The more I read about Walter Lippman, the more I like him. Old-time values, though you have to take his arrogance and his self-serving nature with his value-based prescriptions. Writing over 75 years ago, he grieved that the ancient solidities of religious faith were in decline. He wrote about this with passion and pessimism, especially after Hitler had conquered all of Western Europe.
There is much that can produce similar pessimism today but we cannot allow this to conquer us.
Lippman had the tendency to blame all of America’s troubles on its enemies, illuminating the tendency of each of us is to look down on those who disagree with us. He thought our salvation lay within ourselves and could not be achieved by looking elsewhere.
“Our civilization can be maintained and restored,” he wrote in 1940, “only by remembering and rediscovering the truths, and by reestablishing the virtuous habits on which it was founded. There is no use looking into the blank future for some new and fancy revelation of what man needs in order to live. The elemental principles of work and sacrifice and duty—and the transcendent criteria of truth, justice and righteousness—and the grace of love and charity are the things which have made men free…only in this profound, this stern, in this tested wisdom shall we find once more the light and the courage we need.”
Surely, words for today, words for this moment, words for eternity.
What’s the role of religion in all of this, I ask. Is it an essential requirement for one to lead a moral life? I wouldn’t say that. I know people, a couple of my children among them, who are leading moral lives and yet they would not call themselves religious. But they do believe there are higher values that stem from something outside themselves. For me, religion has played that role. Not alone. A deep appreciation of nature, of humanity at its best leads me to the same conviction in the imperative of certain moral values. But religion, as I’ve understood and tried to practice it, has played a bigger role than anything.
Timeless wisdom from Walter Lippman “Those in high places are more than the administrators of government bureaus. They are more than the writers of laws. They are the custodians of the nation’s ideals, of its permanent hopes, of the faith that makes a nation out of the mere aggregation of individuals.”
A message for leaders in every walk of life today and forever.
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