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Walter Lippmann >> Public Opinion
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For a moral code is a scheme of conduct applied to a number of typical
instances. To behave as the code directs is to serve whatever purpose
the code pursues. It may be God's will, or the king's, individual
salvation in a good, solid, three dimensional paradise, success on
earth, or the service of mankind. In any event the makers of the code
fix upon certain typical situations, and then by some form of
reasoning or intuition, deduce the kind of behavior which would
produce the aim they acknowledge. The rules apply where they apply.
But in daily living how does a man know whether his predicament is the
one the law-giver had in mind? He is told not to kill. But if his
children are attacked, may he kill to stop a killing? The Ten
Commandments are silent on the point. Therefore, around every code
there is a cloud of interpreters who deduce more specific cases.
Suppose, then, that the doctors of the law decide that he may kill in
self-defense. For the next man the doubt is almost as great; how does
he know that he is defining self-defense correctly, or that he has not
misjudged the facts, imagined the attack, and is really the aggressor?
Perhaps he has provoked the attack. But what is a provocation? Exactly
these confusions infected the minds of most Germans in August, 1914.
Far more serious in the modern world than any difference of moral code
is the difference in the assumptions about facts to which the code is
applied. Religious, moral and political formulae are nothing like so
far apart as the facts assumed by their votaries. Useful discussion,
then, instead of comparing ideals, reexamines the visions of the
facts. Thus the rule that you should do unto others as you would have
them do unto you rests on the belief that human nature is uniform. Mr.
Bernard Shaw's statement that you should not do unto others what you
would have them do unto you, because their tastes may be different,
rests on the belief that human nature is not uniform. The maxim that
competition is the life of trade consists of a whole tome of
assumptions about economic motives, industrial relations, and the
working of a particular commercial system. The claim that America will
never have a merchant marine, unless it is privately owned and
managed, assumes a certain proved connection between a certain kind of
profit-making and incentive. The justification by the bolshevik
propagandist of the dictatorship, espionage, and the terror, because
"every state is an apparatus of violence" [Footnote: See _Two Years
of Conflict on the Internal Front_, published by the Russian
Socialist Federated Soviet Republic, Moscow, 1920. Translated by
Malcolm W. Davis for the _New York Evening Post_, January 15,
1921.] is an historical judgment, the truth of which is by no means
self-evident to a non-communist.
At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a
map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the
sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history
(so understood), the rules of the code apply. So far as the facts of
personality, of the environment and of memory are different, by so far
the rules of the code are difficult to apply with success. Now every
moral code has to conceive human psychology, the material world, and
tradition some way or other. But in the codes that are under the
influence of science, the conception is known to be an hypothesis,
whereas in the codes that come unexamined from the past or bubble up
from the caverns of the mind, the conception is not taken as an
hypothesis demanding proof or contradiction, but as a fiction accepted
without question. In the one case, man is humble about his beliefs,
because he knows they are tentative and incomplete; in the other he is
dogmatic, because his belief is a completed myth. The moralist who
submits to the scientific discipline knows that though he does not
know everything, he is in the way of knowing something; the dogmatist,
using a myth, believes himself to share part of the insight of
omniscience, though he lacks the criteria by which to tell truth from
error. For the distinguishing mark of a myth is that truth and error,
fact and fable, report and fantasy, are all on the same plane of
credibility.
The myth is, then, not necessarily false. It might happen to be wholly
true. It may happen to be partly true. If it has affected human
conduct a long time, it is almost certain to contain much that is
profoundly and importantly true. What a myth never contains is the
critical power to separate its truths from its errors. For that power
comes only by realizing that no human opinion, whatever its supposed
origin, is too exalted for the test of evidence, that every opinion is
only somebody's opinion. And if you ask why the test of evidence is
preferable to any other, there is no answer unless you are willing to
use the test in order to test it.
