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Books: Public Opinion

W >> Walter Lippmann >> Public Opinion



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PUBLIC OPINION

BY

WALTER LIPPMANN


TO
FAYE LIPPMANN

Wading River,
Long Island.
1921.

_"Behold! human beings living in a sort of underground den,
which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all across
the den; they have been here from their childhood, and have their
legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only
see before them; for the chains are arranged in such a manner as
to prevent them from turning round their heads. At a distance
above and behind them the light of a fire is blazing, and between
the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will
see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen
which marionette players have before them, over which they show
the puppets.

I see, he said.

And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying
vessels, which appear over the wall; also figures of men and
animals, made of wood and stone and various materials; and some
of the prisoners, as you would expect, are talking, and some of
them are silent?

This is a strange image, he said, and they are strange prisoners.

Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows,
or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the
opposite wall of the cave?

True, he said: how could they see anything but the shadows if
they were never allowed to move their heads?

And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they
would see only the shadows?

Yes, he said.

And if they were able to talk with one another, would they not
suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?"_
--The Republic of Plato, Book Seven. (Jowett Translation.)


CONTENTS

PART I. INTRODUCTION

I. The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads

PART II. APPROACHES TO THE WORLD OUTSIDE

II. Censorship and Privacy

III. Contact and Opportunity

IV. Time and Attention

V. Speed, Words, and Clearness

PART III. STEREOTYPES

VI. Stereotypes

VII. Stereotypes as Defense

VIII. Blind Spots and Their Value

IX. Codes and Their Enemies

X. The Detection of Stereotypes

PART IV. INTERESTS

XI. The Enlisting of Interest

XII. Self-Interest Reconsidered

PART V. THE MAKING OF A COMMON WILL

XIII. The Transfer of Interest

XIV. Yes or No

XV. Leaders and the Rank and File

PART VI. THE IMAGE OF DEMOCRACY

XVI. The Self-Centered Man

XVII. The Self-Contained Community

XVIII. The Role of Force, Patronage, and Privilege

XIX. The Old Image in a New Form: Guild Socialism

XX. A New Image

PART VII. NEWSPAPERS

XXI. The Buying Public

XXII. The Constant Reader

XXIII. The Nature of News

XXIV. News, Truth, and a Conclusion

PART VIII. ORGANIZED INTELLIGENCE

XXV. The Entering Wedge

XXVI. Intelligence Work

XXVII. The Appeal to the Public

XXVIII. The Appeal to Reason




PART I

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

THE WORLD OUTSIDE AND THE PICTURES
IN OUR HEADS




CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION

THE WORLD OUTSIDE AND THE PICTURES
IN OUR HEADS

There is an island in the ocean where in 1914 a few Englishmen,
Frenchmen, and Germans lived. No cable reaches that island, and the
British mail steamer comes but once in sixty days. In September it had
not yet come, and the islanders were still talking about the latest
newspaper which told about the approaching trial of Madame Caillaux
for the shooting of Gaston Calmette. It was, therefore, with more than
usual eagerness that the whole colony assembled at the quay on a day
in mid-September to hear from the captain what the verdict had been.
They learned that for over six weeks now those of them who were
English and those of them who were French had been fighting in behalf
of the sanctity of treaties against those of them who were Germans.
For six strange weeks they had acted as if they were friends, when in
fact they were enemies.

But their plight was not so different from that of most of the
population of Europe. They had been mistaken for six weeks, on the
continent the interval may have been only six days or six hours. There
was an interval. There was a moment when the picture of Europe on
which men were conducting their business as usual, did not in any way
correspond to the Europe which was about to make a jumble of their
lives. There was a time for each man when he was still adjusted to an
environment that no longer existed. All over the world as late as July
25th men were making goods that they would not be able to ship, buying
goods they would not be able to import, careers were being planned,
enterprises contemplated, hopes and expectations entertained, all in
the belief that the world as known was the world as it was. Men were
writing books describing that world. They trusted the picture in their
heads. And then over four years later, on a Thursday morning, came the
news of an armistice, and people gave vent to their unutterable relief
that the slaughter was over. Yet in the five days before the real
armistice came, though the end of the war had been celebrated, several
thousand young men died on the battlefields.

