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Walter Lippmann >> Public Opinion
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Most of us would deal with affairs through a rather haphazard and
shifting assortment of stereotypes, if a comparatively few men in each
generation were not constantly engaged in arranging, standardizing,
and improving them into logical systems, known as the Laws of
Political Economy, the Principles of Politics, and the like. Generally
when we write about culture, tradition, and the group mind, we are
thinking of these systems perfected by men of genius. Now there is no
disputing the necessity of constant study and criticism of these
idealized versions, but the historian of people, the politician, and
the publicity man cannot stop there. For what operates in history is
not the systematic idea as a genius formulated it, but shifting
imitations, replicas, counterfeits, analogies, and distortions in
individual minds.
Thus Marxism is not necessarily what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital,
but whatever it is that all the warring sects believe, who claim to be
the faithful. From the gospels you cannot deduce the history of
Christianity, nor from the Constitution the political history of
America. It is Das Kapital as conceived, the gospels as preached and
the preachment as understood, the Constitution as interpreted and
administered, to which you have to go. For while there is a
reciprocating influence between the standard version and the current
versions, it is these current versions as distributed among men which
affect their behavior. [Footnote: But unfortunately it is ever so much
harder to know this actual culture than it is to summarize and to
comment upon the works of genius. The actual culture exists in people
far too busy to indulge in the strange trade of formulating their
beliefs. They record them only incidentally, and the student rarely
knows how typical are his data. Perhaps the best he can do is to
follow Lord Bryce's suggestion [_Modern Democracies_, Vol. i, p.
156] that he move freely "among all sorts and conditions of men," to
seek out the unbiassed persons in every neighborhood who have skill in
sizing up. "There is a _flair_ which long practise and 'sympathetic
touch' bestow. The trained observer learns how to profit by small
indications, as an old seaman discerns, sooner than the landsman,
the signs of coming storm." There is, in short, a vast amount of
guess work involved, and it is no wonder that scholars, who enjoy
precision, so often confine their attentions to the neater formulations
of other scholars.]
"The theory of Relativity," says a critic whose eyelids, like the Lady
Lisa's, are a little weary, "promises to develop into a principle as
adequate to universal application as was the theory of Evolution. This
latter theory, from being a technical biological hypothesis, became an
inspiring guide to workers in practically every branch of knowledge:
manners and customs, morals, religions, philosophies, arts, steam
engines, electric tramways--everything had 'evolved.' 'Evolution'
became a very general term; it also became imprecise until, in many
cases, the original, definite meaning of the word was lost, and the
theory it had been evoked to describe was misunderstood. We are hardy
enough to prophesy a similar career and fate for the theory of
Relativity. The technical physical theory, at present imperfectly
understood, will become still more vague and dim. History repeats
itself, and Relativity, like Evolution, after receiving a number of
intelligible but somewhat inaccurate popular expositions in its
scientific aspect, will be launched on a world-conquering career. We
suggest that, by that time, it will probably be called _Relativismus_.
Many of these larger applications will doubtless be justified; some will
be absurd and a considerable number will, we imagine, reduce to truisms.
And the physical theory, the mere seed of this mighty growth, will become
once more the purely technical concern of scientific men." [Footnote:
_The Times_ (London), _Literary Supplement_, June 2, 1921, p.
352. Professor Einstein said when he was in America in 1921 that
people tended to overestimate the influence of his theory, and to
under-estimate its certainty.]
But for such a world-conquering career an idea must correspond,
however imprecisely, to something. Professor Bury shows for how long a
time the idea of progress remained a speculative toy. "It is not
easy," he writes, [Footnote: J. B. Bury, _The Idea of Progress_,
p. 324.] "for a new idea of the speculative order to penetrate and
inform the general consciousness of a community until it has assumed
some external and concrete embodiment, or is recommended by some
striking material evidence. In the case of Progress both these
conditions were fulfilled (in England) in the period 1820-1850." The
most striking evidence was furnished by the mechanical revolution.