4
The statement is, I think, susceptible of overwhelming proof, that
moral codes assume a particular view of the facts. Under the term
moral codes I include all kinds: personal, family, economic,
professional, legal, patriotic, international. At the center of each
there is a pattern of stereotypes about psychology, sociology, and
history. The same view of human nature, institutions or tradition
rarely persists through all our codes. Compare, for example, the
economic and the patriotic codes. There is a war supposed to affect
all alike. Two men are partners in business. One enlists, the other
takes a war contract. The soldier sacrifices everything, perhaps even
his life. He is paid a dollar a day, and no one says, no one believes,
that you could make a better soldier out of him by any form of
economic incentive. That motive disappears out of his human nature.
The contractor sacrifices very little, is paid a handsome profit over
costs, and few say or believe that he would produce the munitions if
there were no economic incentive. That may be unfair to him. The point
is that the accepted patriotic code assumes one kind of human nature,
the commercial code another. And the codes are probably founded on
true expectations to this extent, that when a man adopts a certain
code he tends to exhibit the kind of human nature which the code
demands.
That is one reason why it is so dangerous to generalize about human
nature. A loving father can be a sour boss, an earnest municipal
reformer, and a rapacious jingo abroad. His family life, his business
career, his politics, and his foreign policy rest on totally different
versions of what others are like and of how he should act. These
versions differ by codes in the same person, the codes differ somewhat
among persons in the same social set, differ widely as between social
sets, and between two nations, or two colors, may differ to the point
where there is no common assumption whatever. That is why people
professing the same stock of religious beliefs can go to war. The
element of their belief which determines conduct is that view of the
facts which they assume.
That is where codes enter so subtly and so pervasively into the making
of public opinion. The orthodox theory holds that a public opinion
constitutes a moral judgment on a group of facts. The theory I am
suggesting is that, in the present state of education, a public
opinion is primarily a moralized and codified version of the facts. I
am arguing that the pattern of stereotypes at the center of our codes
largely determines what group of facts we shall see, and in what light
we shall see them. That is why, with the best will in the world, the
news policy of a journal tends to support its editorial policy; why a
capitalist sees one set of facts, and certain aspects of human nature,
literally sees them; his socialist opponent another set and other
aspects, and why each regards the other as unreasonable or perverse,
when the real difference between them is a difference of perception.
That difference is imposed by the difference between the capitalist
and socialist pattern of stereotypes. "There are no classes in
America," writes an American editor. "The history of all hitherto
existing society is the history of class struggles," says the
Communist Manifesto. If you have the editor's pattern in your mind,
you will see vividly the facts that confirm it, vaguely and
ineffectively those that contradict. If you have the communist
pattern, you will not only look for different things, but you will see
with a totally different emphasis what you and the editor happen to
see in common.
5
And since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts,
he who denies either my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is
to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The
opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we
ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an
explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own
assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole. It is
only when we are in the habit of recognizing our opinions as a partial
experience seen through our stereotypes that we become truly tolerant
of an opponent. Without that habit, we believe in the absolutism of
our own vision, and consequently in the treacherous character of all
opposition. For while men are willing to admit that there are two
sides to a "question," they do not believe that there are two sides to
what they regard as a "fact." And they never do believe it until after
long critical education, they are fully conscious of how second-hand
and subjective is their apprehension of their social data.
So where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive
their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for
them to credit each other with honesty. If the pattern fits their
experience at a crucial point, they no longer look upon it as an
interpretation. They look upon it as "reality." It may not resemble
the reality, except that it culminates in a conclusion which fits a
real experience. I may represent my trip from New York to Boston by a
straight line on a map, just as a man may regard his triumph as the
end of a straight and narrow path. The road by which I actually went
to Boston may have involved many detours, much turning and twisting,
just as his road may have involved much besides pure enterprise, labor
and thrift. But provided I reach Boston and he succeeds, the airline
and the straight path will serve as ready made charts. Only when
somebody tries to follow them, and does not arrive, do we have to
answer objections. If we insist on our charts, and he insists on
rejecting them, we soon tend to regard him as a dangerous fool, and he
to regard us as liars and hypocrites. Thus we gradually paint
portraits of each other. For the opponent presents himself as the man
who says, evil be thou my good. He is an annoyance who does not fit
into the scheme of things. Nevertheless he interferes. And since that
scheme is based in our minds on incontrovertible fact fortified by
irresistible logic, some place has to be found for him in the scheme.