Looking back we can see how indirectly we know the environment in
which nevertheless we live. We can see that the news of it comes to us
now fast, now slowly; but that whatever we believe to be a true
picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself. It is harder
to remember that about the beliefs upon which we are now acting, but
in respect to other peoples and other ages we flatter ourselves that
it is easy to see when they were in deadly earnest about ludicrous
pictures of the world. We insist, because of our superior hindsight,
that the world as they needed to know it, and the world as they did
know it, were often two quite contradictory things. We can see, too,
that while they governed and fought, traded and reformed in the world
as they imagined it to be, they produced results, or failed to produce
any, in the world as it was. They started for the Indies and found
America. They diagnosed evil and hanged old women. They thought they
could grow rich by always selling and never buying. A caliph, obeying
what he conceived to be the Will of Allah, burned the library at
Alexandria.

Writing about the year 389, St. Ambrose stated the case for the
prisoner in Plato's cave who resolutely declines to turn his head. "To
discuss the nature and position of the earth does not help us in our
hope of the life to come. It is enough to know what Scripture states.
'That He hung up the earth upon nothing' (Job xxvi. 7). Why then argue
whether He hung it up in air or upon the water, and raise a
controversy as to how the thin air could sustain the earth; or why, if
upon the waters, the earth does not go crashing down to the bottom?...
Not because the earth is in the middle, as if suspended on even
balance, but because the majesty of God constrains it by the law of
His will, does it endure stable upon the unstable and the void."
[Footnote: Hexaemeron, i. cap 6, quoted in _The Mediæval Mind_,
by Henry Osborn Taylor, Vol. i, p. 73.]

It does not help us in our hope of the life to come. It is enough to
know what Scripture states. Why then argue? But a century and a half
after St. Ambrose, opinion was still troubled, on this occasion by the
problem of the antipodes. A monk named Cosmas, famous for his
scientific attainments, was therefore deputed to write a Christian
Topography, or "Christian Opinion concerning the World." [Footnote:
Lecky, _Rationalism in Europe_, Vol. I, pp. 276-8.] It is clear
that he knew exactly what was expected of him, for he based all his
conclusions on the Scriptures as he read them. It appears, then, that
the world is a flat parallelogram, twice as broad from east to west as
it is long from north to south., In the center is the earth surrounded
by ocean, which is in turn surrounded by another earth, where men
lived before the deluge. This other earth was Noah's port of
embarkation. In the north is a high conical mountain around which
revolve the sun and moon. When the sun is behind the mountain it is
night. The sky is glued to the edges of the outer earth. It consists
of four high walls which meet in a concave roof, so that the earth is
the floor of the universe. There is an ocean on the other side of the
sky, constituting the "waters that are above the firmament." The space
between the celestial ocean and the ultimate roof of the universe
belongs to the blest. The space between the earth and sky is inhabited
by the angels. Finally, since St. Paul said that all men are made to
live upon the "face of the earth" how could they live on the back
where the Antipodes are supposed to be? With such a passage before
his eyes, a Christian, we are told, should not 'even speak of the
Antipodes.'" [Footnote: _Id._]

Far less should he go to the Antipodes; nor should any Christian
prince give him a ship to try; nor would any pious mariner wish to
try. For Cosmas there was nothing in the least absurd about his map.
Only by remembering his absolute conviction that this was the map of
the universe can we begin to understand how he would have dreaded
Magellan or Peary or the aviator who risked a collision with the
angels and the vault of heaven by flying seven miles up in the air. In
the same way we can best understand the furies of war and politics by
remembering that almost the whole of each party believes absolutely in
its picture of the opposition, that it takes as fact, not what is, but
what it supposes to be the fact. And that therefore, like Hamlet, it
will stab Polonius behind the rustling curtain, thinking him the king,
and perhaps like Hamlet add:

"Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
I took thee for thy better; take thy fortune."

