Books: Public Opinion
W >>
Walter Lippmann >> Public Opinion
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24
Within each social set there are augurs like the van der Luydens and
Mrs. Manson Mingott in "The Age of Innocence," [Footnote: Edith
Wharton, _The Age of Innocence._] who are recognized as the
custodians and the interpreters of its social pattern. You are made,
they say, if the van der Luydens take you up. The invitations to their
functions are the high sign of arrival and status. The elections to
college societies, carefully graded and the gradations universally
accepted, determine who is who in college. The social leaders,
weighted with the ultimate eugenic responsibility, are peculiarly
sensitive. Not only must they be watchfully aware of what makes for
the integrity of their set, but they have to cultivate a special gift
for knowing what other social sets are doing. They act as a kind of
ministry of foreign affairs. Where most of the members of a set live
complacently within the set, regarding it for all practical purposes
as the world, the social leaders must combine an intimate knowledge of
the anatomy of their own set with a persistent sense of its place in
the hierarchy of sets.
The hierarchy, in fact, is bound together by the social leaders. At
any one level there is something which might almost be called a social
set of the social leaders. But vertically the actual binding together
of society, in so far as it is bound together at all by social
contact, is accomplished by those exceptional people, frequently
suspect, who like Julius Beaufort and Ellen Olenska in "The Age of
Innocence" move in and out. Thus there come to be established personal
channels from one set to another, through which Tarde's laws of
imitation operate. But for large sections of the population there are
no such channels. For them the patented accounts of society and the
moving pictures of high life have to serve. They may develop a social
hierarchy of their own, almost unnoticed, as have the Negroes and the
"foreign element," but among that assimilated mass which always
considers itself the "nation," there is in spite of the great
separateness of sets, a variety of personal contacts through which a
circulation of standards takes place.
Some of the sets are so placed that they become what Professor Ross
has called "radiant points of conventionality." [Footnote: Ross,
_Social Psychology_, Ch. IX, X, XI.] Thus the social superior is
likely to be imitated by the social inferior, the holder of power is
imitated by subordinates, the more successful by the less successful,
the rich by the poor, the city by the country. But imitation does not
stop at frontiers. The powerful, socially superior, successful, rich,
urban social set is fundamentally international throughout the western
hemisphere, and in many ways London is its center. It counts among its
membership the most influential people in the world, containing as it
does the diplomatic set, high finance, the upper circles of the army
and the navy, some princes of the church, a few great newspaper
proprietors, their wives and mothers and daughters who wield the
scepter of invitation. It is at once a great circle of talk and a real
social set. But its importance comes from the fact that here at last
the distinction between public and private affairs practically
disappears. The private affairs of this set are public matters, and
public matters are its private, often its family affairs. The
confinements of Margot Asquith like the confinements of royalty are,
as the philosophers say, in much the same universe of discourse as a
tariff bill or a parliamentary debate.
There are large areas of governments in which this social set is not
interested, and in America, at least, it has exercised only a
fluctuating control over the national government. But its power in
foreign affairs is always very great, and in war time its prestige is
enormously enhanced. That is natural enough because these
cosmopolitans have a contact with the outer world that most people do
not possess. They have dined with each other in the capitals, and
their sense of national honor is no mere abstraction; it is a concrete
experience of being snubbed or approved by their friends. To Dr.
Kennicott of Gopher Prairie it matters mighty little what Winston
thinks and a great deal what Ezra Stowbody thinks, but to Mrs. Mingott
with a daughter married to the Earl of Swithin it matters a lot when
she visits her daughter, or entertains Winston himself. Dr. Kennicott
and Mrs. Mingott are both socially sensitive, but Mrs. Mingott is
sensitive to a social set that governs the world, while Dr.
Kennicott's social set governs only in Gopher Prairie. But in matters
that effect the larger relationships of the Great Society, Dr.
Kennicott will often be found holding what he thinks is purely his own
opinion, though, as a matter of fact, it has trickled down to Gopher
Prairie from High Society, transmuted on its passage through the
provincial social sets.
4
It is no part of our inquiry to attempt an account of the social
tissue. We need only fix in mind how big is the part played by the
social set in our spiritual contact with the world, how it tends to
fix what is admissible, and to determine how it shall be judged.
