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Walter Lippmann >> Public Opinion
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A scene not so different was played in the United States Senate. At
breakfast on the morning of September 29, 1919, some of the Senators
read a news dispatch in the _Washington Post_ about the landing
of American marines on the Dalmatian coast. The newspaper said:
FACTS NOW ESTABLISHED
"The following important facts appear already _established_. The
orders to Rear Admiral Andrews commanding the American naval forces in
the Adriatic, came from the British Admiralty via the War Council and
Rear Admiral Knapps in London. The approval or disapproval of the
American Navy Department was not asked....
WITHOUT DANIELS' KNOWLEDGE
"Mr. Daniels was admittedly placed in a peculiar position when cables
reached here stating that the forces over which he is presumed to have
exclusive control were carrying on what amounted to naval warfare
without his knowledge. It was fully realized that the _British
Admiralty might desire to issue orders to Rear Admiral Andrews_ to
act on behalf of Great Britain and her Allies, because the situation
required sacrifice on the part of some nation if D'Annunzio's
followers were to be held in check.
"It was further realized that _under the new league of nations plan
foreigners would be in a position to direct American Naval forces in
emergencies_ with or without the consent of the American Navy
Department...." etc. (Italics mine).
The first Senator to comment is Mr. Knox of Pennsylvania. Indignantly
he demands investigation. In Mr. Brandegee of Connecticut, who spoke
next, indignation has already stimulated credulity. Where Mr. Knox
indignantly wishes to know if the report is true, Mr. Brandegee, a
half a minute later, would like to know what would have happened if
marines had been killed. Mr. Knox, interested in the question, forgets
that he asked for an inquiry, and replies. If American marines had
been killed, it would be war. The mood of the debate is still
conditional. Debate proceeds. Mr. McCormick of Illinois reminds the
Senate that the Wilson administration is prone to the waging of small
unauthorized wars. He repeats Theodore Roosevelt's quip about "waging
peace." More debate. Mr. Brandegee notes that the marines acted "under
orders of a Supreme Council sitting somewhere," but he cannot recall
who represents the United States on that body. The Supreme Council is
unknown to the Constitution of the United States. Therefore Mr. New of
Indiana submits a resolution calling for the facts.
So far the Senators still recognize vaguely that they are discussing a
rumor. Being lawyers they still remember some of the forms of
evidence. But as red-blooded men they already experience all the
indignation which is appropriate to the fact that American marines
have been ordered into war by a foreign government and without the
consent of Congress. Emotionally they want to believe it, because they
are Republicans fighting the League of Nations. This arouses the
Democratic leader, Mr. Hitchcock of Nebraska. He defends the Supreme
Council: it was acting under the war powers. Peace has not yet been
concluded because the Republicans are delaying it. Therefore the
action was necessary and legal. Both sides now assume that the report
is true, and the conclusions they draw are the conclusions of their
partisanship. Yet this extraordinary assumption is in a debate over a
resolution to investigate the truth of the assumption. It reveals how
difficult it is, even for trained lawyers, to suspend response until
the returns are in. The response is instantaneous. The fiction is
taken for truth because the fiction is badly needed.
A few days later an official report showed that the marines were not
landed by order of the British Government or of the Supreme Council.
They had not been fighting the Italians. They had been landed at the
request of the Italian Government to protect Italians, and the
American commander had been officially thanked by the Italian
authorities. The marines were not at war with Italy. They had acted
according to an established international practice which had nothing
to do with the League of Nations.
The scene of action was the Adriatic. The picture of that scene in the
Senators' heads at Washington was furnished, in this case probably
with intent to deceive, by a man who cared nothing about the Adriatic,
but much about defeating the League. To this picture the Senate
responded by a strengthening of its partisan differences over the
League.
5
Whether in this particular case the Senate was above or below its
normal standard, it is not necessary to decide. Nor whether the Senate
compares favorably with the House, or with other parliaments. At the
moment, I should like to think only about the world-wide spectacle of
men acting upon their environment, moved by stimuli from their
pseudo-environments. For when full allowance has been made for
deliberate fraud, political science has still to account for such
facts as two nations attacking one another, each convinced that it is
acting in self-defense, or two classes at war each certain that it
speaks for the common interest. They live, we are likely to say, in
different worlds. More accurately, they live in the same world, but
they think and feel in different ones.