Rarely in politics or industrial disputes is a place made for him by
the simple admission that he has looked upon the same reality and seen
another aspect of it. That would shake the whole scheme.
Thus to the Italians in Paris Fiume was Italian It was not merely a
city that it would be desirable to include within the Italian kingdom.
It was Italian. They fixed their whole mind upon the Italian majority
within the legal boundaries of the city itself. The American
delegates, having seen more Italians in New York than there are in
Fiume, without regarding New York as Italian, fixed their eyes on
Fiume as a central European port of entry. They saw vividly the
Jugoslavs in the suburbs and the non-Italian hinterland. Some of the
Italians in Paris were therefore in need of a convincing explanation
of the American perversity. They found it in a rumor which started, no
one knows where, that an influential American diplomat was in the
snares of a Jugoslav mistress. She had been seen.... He had been
seen.... At Versailles just off the boulevard. ... The villa with the
large trees.
This is a rather common way of explaining away opposition. In their
more libelous form such charges rarely reach the printed page, and a
Roosevelt may have to wait years, or a Harding months, before he can
force an issue, and end a whispering campaign that has reached into
every circle of talk. Public men have to endure a fearful amount of
poisonous clubroom, dinner table, boudoir slander, repeated,
elaborated, chuckled over, and regarded as delicious. While this sort
of thing is, I believe, less prevalent in America than in Europe, yet
rare is the American official about whom somebody is not repeating a
scandal.
Out of the opposition we make villains and conspiracies. If prices go
up unmercifully the profiteers have conspired; if the newspapers
misrepresent the news, there is a capitalist plot; if the rich are too
rich, they have been stealing; if a closely fought election is lost,
the electorate was corrupted; if a statesman does something of which
you disapprove, he has been bought or influenced by some discreditable
person. If workingmen are restless, they are the victims of agitators;
if they are restless over wide areas, there is a conspiracy on foot.
If you do not produce enough aeroplanes, it is the work of spies; if
there is trouble in Ireland, it is German or Bolshevik "gold." And if
you go stark, staring mad looking for plots, you see all strikes, the
Plumb plan, Irish rebellion, Mohammedan unrest, the restoration of
King Constantine, the League of Nations, Mexican disorder, the
movement to reduce armaments, Sunday movies, short skirts, evasion of
the liquor laws, Negro self-assertion, as sub-plots under some
grandiose plot engineered either by Moscow, Rome, the Free Masons, the
Japanese, or the Elders of Zion.
CHAPTER X
THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES
1
Skilled diplomatists, compelled to talk out loud to the warring
peoples, learned how to use a large repertory of stereotypes. They
were dealing with a precarious alliance of powers, each of which was
maintaining its war unity only by the most careful leadership. The
ordinary soldier and his wife, heroic and selfless beyond anything in
the chronicles of courage, were still not heroic enough to face death
gladly for all the ideas which were said by the foreign offices of
foreign powers to be essential to the future of civilization. There
were ports, and mines, rocky mountain passes, and villages that few
soldiers would willingly have crossed No Man's Land to obtain for
their allies.
Now it happened in one nation that the war party which was in control
of the foreign office, the high command, and most of the press, had
claims on the territory of several of its neighbors. These claims were
called the Greater Ruritania by the cultivated classes who regarded
Kipling, Treitschke, and Maurice Barres as one hundred percent
Ruritanian. But the grandiose idea aroused no enthusiasm abroad. So
holding this finest flower of the Ruritanian genius, as their poet
laureate said, to their hearts, Ruritania's statesmen went forth to
divide and conquer. They divided the claim into sectors. For each
piece they invoked that stereotype which some one or more of their
allies found it difficult to resist, because that ally had claims for
which it hoped to find approval by the use of this same stereotype.
The first sector happened to be a mountainous region inhabited by
alien peasants. Ruritania demanded it to complete her natural
geographical frontier. If you fixed your attention long enough on the
ineffable value of what is natural, those alien peasants just
dissolved into fog, and only the slope of the mountains was visible.
