The Eclipse of the Public Philosophy

1. On the Efficacy of Ideas

Yet, however crude and clumsy our knowledge of the process, there is no doubt that a character is acquired by experience and education. Within limits that we have not measured, human nature is malleable. Can we doubt it when we remember that when Shakespeare was alive there were no Americans, that when Virgil was alive there were no Englishmen, and that when Homer was alive there were no Romans? Quite certainly, men have acquired the ways of thinking, feeling and acting which we recognize as their ethnic, national, class and occupational characteristics. Comparatively speaking these characteristics are, moreover, recently acquired. Even within the brief span of historical time characters have been acquired and have been lost and have been replaced by other characters. This is what gives to man’s history, despite his common humanity, its infinite variety.

Because human nature is, as Hocking puts it, "the most plastic part of the living world, the most adaptable, the most educable,"⁴ it is also the most mal-adaptable and mis-educable. The cultural heritage which contains the whole structure and fabric of the good life, is acquired. It maybe rejected. It may be acquired badly. It may not be acquired at all. For we are not born with it. If it is not transmitted from one generation to the next, it may be lost, indeed forgotten through a dark age, until somewhere and somehow men rediscover it, and, exploring the world again, recreate it anew.

The acquired culture is not transmitted in our genes, and so the issue is always in doubt. The good life in the good society, though attainable, is never attained and possessed once and for all. So what has been attained will again be lost if the wisdom of the good life in a good society is not transmitted.

That is the central and critical condition of the Western society: that the democracies are ceasing to receive the traditions of civility in which the good society, 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.
pp. 94-96

4. William Ernest Hocking, Human Nature and Its Remaking (1925), p 15.

Walter Lippman, Essays In The Public Philosophy - 1955