It is to these special worlds, it is to these private or group, or
class, or provincial, or occupational, or national, or sectarian
artifacts, that the political adjustment of mankind in the Great
Society takes place. Their variety and complication are impossible to
describe. Yet these fictions determine a very great part of men's
political behavior. We must think of perhaps fifty sovereign
parliaments consisting of at least a hundred legislative bodies. With
them belong at least fifty hierarchies of provincial and municipal
assemblies, which with their executive, administrative and legislative
organs, constitute formal authority on earth. But that does not begin
to reveal the complexity of political life. For in each of these
innumerable centers of authority there are parties, and these parties
are themselves hierarchies with their roots in classes, sections,
cliques and clans; and within these are the individual politicians,
each the personal center of a web of connection and memory and fear
and hope.
Somehow or other, for reasons often necessarily obscure, as the result
of domination or compromise or a logroll, there emerge from these
political bodies commands, which set armies in motion or make peace,
conscript life, tax, exile, imprison, protect property or confiscate
it, encourage one kind of enterprise and discourage another,
facilitate immigration or obstruct it, improve communication or censor
it, establish schools, build navies, proclaim "policies," and
"destiny," raise economic barriers, make property or unmake it, bring
one people under the rule of another, or favor one class as against
another. For each of these decisions some view of the facts is taken
to be conclusive, some view of the circumstances is accepted as the
basis of inference and as the stimulus of feeling. What view of the
facts, and why that one?
And yet even this does not begin to exhaust the real complexity. The
formal political structure exists in a social environment, where there
are innumerable large and small corporations and institutions,
voluntary and semi-voluntary associations, national, provincial, urban
and neighborhood groupings, which often as not make the decision that
the political body registers. On what are these decisions based?
"Modern society," says Mr. Chesterton, "is intrinsically insecure
because it is based on the notion that all men will do the same thing
for different reasons.... And as within the head of any convict may be
the hell of a quite solitary crime, so in the house or under the hat
of any suburban clerk may be the limbo of a quite separate philosophy.
The first man may be a complete Materialist and feel his own body as a
horrible machine manufacturing his own mind. He may listen to his
thoughts as to the dull ticking of a clock. The man next door may be a
Christian Scientist and regard his own body as somehow rather less
substantial than his own shadow. He may come almost to regard his own
arms and legs as delusions like moving serpents in the dream of
delirium tremens. The third man in the street may not be a Christian
Scientist but, on the contrary, a Christian. He may live in a fairy
tale as his neighbors would say; a secret but solid fairy tale full of
the faces and presences of unearthly friends. The fourth man may be a
theosophist, and only too probably a vegetarian; and I do not see why
I should not gratify myself with the fancy that the fifth man is a
devil worshiper.... Now whether or not this sort of variety is
valuable, this sort of unity is shaky. To expect that all men for all
time will go on thinking different things, and yet doing the same
things, is a doubtful speculation. It is not founding society on a
communion, or even on a convention, but rather on a coincidence. Four
men may meet under the same lamp post; one to paint it pea green as
part of a great municipal reform; one to read his breviary in the
light of it; one to embrace it with accidental ardour in a fit of
alcoholic enthusiasm; and the last merely because the pea green post
is a conspicuous point of rendezvous with his young lady. But to
expect this to happen night after night is unwise...." [Footnote: G.
K. Chesterton, "The Mad Hatter and the Sane Householder," _Vanity
Fair_, January, 1921, p. 54]
For the four men at the lamp post substitute the governments, the
parties, the corporations, the societies, the social sets, the trades
and professions, universities, sects, and nationalities of the world.