2

Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public
only through a fictitious personality. Hence the modicum of truth in
the old saying that no man is a hero to his valet. There is only a
modicum of truth, for the valet, and the private secretary, are often
immersed in the fiction themselves. Royal personages are, of course,
constructed personalities. Whether they themselves believe in their
public character, or whether they merely permit the chamberlain to
stage-manage it, there are at least two distinct selves, the public
and regal self, the private and human. The biographies of great people
fall more or less readily into the histories of these two selves. The
official biographer reproduces the public life, the revealing memoir
the other. The Charnwood Lincoln, for example, is a noble portrait,
not of an actual human being, but of an epic figure, replete with
significance, who moves on much the same level of reality as Aeneas or
St. George. Oliver's Hamilton is a majestic abstraction, the sculpture
of an idea, "an essay" as Mr. Oliver himself calls it, "on American
union." It is a formal monument to the state-craft of federalism,
hardly the biography of a person. Sometimes people create their own
facade when they think they are revealing the interior scene. The
Repington diaries and Margot Asquith's are a species of
self-portraiture in which the intimate detail is most revealing as an
index of how the authors like to think about themselves.

But the most interesting kind of portraiture is that which arises
spontaneously in people's minds. When Victoria came to the throne,
says Mr. Strachey, [Footnote: Lytton Strachey, _Queen Victoria_,
p. 72.] "among the outside public there was a great wave of
enthusiasm. Sentiment and romance were coming into fashion; and the
spectacle of the little girl-queen, innocent, modest, with fair hair
and pink cheeks, driving through her capital, filled the hearts of the
beholders with raptures of affectionate loyalty. What, above all,
struck everybody with overwhelming force was the contrast between
Queen Victoria and her uncles. The nasty old men, debauched and
selfish, pigheaded and ridiculous, with their perpetual burden of
debts, confusions, and disreputabilities--they had vanished like the
snows of winter and here at last, crowned and radiant, was the
spring."

M. Jean de Pierrefeu [Footnote: Jean de Pierrefeu, _G. Q. G. Trois
ans au Grand Quartier General_, pp 94-95.] saw hero-worship at
first hand, for he was an officer on Joffre's staff at the moment of
that soldier's greatest fame:

"For two years, the entire world paid an almost divine homage to the
victor of the Maine. The baggage-master literally bent under the
weight of the boxes, of the packages and letters which unknown people
sent him with a frantic testimonial of their admiration. I think that
outside of General Joffre, no commander in the war has been able to
realize a comparable idea of what glory is. They sent him boxes of
candy from all the great confectioners of the world, boxes of
champagne, fine wines of every vintage, fruits, game, ornaments and
utensils, clothes, smoking materials, inkstands, paperweights. Every
territory sent its specialty. The painter sent his picture, the
sculptor his statuette, the dear old lady a comforter or socks, the
shepherd in his hut carved a pipe for his sake. All the manufacturers
of the world who were hostile to Germany shipped their products,
Havana its cigars, Portugal its port wine. I have known a hairdresser
who had nothing better to do than to make a portrait of the General
out of hair belonging to persons who were dear to him; a professional
penman had the same idea, but the features were composed of thousands
of little phrases in tiny characters which sang the praise of the
General. As to letters, he had them in all scripts, from all
countries, written in every dialect, affectionate letters, grateful,
overflowing with love, filled with adoration. They called him Savior
of the World, Father of his Country, Agent of God, Benefactor of
Humanity, etc.... And not only Frenchmen, but Americans, Argentinians,
Australians, etc. etc.... Thousands of little children, without their
parents' knowledge, took pen in hand and wrote to tell him their love:
most of them called him Our Father. And there was poignancy about
their effusions, their adoration, these sighs of deliverance that
escaped from thousands of hearts at the defeat of barbarism. To all
these naif little souls, Joffre seemed like St. George crushing the
dragon. Certainly he incarnated for the conscience of mankind the
victory of good over evil, of light over darkness.

Lunatics, simpletons, the half-crazy and the crazy turned their
darkened brains toward him as toward reason itself. I have read the
letter of a person living in Sydney, who begged the General to save
him from his enemies; another, a New Zealander, requested him to send
some soldiers to the house of a gentleman who owed him ten pounds and
would not pay.

Finally, some hundreds of young girls, overcoming the timidity of
their sex, asked for engagements, their families not to know about it;
others wished only to serve him."

