A Preface to Politics

by Walter Lippmann

Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character. We extend this into all our thinking. Between us and the realities of social life we build up a mass of generalizations, abstract ideas, ancient glories, and personal wishes. They simplify and soften experience. It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves. We worry about their fate and forget their original content.

For words, theories, symbols, slogans, abstractions of all kinds are nothing but the porous vessels into which life flows, is contained for a time, and then passes through. But our reverence clings to the vessels. The old meaning may have disappeared, a new one come in--no matter, we try to believe there has been no change. And when life's expansion demands some new container, nothing is more difficult than the realization that the old vessels cannot be stretched to the present need.

It is interesting to notice how in the very act of analyzing it I have fallen into this curious and ancient habit. My point is that the metaphor is taken for the reality: I have used at least six metaphors to state it. Abstractions are not cloaks, nor wax figures, nor walls, nor vessels, and life doesn't flow like water. What they really are you and I know inwardly by using abstractions and living our lives. But once I attempt to give that inwardness expression, I must use the only weapons I have--abstractions, theories, phrases. By an effort of the sympathetic imagination you can revive within yourself something of my inward sense. As I have had to abstract from life in order to communicate, so you are compelled to animate my abstractions, in order to understand.

I know of no other method of communication between two people. Language is always grossly inadequate. It is inadequate if the listener is merely passive, if he falls into the mistake of the literal-minded who expect words to contain a precise image of reality. They never do. All language can achieve is to act as a guidepost to the imagination enabling the reader to recreate the author's insight. The artist does that: he controls his medium so that we come most readily to the heart of his intention. In the lyric poet the control is often so delicate that the hearer lives over again the finely shaded mood of the poet. Take the words of a lyric for what they say, and they say nothing most of the time. And that is true of philosophers. You must penetrate the ponderous vocabulary, the professional cant to the insight beneath or you scoff at the mountain ranges of words and phrases. It is this that Bergson means when he tells us that a philosopher's intuition always outlasts his system. Unless you get at that you remain forever foreign to the thinker.

That too is why debating is such a wretched amusement and most partisanship, most controversy, so degrading. The trick here is to argue from the opponent's language, never from his insight. You take him literally, you pick up his sentences, and you show what nonsense they are. You do not try to weigh what you see against what he sees; you contrast what you see with what he says. So debating becomes a way of confirming your own prejudices; it is never, never in any debate I have suffered through, a search for understanding from the angles of two differing insights.

And, of course, in those more sinister forms of debating, court trials, where the stakes are so much bigger, the skill of a successful lawyer is to make the atmosphere as opaque as possible to the other lawyer's contention. Men have been hanged as a result. How often in a political campaign does a candidate suggest that behind the platforms and speeches of his opponents there might be some new and valuable understanding of the country's need?

The fact is that we argue and quarrel an enormous lot over words. Our prevailing habit is to think about phrases, "ideals," theories, not about the realities they express. In controversy we do not try to find our opponent's meaning: we examine his vocabulary. And in our own efforts to shape policies we do not seek out what is worth doing: we seek out what will pass for moral, practical, popular or constitutional.

In this the Vice Commission reflected our national habits. For those earnest men and women in Chicago did not set out to find a way of abolishing prostitution; they set out to find a way that would conform to four idols they worshiped. The only cure for prostitution might prove to be "immoral," "impractical," unconstitutional, and unpopular. I suspect that it is. But the honest thing to do would have been to look for that cure without preconceived notions. Having found it, the Commission could then have said to the public: "This is what will cure the social evil. It means these changes in industry, sex relations, law and public opinion. If you think it is worth the cost you can begin to deal with the problem. If you don't, then confess that you will not abolish prostitution, and turn your compassion to softening its effects."

That would have left the issues clear and wholesome. But the procedure of the Commission is a blow to honest thinking. Its conclusions may "square with the public conscience of the American people" but they will not square with the intellectual conscience of anybody. To tell you at the top of the page that absolute annihilation of prostitution is the ultimate ideal and twenty lines further on that the method must be constitutional is nothing less than an insult to the intelligence. Calf-worship was never more idolatrous than this. Truth would have slept more comfortably in Procrustes' bed.

Let no one imagine that I take the four preconceived ideas of the Commission too seriously. On the first reading of the report they aroused no more interest in me than the ordinary lip-honor we all do to conventionality--I had heard of the great fearlessness of this report, and I supposed that this bending of the knee was nothing but the innocent hypocrisy of the reformer who wants to make his proposal not too shocking. But it was a mistake. Those four idols really dominated the minds of the Commission, and without them the report cannot be understood. They are typical idols of the American people. This report offers an opportunity to see the concrete results of worshiping them.