"Men who were born at the beginning of the century had seen, before
they had passed the age of thirty, the rapid development of steam
navigation, the illumination of towns and houses by gas, the opening
of the first railway." In the consciousness of the average householder
miracles like these formed the pattern of his belief in the
perfectibility of the human race.
Tennyson, who was in philosophical matters a fairly normal person,
tells us that when he went by the first train from Liverpool to
Manchester (1830) he thought that the wheels ran in grooves. Then he
wrote this line:
"Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of
change." [Footnote: 2 Tennyson, _Memoir by his Son_, Vol. I, p.
195. Cited by Bury, _op. cit_., p. 326.]
And so a notion more or less applicable to a journey between Liverpool
and Manchester was generalized into a pattern of the universe "for
ever." This pattern, taken up by others, reinforced by dazzling
inventions, imposed an optimistic turn upon the theory of evolution.
That theory, of course, is, as Professor Bury says, neutral between
pessimism and optimism. But it promised continual change, and the
changes visible in the world marked such extraordinary conquests of
nature, that the popular mind made a blend of the two. Evolution first
in Darwin himself, and then more elaborately in Herbert Spencer, was a
"progress towards perfection."
2
The stereotype represented by such words as "progress" and
"perfection" was composed fundamentally of mechanical inventions. And
mechanical it has remained, on the whole, to this day. In America more
than anywhere else, the spectacle of mechanical progress has made so
deep an impression, that it has suffused the whole moral code. An
American will endure almost any insult except the charge that he is
not progressive. Be he of long native ancestry, or a recent immigrant,
the aspect that has always struck his eye is the immense physical
growth of American civilization. That constitutes a fundamental
stereotype through which he views the world: the country village will
become the great metropolis, the modest building a skyscraper, what is
small shall be big; what is slow shall be fast; what is poor shall be
rich; what is few shall be many; whatever is shall be more so.
Not every American, of course, sees the world this way. Henry Adams
didn't, and William Allen White doesn't. But those men do, who in the
magazines devoted to the religion of success appear as Makers of
America. They mean just about that when they preach evolution,
progress, prosperity, being constructive, the American way of doing
things. It is easy to laugh, but, in fact, they are using a very great
pattern of human endeavor. For one thing it adopts an impersonal
criterion; for another it adopts an earthly criterion; for a third it
is habituating men to think quantitatively. To be sure the ideal
confuses excellence with size, happiness with speed, and human nature
with contraption. Yet the same motives are at work which have ever
actuated any moral code, or ever will. The desire for the biggest, the
fastest, the highest, or if you are a maker of wristwatches or
microscopes the smallest; the love in short of the superlative and the
"peerless," is in essence and possibility a noble passion.
Certainly the American version of progress has fitted an extraordinary
range of facts in the economic situation and in human nature. It
turned an unusual amount of pugnacity, acquisitiveness, and lust of
power into productive work. Nor has it, until more recently perhaps,
seriously frustrated the active nature of the active members of the
community. They have made a civilization which provides them who made
it with what they feel to be ample satisfaction in work, mating and
play, and the rush of their victory over mountains, wildernesses,
distance, and human competition has even done duty for that part of
religious feeling which is a sense of communion with the purpose of
the universe. The pattern has been a success so nearly perfect in the
sequence of ideals, practice, and results, that any challenge to it is
called un-American.
And yet, this pattern is a very partial and inadequate way of
representing the world. The habit of thinking about progress as
"development" has meant that many aspects of the environment were
simply neglected. With the stereotype of "progress" before their eyes,
Americans have in the mass seen little that did not accord with that
progress. They saw the expansion of cities, but not the accretion of
slums; they cheered the census statistics, but refused to consider
overcrowding; they pointed with pride to their growth, but would not
see the drift from the land, or the unassimilated immigration. They
expanded industry furiously at reckless cost to their natural
resources; they built up gigantic corporations without arranging for
industrial relations. They grew to be one of the most powerful nations
on earth without preparing their institutions or their minds for the
ending of their isolation. They stumbled into the World War morally
and physically unready, and they stumbled out again, much
disillusioned, but hardly more experienced.