Affairs within its immediate competence each set more or less
determines for itself. Above all it determines the detailed
administration of the judgment. But the judgment itself is formed on
patterns [Footnote: _Cf_. Part III] that may be inherited from
the past, transmitted or imitated from other social sets. The highest
social set consists of those who embody the leadership of the Great
Society. As against almost every other social set where the bulk of
the opinions are first hand only about local affairs, in this Highest
Society the big decisions of war and peace, of social strategy and the
ultimate distribution of political power, are intimate experiences
within a circle of what, potentially at least, are personal
acquaintances.
Since position and contact play so big a part in determining what can
be seen, heard, read, and experienced, as well as what it is
permissible to see, hear, read, and know, it is no wonder that moral
judgment is so much more common than constructive thought. Yet in
truly effective thinking the prime necessity is to liquidate
judgments, regain an innocent eye, disentangle feelings, be curious
and open-hearted. Man's history being what it is, political opinion on
the scale of the Great Society requires an amount of selfless
equanimity rarely attainable by any one for any length of time. We are
concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones. The
time and attention are limited that we can spare for the labor of not
taking opinions for granted, and we are subject to constant
interruption.
CHAPTER IV
TIME AND ATTENTION
NATURALLY it is possible to make a rough estimate only of the amount
of attention people give each day to informing themselves about public
affairs. Yet it is interesting that three estimates that I have
examined agree tolerably well, though they were made at different
times, in different places, and by different methods. [Footnote: July,
1900. D. F. Wilcox, _The American Newspaper: A Study in Social
Psychology_, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, vol. xvi, p. 56. (The statistical tables are reproduced in
James Edward Rogers, _The American Newspaper_.)
1916 (?) W. D. Scott, _The Psychology of Advertising_, pp.
226-248. See also Henry Foster Adams, _Advertising and its Mental
Laws_, Ch. IV.
1920 _Newspaper Reading Habits of College Students_, by Prof.
George Burton Hotchkiss and Richard B. Franken, published by the
Association of National Advertisers, Inc., 15 East 26th Street, New
York City.]
A questionnaire was sent by Hotchkiss and Franken to 1761 men and
women college students in New York City, and answers came from all but
a few. Scott used a questionnaire on four thousand prominent business
and professional men in Chicago and received replies from twenty-three
hundred. Between seventy and seventy-five percent of all those who
replied to either inquiry thought they spent a quarter of an hour a
day reading newspapers. Only four percent of the Chicago group guessed
at less than this and twenty-five percent guessed at more. Among the
New Yorkers a little over eight percent figured their newspaper
reading at less than fifteen minutes, and seventeen and a half at
more.
Very few people have an accurate idea of fifteen minutes, so the
figures are not to be taken literally. Moreover, business men,
professional people, and college students are most of them liable to a
curious little bias against appearing to spend too much time over the
newspapers, and perhaps also to a faint suspicion of a desire to be
known as rapid readers. All that the figures can justly be taken to
mean is that over three quarters of those in the selected groups rate
rather low the attention they give to printed news of the outer world.
These time estimates are fairly well confirmed by a test which is less
subjective. Scott asked his Chicagoans how many papers they read each
day, and was told that
14 percent read but one paper
46 " " two papers
21 " " three papers
10 " " four papers
3 " " five papers
2 " " six papers
3 " " all the papers (eight
at the time of this inquiry).
The two- and three-paper readers are sixty-seven percent, which comes
fairly close to the seventy-one percent in Scott's group who rate
themselves at fifteen minutes a day. The omnivorous readers of from
four to eight papers coincide roughly with the twenty-five percent who
rated themselves at more than fifteen minutes.
2
It is still more difficult to guess how the time is distributed. The
college students were asked to name "the five features which interest
you most." Just under twenty percent voted for "general news," just
under fifteen for editorials, just under twelve for "politics," a
little over eight for finance, not two years after the armistice a
little over six for foreign news, three and a half for local, nearly
three for business, and a quarter of one percent for news about
"labor." A scattering said they were most interested in sports,
special articles, the theatre, advertisements, cartoons, book reviews,
"accuracy," music, "ethical tone," society, brevity, art, stories,
shipping, school news, "current news," print. Disregarding these,
about sixty-seven and a half percent picked as the most interesting
features news and opinion that dealt with public affairs.
