Lippmann on Literal and Spiritual Immigration

I recently read Walter Lippmann's wonderful Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest. The book is well-worth reading. It captures the combination of energy, confusion, and optimism that characterizes much of progressive-era political thought. Lippmann's broad theme is the contemporary condition of "drift"--a sense of restlessness and political impotence--produced by liberalism's overthrow of traditional authority and custom. The reform movements of his day understand this problem, but they all seek to restore some utopian, imagined, romantic past. Some yearn for the solidity of village life. Others for the return of non-consolidated private property and the the mom-and-pop store economy. All this is futile nostalgia for a past that will never return. The only way forward is the establishment of a new kind of deliberate, rational, scientific mastery over society. Here Lippmann still has faith that scientific mastery is consistent with democratic self-rule. Indeed, science and democracy are two sides of the same coin. It's interesting to compare this young Lippmann with the more mature Lippmann's famous critique of democratic rationality.

Lippmann says a number of interesting things about the labor movement, the managerial revolution in private industry, the stupidity of anti-trust regulation, the women's rights movement, etc. I may blog more about those discussions later.

Anyway, here's a wonderful passage from Lippmann on the condition of the modern American soul:

In Queenstown harbor I once talked to an Irish boy who was about to embark for America. His home was in the West of Ireland, in a small village where his sister and he helped their father till a meager farm. They had saved enough for a pas- sage to America, and they were abandoning their home. I asked the boy whether he knew anyone in America. He didn't, but his parish priest at home did. He was going to write to Father Riley every week. Would he ever return to Ireland? "Yes,"  said this boy of eighteen, "I'm going to die in Ireland." Where was he going to in America? To a place called New Haven. He was, in short, going from one epoch into another, and for guidance he had the parish priest at home and perhaps the ward boss in New Haven. His gentleness and trust in the slums of New Haven, assaulted by din and glare, hedged in by ugliness and cynical push, — if there is any adventure comparable to his, I have not heard of it. At the very moment when he needed a faith, he was cutting loose from it. If he becomes brutal, greedy, vulgar, will it be so surprising? If he fails to measure up to the requirements of citizenship in a world reconstruction, is there anything strange about it? 

Well, he was an immigrant in the literal sense. All of us are immigrants spiritually. We are all of us immigrants in the industrial world, and we have no authority to lean upon. We are an uprooted people, newly arrived, and nouveau riche. As a nation we have all the vulgarity that goes with that, all the scattering of soul. The modern man is not yet settled in his world. It is strange to him, terrifying, alluring, and incomprehensibly big. The evidence is everywhere: the amusements of the city; the jokes that pass for jokes; the blare that stands for beauty, the folksongs of Broadway, the feeble and apologetic pulpits, the cruel standards of success, raucous purity. We make love to ragtime and we die to it. We are blown hither and thither like litter before the wind. Our days are lumps of undigested experience. You have only to study what newspapers regard as news to see how we are torn and twisted by the irrelevant: in frenzy about issues that do not concern us, bored with those that do. Is it a wild mistake to say that the absence of central authority has disorganized our souls, that our souls are like Peer Gynt's onion, in that they lack a kernel?