intimation, by suggestion, by analogy, what he means to say. For he is beyond the boundaries of the commonsense, where what is most poignant is inexact and the last things are ineffable. . . .

He must, therefore, resort to metaphors, parables, and poetic fantasy. For the transcendent truths of the spirit are beyond the limits of commonsense and cannot be stated directly by language, which works within the limitations of commonsense. They can only be suggested to the imagination.

Here, surely, we come upon the innermost problem of religious teaching in our age. For the transcendent experience is not easily evoked where there is not already a disposition to transcend experience and common sense. Yet the disposition to respond to revelation was, I think you will agree, greater in the ages of faith than it is in modern times. May I, venturing greatly, presume to say that the problem of irreligion has become so poignant because it has become necessary, as it was not in the ages of faith, to clear up the ambiguity between the supernatural and the eternal?

“Ours is an age,” says the English philosopher, C. E. M. Joad, “which has . . . no beliefs in regard to the existence of an order of reality other than that which we can see and touch”—that is to say an order of reality which, however abstrusely it may be described mathematically can nevertheless be verified by events. Now in the Ages of Faith the common sense of mankind took it for granted that the order of reality which men can actually see and touch was a small part of what we should now call a supernatural order. The old believer did not think of this supernatural order as being, in our sense of the term, supernatural. What we now call supernatural was for him the natural order of things. There was no conflict with his commonsense. Indeed to him it was commonsense to believe that the visible life of man on earth was the prelude to a larger and different life in an everlasting scheme of things. There was, therefore, an ambiguity in the old religion. Men did not have to distinguish between the supernatural and the eternal, between the Kingdom of God as having an existence in time and lace, and the Kingdom of God within them as an essence outside of time and place. . . .

The critical change which has come in the Modern Age is an alteration of the commonsense of mankind. It is no longer natural to believe that the mundane experience of each individual is not his whole experience. In physics and the metaphysics of modern men, it is no longer self-evident, indeed it is not easily credible, that his experience continues in everlasting time and in some other place. He does not believe in the cosmic framework - as Dante for example visualized it - with its geography, its history, and its constitutional system. Thus for modern man the transcendent experience does not have the support of his common sense, and of his science, and of his cosmogony. If he is to attain it, he must reach it by a steeper and abrupter ascent from his mundane experience, and he must seize it in a much purer form. For the multitude there were the parables and in all the organized religions a much simpler and easier standard of religious life than that which the seers and the saints demanded of themselves. The alteration of commonsense by the development and popularization of science has not discredited the truth of religion. It has, however, left the churches and the preachers the task of making the harder standard of religious experience credible and convincing in itself—without the support of a supernatural physics and a supernatural history. They will have, I believe, to determine, after deep meditation and searching self-examination, how they can demonstrate that the life of the spirit is in fact the fulfillment of the nature of man. That demonstration, if it can be made, will become the support, as supernaturalism was in the Ages of Faith, of the religious life. . . .

If the great hypothesis is valid, then there is no conflict, as the worldly believe, between the deepest needs of the old Adam and the idea of the New Man. Then we are so constituted that our paramount needs are identical with our moral obligations. In so far as we know the true needs of our natures and serve them, we do in fact fulfill the moral law. And as we understand the moral law truly and obey it, we live according to the dictates of our own natures. And so it can be argued, and perhaps in the end demonstrated, that the disorder which oppresses us comes because modern men do not transcend their immediate experience—that though they become educated, they do not become transformed. Today the moralists speak of this disorder as sin and vice. The statesmen speak of it as lawless and anti-social conduct. The physicians speak of it as maladjustment disclosed by symptoms of anxiety. Are they not talking about the same thing? Are they not talking about the person who has failed to understand and to live in the order to which man, as he is actually constituted, belongs? If that is so, then by the research and the meditations of dedicated men, and by the inspired disclosures of men of genius, the life of the spirit and the common sense of men may again be brought into harmony.

“When men can no longer be theists,” wrote the author of A Preface to Morals, “they must, if they are civilized, become humanists. They must live by the premise that whatever is righteous is inherently desirable because experience will demonstrate its desirability. They must live, therefore, in the belief that the duty of man is not to make his will conform to the will of God but to the surest knowledge of the conditions of human happiness.”

James A. Haught quotes the following Lippmann views, found in The Public Philosophy (1955) and A Preface to Morals (1929):

• There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation. . . . No more than the kings before them should the people be hedged with divinity.

• The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.

• Insofar as men have now lost their belief in a heavenly king, they have to find some other ground for their moral choices than the revelation of his will. It follows necessarily that they must find the tests of righteousness wholly within human experience.

• The greatest of all perplexities in theology has been to reconcile the infinite goodness of God with his omnipotence. Nothing puts a greater strain upon the faith of the common man than the existence of utterly irrational suffering in the universe.

Correspondence

{CE; CL; Humanist Newsletter, September- October 1953; TYD; WAS, 6 April 1949}