Our Need for a Public Philosophy

by WALTER LIPPMANN

1

UNDERLYING the present critical condition of western society is the fact that the democracies are ceasing to receive those traditions of civility in which the good society, or the liberal democratic way of life at its best, originated and developed. They are cut off from the public philosophy and the political arts which are needed to govern the liberal democratic society. They have not been initiated into its secrets, and they do not greatly care for as much of it as they are prepared to understand. In Toynbee’s terrible phrase, they are proletarians who are “in” but are not “of” the society they dominate.

To speak of a public philosophy is, I am well aware, to raise dangerous questions, rather like opening Pandora‘s box. within the western nations, as Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., has put it, there is “a plurality of incompatible faiths”; there is also a multitude of secularized and agnostic people. Since there is so little prospect of agreement, and such certainty of dissension, on the content of the public philosophy, it seems expedient not to raise the issues by talking about them. It is easier to follow the rule that a person’s beliefs are private and only overt conduct is a public matter.

One might say that this prudent rule reflects and registers the terms of settlement of the religious wars and of the long struggle against the exclusive authority in the realm of the spirit of “thrones or dominations, or principalities or powers.”

Freedom of religion and of thought and of speech was achieved by denying both to the state and to the established church a sovereign monopoly in the field of religion, philosophy, morals, science, learning, opinion, and conscience. The liberal constitutions with their bills cf rights fixed the boundaries past which the sovereign — the king, the parliament, the congress, the voters — was forbidden to go. Yet the men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who established these great salutary rules would certainly have denied that a community could do without a general public philosophy. They were themselves the adherents of a public philosophy— of the doctrine of natural law, which held that there was a law “above the ruler and the sovereign people above the whole community of mortals.”

The traditions of civility spring from this principle, which was first worked out by the Stoics. As Krnest Barker says: “The rational faculty of man was conceived as producing a common conception of law and order which possessed a universal validity... This common conception included, as its three great notes, the three values of Liberty, Equality and the brotherhood or Fraternity of all mankind. This common conception, and its three great notes, have formed a European set of ideas for over two thousand years. It was a set of ideas which lived and moved in the Middle Ages; and St. Thomas Aquinas cherished the idea of a sovereign law of nature imprinted in the heart and nature of man, to which kings and legislators must everywhere bow. It was a set of ideas which lived and acted with an even greater animation from the days of the Reformation to those of the French Revolution. . . . Spoken through the mouth of Locke, [they had justified] the English Revolution of 1688 and had recently served to inspire the American Revolution of 1776.... They were ideas of the proper conduct of states and governments in the area of internal affairs. They were ideas of the natural rights of man—of liberty, political and civic, with sovereignty residing essentially in the nation, and with free communication of thoughts and opinions; of equality before the law, and the equal repartition of public expenses among all the members of the public; of a general fraternity which tended in practice to be sadly restricted within the nation but which could, on occasion, be extended by decree to protect all nations struggling for freedom.”

Copyright 1955, by Walter Lippmann

These traditions were expounded in the treatises of philosophers, were developed in the tracts of the publicists, were absorbed by the lawyers and applied in the courts. At times of great stress some of the endangered traditions were committed to writing, as in the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence. For the guidance of judges and lawyers large portions were described as in Lord Coke’s examination of the common law. The public philosophy was in part expounded in the Bill of Rights of 1689. It was re-enacted in the first ten amendments of the Constitution of the United States. The largest part of the public philosophy was never explicitly stated. Being the wisdom of a great society over the generations, it can never be stated in any single document. But the traditions of civility permeated the peoples of the West and provided a standard of public and private action which facilitated and protected the institutions of freedom and the growth of democracy.

The founders of our free institutions were themselves adherents of this public philosophy. When they insisted upon excluding the temporal power from the realm of the mind and the spirit, it was not that they had no public philosophy. It was because experience had taught them that as power corrupts, it corrupts the public philosophy. It was therefore a practical rule of politics that the government should not be given sovereignty and proprietorship over the public philosophy.

