The Twilight of the American Enlightenment

by George Marsden

  Friedan was writing on the eve of America’s greatest national identity crisis since the American Revolution itself, and the parallel between the individual and national challenges can be instructive. If many individual American women and men were suffering from identity crises in the 1960s, they could, as Friedan was pointing out, at least turn to a consensus extending from theologians to scientists to pop culture that they should be pursing an ideal of freedom and self-fulfillment.

  Aside from its later impact on the women’s movement, what were the practical implications of this ideal of freedom in the sense of personal autonomy for ordinary Americans? It is, of course, impossible to measure that in most cases. Perhaps the most practical impact would be the message it sent to young people growing up in any one of the countless American subcommunities. If one were a young person growing up in a Polish Catholic neighborhood in Chicago, in a Jewish community in Brooklyn, or in a small town of the Midwest or the South, the implication of the message was that one should get out from under the petty constraints of local communities and traditions and be true to oneself. One then needed also to avoid the conformity and alienation in the marketplace or the suburbs—something that might prove more difficult.

  The problem was that freedom is often largely a negative term: “just another word for nothing left to lose,” as Janis Joplin would famously sing shortly before her death in 1970.17 So if one sought to construct a new identity, the ideal of autonomy did not in itself provide a standard for determining what constituted self-fulfillment. Once one was free from restrictive traditions or expectations, what was going to replace them as a basis for determining what was good for human flourishing? The critics of modernity were warning that one must be vigilant against the demands of hyperorganized commercial society and consumerism lest they undermine one’s true humanity. Yet, it was not clear what criteria one should use to determine what the positive alternatives were to the shackles either of traditionalism or of modern conformity.

  THREE

  Enlightenment’s End? Building Without Foundations

  The social commentators who identified conformity as a preeminent modern problem could assume that autonomy was the solution because they were taking for granted that there were better values that authentic, self-fulfilled people could draw upon. John Dewey, the highly influential philosopher and educator, for instance, had proposed in the 1930s that “a common faith” could be built around self-evident “goods of human association, or arts, and of knowledge.” Dewey presented these ideas as self-evident principles. “We need no external criterion and guarantee for their goodness,” he affirmed. “They are had, they exist as good, and out of them we frame our ideal ends.” Dewey’s liberal heirs in the 1950s spoke much the same way, as though there were such common “goods,” which autonomous persons of goodwill could recognize and around which a healthy society might be built.1

  One can better understand the basis for such confidence among the centrist liberal proponents of this outlook by looking at how they defended it—not against opponents, but against those whom they regarded as heretics. A heretic is not the advocate of an entirely opposing ideology, after all, but an insider, someone who believes that he or she is speaking for the tradition but has come to conclusions that others in the community denounce as unorthodox.

  In this case, the heretic was one of the most distinguished sages of the time, Walter Lippmann. His heresy was to say that his liberal colleagues were trying to build a public consensus based on inherited principles, even after they had dynamited the foundations on which those principles had first been established. The result was that liberal culture, of which he was a part, had no adequate shared criteria for determining “the good.” Lippmann’s proposed solution seemed to his peers to be much better fitted to the eighteenth century than to advanced twentieth-century thought. The story of what proved to be Lippmann’s last book, Essays in the Public Philosophy, published in 1955—and the negative reactions of his fellow liberals to that book—highlights one of the great unresolved issues of the day.2

  At midcentury, Lippmann had just turned sixty, and he was unquestionably a leading figure in shaping the American liberal consensus. A renowned journalist and author, he was the prototype of the public intellectual. He had grown up in a well-to-do Jewish family, had been educated at Harvard, and had become one of the first Jews to be fully accepted into the cosmopolitan mainstream. While still in his mid-twenties, in 1914, he had helped to found The New Republic, and he had already published the first two of what would become a score of influential books. His best-selling 1929 book A Preface to Morals was perhaps the volume that best stated the problems inherent in the transition America was undergoing at the time—the transition from the moral confidence of the Progressive era to the uncertainties of postwar modernity. Lippmann’s fame and influence continued unabated into the era of the Cold War—in fact, he was the one who had popularized the term “Cold War,” in a 1947 book title. His writings, including countless editorials, were unquestionably among the leading works of the day, setting the agenda for discussions of American democratic civilization and its future.3

  Lippmann signaled by his title, Essays in the Public Philosophy, that he would be addressing one of the most important questions of the time: On what philosophical basis might America build a unified public culture, given all its diversity? He began his answer in a prophetic mode, titling his opening section “The Decline of the West,” and recounting the essential twentieth-century political problems that he had been writing about for four decades. From his point of view as “a liberal democrat,” the crucial question of the age was whether “both liberty and democracy can be preserved before the one destroys the other.” The danger was that democratic government would be overwhelmed by mass opinion, which had proved itself incapable of responding rationally to society’s rapidly changing needs. Lippmann had already written on this topic eloquently and influentially in the 1920s, and Hitler’s popular support in his rise to power in the 1930s had proven that his fears were more than justified. “The impulse to escape from freedom, which Erich Fromm has described so well,” Lippmann wrote, confirmed the broader urgency of addressing the underlying issue.

