Wanted: A Public Philosophy 
By Charles Wellborn

[Dr. Charles Wellborn is Professor of Religion Emeritus, Florida State University, Tallahassee and for 20 years was Dean of the FSU Overseas Campus in London.]

During 1963 and 1964 I spent much of my time in an in-depth study of the career of Walter Lippmann, the political columnist and philosopher. The result was a book called Twentieth Century Pilgrimage: Walter Lippmann and the Public Philosophy, published in 1969. The book, I must confess, made hardly a ripple in the wide sea of political thought.

Lippmann is remembered today primarily as an influential syndicated newspaper columnist. Indeed, at one point his status inspired a famous New Yorker cartoon, depicting two dowagers at the breakfast table on a New York commuter train. One lady says to the other, "Just a cup of coffee and Walter Lippmann. That's all I need for breakfast." But Lippmann was respected by more than commuters. When he visited London, he was received by Winston Churchill. Two lengthy interviews with Nikita Khrushchev, the Russian leader, were internationally televised and resulted in a best-selling book. And shortly after John F. Kennedy was elected president, he visited Lippmann for a long session of political advice and counsel.

Lippmann, however, was much more than a widely-read political pundit. Across his half-century career he produced a series of thoughtful books. His 1922 work called Public Opinion is still ranked as a classic in its field. The most important of his books, setting out his mature and considered views, was a slim volume called The Public Philosophy which appeared in 1955.

In recent days I have gone back to that seminal publication and have found it even more relevant and insightful than when it was first written. Lippmann's prophecies have been largely fulfilled, and his analysis remains pertinent, more than forty years later.

What were the problems which disturbed Lippmann? He saw the recent history of Western society as drastic evidence of dangerous political decay. Possessing the greatest accumulation of technological power and potential the world has ever known, victorious in battle (and now, in Cold War) over all enemies, verbally committed to high ideals and noble purposes, the democratic nations have still failed by and large to achieve the kind of society expected by their people and demanded by the times.

The trends which Lippmann described in 1955 have become more pronounced in the years since. Today we are an economically prosperous society; yet there are potentially convulsive problems lurking below the political surface. We are a nation of conflicting pressure groups in constant struggle with one another. Of course, in one sense we have always been so. The difference today is that many of these pressure groups--ethnic, economic, social--seem gradually to be giving up on the prescribed democratic methods of change. Violence, force, disorder, combined with the skillful media manipulation of public opinion, are more and more becoming the pragmatic means of change. We condemn the terrorist methods of Palestinian guerrillas or Algerian rebels; yet we are nourishing within our own boundaries a situation in which our rapidly expanding underclass--people who no longer feel they have a stake in the maintenance of a stable democratic society--increasingly are led to resort to anti-democratic tactics. Force begets force, and a democratic society threatened by internal convulsion is steadily tempted to abandon its own principles and meet brute power with even greater power.

How has this happened? Why does an America committed to peace and freedom now have to deal with anarchic militia groups who blow up buildings in Oklahoma City? Why must we face lawless and destructive uprisings of the economically and socially depressed classes in our cities? Why are so many inner city areas now "no-go" areas for even the appointed forces of the law? Why does the gap between the rich and the poor grow steadily larger?

The situation is certainly not helped by a significant warping of the original theory of rule by democratically elected representatives. The founders and most of the early leaders of the American democracy subscribed to the concept set out most clearly by the English parliamentarian, Edmund Burke. Government should be administered by representatives elected by the people in a system which was optimistically expected to place in office the most capable and thoughtful leaders of the nation. These representatives were expected to use their own wisdom and conscientious judgment in putting legislation into place. In our revolutionary information and media age that theory has devolved in practice into a system which favors the election of those candidates with the most money and the most effective "spin doctors." Once in office, these elected officials are prisoners of volatile and rapidly-changing public opinion, expected not to exercise any independent judgment but to conform to the wishes of 51% of their constituents. The spectacle of an American president with three television sets in the Oval office, so that he could be up to date instantly on the opinion polls of all three major television networks, is a sad commentary on the present system. Rubber stamp representative government, responding to a public opinion manipulated by skillful use of half-truths and inadequate, sensationalized media exposure, can rapidly degenerate into the rule of the mob.

