Mixing Past and Future

Ó American Sociological Association 2013 DOI: 10.1177/0094306113499137 http://cs.sagepub.com EDITOR’S REMARKS MIXING PAST AND FUTURE The Past regularly invokes social science research in his essays, and because of the internet, his Scholarly reputations that for a time seem version of what ‘‘we’’ are saying is very unimpeachable now shrink or evaporate so widely discussed. Widely, yes; how deeply speedily that ‘‘intergenerational’’ percep- remains the unanswerable question. Yet tions of whom to read will soon be measured long before the ascension of globalized dis- in months rather than decades. As some the- course, before the tyrannical computeriza- orists have begun to explain (e.g., Hassan tion of consciousness had reached deep 2012; Rosa 2013), to remain hip in any single into our minds, prior to the nattering of intellectual or artistic field becomes ever tiny screens demanding perpetual attention, more taxing, more and more breathless, there was a journalist whose presence was so with returns that seem weaker and less pre- overwhelming for so long that he became dictable than one might wish. Where to indistinguishable from ‘‘what right-thinking invest one’s time and energy for the purpose people ought to think about important mat- of edification becomes as tricky and unset- ters.’’ His name, of course, was Walter tling as trusting hedge fund managers to Lippmann. grow one’s retirement savings. Who are the In 1943 James Thurber created a cartoon for blue chip writers and thinkers with whom The New Yorker showing a couple reading one can confidently spend those few hours their morning newspaper, the woman per day, week, or month that can be wrested saying to the man ‘‘Lippmann scares me from the everyday duties of emailing, meet- this morning’’ (Steel 1981: 432ff). She was ings, and online surfing? Whose stock holds ‘‘scared’’ because Lippmann was famously its value? trusted to tell the unpleasant truth, as a soci- An expert in marriage and the family ologist without portfolio, political scientist, recently said to me, ‘‘Ernest Burgess wrote moral philosopher, and presidential advisor. an early book about the family, and it’s hum- For decades he was the voice of apparent bling to examine it now, because he was reason in the popular press—his audience doing all the stuff we continue to do, the cor- numbered ten million of the savviest relations and so on, even if his methods were citizens—and his books were taken as seri- less fancy’’ (see Burgess and Locke 1945; 4th ously as any scholar’s, and far more widely edition, 1971). So, does one burrow into read: ‘‘Walter Lippmann had left his finger- what’s left of the library stacks to find Bur- prints on, and even helped mold, almost gess’s 800-page textbook, or even Willard every major issue in American life over six Waller’s related monographs from the decades’’ (Steele 1980: xvii, xii). Yet he, too, 1930s, in order to limn the ground floor of has now become for most readers merely family-oriented sociology? Or does one allow a somewhat notable name without content or oneself to believe that the latest monograph any compulsion to consult. The fact that his subsumes these antique works, consigning books—most notably Public Opinion (1922), them permanently to the airless forgetfulness The Phantom Public (1925), A Preface to Morals of closed stacks? No-one can say with any (1929), and The Good Society (1937)—were authority; things are moving too fast to judge. universally read and respected, going Today the most visible ‘‘sociological imagi- through many printings and editions long nation’’ in journalistic form seems to revolve after their first appearance, no longer seems around columnists of The New York Times, to carry much weight. Even The Essential sometimes Paul Krugman, other times Lippmann (1963; 1982) is out of print. Were Maureen Dowd or their colleagues, but it not for Transaction Publishers reprinting mostly David Brooks. His right-center cul- his works ‘‘on demand,’’ Lippmann’s books tural conservatism notwithstanding, Brooks would be hard to find except in vanishing 653 Contemporary Sociology 42, 5 Downloaded from csx.sagepub.com at ASA - American Sociological Association on September 12, 2013 654 Editor’s Remarks used-book stores. At his death in 1974, this addresses (see a sample in The New York situation would have seemed as unlikely as Times:Pe´rez-Pen˜a, 2013), remains a classic if the names of all The New York Times’ cur- document of its genre. rent columnists were to disappear overnight. Lippmann begins by noting ‘‘a special Every U.S. president from Teddy Roosevelt uneasiness which perturbs the scholar. He (Lippmann’s hero when young) through feels that he ought to be doing something Nixon knew and listened to the scholar- about the world’s troubles, or at least to be journalist. In December 1917, at 28, he drafted