In the World War the good and the evil influence of the American
stereotype was plainly visible. The idea that the war could be won by
recruiting unlimited armies, raising unlimited credits, building an
unlimited number of ships, producing unlimited munitions, and
concentrating without limit on these alone, fitted the traditional
stereotype, and resulted in something like a physical miracle.
[Footnote: I have in mind the transportation and supply of two million
troops overseas. Prof. Wesley Mitchell points out that the total
production of goods after our entrance into the war did not greatly
increase in volume over that of the year 1916; but that production for
war purposes did increase.] But among those most affected by the
stereotype, there was no place for the consideration of what the
fruits of victory were, or how they were to be attained. Therefore,
aims were ignored, or regarded as automatic, and victory was
conceived, because the stereotype demanded it, as nothing but an
annihilating victory in the field. In peace time you did not ask what
the fastest motor car was for, and in war you did not ask what the
completest victory was for. Yet in Paris the pattern did not fit the
facts. In peace you can go on endlessly supplanting small things with
big ones, and big ones with bigger ones; in war when you have won
absolute victory, you cannot go on to a more absolute victory. You
have to do something on an entirely different pattern. And if you lack
such a pattern, the end of the war is to you what it was to so many
good people, an anticlimax in a dreary and savorless world.
This marks the point where the stereotype and the facts, that cannot
be ignored, definitely part company. There is always such a point,
because our images of how things behave are simpler and more fixed
than the ebb and flow of affairs. There comes a time, therefore, when
the blind spots come from the edge of vision into the center. Then
unless there are critics who have the courage to sound an alarm, and
leaders capable of understanding the change, and a people tolerant by
habit, the stereotype, instead of economizing effort, and focussing
energy as it did in 1917 and 1918, may frustrate effort and waste
men's energy by blinding them, as it did for those people who cried
for a Carthaginian peace in 1919 and deplored the Treaty of Versailles
in 1921.
3
Uncritically held, the stereotype not only censors out much that needs
to be taken into account, but when the day of reckoning comes, and the
stereotype is shattered, likely as not that which it did wisely take
into account is ship-wrecked with it. That is the punishment assessed
by Mr. Bernard Shaw against Free Trade, Free Contract, Free
Competition, Natural Liberty, Laissez-faire, and Darwinism. A hundred
years ago, when he would surely have been one of the tartest advocates
of these doctrines, he would not have seen them as he sees them
to-day, in the Infidel Half Century, [Footnote: _Back to
Methuselah_. Preface.] to be excuses for "'doing the other fellow
down' with impunity, all interference by a guiding government, all
organization except police organization to protect legalized fraud
against fisticuffs, all attempt to introduce human purpose and design
and forethought into the industrial welter being 'contrary to the laws
of political economy'" He would have seen, then, as one of the
pioneers of the march to the plains of heaven [Footnote: _The
Quintessence of Ibsenism_] that, of the kind of human purpose and
design and forethought to be found in a government like that of Queen
Victoria's uncles, the less the better. He would have seen, not the
strong doing the weak down, but the foolish doing the strong down. He
would have seen purposes, designs and forethoughts at work,
obstructing invention, obstructing enterprise, obstructing what he
would infallibly have recognized as the next move of Creative
Evolution.
Even now Mr. Shaw is none too eager for the guidance of any guiding
government he knows, but in theory he has turned a full loop against
laissez-faire. Most advanced thinking before the war had made the same
turn against the established notion that if you unloosed everything,
wisdom would bubble up, and establish harmony. Since the war, with its
definite demonstration of guiding governments, assisted by censors,
propagandists, and spies, Roebuck Ramsden and Natural Liberty have
been readmitted to the company of serious thinkers.
One thing is common to these cycles. There is in each set of
stereotypes a point where effort ceases and things happen of their own
accord, as you would like them to. The progressive stereotype,
powerful to incite work, almost completely obliterates the attempt to
decide what work and why that work. Laissez-faire, a blessed release
from stupid officialdom, assumes that men will move by spontaneous
combustion towards a pre-established harmony. Collectivism, an
antidote to ruthless selfishness, seems, in the Marxian mind, to
suppose an economic determinism towards efficiency and wisdom on the
part of socialist officials. Strong government, imperialism at home
and abroad, at its best deeply conscious of the price of disorder,
relies at last on the notion that all that matters to the governed
will be known by the governors. In each theory there is a spot of
blind automatism.