Think of the legislator voting a statute that will affect distant
peoples, a statesman coming to a decision. Think of the Peace
Conference reconstituting the frontiers of Europe, an ambassador in a
foreign country trying to discern the intentions of his own government
and of the foreign government, a promoter working a concession in a
backward country, an editor demanding a war, a clergyman calling on
the police to regulate amusement, a club lounging-room making up its
mind about a strike, a sewing circle preparing to regulate the
schools, nine judges deciding whether a legislature in Oregon may fix
the working hours of women, a cabinet meeting to decide on the
recognition of a government, a party convention choosing a candidate
and writing a platform, twenty-seven million voters casting their
ballots, an Irishman in Cork thinking about an Irishman in Belfast, a
Third International planning to reconstruct the whole of human
society, a board of directors confronted with a set of their
employees' demands, a boy choosing a career, a merchant estimating
supply and demand for the coming season, a speculator predicting the
course of the market, a banker deciding whether to put credit behind a
new enterprise, the advertiser, the reader of advertisments.... Think
of the different sorts of Americans thinking about their notions of
"The British Empire" or "France" or "Russia" or "Mexico." It is not so
different from Mr. Chesterton's four men at the pea green lamp post.
6
And so before we involve ourselves in the jungle of obscurities about
the innate differences of men, we shall do well to fix our attention
upon the extraordinary differences in what men know of the world.
[Footnote: _Cf_. Wallas, _Our Social Heritage_, pp. 77 _et seq_.]
I do not doubt that there are important biological differences. Since
man is an animal it would be strange if there were not. But as
rational beings it is worse than shallow to generalize at all
about comparative behavior until there is a measurable similarity
between the environments to which behavior is a response.
The pragmatic value of this idea is that it introduces a much needed
refinement into the ancient controversy about nature and nurture,
innate quality and environment. For the pseudo-environment is a hybrid
compounded of "human nature" and "conditions." To my mind it shows the
uselessness of pontificating about what man is and always will be from
what we observe man to be doing, or about what are the necessary
conditions of society. For we do not know how men would behave in
response to the facts of the Great Society. All that we really know is
how they behave in response to what can fairly be called a most
inadequate picture of the Great Society. No conclusion about man or
the Great Society can honestly be made on evidence like that.
This, then, will be the clue to our inquiry. We shall assume that what
each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on
pictures made by himself or given to him. If his atlas tells him that
the world is flat he will not sail near what he believes to be the
edge of our planet for fear of falling off. If his maps include a
fountain of eternal youth, a Ponce de Leon will go in quest of it. If
someone digs up yellow dirt that looks like gold, he will for a time
act exactly as if he had found gold. The way in which the world is
imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do. It does
not determine what they will achieve. It determines their effort,
their feelings, their hopes, not their accomplishments and results.
The very men who most loudly proclaim their "materialism" and their
contempt for "ideologues," the Marxian communists, place their entire
hope on what? On the formation by propaganda of a class-conscious
group. But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture
to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?
What is class consciousness but a way of realizing the world? National
consciousness but another way? And Professor Giddings' consciousness
of kind, but a process of believing that we recognize among the
multitude certain ones marked as our kind?
Try to explain social life as the pursuit of pleasure and the
avoidance of pain. You will soon be saying that the hedonist begs the
question, for even supposing that man does pursue these ends, the
crucial problem of why he thinks one course rather than another likely
to produce pleasure, is untouched. Does the guidance of man's
conscience explain? How then does he happen to have the particular
conscience which he has? The theory of economic self-interest? But how
do men come to conceive their interest in one way rather than another?
The desire for security, or prestige, or domination, or what is
vaguely called self-realization? How do men conceive their security,
what do they consider prestige, how do they figure out the means of
domination, or what is the notion of self which they wish to realize?
Pleasure, pain, conscience, acquisition, protection, enhancement,
mastery, are undoubtedly names for some of the ways people act. There
may be instinctive dispositions which work toward such ends. But no
statement of the end, or any description of the tendencies to seek it,
can explain the behavior which results. The very fact that men
theorize at all is proof that their pseudo-environments, their
interior representations of the world, are a determining element in
thought, feeling, and action. For if the connection between reality
and human response were direct and immediate, rather than indirect and
inferred, indecision and failure would be unknown, and (if each of us
fitted as snugly into the world as the child in the womb), Mr. Bernard
Shaw would not have been able to say that except for the first nine
months of its existence no human being manages its affairs as well as
a plant.