But as time went on, there fell out of fashion the public philosophy of the founders of western institutions. The rule that the temporal power should be excluded from the realm of the mind and of the spirit was then subtly transformed. It became the rule that ideas and principles are private — with only subjective relevance and significance. Only when there is “a clear and present danger” to public order are the acts of speaking and publishing in the public domain. All the first and last things were thus removed from the public domain. All that has to do with what man is and should be, or how he should hold himself in the scheme of things, what are his rightful ends and the legitimate means, became private and subjective and publicly unaccountable. And so, the liberal democracies of the West became the first great society to treat as a private concern the formative beliefs that shape the character of its citizens.

This has brought about a radical change in the meaning of freedom. Originally it was founded on the postulate that there was a universal order on which all reasonable men were agreed; within that public agreement on the fundamentals and on the ultimates, it was safe to permit, and it would be desirable to encourage, dissent and dispute. But 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.

As long as it worked, there was an obvious practical advantage in treating (he struggle for the ultimate allegiance of men as not within the sphere of the public interest. It was a way of not having to open the Pandora‘s box of theological, moral, and ideological issues which divide the western society. But in this century, when the hard decisions have had to be made, this rule of prudence has ceased to work. The expedient worked only as long as the general mass of the people were not seriously dissatisfied with things as they are. It was an expedient that looked toward reforms and improvement. But it assumed a society which was secure, progressive, expanding, and unchallenged. That is why it was only in the fine Victorian weather, before the storm clouds of the great wars began to gather, that the liberal democratic policy of public agnosticism and practical neutrality in ultimate issues was possible.

2

IN THE simple and relatively homogeneous society of the eighteenth century, natural law provided the principles of a free state. But then the mode of such thinking went out of fashion. In the nineteenth century, little was done to remint the old ideas. They were regarded as obsolete and false, as hostile to the rise of democracy, and they were abandoned to the reactionaries. The great frame of reference to the rational order was missing. No body of specific principles and precepts was worked out in order to regulate international relations, and within national states to cope with the problems raised by the industrial revolution and the advance of science and technology.

Yet, in this plurafized and fragmenting society, a public philosophy with common and binding principles was more necessary than it had ever been. The proof of the need is in the impulse to escape from freedom, which Erich Fromm has described so well. It has been growing stronger as the emancipation of the masses of the people from authority has brought the dissolution of public, general, objective criteria of the true and the false, the right and the wrong. “I can assure you,” wrote André Gide in 1928, “that the feeling of freedom can plunge the soul into a sort of anguish.”

But until the historic disasters of our own time, the loneliness and anxiety of modern men had been private, without public and overt political effect. As long as the public order still provided external security, their inner insecurity was still a personal and private and inward affair. Since the breakdown of public order during the First World War, there has been HO security for multitudes and no ease of mind for anyone.

Observing the public disorder in which he himself had always lived, and knowing how the inner disorder provoked the impulse to escape from it, Hitler conceived his doctrine. He wrote in Mein Kampf that the masses are “like a woman . . . who will submit to the strong man rather than dominate the weakling; . . . the masses love the ruler rather than the suppliant, and inwardly they are far more satisfied by a doctrine which tolerates no rival than by the grant of liberal freedom; they often feel at a loss what to do with it, and even easily feel themselves deserted.”

The masses that Hitler was planning to dominate are the modern men who find in freedom from the constraints of the ancestral order an intolerable loss of guidance and of support. With Gide they are finding that the burden of freedom is too great an anxiety. The older structures of society are dissolving, and they must make their way through a time of troubles. They have been taught to expect a steady progress toward a higher standard of life, and they have not been prepared to withstand the frustrations of a prolonged crisis in the outer world and the loneliness of their self-centered isolation.