  That deeper issue was the vogue of moral relativism. Specifically, Lippmann was concerned that there were no longer any transcendent moral standards to which to appeal in guiding either the government or the people. In the first half of the twentieth century, there had been a trend to separate the law from reference to any higher moral system. Lippmann had now come to see that as a dangerous innovation. The institutions of free societies, he observed, had been founded “on the postulate that there was a universal order on which all reasonable men were agreed.” In the era of America’s founding, even if the more secular thinkers and the traditional Christians may have differed on the exact source of that order and its content, “they did agree that there was a valid law which, whether it was the commandment of God or the reason of things, was transcendent.” Speaking of such essential principles as “freedom of religion and of thought and of speech,” Lippmann affirmed that “the men of the seventeenth and eighteenth century who established these great salutatory rules would certainly have denied that a community could do without a general public philosophy.” But the idea, so essential to establishing democratic institutions, that there was such a higher moral order had not survived modern pluralism, and “with the disappearance of the public philosophy—and of a consensus on the first and last things—there was opened up a great vacuum in the public mind, yawning to be filled.”

  The task of building consensus and community, as Lippmann saw it, was not just a matter of forging agreements on policies here and there; ultimately, it would rest on underlying philosophical and moral assumptions. One of the effects of pluralism was that morality had come to be thought of as an essentially subjective and private matter. “It became the rule that ideas and principles are private—with only subjective relevance
and significance,” he wrote. Lippmann saw that same trend in philosophy. Referring to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, Lippmann declared that “if what is good, what is right, what is true, is only what the individual ‘chooses’ to ‘invent’, then we are outside the traditions of civility.” With no objective point of moral reference, with no philosopher to teach people that there was any order or meaning beyond the subjective self, there was nothing with which to counter the madness of the masses or to preempt their madness by educating them in the traditions of civility.

  The only hope for reestablishing a public philosophy, and thus for preserving free institutions, said Lippmann, was a recovery of natural law. He asserted this point not so much as a philosophical argument as a philosophical agenda. He did not define natural law beyond referencing an article on it by Mortimer Adler, a Jewish scholar who had long been its chief secular advocate. Nor did Lippmann say precisely how natural law was to be discovered. Rather, by a recovery of “natural law,” he meant a return to the conviction that had long been basic to Western thought: that there was some sort of objective moral order or set of timeless moral principles that could be discovered through rational inquiry. The common law and the principles of a free society, he believed, could be sustained only on such a basis. “Except on the premises of this philosophy,” he declared, “it is impossible to reach intelligible and workable conceptions of popular election, majority rule, representative assemblies, free speech, loyalty, property, corporations and voluntary associates.”4

  Walter Lippmann was, as one of his closest friends said of him, very much “a child of the enlightenment,”5 and it is helpful to think of him and his project as a public intellectual in that framework. As a quintessential cosmopolitan without strong connections to any ethnic or religious community, he was deeply committed to a universal order of civility. That commitment was in harmony with the outlooks of many of the nation’s eighteenth-century philosopher-founders, such as Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison, who wanted to get away from the authority of sectarian subcommunities and to build a larger order on self-evident principles on which people of goodwill ought to agree. In the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, such cosmopolitan outlooks fit the agenda of many of America’s leading thinkers who were trying to establish common principles for public life that would transcend local and parochial prejudices. Lippmann studied at Harvard with the famed philosophers William James and George Santayana, and he had been very much in sympathy with the early twentieth-century challenge of how to reconstruct a public philosophy that would meet the demands of the modern age.

  The great modern intellectual challenge to establishing a universal philosophy was Darwinism. Prior to Charles Darwin, it had been difficult even for the more secularly minded to imagine a universe that was not the product of an intelligence. Hence, it had seemed likely that humans should be able to discover some transcendent moral order. Darwin made it plausible to imagine that both the universe and humans themselves were the products of chance natural forces. In that case, moral systems were all human inventions and were best understood by their comparative histories. Added to these theoretical issues was the practical matter that the United States, by the beginning of the twentieth century, was becoming increasingly diverse. How could one reconstruct a common philosophy in such a world?