The chief difficulty in adapting the psychoanalytic scheme to
political thought arises in this connection. The Freudians are
concerned with the maladjustment of distinct individuals to other
individuals and to concrete circumstances. They have assumed that if
internal derangements could be straightened out, there would be little
or no confusion about what is the obviously normal relationship. But
public opinion deals with indirect, unseen, and puzzling facts, and
there is nothing obvious about them. The situations to which public
opinions refer are known only as opinions. The psychoanalyst, on the
other hand, almost always assumes that the environment is knowable,
and if not knowable then at least bearable, to any unclouded
intelligence. This assumption of his is the problem of public opinion.
Instead of taking for granted an environment that is readily known,
the social analyst is most concerned in studying how the larger
political environment is conceived, and how it can be conceived more
successfully. The psychoanalyst examines the adjustment to an X,
called by him the environment; the social analyst examines the X,
called by him the pseudo-environment.
He is, of course, permanently and constantly in debt to the new
psychology, not only because when rightly applied it so greatly helps
people to stand on their own feet, come what may, but because the
study of dreams, fantasy and rationalization has thrown light on how
the pseudo-environment is put together. But he cannot assume as his
criterion either what is called a "normal biological career"
[Footnote: Edward J. Kempf, _Psychopathology_, p. 116.] within
the existing social order, or a career "freed from religious
suppression and dogmatic conventions" outside. [Footnote: _Id_.,
p. 151.] What for a sociologist is a normal social career? Or one
freed from suppressions and conventions? Conservative critics do, to
be sure, assume the first, and romantic ones the second. But in
assuming them they are taking the whole world for granted. They are
saying in effect either that society is the sort of thing which
corresponds to their idea of what is normal, or the sort of thing
which corresponds to their idea of what is free. Both ideas are merely
public opinions, and while the psychoanalyst as physician may perhaps
assume them, the sociologist may not take the products of existing
public opinion as criteria by which to study public opinion.
7
The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out
of sight, out of mind. It has to be explored, reported, and imagined.
Man is no Aristotelian god contemplating all existence at one glance.
He is the creature of an evolution who can just about span a
sufficient portion of reality to manage his survival, and snatch what
on the scale of time are but a few moments of insight and happiness.
Yet this same creature has invented ways of seeing what no naked eye
could see, of hearing what no ear could hear, of weighing immense
masses and infinitesimal ones, of counting and separating more items
than he can individually remember. He is learning to see with his mind
vast portions of the world that he could never see, touch, smell,
hear, or remember. Gradually he makes for himself a trustworthy
picture inside his head of the world beyond his reach.
Those features of the world outside which have to do with the behavior
of other human beings, in so far as that behavior crosses ours, is
dependent upon us, or is interesting to us, we call roughly public
affairs. The pictures inside the heads of these human beings, the
pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes, and
relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures which are
acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name
of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters. And so in the
chapters which follow we shall inquire first into some of the reasons
why the picture inside so often misleads men in their dealings with
the world outside. Under this heading we shall consider first the
chief factors which limit their access to the facts. They are the
artificial censorships, the limitations of social contact, the
comparatively meager time available in each day for paying attention
to public affairs, the distortion arising because events have to be
compressed into very short messages, the difficulty of making a small
vocabulary express a complicated world, and finally the fear of facing
those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of
men's lives.
The analysis then turns from these more or less external limitations
to the question of how this trickle of messages from the outside is
affected by the stored up images, the preconceptions, and prejudices
which interpret, fill them out, and in their turn powerfully direct
the play of our attention, and our vision itself. From this it
proceeds to examine how in the individual person the limited messages
from outside, formed into a pattern of stereotypes, are identified
with his own interests as he feels and conceives them. In the
succeeding sections it examines how opinions are crystallized into
what is called Public Opinion, how a National Will, a Group Mind, a
Social Purpose, or whatever you choose to call it, is formed.
The first five parts constitute the descriptive section of the book.
There follows an analysis of the traditional democratic theory of
public opinion. The substance of the argument is that democracy in its
original form never seriously faced the problem which arises because
the pictures inside people's heads do not automatically correspond
with the world outside. And then, because the democratic theory is
under criticism by socialist thinkers, there follows an examination of
the most advanced and coherent of these criticisms, as made by the
English Guild Socialists. My purpose here is to find out whether these
reformers take into account the main difficulties of public opinion.