They are men who rise up against freedom, unable to cope with its insoluble difficulties and unable to endure the denial of communion in public and common truths. There is a profound disorientation in their experience, a radical disconnection between the notions of their minds and the needs of their souls. They have become the “lonely crowd” that Riesman has described. They are Durkheim‘s anomic mass. They are Toynbee‘s proletarians who are “of” but not “in” the community they live in; for they “have no ‘stake’ in their community beyond the fact of its physical existence.” Their “true hallmark . . . is neither poverty nor humble birth but is the consciousness — and the resentment that this consciousness inspires — of being disinherited.” They are, as Karl Jaspers says, men dissolved “into an anonymous mass” because they are “without an authentic world, without provenance or roots” — without, that is to say, belief and faith that they can live by.

The freedom which modern men are turned away from, sometimes with relief and often with enthusiasm, is the hollow shell of freedom. The current theory of freedom holds that what men believe may be important to them but that it has almost no public significance. The outer defenses of the free way of life stand upon the legal guarantees against the coercion of belief. But the citadel is vacant because the public philosophy is gone, and all that the defenders of freedom have to defend in common is a public neutrality and a public agnosticism.

Yet when we have demonstrated the need for the public philosophy, how do we prove that the need can be satisfied? Not, we may be sure, by exhortation, however eloquent, to rise to the enormity of the present danger; still less by lamentations about the glory and the grandeur that are past. The modern men to whom the argument is addressed have a low capacity to believe in the invisible, the intangible, and the imponderable. Public principles can, of course, be imposed by a despotic government. But the public philosophy of a free society cannot be restored by fiat and by force. To come to grips with the unbelief which underlies the condition of anomy, we must find a way to re-establish confidence in the validity of public standards. We must renew the convictions from which our public morality springs.

In the prevailing popular culture of the West all philosophies are the instruments of some man’s purpose, all truths are self-centered and self-regarding, and all principles are the rationalizations of some special interest. There is no public criterion of the true and the false, of the right and the wrong, beyond that which the preponderant mass of voters, consumers, readers, and listeners happen at the moment to be supposed to want.

There is no reason to think that this condition of mind can be changed until it can be proved to the modern skeptic that there are certain principles which, when they have been demonstrated, only the wilfully irrational can deny; that there are certain obligations binding on all men who are committed to a free society; and that only the wilfully subversive can reject them. The skeptic must find the proof compelling. His skepticism cannot be cured by forcing him to conform.

In order to repair the capacity to believe in the public philosophy, it will be necessary to demonstrate the practical relevance and the productivity of the public philosophy. It is almost impossible to deny its high and broad generalities. The difficulty is to see how they are to be applied in the practical affairs of a modern state. Given the practical need, which is acute, and the higher generalities, which are self-evident, can we develop a positive working doctrine of the good society under modern conditions? The answer which I am making to this question is that it can be done if the ideas of the public philosophy are recovered and are re-established in the minds of men of light, and leading.

3

LET US, then, put the matter to the test by applying the public philosophy to some of the great topics of our public life.

I shall begin with the theory of private property — before and after the loss of the public philosophy and the rupture of the traditions. We can do this conveniently by examining what Blackstone, working in the middle of the eighteenth century, does with the theory of private property. Blackstone’s mind was formed in the classical tradition. But Blackstone’s world was in movement, and he was not equal to the creative effort of using the tradition to cope with the new circumstances. He had declared that security of the person was the first, that liberty of the individual was the second, and that property was the third “absolute right, inherent in every Englishman.” But, as a civilized man, he had to do more than to assert the absolute right. He had to “examine more deeply the rudiments and grounds” on which it could be justified rationally.