That spot covers up some fact, which if it were taken into account,
would check the vital movement that the stereotype provokes. If the
progressive had to ask himself, like the Chinaman in the joke, what he
wanted to do with the time he saved by breaking the record, if the
advocate of laissez-faire had to contemplate not only free and
exuberant energies of men, but what some people call their human
nature, if the collectivist let the center of his attention be
occupied with the problem of how he is to secure his officials, if the
imperialist dared to doubt his own inspiration, you would find more
Hamlet and less Henry the Fifth. For these blind spots keep away
distracting images, which with their attendant emotions, might cause
hesitation and infirmity of purpose. Consequently the stereotype not
only saves time in a busy life and is a defense of our position in
society, but tends to preserve us from all the bewildering effect of
trying to see the world steadily and see it whole.
CHAPTER IX
CODES AND THEIR ENEMIES
ANYONE who has stood at the end of a railroad platform waiting for a
friend, will recall what queer people he mistook for him. The shape of
a hat, a slightly characteristic gait, evoked the vivid picture in his
mind's eye. In sleep a tinkle may sound like the pealing of a great
bell; the distant stroke of a hammer like a thunderclap. For our
constellations of imagery will vibrate to a stimulus that is perhaps
but vaguely similar to some aspect of them. They may, in
hallucination, flood the whole consciousness. They may enter very
little into perception, though I am inclined to think that such an
experience is extremely rare and highly sophisticated, as when we gaze
blankly at a familiar word or object, and it gradually ceases to be
familiar. Certainly for the most part, the way we see things is a
combination of what is there and of what we expected to find. The
heavens are not the same to an astronomer as to a pair of lovers; a
page of Kant will start a different train of thought in a Kantian and
in a radical empiricist; the Tahitian belle is a better looking person
to her Tahitian suitor than to the readers of the _National
Geographic Magazine_.
Expertness in any subject is, in fact, a multiplication of the number
of aspects we are prepared to discover, plus the habit of discounting
our expectations. Where to the ignoramus all things look alike, and
life is just one thing after another, to the specialist things are
highly individual. For a chauffeur, an epicure, a connoisseur, a
member of the President's cabinet, or a professor's wife, there are
evident distinctions and qualities, not at all evident to the casual
person who discusses automobiles, wines, old masters, Republicans, and
college faculties.
But in our public opinions few can be expert, while life is, as Mr.
Bernard Shaw has made plain, so short. Those who are expert are so on
only a few topics. Even among the expert soldiers, as we learned
during the war, expert cavalrymen were not necessarily brilliant with
trench-warfare and tanks. Indeed, sometimes a little expertness on a
small topic may simply exaggerate our normal human habit of trying to
squeeze into our stereotypes all that can be squeezed, and of casting
into outer darkness that which does not fit.
Whatever we recognize as familiar we tend, if we are not very careful,
to visualize with the aid of images already in our mind. Thus in the
American view of Progress and Success there is a definite picture of
human nature and of society. It is the kind of human nature and the
kind of society which logically produce the kind of progress that is
regarded as ideal. And then, when we seek to describe or explain
actually successful men, and events that have really happened, we read
back into them the qualities that are presupposed in the stereotypes.
These qualities were standardized rather innocently by the older
economists. They set out to describe the social system under which
they lived, and found it too complicated for words. So they
constructed what they sincerely hoped was a simplified diagram, not so
different in principle and in veracity from the parallelogram with
legs and head in a child's drawing of a complicated cow. The scheme
consisted of a capitalist who had diligently saved capital from his
labor, an entrepreneur who conceived a socially useful demand and
organized a factory, a collection of workmen who freely contracted,
take it or leave it, for their labor, a landlord, and a group of
consumers who bought in the cheapest market those goods which by the
ready use of the pleasure-pain calculus they knew would give them the
most pleasure. The model worked. The kind of people, which the model
assumed, living in the sort of world the model assumed, invariably
cooperated harmoniously in the books where the model was described.