Walter Lippmann, however, was concerned with more basic problems than these largely technical ones. He believed that a central clue to our difficulty lies in the progressive loss of what he called the "public philosophy" or the "tradition of civility"--a body of knowledge and understanding slowly and painfully arrived at over more than twenty centuries of Western thought and experience. Within this overall loss, the most serious problem is the loss of any generally accepted moral standard.

The inescapable fact is that nowadays many people, perhaps most, do not actually believe in universal moral rules. Every situation in which people find themselves seems to be different, and every moral decision they make is surrounded by a complex, compromising halo of cause and effect. "Thou shalt not steal"--fine, but perhaps if you had a violent father, or a drunken mother, a lousy education, and the gene for criminality, then stealing would be, if not excusable, then at least not really your fault. Certainly the kind of theft that involves intricate corporate legal maneuvers or political chicanery isn't really covered by that injunction. And the average gland-crazed teenager would probably think "Thou shalt not commit adultery" a pretty stupid rule when he has been brainwashed by the culture to believe that every woman, married or not, is panting for sex and eagerly awaiting his virile advances. 

Bryan Appleyard, an astute British critic of the contemporary scene, has recently written, "Modern morals, if any, tend to be entirely subjective and limited only at the outermost margins by the objective reality of the existence of other people." (The Times, London, January 4, 1998)

Lippmann foresaw this moral anarchy almost a half century ago. Increasingly, over the last few decades we have seen the rise of the cult of the individual. In our laudable exaltation of the ideal of individual freedom we have lost sight of the equally important idea of individual and social responsibility. An overarching and generally agreed sense of community morality has been replaced by an anarchic ethic which makes morality for many purely a matter of individual preference. Each individual is the final judge of right and wrong. What's "good for me", a standard largely determined by the degree of personal pleasure or material gain, is somehow transmuted into what is good for all. The individual reigns as moral king.

The problem with this kind of individualistic ethic is that (with my sincere apologies to the human race, of which I am most definitely a part) most individuals are narrow-minded and shortsighted. The tradition of general moral rules, affecting every one's behavior, incorporates spiritual insight and wisdom, hard earned and long tested. These rules, of which the prime example is the Ten Commandments, are based on the impact of individuals in the wider realm. In the Old Testament Jehovah saw the entire history of the people of Israel as dependent on their general obedience to his moral law. And in the end he was right. The Jewish and later the Christian moral view triumphed and eventually formed a civilization--not perfect, by any means--but one of unparalleled freedom, wealth, and creativity. It is therefore simply moral madness to dump the accumulated religious and ethical wisdom of the centuries. 

What is the root cause of this contemporary moral madness? Lippmann believed that it arises out of the fact that modern man has been systematically conditioned to believe that reliable knowledge can only arise out of that which can be sensibly experienced and mathematically verified. Blithely casting aside the long history of the struggle for a humanizing civilization, today's individual is effectively cut off from the past, thereby losing touch with the truth which teaches the necessity for the subjugation of a person's first nature--existence in self-centered barbarism--to the moral demands of his second nature--the realm of essence and ultimate reality.

As a result, for many today there is no room for a supremely important structure of "oughtness," a final moral standard by which all human actions must be judged. No such standard can arise out of or be derived from the ambiguous earth-bound flow of human existence, flawed as it is by its concentration on the pleasure, power, and material gain of the individual. What Confucius called the "mandate of heaven" can only be glimpsed in our contact with the realm of essence. For centuries mankind's spiritual and philosophic geniuses have sought to discover and establish a moral standard which requires that each individual's actions must be ethically measured, not only by the consequences for the individual, but by the effects upon others in the total community of which we are inescapably a part. Without such a standard we are condemned to live in a largely amoral world in which it is every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. Thomas Hobbes' ghastly vision of a society in which every man is at war with every other man is the depressing result.

The centuries-long search for this ultimate standard is what Lippman meant by the "traditions of civility." He believed, as I do, that such values as truth, beauty, and love are not pathetic phantasms of the human imagination but final constituents of moral reality. Through our human search (and for the Christian, as we shall see in a moment, through the graceful revelation of God in Christ) we have discovered intimations of that realm of essence. It is imperative that we do not discard or disregard that most significant achievement of the human pilgrimage.

True, these ultimate moral values do not supply us with a legalistic set of rules, automatically applicable to every human decision. Created as free moral agents, we have the responsibility of moral struggle as we attempt, always in the light and judgment of those values, to work out decisions in the ambiguities of existence. In many cases, given the nature of an imperfect and sinful world, we can only hope to achieve that which is "more right" under the circumstances. But what is "more right" must always be measured by essential and final moral standards.

