Text and Talk
March 8, 2025 – Zoom Only
Jim Roseman
The Importance of Public Philosophy
As the old expression goes, sometimes it’s darkest just before dawn. Is it so now? Might it be that within the columns of our present cultural darkness we might be able to color a new day?
When we look out upon the Western world today it’s easy to be melancholy, even at times to feel depressed, almost losing hope. Some say that’s just nostalgia for a world that never really was. And there’s some truth to that. But that’s not all it is. For a long time now on a lot of different fronts there has been concern, even outrage expressed about the loss of civility and the deterioration of culture. We think of this mostly as a contemporary phenomenon, the pugnaciousness of our current political and social moment. And then someone reminds us of the uncivil raucous between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams during their presidential pursuits.[1] But there is something different about our moment, and it didn’t begin in this generation. It’s not only about incivility in politics, nor even about crime and social injustice. It’s more fundamental than that. Listen to famed journalist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann whose reflections began in the wake of WWI in the 1920s, developed with the rise of Hitler, and finally came to print after the Second World War in 1955 as The Public Philosophy:
During the fateful summer of 1938 I began writing a book in an effort to come to terms in my own mind and heart with the mounting disorder in our Western society. . .. I was filled with foreboding that the nations of the Atlantic Community would not prove equal to the challenge, and that, if they failed, we should lose our great traditions of civility, the liberties Western man had won for himself after centuries of struggle and which were now threatened by the rising tide of barbarity.[2]
Could liberal democracy and its prevailing late nineteenth/early twentieth-century American tenet of always advancing upward idea of progress, survive? In his The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, historian George Marsden identifies what led to Lippmann’s question and his growing concern that liberal democracy had lost its story. “John Dewey, the highly influential philosopher and educator . . . had proposed in the 1930s that a ‘common faith’ [a public philosophy] could be built on self-evident ‘goods of human associations, or arts, and of knowledge.’” To Dewey, “‘We need no external criterion and guarantee for their goodness.” These “goods” exist simply in pragmatic terms. They operate “as good, and out of them we frame our ideal ends.’”[3] Expressed in his concern that the West had lost its way, Marsden says Lippmann began to speak as a heretic to his own tradition of political and social liberalism. He came to reject the consensus that a coherent public philosophy, a social fabric, could be built merely on “inherited principles, even after [the culture] had dynamited the foundations on which those principles had first been established.”[4] Having escaped freedom, of which Eric Fromm famously wrote,[5] Lippmann questioned whether any freedom could be sustained in a public philosophy whose foundation is moral relativism. “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 any higher moral system. Lippmann had now come to see that as a dangerous innovation.”[6] By jettisoning any requirement of an “external criterion” to underwrite our goodness, Lippmann had come to believe the center could not hold.
Once the traditional liberal public philosophy no longer had a center, and once the theory of public life had jettisoned any external criterion to order public life, new horizontal-only structures had to be found. Ever since experiments with new foundations on which to rebuild liberal public life abound. In the wake of WWII, as 60 million people went home to restart their lives, and as rebuilding the whole world became an urgent focus, the U. S. and global economies experienced a jolt of energy. Global free trade took over and the prevailing public philosophy became economic—in part a function of the post war effort and in part a Cold War strategy in the West against the encroachment of communism.[7] American consumerism exploded and was slowly exported around the world. Homo Economicus (Economic Man) and globalization were born.[8] Still wedded to 19th century progressivism, parallel with and to some extent an expression of it, a newly energized semi-Smithian “invisible hand,” a semi-Hegelian “absolute spirit,” and semi-Marxist “dialectic” secularized providence theory of progressivist public life. The 1960s pursuit of the Great Society was viewed as the “manifestly destined” complement to the market-driven economic order. But even these complementary economic and social theories quickly proved insufficient for the new progressivism. It must go further. Sparked by the 1960s American cultural revolution, the 1970s spawned a complete fracturing of common life into a new kind of tribalism. Racism, feminism, LGBTQ-ism, environmentalism, etc., etc., each bobbing like corks on a wispy sea of moral relativism and its social progeny cultural relativism, adapted into a political strategy: Identity Politics was born. Added to these in more recent days, now established with their own political identities, immigrants and refugees from foreign conflicts and abusive political orders have become their own tribes. The Western world has fragmented into nothing but pieces and parts.[9]
When we attempt to build and live in a society with no external criterion of goodness, moral relativism reigns to such an extent that the very idea of “common” good vanishes. Goodness itself becomes lost in ‘he said, she said’ arguments. The whole society becomes incoherent. The social fabric frays into an array of individual threads. Life doesn’t make sense anymore.
Philosopher and ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre says, “When someone complains – as do some of those who attempt or commit suicide – that his life is meaningless, he or she is often and characteristically complaining that the narrative of their life has become unintelligible to them, that it lacks any point, any movement towards a climax or telos.”[10] He further says, “man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. . .. There is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources.”[11] We have lost our story. We try to live today as if we don’t have inherited traditions. We live only in the moment. And without a story every moment is just a moment. None is connected to another. Life has become unintelligible.