Between the lines of his elegant and stately prose one can see, I think, that Blackstone was puzzled. According to his tradition, the rational justification of property is as a system of corresponding and reciprocal rights and duties. In the public philosophy an absolute right to property, or to anything else that affects other men, cannot be entertained. To claim it is to be outside the law and the bounds of civility. This conception of property is most easily intelligible in a society where the principal forms of private property are in agricultural land. The land is visible and its products are known to all. This lends itself to a definition of the corresponding rights and duties: of the landlord with his tenants and hired workers below him in the hierarchy and with the sovereign power above him, claiming taxes and services.

When the main forms of property are intangible the difficulty of defining rights and duties is much greater. When Blackstone was writing, England was a rising commercial power and the comparatively simple problems of a society based on property and land were already overtaken by the problems of an economy in which property was owned as money, as commercial paper, as stocks and bonds. It was easy enough to assert rights to intangible property but difficult to define the duties of intangible property. Yet unless that was done, property would not be under general laws.

Blackstone is in a way a tragic figure in that, thanks to his education, he had the intimation that the right direction was to work toward bringing intangible property under public standards. Yet for one reason or another he did not take it. He was, however, troubled. As a man steeped in the civilized traditions of the West, he knew that there must be rational limits put upon the acquisitive and possessive instincts. As a man of the world that is to say, of his world and of the world that was to come — he knew also how little the rising men of property wished to hear about obligations that would limit their absolute rights.

So, with a certain regret, and perhaps with an intuitive foreboding, he wrote that “pleased as we are with the possession, we seem afraid to look back to the means by which it was acquired, as if fearful of some defect in our title . . . not caring to reflect that (accurately and strictly speaking) there is no foundation in nature or in natural law, why a set of words upon parchment should convey the dominion of land: why the son should have a right to exclude his fellow-creatures from a determinate spot of ground because his father had done so before him: or why the occupier of a particular field or a jewel, when lying on his death bed, and no longer able to maintain possession, should be entitled to tell the rest of the world which of them should enjoy it after him.”

Blackstone thought that these questions which challenge the “sole and despotic dominion” of the property holder “would be useless and even troublesome in common life.” As a man of his world he felt bound to say that “it is well if the mass of mankind will obey the laws when made, without scrutinizing too nicely into the reason for making them.” But as one formed in the traditions of civility, he could not ignore the question of whether there was “some defect in our title” to absolute property. And as an exponent of “rational science” he felt bound to expound the classical conception of private property. He puts it this way: a man’s property “consists in the free use, enjoyment and disposal of all his acquisitions, without any control or diminution, save only by the law of the land. The original of private property is probably founded in nature . . . but certainly the modifications under which we at present find it, the method of conserving it in the present owner, and of translating it from man to man, are entirely derived from society; and are some of those civil advantages in exchange for which every individual has resigned a part of his natural liberty.”

The rights of property, that is to say, are a creation of the laws of the state. And since the laws can be altered, there are no absolute rights of property. There are legal rights to use and to enjoy and to dispose of property. The laws define what are the rights to use and to enjoy and to dispose of property which the courts will enforce.

Conceived in this fashion, private property can never be regarded as giving to any man an absolute title to exercise the “sole and despotic dominion” over the land and the resources of nature. The ultimate title does not lie in the owner. The title is in “mankind,” in The People as a corporate community. The rights of the individual in that patrimony are creations of the law, and have no other validity except as they are ordained by law. The purpose of laws which establish private property is not to satisfy the acquisitive and possessive instincts of the primitive man, but to promote “the grand ends of civil society” — which comprehend “the peace and security of individuals.”

Because the legal owner enjoys the use of a limited necessity belonging to all men, he cannot be the sovereign lord of his possessions. He is not entitled to exercise his absolute, and therefore arbitrary, will. He owes duties that correspond with his rights. His ownership is a grant made by the laws to achieve not his private purposes but the common social purpose. Therefore, the laws of property may and should be judged, reviewed, and when necessary amended, so as to define the specific system of rights and duties that will promote the ends of society.