Where does the faithful Christian believer stand in this situation? As Christians, we believe that we have been transformed by the grace of God into "new beings," "born-again" men and women. We do not kid ourselves that this means we are ethically perfect and without sin. In fact, we are more conscious of our sin and moral failure than ever before. But in our encounter with the Christ-event we have been brought face to face with an ultimate ethic of perfect love. Jesus did not discard or ignore the Old Testament Law--the Ten Commandments--but he absorbed those commandments into a deeper and far more demanding ethic, most succinctly set out in the Sermon on the Mount.

An essential part of our Christian calling is to proclaim that perfect-love ethic to the world around us. But we must also realize that without the consequences of conversion and Christian commitment, that ethic never makes sense to the world at large. Today we live in a multi-cultural, multi-religious society. Without in any way neglecting our evangelistic imperative, we must also lend our efforts to the maintenance and establishment of a society in which such minimal standards as justice, honesty, fairness, integrity, and respect for human beings as valuable entities, each in his own right, are recognized and adhered to.

It is testimony to the validity of the realm of moral essence that the world's great religions and most of the world's greatest philosophers have centered upon the struggle to find some moral absolute. Even the sincere secular humanist seeks some ultimate moral meaning in the universe. Lippmann, though not himself a professing Christian, repeatedly picked out the Christian Church through the ages as the single most powerful testimony to the "traditions of civility." Speaking in 1938 to a Salvation Army dinner in New York, Lippmann said, "The final faith by which all human philosophies must be tested, the touchstone of all party creeds, all politics of state, all relations among men, the inner nucleus of the universal conscience, is in possession of the Salvation Army."

Lippmann's recognition, which I share, places a heavy responsibility upon the modern Christian community It is an essential part of our mission to support and uphold those "traditions of civility," that public philosophy. To do so is not to be disloyal to our faith. Far from it. Jesus certainly demands from us in the realm of ethics more than justice, honesty, fairness, and integrity. He demands perfect love. But it is important to remember that he never demands less than justice, fairness, honesty, and integrity in our every action. We betray Him whenever we settle for anything less. 

I believe with all my heart that God is deeply concerned about every Christian believer. But I am constrained to believe by the nature of the God I worship that he is also deeply concerned about every little human entity everywhere. I believe his love and compassion reach out to a starving Arab child, to a suffering Chinese dissident, to a morally and educationally deprived teenager in an American urban ghetto, and to an ordinary citizen cheated and oppressed by a greedy, profit-driven business executive. If God cares, then so must I. And my care must be translated into a struggle to change the situation and to at least bring others closer to those moral standards which should be acknowledged by the whole society.

Lippmann believed, as I do, that no free and democratic--no "good"--human society can long endure without a "mandate from heaven." When our Founding Fathers in America incorporated into the Declaration of Independence the phrase, "All men are created equal," they acknowledged that the right of every tiny human entity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is a God-given, natural right. I do not mean to say that any earthly government is a reflection of the will of God. I do not believe in the "divine right of kings", no more than I believe in the "divine right of America." What I do believe is that a good government and a good society is one which takes seriously an overarching structure of right and wrong and is not reluctant to have its actions measured by that standard.

Human equality under law and the consequent right to justice can never be demonstrated in the laboratory or by mathematical calculations. Values such as honesty, faithfulness, and integrity can never be established by public opinion polls. These values are derived from the realm of essence. In Christian terms they are "God-given." The truth of that proposition is our legacy of centuries of human struggle, our "traditions of civility."

I believe that the greatest moral and ethical challenge of our day is not that of any particular moral issue or evil, important as it may be. Our challenge is to re-establish, reinforce, and undergird the public philosophy. That task cannot be accomplished by force or by direction from "the powers that be" in earthly terms. No amendment to the U.S. Constitution declaring us to be a "Christian" nation will make one whit of difference. The task can only be accomplished by persons of faith and good will--politicians, educators, business men and women, working people, all of us--sounding out loud and clear our testimony and our witness.

Christians, now as always, have a major role to play. We are called to that task as surely as any minister or missionary is called to his or her vocation. To fail to respond to the challenge, to shrug off its imperative importance, is, in the deepest and most meaningful sense of the Christian term, blasphemy.

Updated Monday, January 01, 2001