This was a mixed college group. The girls professed greater interest
than the boys in general news, foreign news, local news, politics,
editorials, the theatre, music, art, stories, cartoons,
advertisements, and "ethical tone." The boys on the other hand were
more absorbed in finance, sports, business page, "accuracy" and
"brevity." These discriminations correspond a little too closely with
the ideals of what is cultured and moral, manly and decisive, not to
make one suspect the utter objectivity of the replies.
Yet they agree fairly well with the replies of Scott's Chicago
business and professional men. They were asked, not what features
interested them most, but why they preferred one newspaper to another.
Nearly seventy-one percent based their conscious preference on local
news (17.8%), or political (15.8%) or financial (11.3%), or foreign
(9.5%), or general (7.2%), or editorials (9%). The other thirty
percent decided on grounds not connected with public affairs. They
ranged from not quite seven who decided for ethical tone, down to one
twentieth of one percent who cared most about humor.
How do these preferences correspond with the space given by newspapers
to various subjects? Unfortunately there are no data collected on this
point for the newspapers read by the Chicago and New York groups at
the time the questionnaires were made. But there is an interesting
analysis made over twenty years ago by Wilcox. He studied one hundred
and ten newspapers in fourteen large cities, and classified the
subject matter of over nine thousand columns.
Averaged for the whole country the various newspaper matter was found
to fill:
{ (a) War News 17.9
{ { Foreign 1.2
{ (b) General " 21.8 { Politics 6.4
I. News 55.3 { { Crime 3.1
{ { Misc. 11.1
{
{ { Business 8.2
{ (c) Special " 15.6 { Sport 5.1
{ Society 2.3
II. Illustrations 3.1
III. Literature 2.4
{ (a) Editorials 3.9
IV. Opinion 7.1 { (b) Letters & Exchange 3.2
V. Advertisements 32.1
In order to bring this table into a fair comparison, it is necessary
to exclude the space given to advertisements, and recompute the
percentages. For the advertisements occupied only an infinitesimal
part of the conscious preference of the Chicago group or the college
group. I think this is justifiable for our purposes because the press
prints what advertisements it can get, [Footnote: Except those which it
regards as objectionable, and those which, in rare instances, are
crowded out.] whereas the rest of the paper is designed to the taste
of its readers. The table would then read:
{War News 26.4-
{ {Foreign 1.8-
I. News 81.4+{General News 32.0+ {Political 9.4+
{ {Crime 4.6-
{ {Misc. 16.3+
{
{ {Business 12.1-
{Special " 23.0- {Sporting 7.5+
{Society 3.3-
II. Illustrations 4.6-
III. Literature 3.5+
IV. Opinion 10.5- {Editorials 5.8-
{Letters 4.7+
In this revised table if you add up the items which may be supposed to
deal with public affairs, that is to say war, foreign, political,
miscellaneous, business news, and opinion, you find a total of 76.5%
of the edited space devoted in 1900 to the 70.6% of reasons given by
Chicago business men in 1916 for preferring a particular newspaper,
and to the five features which most interested 67.5% of the New York
College students in 1920.
This would seem to show that the tastes of business men and college
students in big cities to-day still correspond more or less to the
averaged judgments of newspaper editors in big cities twenty years
ago. Since that time the proportion of features to news has
undoubtedly increased, and so has the circulation and the size of
newspapers. Therefore, if to-day you could secure accurate replies
from more typical groups than college students or business and
professional men, you would expect to find a smaller percentage of
time devoted to public affairs, as well as a smaller percentage of
space. On the other hand you would expect to find that the average man
spends more than the quarter of an hour on his newspaper, and that
while the percentage of space given to public affairs is less than
twenty years ago the net amount is greater.