4

THIS is a doctrine of private property which denies the pretension to a “sole and despotic dominion.” When Blackstone, though his conscience was troubled, accepted the sole and despotic dominion, he broke with the public philosophy and the traditions of civility. After his break the recognized theorists developed regressively the conception of private property as an absolute right. For a time they excluded from political philosophy, from jurisprudence, and from legislation almost any notion that property had duties as well as rights.

Absolute private property inevitably produced intolerable evils. Absolute owners did grave damage to their neighbors and to their descendants: they ruined the fertility of the land, they exploited destructively the minerals under the surface, they burned and cut forests, they destroyed the wild life, they polluted streams, they cornered supplies and formed monopolies, they held land and resources out of use, they exploited the feeble bargaining power of wage earners.

For such abuses of absolute property the political scientists and the lawmakers had no remedy. They had lost the tradition that property is the creation of the law for social purposes. They had no principles by which the law could deal with the abuses of property. The individualists of the nineteenth century could not, therefore, defend and preserve the system of private property by reforming it and by adapting it to the circumstances of the modern age. They knew much about the rights of property and little about any corresponding duties. And so, because there was no legal remedy for the abuses of private property, because the duties which are the rational justification of property were no longer defined and enforced, the idea of private property lost its rational justification.

Between the property holders and ihe propertyless, who became the majority in many countries, there was, in consequence, no connecting bond, no consensus within the same realm of national discourse. The proletariat had the duty to respect the rights of owners. But the owners owed no reciprocal duty to the proletariat. There were no obligations in which the proletarians found their rights. Thus there arose the ominous phenomenon of “the two nations,” the confrontation of those who owned the earth by those who had nothing to lose. The latter were more numerous than the former. As they acquired votes, the main issue in the domestic politics of the democracies became the struggle between the minority who had so much absolute property and the great mass of the electorate who had so little.

To this conflict there have been and are two possible outcomes: a gradual, cumulative, and perhaps at last a violent expropriation of the men of property — or reforms of the laws of property which restore adequate duties. But for several generations after Blackstone, the very idea of property as a system of duties was obscured. The public philosophy was discarded, and the most humane and enlightened men of the nineteenth century had little notion how rational reforms could be made. The alternatives, it appeared, were to defend absolute property against the growing discontent of the propertyless, or to abolish private property. It was a dangerous and a false dilemma. But in the nineteenth century this became the dilemma. The choice, it was said, was between individualism and collectivism, between Manchester and Marxists, between absolute property maintained by the force of the few and absolute property abolished by the dictatorship of the mass.

The case of Blackstone has shown, I hope, that a different and better theory of property was possible. It was possible if he and his successors had adhered to the public philosophy — if they had used, instead of abandoning, the principles which he stated so well. The earth is the general property of all mankind. Private titles of ownership are assigned by lawmaking authorities to promote the grand ends of civil society. Private properly is therefore a system of legal rights and duties; under changing conditions the system must be kept in accord with the grand ends of civil society.

Blackstone and his successors did not work out legal propositions from these postulates. As I am contending that it would have been better if they had done so, I now ask myself: What is the validity of these principles? Are they devices, like the rules of the road, for regulating the traffic? If they are only that, then another set of assumptions could be just as valid, like the rule of the road in Britain that one must drive to the left. One can construct — and in fact men have — systems of property on quite different assumptions; on the assumption, for example, that the earth is the general property of white men only, or of a master race of white men, or of those castes which have not sinned in a previous incarnation. But if the principles are more than that, if they have a validity which overrides such special claims, what is the virtue which gives them their validity?

They are the laws of a rational order of human society — in the sense that all men, when they are sincerely and lucidly rational, will regard them as self-evident. The rational order consists of the terms which must be met in order to fulfill men‘s capacity for the good life in this world. They are the terms of the widest consensus of rational men in a plural society. They are the propositions to which all men concerned, if they are sincerely and lucidly rational, can be expected to converge. There could never be a consensus that Africa belongs to the descendants of the Dutch settlers; a property system founded on that pretension cannot be generally acceptable, and will generate disorder. The classical doctrine has a superior validity in that a system of property based upon it may obtain a consensus of support in the community, and would have the prospect of being workable.