  Walter Lippmann’s teacher William James offered constructive principles that might point to a way out. According to James’s pragmatism, we can find out which beliefs to hold on to as “true” by seeing which ones prove themselves most effective in getting us into adjustment with the rest of our experiences with reality, including the beliefs we already firmly hold. That is to say, in effect, that rather than descending into relativism or skepticism, we could rely on a sort of survival of the fittest of beliefs, some of which we could accept as true because they have proven to work in the real world.6

  Early in his career, Walter Lippmann adopted an outlook that had a Jamesean hue. “We have to act on what we believe, on half-knowledge, illusion and error,” he wrote in 1913 in his first major book, A Preface to Politics. “Experience itself will reveal our mistakes,” he continued. “Research and criticism may convert them into wisdom.” He also, as was common in the Progressive era, had faith that the scientific method could bring people of diverse interests into practical agreement. “The discipline of science,” he wrote in Drift and Mastery in 1914, “is the only one that gives any assurance that from the same set of facts men will come approximately to the same conclusion.” Science was the best hope humanity had in the face of modern pluralism. “And as the modern world can be civilized only by the effort of innumerable people,” Lippmann declared, “we have a right to call science the discipline of democracy.”7

  By the time Lippmann published A Preface to Morals in 1929, the confidence of the Western world in scientifically based mastery of human problems had been badly shaken by the disaster of the Great War. The 1920s had become the era of “the disillusion of the intellectuals.” As Lippmann put it, the present was “the first age . . . in the history of mankind when the circumstances of life have conspired with the intellectual habits of the time to render any fixed and authoritative belief incredible to large masses of men.”

  Lippmann went on to argue, in contrast to the moralistic platitudes of Protestant theological modernists, that it was time to face frankly the irreversible reality of this breakdown of the old authorities and to reconstruct humanism on a new, secular basis. The fundamental problem for the modern moralist, he declared, “is how mankind, deprived of the great fictions, is to come to terms with the needs which created those fictions.” Still reflecting the spirit of William James, Lippmann was proposing that the constructive moralist should look beneath the varieties of formal systems for the insights into human experience that have been discovered and rediscovered through the ages.8

  Despite the enthusiastic reception of A Preface to Morals, by the early 1930s the combination of increasingly skeptical intellectual trends, the Great Depression, and the spread of totalitarianism had made such gentlemanly constructive pragmatism problematic. In 1929, the same year that A Preface to Morals appeared, journalist Joseph Wood Krutch published The Modern Temper, in which he argued that evolutionary naturalism, if consistently applied, undermined not only traditional religion but also traditional moralities. Supposed moral norms were, after all, nothing more than survival mechanisms from more primitive times. Evolutionary naturalism, he emphasized, had the necessary implication of undermining all moral authority. Carl Becker, a leading historian of the era, argued for a skeptical pragmatism that anticipated later twentieth-century views regarding moral systems as simply the useful constructions of those who were in power. In his classic 1932 book The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, Becker maintained that the enlightenment thinkers were really men of faith as much as men of reason. They had an unfounded faith that the universe was the product of a deity and that there were objective natural and moral laws that reason could discover. Their outlook, Becker argued, was thus closer to that of the medieval thinkers of the thirteenth century than it was to that of truly modern thinkers who realized they lived in a chance universe.9

  Lippmann did not share such radical skepticism, but by the mid-1930s he was wondering about the ability of modern liberal culture and modern science to find an adequate basis for building a moral community. The darkening clouds of totalitarianism as well as the deep economic depression made it a real question as to whether democracies could survive. Lippmann at first supported the New Deal, but he then became dubious of the government’s ability to solve societal problems through pragmatic and increasingly collectivist action. It was around this time, in the later 1930s, that he began to take up the project that would eventually become Essays in the Public Philosophy. Lippmann had begun to question the conclusion of his liberal contemporaries that modern natural science dictated a rejection of eighteenth-century views of natural law, esp
ecially of a higher moral law, as irrecoverable mythology. Lippmann had begun to think, rather, that twentieth-century mainstream Western thought had taken a serious wrong turn into a dead end. Pragmatism by itself could not get them out. Therefore, it was time to see if somehow a higher moral law might be recovered as a basis for a shared social morality.10

  Lippmann’s proposal was complicated by the fact that, by the 1950s, natural-law philosophy was chiefly associated with Roman Catholicism. Anti-Catholicism was still strong in much of American life. Since the 1930s, many liberals, including both mainstream Protestant and secular liberals, had associated Catholicism with fascism. After World War II, it had been commonplace to ask whether Catholicism was compatible with democracy. When in 1949 journalist Paul Blanshard argued in American Freedom and Catholic Power that true freedom and true Catholicism were incompatible, his book reached the best-seller lists. In 1951, William F. Buckley, a Roman Catholic and a recent Yale grad, created a furor in his God and Man at Yale by alleging that education at Yale was relativistic and atheistic. The anti-Christian stance of many of the faculty, he said, was of a piece with their being on the wrong side of the battle between individualism and collectivism. In 1955 Buckley founded The National Review, a crucial step in launching a new conservatism. At the time, however, the fact that Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom Buckley supported, was a Roman Catholic heightened liberal fears that Catholicism might be associated with repression.11