I took the week of the 4th to
read one of those books which American intellectuals talk about but seldom still
read. Walter Lippmann’s A
Preface to Morals is a 1929 effort to construct a set of values to
guide public policy in an age that rejects Christian faith. Lippmann writes for people who have become perplexed by their own irreligion:
“Prisoners who
have been released [from religion]…ought to be serene and composed. They are
free to make their own lives. There are
no conventions, no taboos, no gods, priests, princes, fathers or revelations
they must accept. Yet, the result is not
as good as they thought it would be. The prison door is wide open…yet they stagger
out into trackless space under a blinding sun.”
Lippmann’s description was as prescient as
it was poetic. The illicit experience of
being morally adrift, which haunted Harvard a hundred years ago, has now
ravished and defiled the American countryside. Once severed from tradition,
people discover there’s still no shortage of folks who tell them what to do. The government, the boss, the bank and the
insurance companies collude to keep a better stranglehold on them than the
church ever did, but now these institutions lack moral authority, and people do
not have anything but their inarticulate rage with which to criticize them.
Lippmann’s proposal was for the educated
elite, unburdened by “popular religion,” to grow up—to learn to discipline their
desires according to their own original conscience.
Yet, I wonder if even smart people might
not benefit from some Transcendent help in disciplining their desires. It’s rather burdensome to whip up moral
vision from scratch. Honestly, this age
of moral experimentation doesn’t seem to be stumbling onto many digestible
social recipes. The ones on the menu appear to be the kind of arbitrary solutions our Founders rebelled against.
American Independence works if it is
thought of as independence from arbitrary power. But when traditional moral
authority is thought to be arbitrary, too, and we become independent from long-established
claims on one another, then democracy will descend into the chaos our founders
feared. Our ongoing independence requires dependence on God. Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain.
