PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

misjudged the facts, imagined the attack, and is really the aggressor?
Perhaps he has provoked the attack. But what is a provocation? Exactly
these confusions infected the minds of most Germans in August, 1914.
Far more serious in the modern world than any difference of moral code
is the difference in the assumptions about facts to which the code is
applied. Religious, moral and political formulae are nothing like so
far apart as the facts assumed by their votaries. Useful discussion,
then, instead of comparing ideals, reexamines the visions of the
facts. Thus the rule that you should do unto others as you would have
them do unto you rests on the belief that human nature is uniform. Mr.
Bernard Shaw's statement that you should not do unto others what you
would have them do unto you, because their tastes may be different,
rests on the belief that human nature is not uniform. The maxim that
competition is the life of trade consists of a whole tome of
assumptions about economic motives, industrial relations, and the
working of a particular commercial system. The claim that America will
never have a merchant marine, unless it is privately owned and
managed, assumes a certain proved connection between a certain kind of
profit-making and incentive. The justification by the bolshevik
propagandist of the dictatorship, espionage, and the terror, because
"every state is an apparatus of violence" [Footnote: See _Two Years
of Conflict on the Internal Front_, published by the Russian
Socialist Federated Soviet Republic, Moscow, 1920. Translated by
Malcolm W. Davis for the _New York Evening Post_, January 15,
1921.] is an historical judgment, the truth of which is by no means
self-evident to a non-communist.
At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a
map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the
sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history
(so understood), the rules of the code apply. So far as the facts of
personality, of the environment and of memory are different, by so far
the rules of the code are difficult to apply with success. Now every
moral code has to conceive human psychology, the material world, and
tradition some way or other. But in the codes that are under the
influence of science, the conception is known to be an hypothesis,
whereas in the codes that come unexamined from the past or bubble up
from the caverns of the mind, the conception is not taken as an
hypothesis demanding proof or contradiction, but as a fiction accepted
without question. In the one case, man is humble about his beliefs,
because he knows they are tentative and incomplete; in the other he is
dogmatic, because his belief is a completed myth. The moralist who
submits to the scientific discipline knows that though he does not
know everything, he is in the way of knowing something; the dogmatist,
using a myth, believes himself to share part of the insight of
omniscience, though he lacks the criteria by which to tell truth from
error. For the distinguishing mark of a myth is that truth and error,