With modification and embroidery, this pure fiction, used by
economists to simplify their thinking, was retailed and popularized
until for large sections of the population it prevailed as the
economic mythology of the day. It supplied a standard version of
capitalist, promoter, worker and consumer in a society that was
naturally more bent on achieving success than on explaining it. The
buildings which rose, and the bank accounts which accumulated, were
evidence that the stereotype of how the thing had been done was
accurate. And those who benefited most by success came to believe they
were the kind of men they were supposed to be. No wonder that the
candid friends of successful men, when they read the official
biography and the obituary, have to restrain themselves from asking
whether this is indeed their friend.
2
To the vanquished and the victims, the official portraiture was, of
course, unrecognizable. For while those who exemplified progress did
not often pause to inquire whether they had arrived according to the
route laid down by the economists, or by some other just as
creditable, the unsuccessful people did inquire. "No one," says
William James, [Footnote: _The Letters of William James,_ Vol. I,
p.65] "sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of
detail extends." The captains of industry saw in the great trusts
monuments of (their) success; their defeated competitors saw the
monuments of (their) failure. So the captains expounded the economies
and virtues of big business, asked to be let alone, said they were the
agents of prosperity, and the developers of trade. The vanquished
insisted upon the wastes and brutalities of the trusts, and called
loudly upon the Department of Justice to free business from
conspiracies. In the same situation one side saw progress, economy,
and a splendid development; the other, reaction, extravagance, and a
restraint of trade. Volumes of statistics, anecdotes about the real
truth and the inside truth, the deeper and the larger truth, were
published to prove both sides of the argument.
For when a system of stereotypes is well fixed, our attention is
called to those facts which support it, and diverted from those which
contradict. So perhaps it is because they are attuned to find it, that
kindly people discover so much reason for kindness, malicious people
so much malice. We speak quite accurately of seeing through
rose-colored spectacles, or with a jaundiced eye. If, as Philip
Littell once wrote of a distinguished professor, we see life as
through a class darkly, our stereotypes of what the best people and
the lower classes are like will not be contaminated by understanding.
What is alien will be rejected, what is different will fall upon
unseeing eyes. We do not see what our eyes are not accustomed to take
into account. Sometimes consciously, more often without knowing it, we
are impressed by those facts which fit our philosophy.
3
This philosophy is a more or less organized series of images for
describing the unseen world. But not only for describing it. For
judging it as well. And, therefore, the stereotypes are loaded with
preference, suffused with affection or dislike, attached to fears,
lusts, strong wishes, pride, hope. Whatever invokes the stereotype is
judged with the appropriate sentiment. Except where we deliberately
keep prejudice in suspense, we do not study a man and judge him to be
bad. We see a bad man. We see a dewy morn, a blushing maiden, a
sainted priest, a humorless Englishman, a dangerous Red, a carefree
bohemian, a lazy Hindu, a wily Oriental, a dreaming Slav, a volatile
Irishman, a greedy Jew, a 100% American. In the workaday world that is
often the real judgment, long in advance of the evidence, and it
contains within itself the conclusion which the evidence is pretty
certain to confirm. Neither justice, nor mercy, nor truth, enter into
such a judgment, for the judgment has preceded the evidence. Yet a
people without prejudices, a people with altogether neutral vision, is
so unthinkable in any civilization of which it is useful to think,
that no scheme of education could be based upon that ideal. Prejudice
can be detected, discounted, and refined, but so long as finite men
must compress into a short schooling preparation for dealing with a
vast civilization, they must carry pictures of it around with them,
and have prejudices. The quality of their thinking and doing will
depend on whether those prejudices are friendly, friendly to other
people, to other ideas, whether they evoke love of what is felt to be
positively good, rather than hatred of what is not contained in their
version of the good.
Morality, good taste and good form first standardize and then
emphasize certain of these underlying prejudices. As we adjust
ourselves to our code, we adjust the facts we see to that code.
Rationally, the facts are neutral to all our views of right and wrong.
Actually, our canons determine greatly what we shall perceive and how.
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