The next sector was inhabited by Ruritanians, and on the principle
that no people ought to live under alien rule, they were re-annexed.
Then came a city of considerable commercial importance, not inhabited
by Ruritanians. But until the Eighteenth Century it had been part of
Ruritania, and on the principle of Historic Right it was annexed.
Farther on there was a splendid mineral deposit owned by aliens and
worked by aliens. On the principle of reparation for damage it was
annexed. Beyond this there was a territory inhabited 97% by aliens,
constituting the natural geographical frontier of another nation,
never historically a part of Ruritania. But one of the provinces which
had been federated into Ruritania had formerly traded in those
markets, and the upper class culture was Ruritanian. On the principle
of cultural superiority and the necessity of defending civilization,
the lands were claimed. Finally, there was a port wholly disconnected
from Ruritania geographically, ethnically, economically, historically,
traditionally. It was demanded on the ground that it was needed for
national defense.
In the treaties that concluded the Great War you can multiply examples
of this kind. Now I do not wish to imply that I think it was possible
to resettle Europe consistently on any one of these principles. I am
certain that it was not. The very use of these principles, so
pretentious and so absolute, meant that the spirit of accommodation
did not prevail and that, therefore, the substance of peace was not
there. For the moment you start to discuss factories, mines,
mountains, or even political authority, as perfect examples of some
eternal principle or other, you are not arguing, you are fighting.
That eternal principle censors out all the objections, isolates the
issue from its background and its context, and sets going in you some
strong emotion, appropriate enough to the principle, highly
inappropriate to the docks, warehouses, and real estate. And having
started in that mood you cannot stop. A real danger exists. To meet it
you have to invoke more absolute principles in order to defend what is
open to attack. Then you have to defend the defenses, erect buffers,
and buffers for the buffers, until the whole affair is so scrambled
that it seems less dangerous to fight than to keep on talking.
There are certain clues which often help in detecting the false
absolutism of a stereotype. In the case of the Ruritanian propaganda
the principles blanketed each other so rapidly that one could readily
see how the argument had been constructed. The series of
contradictions showed that for each sector that stereotype was
employed which would obliterate all the facts that interfered with the
claim. Contradiction of this sort is often a good clue.
2
Inability to take account of space is another. In the spring of 1918,
for example, large numbers of people, appalled by the withdrawal of
Russia, demanded the "reestablishment of an Eastern Front." The war,
as they had conceived it, was on two fronts, and when one of them
disappeared there was an instant demand that it be recreated. The
unemployed Japanese army was to man the front, substituting for the
Russian. But there was one insuperable obstacle. Between Vladivostok
and the eastern battleline there were five thousand miles of country,
spanned by one broken down railway. Yet those five thousand miles
would not stay in the minds of the enthusiasts. So overwhelming was
their conviction that an eastern front was needed, and so great their
confidence in the valor of the Japanese army, that, mentally, they had
projected that army from Vladivostok to Poland on a magic carpet. In
vain our military authorities argued that to land troops on the rim of
Siberia had as little to do with reaching the Germans, as climbing
from the cellar to the roof of the Woolworth building had to do with
reaching the moon.
The stereotype in this instance was the war on two fronts. Ever since
men had begun to imagine the Great War they had conceived Germany held
between France and Russia. One generation of strategists, and perhaps
two, had lived with that visual image as the starting point of all
their calculations. For nearly four years every battle-map they saw
had deepened the impression that this was the war. When affairs took a
new turn, it was not easy to see them as they were then. They were
seen through the stereotype, and facts which conflicted with it, such
as the distance from Japan to Poland, were incapable of coming vividly
into consciousness.