saying something which will help others to The Fourteen Points which Woodrow Wilson do something about them. The world needs delivered to Congress on January 8, 1918, ideas: how can he sit in his study. And thereby establishing a new world order. yet, at the same time he hears the voice of From then on, he was never far from the another conscience, the conscience of the political center of the United States, and scholar...hemustpreserveaquietindiffer- also abroad. Fifty years later, the relationship ence to the immediate and a serene attach- Lyndon Baines Johnson and him went from ment to the processs of inquiry and under- being confederates to enemies when Lipp- standing’’ (Lippmann 1932: 148). He then mann realized that LBJ had lied to him quotes from one of Robert Browning’s least regarding his intentions in Vietnam. He melodious poems, ‘‘A Grammarian’s Funer- instantly began to attack LBJ frontally and al’’ (Men and Women, 1855). Doing so nowa- continuously: ‘‘There is a growing feeling days would seem not only pretentious, that Johnson’s America is no longer the his- Eurocentric, patriarchal, and condescend- toric America . it is a bastard empire which ing, but would also mystify its listeners relies on superior force to achieve its purpo- due to its syntax and vocabulary. ses, and is no longer an example of the wis- Lippmann reminds his listeners, most of dom and humanity of a free society. It is whom had surely read Browning at some a feeling that the American promise has been point, that ‘‘as a man of his time he [the schol- betrayed and abandoned’’ (Newsweek, Octo- ar] is impelled against his instincts to enter ber 9, 1967; Steele 1980: 577). LBJ allegedly thearena...heisafraidtosaywiththe told his intimates that he knew the war in high assurance of the Grammarian: ‘Leave Vietnam was lost when Walter Cronkite Now for dogs and apes! Man has Forever.’ withdrew his support on his television He drops his studies, he entangles himself news program; he could as easily have said in affairs, murmuring to himself: ‘But time the same thing about Lippmann, and proba- escapes: Live now or never!’’’ Naturally, there bly did. In fact, Cronkite was a journalist is nothing original here, as Lippmann knew, with a mellifluous voice whereas Lippmann since Plato’s Socrates spent lots of his time was a thinking person’s public intellectual talking about the thought/action dichotomy whose opinion counted a great deal more, that afflicts all responsible people. Yet given and had for 40 years. what the world was preparing to do to itself In 1932 when Lippmann was 42, he was in 1932, and being a man of uncanny political invited to deliver the commencement sense, Lippmann felt the need to speak address at Columbia University, which was against the grain—Max Weber’s speech to soon thereafter printed in The Atlantic a displeased audience in November, 1917, Monthly with this note from its editor: ‘‘Science as a Vocation,’’ comes to mind, also ‘‘This paper is here published because its disappointing its listeners’ expectations—by excellence demands for it a wider audience insisting that scholars should stick to their and the permanence of the printed word’’ business and let the politicians fend for them- (Lippmann 1932). Lippmann was personally selves. In saying this, he seemed to be contra- unhappy at that time, only in part because dicting the arc of his entire life to that point. the country had rapidly sunk from the hys- Lippmann decided to use Browning’s terical boom of the late 1920s into the nadir imagination to aid him, which was a good of the Depression in just a few years. But choice indeed. Browning’s meditation on that notwithstanding, he had advice for the the burying of an imaginary Renaissance Columbia graduates which, when compared scholar is partly heartfelt, partly mocking. with what now passes for commencement His students must find a suitable burial site: Contemporary Sociology 42, 5 Downloaded from csx.sagepub.com at ASA - American Sociological Association on September 12, 2013 Editor’s Remarks 655 ‘‘Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and or does s/he wait for a thorough viewing crop; / Seek we sepulture / On a tall moun- of the data, meanwhile fearful that a compet- tain, citied to the top, / Crowded with cul- itor will ‘‘scoop’’ the story? Remembering, as ture! / All the peaks soar, but one the rest we all do, that Darwin waited 20 years excels; / Clouds over come it.’’ The poet before announcing his discoveries in Origin acknowledges the scholar’s superiority to of Species, and then only reluctantly, we see those who people the ‘‘unlettered plain’’ the distance we have come since his time while at the same time noting his anxiety— and Browning’s in terms of the hastening which Lippmann adopted as his own— race between speed and cogitation.

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