When we speak of these principles as natural laws, we must be careful. They are not scientific “laws” like the laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies. They do not describe human behavior as it is. They prescribe what it should be. They do not enable us to predict what men will actually do. They are the principles of right behavior in the good society governed by the western traditions of civility.

It is possible to organize a state and to conduct a government on quite different principles. But the outcome will not be freedom and the good life.

5

ONLY within a community which adheres to the public philosophy is there sure and sufficient ground for the freedom to think and to ask questions, to speak and to publish. Nobody can justify in principle, much less in practice, a claim that there exists an unrestricted right of anyone to utter anything he likes at any time he chooses. There can, for example, be no right, as Mr. Justice Holmes said, to cry “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Nor is there a right to tell a customer that the glass beads are diamonds, or a voter that the opposition candidate for President is a Soviet agent.

Freedom of speech has become a central concern of the western society because of the discovery among the Greeks that dialectic, as demonstrated in the Socratic dialogues, is a principal method of attaining moral and political truth. “The ability to raise searching difficulties on both sides of a subject will,” said Aristotle, “make us detect more easily the truth and error about the several points that arise.” The right to speak freely is one of the necessary means to the attainment of the truth. That, and not the subjective pleasure of utterance, is why freedom is a necessity in the good society.

In the public philosophy, freedom of speech is conceived as the means to a confrontation of opinion, as in a Socratic dialogue, in a schoolmen‘s disputation, in the critiques of scientists and savants, in a court of law, in a representative assembly, in an open forum. And because the purpose of the confrontation is to discern truth, there are rules of evidence and of parliamentary procedure, there are codes of fair dealing and fair comment, by which a loyal man will consider himself bound when he exercises the right to publish opinions. For the right to freedom of speech is no license to deceive, and willful misrepresentation is a violation of its principles.

In our time the application of these fundamental principles poses many unsolved practical problems. For the modern media of mass communication do not lend themselves easily to a confrontation of opinions. The dialectical process for finding truth works best when the same audience hears all the sides of the disputation. This is manifestly impossible in the moving pictures: if a film advocates a thesis, the same audience cannot be shown another film designed to answer it. Radio and television broadcasts do permit some debate. But despite the effort of the companies to let opposing views be heard equally, and to organize programs on which there are opposing speakers, the technical conditions of broadcasting do not favor genuine and productive debate. For the audience, tuning on and tuning off here and there, cannot be counted upon to hear, even in summary form, the essential evidence and the main arguments on all the significant sides of a question. Rarely, and on very few public issues, does the mass audience have the benefit of the process by which truth is sifted from error: the dialectic of debate in which there are immediate challenge, reply, cross-examination, and rebuttal. The men who regularly broadcast the news and comment upon the news cannot — like a speaker in the Senate or in the House of Commons — be challenged by one of their listeners and compelled then and there to verify their statements of fact and to re-argue their inferences from the facts. Yet, when genuine debate is lacking, freedom of speech does not work as it is meant to work. It has lost the principle which regulates it and justifies it — that is to say, dialectic conducted according to logic and the rules of evidence. If there is no effective debate, the unrestricted right to speak will unloose so many propagandists, procurers, and panderers upon the public that sooner or later in self-defense the people will turn to the censors to protect them.

For, in the absence of debate, unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Gresham’s law, the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.

In the end, what men will most ardently desire is to suppress those who disagree with them and, therefore, stand in the way of the realization of their desires. Thus, once confrontation in debate is no longer necessary, the toleration of all opinions leads to intolerance. Freedom of speech, separated from its essential principle, leads through a short transitional chaos to the destruction of freedom of speech.