This ideal Joffre was compounded out of the victory won by him, his
staff and his troops, the despair of the war, the personal sorrows,
and the hope of future victory. But beside hero-worship there is the
exorcism of devils. By the same mechanism through which heroes are
incarnated, devils are made. If everything good was to come from
Joffre, Foch, Wilson, or Roosevelt, everything evil originated in the
Kaiser Wilhelm, Lenin and Trotsky. They were as omnipotent for evil as
the heroes were omnipotent for good. To many simple and frightened
minds there was no political reverse, no strike, no obstruction, no
mysterious death or mysterious conflagration anywhere in the world of
which the causes did not wind back to these personal sources of evil.

3

Worldwide concentration of this kind on a symbolic personality is rare
enough to be clearly remarkable, and every author has a weakness for
the striking and irrefutable example. The vivisection of war reveals
such examples, but it does not make them out of nothing. In a more
normal public life, symbolic pictures are no less governant of
behavior, but each symbol is far less inclusive because there are so
many competing ones. Not only is each symbol charged with less feeling
because at most it represents only a part of the population, but even
within that part there is infinitely less suppression of individual
difference. The symbols of public opinion, in times of moderate
security, are subject to check and comparison and argument. They come
and go, coalesce and are forgotten, never organizing perfectly the
emotion of the whole group. There is, after all, just one human
activity left in which whole populations accomplish the union sacrée.
It occurs in those middle phases of a war when fear, pugnacity, and
hatred have secured complete dominion of the spirit, either to crush
every other instinct or to enlist it, and before weariness is felt.

At almost all other times, and even in war when it is deadlocked, a
sufficiently greater range of feelings is aroused to establish
conflict, choice, hesitation, and compromise. The symbolism of public
opinion usually bears, as we shall see, [Footnote: Part V.] the marks
of this balancing of interest. Think, for example, of how rapidly,
after the armistice, the precarious and by no means successfully
established symbol of Allied Unity disappeared, how it was followed
almost immediately by the breakdown of each nation's symbolic picture
of the other: Britain the Defender of Public Law, France watching at
the Frontier of Freedom, America the Crusader. And think then of how
within each nation the symbolic picture of itself frayed out, as party
and class conflict and personal ambition began to stir postponed
issues. And then of how the symbolic pictures of the leaders gave way,
as one by one, Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, ceased to be the
incarnation of human hope, and became merely the negotiators and
administrators for a disillusioned world.

Whether we regret this as one of the soft evils of peace or applaud it
as a return to sanity is obviously no matter here. Our first concern
with fictions and symbols is to forget their value to the existing
social order, and to think of them simply as an important part of the
machinery of human communication. Now in any society that is not
completely self-contained in its interests and so small that everyone
can know all about everything that happens, ideas deal with events
that are out of sight and hard to grasp. Miss Sherwin of Gopher
Prairie, [Footnote: See Sinclair Lewis, _Main Street_.] is aware
that a war is raging in France and tries to conceive it. She has never
been to France, and certainly she has never been along what is now the
battlefront.

Pictures of French and German soldiers she has seen, but it is
impossible for her to imagine three million men. No one, in fact, can
imagine them, and the professionals do not try. They think of them as,
say, two hundred divisions. But Miss Sherwin has no access to the
order of battle maps, and so if she is to think about the war, she
fastens upon Joffre and the Kaiser as if they were engaged in a
personal duel. Perhaps if you could see what she sees with her mind's
eye, the image in its composition might be not unlike an Eighteenth
Century engraving of a great soldier. He stands there boldly unruffled
and more than life size, with a shadowy army of tiny little figures
winding off into the landscape behind. Nor it seems are great men
oblivious to these expectations. M. de Pierrefeu tells of a
photographer's visit to Joffre. The General was in his "middle class
office, before the worktable without papers, where he sat down to
write his signature. Suddenly it was noticed that there were no maps
on the walls. But since according to popular ideas it is not possible
to think of a general without maps, a few were placed in position for
the picture, and removed soon afterwards." [Footnote: _Op. cit._,
p. 99.]