No elaborate deductions are to be drawn from these figures. They help
merely to make somewhat more concrete our notions of the effort that
goes day by day into acquiring the data of our opinions. The
newspapers are, of course, not the only means, but they are certainly
the principal ones. Magazines, the public forum, the chautauqua, the
church, political gatherings, trade union meetings, women's clubs, and
news serials in the moving picture houses supplement the press. But
taking it all at the most favorable estimate, the time each day is
small when any of us is directly exposed to information from our
unseen environment.
CHAPTER V
SPEED, WORDS, AND CLEARNESS
1
The unseen environment is reported to us chiefly by words. These words
are transmitted by wire or radio from the reporters to the editors who
fit them into print. Telegraphy is expensive, and the facilities are
often limited. Press service news is, therefore, usually coded. Thus a
dispatch which reads,--
"Washington, D. C. June I.--The United States regards the question of
German shipping seized in this country at the outbreak of hostilities
as a closed incident,"
may pass over the wires in the following form:
"Washn i. The Uni Stas rgds tq of Ger spg seized in ts cou at t outbk
o hox as a clod incident." [Footnote: Phillip's Code.]
A news item saying:
"Berlin, June 1, Chancellor Wirth told the Reichstag to-day in
outlining the Government's program that 'restoration and
reconciliation would be the keynote of the new Government's policy.'
He added that the Cabinet was determined disarmament should be carried
out loyally and that disarmament would not be the occasion of the
imposition of further penalties by the Allies."
may be cabled in this form:
"Berlin 1. Chancellor Wirth told t Reichstag tdy in outlining the gvts
pgn tt qn restoration & reconciliation wd b the keynote f new gvts
policy. qj He added ttt cabinet ws dtmd disarmament sd b carried out
loyally & tt disarmament wd n b. the ocan f imposition of further
penalties bi t alis."
In this second item the substance has been culled from a long speech
in a foreign tongue, translated, coded, and then decoded. The
operators who receive the messages transcribe them as they go along,
and I am told that a good operator can write fifteen thousand or even
more words per eight hour day, with a half an hour out for lunch and
two ten minute periods for rest.
2
A few words must often stand for a whole succession of acts, thoughts,
feelings and consequences. We read:
"Washington, Dec. 23--A statement charging Japanese military
authorities with deeds more 'frightful and barbarous' than anything
ever alleged to have occurred in Belgium during the war was issued
here to-day by the Korean Commission, based, the Commission said, on
authentic reports received by it from Manchuria."
Here eyewitnesses, their accuracy unknown, report to the makers of
'authentic reports'; they in turn transmit these to a commission five
thousand miles away. It prepares a statement, probably much too long
for publication, from which a correspondent culls an item of print
three and a half inches long. The meaning has to be telescoped in such
a way as to permit the reader to judge how much weight to give to the
news.
It is doubtful whether a supreme master of style could pack all the
elements of truth that complete justice would demand into a hundred
word account of what had happened in Korea during the course of
several months. For language is by no means a perfect vehicle of
meanings. Words, like currency, are turned over and over again, to
evoke one set of images to-day, another to-morrow. There is no
certainty whatever that the same word will call out exactly the same
idea in the reader's mind as it did in the reporter's. Theoretically,
if each fact and each relation had a name that was unique, and if
everyone had agreed on the names, it would be possible to communicate
without misunderstanding. In the exact sciences there is an approach
to this ideal, and that is part of the reason why of all forms of
world-wide cooperation, scientific inquiry is the most effective.
Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language,
as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors. [Footnote:
Cited by White, _Mechanisms of Character Formation._] The
journalist addressing half a million readers of whom he has only a dim
picture, the speaker whose words are flashed to remote villages and
overseas, cannot hope that a few phrases will carry the whole burden
of their meaning. "The words of Lloyd George, badly understood and
badly transmitted," said M. Briand to the Chamber of Deputies,
[Footnote: Special Cable to _The New York Times,_ May 25, 1921,
by Edwin L, James. ] "seemed to give the Pan-Germanists the idea that
the time had come to start something." A British Prime Minister,
speaking in English to the whole attentive world, speaks his own
meaning in his own words to all kinds of people who will see their
meaning in those words. No matter how rich or subtle--or rather the
more rich and the more subtle that which he has to say, the more his
meaning will suffer as it is sluiced into standard speech and then
distributed again among alien minds. [Footnote: In May of 1921,
relations between England and France were strained by the insurrection
of M. Korfanty in Upper Silesia. The London Correspondence of the
_Manchester Guardian_ (May 20, 1921), contained the following
item:
"The Franco-English Exchange in Words.