My conclusion is that they ignore the difficulties, as completely as
did the original democrats, because they, too, assume, and in a much
more complicated civilization, that somehow mysteriously there exists
in the hearts of men a knowledge of the world beyond their reach.
I argue that representative government, either in what is ordinarily
called politics, or in industry, cannot be worked successfully, no
matter what the basis of election, unless there is an independent,
expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to those
who have to make the decisions. I attempt, therefore, to argue that
the serious acceptance of the principle that personal representation
must be supplemented by representation of the unseen facts would alone
permit a satisfactory decentralization, and allow us to escape from
the intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of us must acquire a
competent opinion about all public affairs. It is argued that the
problem of the press is confused because the critics and the
apologists expect the press to realize this fiction, expect it to make
up for all that was not foreseen in the theory of democracy, and that
the readers expect this miracle to be performed at no cost or trouble
to themselves. The newspapers are regarded by democrats as a panacea
for their own defects, whereas analysis of the nature of news and of
the economic basis of journalism seems to show that the newspapers
necessarily and inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or
lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public
opinion. My conclusion is that public opinions must be organized for
the press if they are to be sound, not by the press as is the case
today. This organization I conceive to be in the first instance the
task of a political science that has won its proper place as
formulator, in advance of real decision, instead of apologist, critic,
or reporter after the decision has been made. I try to indicate that
the perplexities of government and industry are conspiring to give
political science this enormous opportunity to enrich itself and to
serve the public. And, of course, I hope that these pages will help a
few people to realize that opportunity more vividly, and therefore to
pursue it more consciously.
PART II
APPROACHES TO THE WORLD OUTSIDE
CHAPTER 2. CENSORSHIP AND PRIVACY
" 3. CONTACT AND OPPORTUNITY
" 4. TIME AND ATTENTION
" 5. SPEED, WORDS, AND CLEARNESS
CHAPTER II
CENSORSHIP AND PRIVACY
1
The picture of a general presiding over an editorial conference at the
most terrible hour of one of the great battles of history seems more
like a scene from The Chocolate Soldier than a page from life. Yet we
know at first hand from the officer who edited the French communiqués
that these conferences were a regular part of the business of war;
that in the worst moment of Verdun, General Joffre and his cabinet met
and argued over the nouns, adjectives, and verbs that were to be
printed in the newspapers the next morning.
"The evening communiqué of the twenty-third (February 1916)" says M.
de Pierrefeu, [Footnote: _G. Q. G_., pp. 126-129.] "was edited in
a dramatic atmosphere. M. Berthelot, of the Prime Minister's office,
had just telephoned by order of the minister asking General Pelle to
strengthen the report and to emphasize the proportions of the enemy's
attack. It was necessary to prepare the public for the worst outcome
in case the affair turned into a catastrophe. This anxiety showed
clearly that neither at G. H. Q. nor at the Ministry of War had the
Government found reason for confidence. As M. Berthelot spoke, General
Pelle made notes. He handed me the paper on which he had written the
Government's wishes, together with the order of the day issued by
General von Deimling and found on some prisoners, in which it was
stated that this attack was the supreme offensive to secure peace.
Skilfully used, all this was to demonstrate that Germany was letting
loose a gigantic effort, an effort without precedent, and that from
its success she hoped for the end of the war. The logic of this was
that nobody need be surprised at our withdrawal. When, a half hour
later, I went down with my manuscript, I found gathered together in
Colonel Claudel's office, he being away, the major-general, General
Janin, Colonel Dupont, and Lieutenant-Colonel Renouard. Fearing that I
would not succeed in giving the desired impression, General Pellé had
himself prepared a proposed communiqué. I read what I had just done.
It was found to be too moderate. General Pellé's, on the other hand,
seemed too alarming. I had purposely omitted von Deimling's order of
the day. To put it into the communiqué _would be to break with the
formula to which the public was accustomed_, would be to transform
it into a kind of pleading. It would seem to say: 'How do you suppose
we can resist?' There was reason to fear that the public would be
distracted by this change of tone and would believe that everything
was lost. I explained my reasons and suggested giving Deimling's text
to the newspapers in the form of a separate note.
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