In fact, we in the West do live within a story. The core story is the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian story. But it did not begin as a single seamless story. The Greco-Roman stories came together and became understood as a single story through the influence of the Christian story. This was enabled as the Grand Story of God came to be understood as a single story through the Jewish story in and through the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth as the long-awaited Hebrew Messiah. As this story unfolded early believers in Jesus as Messiah, followers of The Way (Christians), came to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the one true God and the hinge-point of all of human history, thus enabling them to look out upon their world and back across time—the Hellenistic Greco-Roman world of which they were a part at the time—to interpret the ancient poets and philosophers as having captured glimpses of the Grand Story albeit through a glass darkly. Reinterpreting those ancient poets and philosophers in the light of Jesus Christ, the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian story became a single story. Beginning only as a very small seed, this story became the prevailing story as the theretofore imagined Eternal Roman Empire began to fail and eventually fell apart with the help of its last emperors, and the Christian church stepped into the breach. Pushing back against the assertion by some in the fifth century that the Christians were the cause of the fall of Rome, in his City of God, St. Augustine told the Grand Story of God in Jesus Christ. The way the followers of The Way (the Christians) lived, following Jesus and his Apostles and their writings (which became known as the New Testament), along with the trans-historical interpretations by St. Augustine and the early Church Fathers, this lived life became institutionalized in the transformed ruins of the old structures of the Empire. This confluence laid the foundation for Western civilization to emerge. And enabled its character, social life, and intellectual order to be shaped and formed. This story became an interwoven social fabric. But, of course, it is still more.
Within and out of this core Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian story, smaller stories would emerge—ones which would become big stories. These smaller stories initially developed organically as themes within the main story. But some became reactions to the core story: think the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and Social and Political Revolution.
This complexity, and the ever-greater complexity that has developed since, makes it difficult to recognize the core Greco-Roman/Judeo-Cristian story of the West as a single fabric. Looking only at the back side of the fine old carpet, all one sees is disparate threads. Frayed and tattered, the messy complexity still has a picture. But on the front side, and only from an external vantage.
Walter Lippmann concluded he and his society of progressive elites had rejected that vantage, what held the fabric together: the “external criterion” which had underwritten it since the beginning. Without it the once coherent world became incoherent. In his Public Philosophy he called for it to be reestablished. And though when he wrote, it remained largely intact among the people at large in the 1950s, it was dissipating. Like remnants of fluorination seeded in the public waters long ago, the dry winds of the prevailing progressive pragmatist philosophy were whisking it away fast. But he feared the old wineskins could not hold the new wine. The religious-based goodness of the people that Tocqueville had noticed on his visit to America, on top of which the positive civil law and public life rested, was changing. This goodness could no longer be relied upon, not at least without an external criterion for the good. Individual liberty without it could not maintain a people good enough to sustain the liberties it had achieved. The chaos of incoherence would eventually engulf the whole, rent the fabric in two, or make it disintegrate. Lippmann first saw this just after WWI, and it broke upon the world in unspeakable ways during WWII. The once coherent story, the finely woven fabric that could give meaning to the common good, to an e pluribus unum, reduced to a jumble of disconnected small stories could give meaning no longer. When the narrative of life becomes unintelligible, life becomes meaningless, MacIntyre says. And we feel it in our bones. Lippmann felt it. We feel it more and more today. As Romano Guardini said, “It is dangerous to ignore realities, for they have a way of avenging themselves.”
[1] For example, Jefferson says of Adams, he has a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Adams called Vice President Jefferson “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” So much for civility. The two men were actually great friends. Their presidential bids (there were two: Adams won the first; Jefferson the second) separated them for a season, but they reconciled later in life. For an elegant account of their relationship, see Gordon S. Wood, Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (New York: Penguin Press, 2017).
[2] Lippman, The Public Philosophy, 3.
[3] Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, 43. Emphasis added.
[4] Ibid., 44.
[5] Fromm, Escape from Freedom (Farrar & Rinehart, 1941)
[6] Marsden, 46.
[7] And along with this, the new formidable Military Industrial Complex was born, further spurring economic activity.
[8] See R. R. Reno, You Better Like It – First Things and “Conservatism, Inc.” in “Let’s Rebalance,” January 1, 2019 Let’s Rebalance – First Things, reviews of Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy (2018).
[9] Consider Columbia Professor Mark Lilla’s comments on the loss of vision in American politics today: “We’re living in a kind of vision free America right now; where the Reagan vision no one really believes in anymore, um . . . on the economic side and even a lot of the social side (gay marriage has been accepted, homosexuality has been accepted), and the old Roosevelt vision is gone; . . . and everyone’s gotten out of the vision business, and . . . Trump does not have a vision [of where] he wants us to go together. And, so it’s really going to be who gets there first. I don’t see either party pointing in that direction right now, and that’s what worries me.” In, Mark Bauerlein, “After Identity Politics,” First Things Podcast, March 18, 2019, https://www.firstthings.com/media/after-identity-politics, accessed April 22, 2019, an interview with Mark Lilla by senior editor Mark Bauerlein to discuss identitarianism in America and Lilla’s book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.
[10] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 202.
[11] Ibid. 201.