PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

Whenever we make an appeal to reason in politics, the difficulty in
this parable recurs. For there is an inherent difficulty about using
the method of reason to deal with an unreasoning world. Even if you
assume with Plato that the true pilot knows what is best for the ship,
you have to recall that he is not so easy to recognize, and that this
uncertainty leaves a large part of the crew unconvinced. By definition
the crew does not know what he knows, and the pilot, fascinated by the
stars and winds, does not know how to make the crew realize the
importance of what he knows. There is no time during mutiny at sea to
make each sailor an expert judge of experts. There is no time for the
pilot to consult his crew and find out whether he is really as wise as
he thinks he is. For education is a matter of years, the emergency a
matter of hours. It would be altogether academic, then, to tell the
pilot that the true remedy is, for example, an education that will
endow sailors with a better sense of evidence. You can tell that only
to shipmasters on dry land. In the crisis, the only advice is to use a
gun, or make a speech, utter a stirring slogan, offer a compromise,
employ any quick means available to quell the mutiny, the sense of
evidence being what it is. It is only on shore where men plan for many
voyages, that they can afford to, and must for their own salvation,
deal with those causes that take a long time to remove. They will be
dealing in years and generations, not in emergencies alone. And
nothing will put a greater strain upon their wisdom than the necessity
of distinguishing false crises from real ones. For when there is panic
in the air, with one crisis tripping over the heels of another, actual
dangers mixed with imaginary scares, there is no chance at all for the
constructive use of reason, and any order soon seems preferable to any
disorder.
It is only on the premise of a certain stability over a long run of
time that men can hope to follow the method of reason. This is not
because mankind is inept, or because the appeal to reason is
visionary, but because the evolution of reason on political subjects
is only in its beginnings. Our rational ideas in politics are still
large, thin generalities, much too abstract and unrefined for
practical guidance, except where the aggregates are large enough to
cancel out individual peculiarity and exhibit large uniformities.
Reason in politics is especially immature in predicting the behavior
of individual men, because in human conduct the smallest initial
variation often works out into the most elaborate differences. That,
perhaps, is why when we try to insist solely upon an appeal to reason
in dealing with sudden situations, we are broken and drowned in
laughter.
4
For the rate at which reason, as we possess it, can advance itself is