"In quarters well acquainted with French ways and character I find a
tendency to think that undue sensibility has been shown by our press
and public opinion in the lively and at times intemperate language of
the French press through the present crisis. The point was put to me
by a well-informed neutral observer in the following manner.
"Words, like money, are tokens of value. They represent meaning,
therefore, and just as money, their representative value goes up and
down. The French word 'etonnant' was used by Bossuet with a terrible
weight of meaning which it has lost to-day. A similar thing can be
observed with the English word 'awful.' Some nations constitutionally
tend to understate, others to overstate. What the British Tommy called
an unhealthy place could only be described by an Italian soldier by
means of a rich vocabulary aided with an exuberant mimicry. Nations
that understate keep their word-currency sound. Nations that overstate
suffer from inflation in their language.
"Expressions such as 'a distinguished scholar,' 'a clever writer,'
must be translated into French as 'a great savant,' 'an exquisite
master.' It is a mere matter of exchange, just as in France one pound
pays 46 francs, and yet one knows that that does not increase its
value at home. Englishmen reading the French press should endeavour to
work out a mental operation similar to that of the banker who puts
back francs into pounds, and not forget in so doing that while in
normal times the change was 25 it is now 46 on account of the war. For
there is a war fluctuation on word exchanges as well as on money
exchanges.
"The argument, one hopes, works both ways, and Frenchmen do not fail
to realize that there is as much value behind English reticence as
behind their own exuberance of expression."]
Millions of those who are watching him can read hardly at all.
Millions more can read the words but cannot understand them. Of those
who can both read and understand, a good three-quarters we may assume
have some part of half an hour a day to spare for the subject. To them
the words so acquired are the cue for a whole train of ideas on which
ultimately a vote of untold consequences may be based. Necessarily the
ideas which we allow the words we read to evoke form the biggest part
of the original data of our opinions. The world is vast, the
situations that concern us are intricate, the messages are few, the
biggest part of opinion must be constructed in the imagination.
When we use the word "Mexico" what picture does it evoke in a resident
of New York? Likely as not, it is some composite of sand, cactus, oil
wells, greasers, rum-drinking Indians, testy old cavaliers flourishing
whiskers and sovereignty, or perhaps an idyllic peasantry à la Jean
Jacques, assailed by the prospect of smoky industrialism, and fighting
for the Rights of Man. What does the word "Japan" evoke? Is it a vague
horde of slant-eyed yellow men, surrounded by Yellow Perils, picture
brides, fans, Samurai, banzais, art, and cherry blossoms? Or the word
"alien"? According to a group of New England college students, writing
in the year 1920, an alien was the following: [Footnote: _The New
Republic_: December 29, 1920, p. 142. ]
"A person hostile to this country."
"A person against the government."
"A person who is on the opposite side."
"A native of an unfriendly country."
"A foreigner at war."
"A foreigner who tries to do harm to the country he is in."
"An enemy from a foreign land."
"A person against a country." etc....
Yet the word alien is an unusually exact legal term, far more exact
than words like sovereignty, independence, national honor, rights,
defense, aggression, imperialism, capitalism, socialism, about which
we so readily take sides "for" or "against."
3
The power to dissociate superficial analogies, attend to differences
and appreciate variety is lucidity of mind. It is a relative faculty.
Yet the differences in lucidity are extensive, say as between a newly
born infant and a botanist examining a flower. To the infant there is
precious little difference between his own toes, his father's watch,
the lamp on the table, the moon in the sky, and a nice bright yellow
edition of Guy de Maupassant. To many a member of the Union League
Club there is no remarkable difference between a Democrat, a
Socialist, an anarchist, and a burglar, while to a highly
sophisticated anarchist there is a whole universe of difference
between Bakunin, Tolstoi, and Kropotkin. These examples show how
difficult it might be to secure a sound public opinion about de
Maupassant among babies, or about Democrats in the Union League Club.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24