The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not
experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event.
That is why until we know what others think they know, we cannot truly
understand their acts. I have seen a young girl, brought up in a
Pennsylvania mining town, plunged suddenly from entire cheerfulness
into a paroxysm of grief when a gust of wind cracked the kitchen
window-pane. For hours she was inconsolable, and to me incomprehensible.
But when she was able to talk, it transpired that if a window-pane
broke it meant that a close relative had died. She was, therefore,
mourning for her father, who had frightened her into running away
from home. The father was, of course, quite thoroughly alive as a
telegraphic inquiry soon proved. But until the telegram came, the
cracked glass was an authentic message to that girl. Why it was
authentic only a prolonged investigation by a skilled psychiatrist
could show. But even the most casual observer could see that the girl,
enormously upset by her family troubles, had hallucinated a complete
fiction out of one external fact, a remembered superstition, and a
turmoil of remorse, and fear and love for her father.

Abnormality in these instances is only a matter of degree. When an
Attorney-General, who has been frightened by a bomb exploded on his
doorstep, convinces himself by the reading of revolutionary literature
that a revolution is to happen on the first of May 1920, we recognize
that much the same mechanism is at work. The war, of course, furnished
many examples of this pattern: the casual fact, the creative
imagination, the will to believe, and out of these three elements, a
counterfeit of reality to which there was a violent instinctive
response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men
respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in
many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they
respond. Let him cast the first stone who did not believe in the
Russian army that passed through England in August, 1914, did not
accept any tale of atrocities without direct proof, and never saw a
plot, a traitor, or a spy where there was none. Let him cast a stone
who never passed on as the real inside truth what he had heard someone
say who knew no more than he did.

In all these instances we must note particularly one common factor. It
is the insertion between man and his environment of a pseudo-environment.
To that pseudo-environment his behavior is a response. But because it
_is_ behavior, the consequences, if they are acts, operate not in
the pseudo-environment where the behavior is stimulated, but in the
real environment where action eventuates. If the behavior is not a
practical act, but what we call roughly thought and emotion, it may
be a long time before there is any noticeable break in the texture of
the fictitious world. But when the stimulus of the pseudo-fact results
in action on things or other people, contradiction soon develops.
Then comes the sensation of butting one's head against a stone wall,
of learning by experience, and witnessing Herbert Spencer's tragedy
of the murder of a Beautiful Theory by a Gang of Brutal Facts, the
discomfort in short of a maladjustment. For certainly, at the level of
social life, what is called the adjustment of man to his environment
takes place through the medium of fictions.

By fictions I do not mean lies. I mean a representation of the
environment which is in lesser or greater degree made by man himself.
The range of fiction extends all the way from complete hallucination
to the scientists' perfectly self-conscious use of a schematic model,
or his decision that for his particular problem accuracy beyond a
certain number of decimal places is not important. A work of fiction
may have almost any degree of fidelity, and so long as the degree of
fidelity can be taken into account, fiction is not misleading. In
fact, human culture is very largely the selection, the rearrangement,
the tracing of patterns upon, and the stylizing of, what William James
called "the random irradiations and resettlements of our
ideas." [Footnote: James, _Principles of Psychology_, Vol. II, p.
638] The alternative to the use of fictions is direct exposure to the
ebb and flow of sensation. That is not a real alternative, for however
refreshing it is to see at times with a perfectly innocent eye,
innocence itself is not wisdom, though a source and corrective of
wisdom. For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex,
and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal
with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and
combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have
to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it. To
traverse the world men must have maps of the world. Their persistent
difficulty is to secure maps on which their own need, or someone
else's need, has not sketched in the coast of Bohemia.

4

The analyst of public opinion must begin then, by recognizing the
triangular relationship between the scene of action, the human picture
of that scene, and the human response to that picture working itself
out upon the scene of action. It is like a play suggested to the
actors by their own experience, in which the plot is transacted in the
real lives of the actors, and not merely in their stage parts. The
moving picture often emphasizes with great skill this double drama of
interior motive and external behavior. Two men are quarreling,
ostensibly about some money, but their passion is inexplicable. Then
the picture fades out and what one or the other of the two men sees
with his mind's eye is reënacted. Across the table they were
quarreling about money. In memory they are back in their youth when
the girl jilted him for the other man. The exterior drama is
explained: the hero is not greedy; the hero is in love.