It is interesting to note that the American authorities dealt with the
new facts more realistically than the French. In part, this was
because (previous to 1914) they had no preconception of a war upon the
continent; in part because the Americans, engrossed in the
mobilization of their forces, had a vision of the western front which
was itself a stereotype that excluded from _their_ consciousness
any very vivid sense of the other theatres of war. In the spring of
1918 this American view could not compete with the traditional French
view, because while the Americans believed enormously in their own
powers, the French at that time (before Cantigny and the Second Marne)
had the gravest doubts. The American confidence suffused the American
stereotype, gave it that power to possess consciousness, that
liveliness and sensible pungency, that stimulating effect upon the
will, that emotional interest as an object of desire, that congruity
with the activity in hand, which James notes as characteristic of what
we regard as "real." [Footnote: _Principles of Psychology_, Vol.
II, p. 300.] The French in despair remained fixed on their accepted
image. And when facts, gross geographical facts, would not fit with
the preconception, they were either censored out of mind, or the facts
were themselves stretched out of shape. Thus the difficulty of the
Japanese reaching the Germans five thousand miles away was, in
measure, overcome by bringing the Germans more than half way to meet
them. Between March and June 1918, there was supposed to be a German
army operating in Eastern Siberia. This phantom army consisted of some
German prisoners actually seen, more German prisoners thought about,
and chiefly of the delusion that those five thousand intervening miles
did not really exist. [Footnote: See in this connection Mr. Charles
Grasty's interview with Marshal Foch, _New York Times_, February
26, 1918. "Germany is walking through Russia. America and Japan, who
are in a position to do so, should go to meet her in Siberia." See
also the resolution by Senator King of Utah, June 10, 1918, and Mr.
Taft's statement in the _New York Times_, June 11, 1918, and the
appeal to America on May 5, 1918, by Mr. A. J. Sack, Director of the
Russian Information Bureau: "If Germany were in the Allied place...
she would have 3,000,000 fighting on the East front within a year."]
3
A true conception of space is not a simple matter. If I draw a
straight line on a map between Bombay and Hong Kong and measure the
distance, I have learned nothing whatever about the distance I should
have to cover on a voyage. And even if I measure the actual distance
that I must traverse, I still know very little until I know what ships
are in the service, when they run, how fast they go, whether I can
secure accommodation and afford to pay for it. In practical life space
is a matter of available transportation, not of geometrical planes, as
the old railroad magnate knew when he threatened to make grass grow in
the streets of a city that had offended him. If I am motoring and ask
how far it is to my destination, I curse as an unmitigated booby the
man who tells me it is three miles, and does not mention a six mile
detour. It does me no good to be told that it is three miles if you
walk. I might as well be told it is one mile as the crow flies. I do
not fly like a crow, and I am not walking either. I must know that it
is nine miles for a motor car, and also, if that is the case, that six
of them are ruts and puddles. I call the pedestrian a nuisance who
tells me it is three miles and think evil of the aviator who told me
it was one mile. Both of them are talking about the space they have to
cover, not the space I must cover.
In the drawing of boundary lines absurd complications have arisen
through failure to conceive the practical geography of a region. Under
some general formula like self-determination statesmen have at various
times drawn lines on maps, which, when surveyed on the spot, ran
through the middle of a factory, down the center of a village street,
diagonally across the nave of a church, or between the kitchen and
bedroom of a peasant's cottage. There have been frontiers in a grazing
country which separated pasture from water, pasture from market, and
in an industrial country, railheads from railroad. On the colored
ethnic map the line was ethnically just, that is to say, just in the
world of that ethnic map.
4
But time, no less than space, fares badly. A common example is that of
the man who tries by making an elaborate will to control his money
long after his death. "It had been the purpose of the first William
James," writes his great-grandson Henry James, [Footnote: _The
Letters of William James_, Vol. I, p. 6.] "to provide that his
children (several of whom were under age when he died) should qualify
themselves by industry and experience to enjoy the large patrimony
which he expected to bequeath to them, and with that in view he left a
will which was a voluminous compound of restraints and instructions.
He showed thereby how great were both his confidence in his own
judgment and his solicitude for the moral welfare of his descendants."
The courts upset the will. For the law in its objection to
perpetuities recognizes that there are distinct limits to the
usefulness of allowing anyone to impose his moral stencil upon an
unknown future. But the desire to impose it is a very human trait, so
human that the law permits it to operate for a limited time after
death.
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