6

WE FIND, then, that the principle of freedom of speech, like that of private property, falls within the bounds of the public philosophy. It can be justified, applied, regulated in a plural society only by adhering to the postulate that there is a rational order of things in which it is possible, by sincere inquiry and rational debate, to distinguish the true and the false, the right and the wrong, the good which leads to the realization of human ends and the evil which leads to the destruction and death of civility.

The free political institutions of the western world were conceived and established by men who believed that there is such an order. They believed that honest reflection on the common experience of mankind would always cause men to come to the same ultimate conclusions. Within the Golden Rule of the same philosophy for elucidating their ultimate ends, they could engage with confident hope in the progressive discovery of truth. All issues could be settled by scientific investigation and by free debate if—but only if—all the investigators and the debaters adhered to the public philosophy; if, that is to say, they had the same criteria and rules of reason for arriving at the truth and for distinguishing good and evil.

Quite evidently, there is no clear sharp line which can be drawn in any community or among communities between those who adhere and those who do not adhere to the public philosophy. But while there are many shades and degrees in the spectrum, the two ends are well-defined. When the adherence of the whole body of people to the public philosophy is firm, a true community exists; where there are division and dissent over the main principles, the result is a condition of latent war.

In the maintenance and formation of a true community the articulate philosophy is, one might say, like the thread which holds the pieces of the fabric together. Not everyone can have mastered the philosophy; most people, presumably, may have heard almost nothing about it. But if among the people of light and leading the public philosophy has, as the Chinese say, the Mandate of Heaven, the beliefs and the habits which cause men to collaborate will remain whole. But if the public philosophy is discarded, being treated as reactionary or as nonsensical, then the stitches will have been pulled out and the fabric will come apart.

The fabrics in the metaphor are the traditions of how the good life is lived and the good society is governed. When they come apart, as they have in the western democracies, the result is tantamount to a kind of collective amnesia. The liberal democracies have been making mistakes in peace and in war which they would never have made were they not suffering from what is a failure of memory. They have forgotten too much of what their predecessors had learned before them. The newly enfranchised democracies are like men who have kept their appetites but have forgotten how to grow food. They have the perennial human needs for law and order, for freedom and justice, for what only good government can give them. But the art of governing well has to be learned. It has to be transmitted from the old to the young, and the habits and the ideas must be maintained as a seamless web of memory among the bearers of the tradition, generation after generation.

When the continuity of the traditions of civility is ruptured, the community is threatened. Unless the rupture is repaired, the community will break down into factional, class, racial, and regional wars. For when the continuity is interrupted, the cultural heritage is not being transmitted. The new generation is faced with the task of rediscovering and reinventing and relearning by trial and error most of what the guardians of a society need to know.

No one generation can do this. For in no one generation are men capable of creating for themselves the arts and sciences of a high civilization. Men can know more than their ancestors did if they start with a knowledge of what their ancestors had already learned. They can do advanced experiments if they do not have to learn all over again how to do the elementary ones. That is why a society can be progressive only if it conserves its traditions.

But traditions are more than the culture of the arts and sciences. They are the public world to which our private worlds are joined. This continuum of public and private memories transcends all persons in their immediate and natural lives and it ties them all together. In it there is performed the mystery by which individuals are adopted and initiated into membership in the community.

“Where I belong,” says Jaspers, “and what I am living for, I first learned in the mirror of history.” When the individual becomes civilized he acquires a second nature. This second nature is made in the image of what he is and is living for and should become. He has seen the image in the mirror of history. This second nature, which rules over the natural man, is at home in the good society. This second nature is no proletarian but feels itself to be a rightful proprietor and ruler of the community. Full allegiance to the community can be given only by a man’s second nature, ruling over his first and primitive nature, and treating it as not finally himself. Then the disciplines and the necessities and the constraints of a civilized life have ceased to be alien to him, and imposed from without. They have become his own inner imperatives.