Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest

by Walter Lippmann, William E. Leuchtenburg (Introduction)

"Drift and Mastery" may not be the most important of Lippmann’s works but it is surely one of the more interesting. Lippmann was a curious young man, and the intellectual tensions in "Drift and Mastery" reflect tensions within Lippmann himself as he struggled - according to Heinz Eulau in his harsh but perceptive essay on Lippmann - with "the warm humanity which he sought and the abstract intellectualism which he feared." Lippmann states in the book's Introduction that this work is an attempt to diagnose the current societal unrest and to arrive at some sense of what democracy implies. It begins with the obvious drift of our time and gropes for the conditions of mastery. He notes that he tries, in these essays, to enter the American problem at a few significant points in order to trace a little of the immense suggestion that radiates from them. It is his hope that the book will leave the reader with a sense of the varied talents and opportunities, powers and organizations that may contribute to a conscious revolution. He adds that he has not been able to convince himself, however, that one policy, one party, one class, or one set of tactics is as fertile as human need.

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction, Philosophy, American History, Sociology, Classics

177 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1914

About the author

Walter Lippmann was an American intellectual, writer, reporter, and political commentator who gained notoriety for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War. Lippmann was twice awarded (1958 and 1962) a Pulitzer Prize for his syndicated newspaper column, "Today and Tomorrow."

Reviews

[Jerry Wall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow!
From 1914, with polish added in the 1960s. Says so much about social thinking. Reminds me of
writings of Harari currently, but more addressing social interaction directly.
Judges have not been trained for the modern world, have never learned how to understand its temper. p. 95
. . . to take out of industry the deadening effects of machine production. You have to find vast sums of money for experiment in methods of humanizing labor. p. 98
. . . we persist in recalling what is by its very nature irrevocable. * * * He glorifies what is gone when he fears what is to come. * * * Beaten nations live in the exploits of their ancestors. * * * The curse of Ireland, of Poland, of Alsace is that they cannot forget what they were. * * * . . . no people who cling so ardently to a family tree as do those come down in the world. p. 102-3
. . . people who are forever dreaming of a mythical past are merely saying that they are afraid of the future. * * * The past which men create for themselves is a place where thought is unnecessary and happiness inevitable. p. 103
. . . drift with impunity. * * * At the only point where effort and intelligence are needed, that point where today is turning into tomorrow, there these people are not found. p. 104
. . . there is always efficiency, a word which covers a multitude of confusions. * * * There are thousands today who, out of patience with almost everything, believe passionately that some one change will set everything right. p. 107
Protestantism was an effort at a little democracy in religion. p. 109
. . . produces art that only a few people would miss if it disappeared. p. 110
. . . remedy for the chaos and ineptitude of modern life. . . p. 111 !!!!!!
Belief does not live by logic, but by the need it fills, and absolutism quiets the uncertainties of the soul, finds answers to unsatisfied desire, and endows men with the sense that they are part of something greater than themselves. In the worldly power of the Roman Church, of Christian Science, of the Salvation Army, or the Mormons, you come to see what a colossal practical power there is in an untroubled faith. But in liberal thought there is chaos, for it lacks the foundations of certainty. p. 114
!!!!!***
All of us are immigrants spiritually. p. 118
Women . . . a faithful conservator of superstition. p. 124
. . . because they have special talents or because they have special opportunities. p. 127
Farmers seem at times to have a kind of personal friendship with the weather and the turning seasons, and those things which no single man can appropriate. p 130
At the present moment over half the men of the working-class do not earn enough to support a family, and that's why their wives and daughters are drawn into industry. * * * We do almost no single, sensible, and deliberate thing to make family life a success. And still the family survives. p. 132
How many homes have been wrecked by the sheer inability of men and women to understand each other can be seen by the enormous use made of the theme in modern literature. p. 133
We surround the obvious with great wastes of silence, and over the simplest facts we teach the soul to stutter. * * * It makes sheep out of those who conform and freaks out of those who rebel. p. 137
. . . he never enjoys his own treasure because he will not spend it. * * * Those who hold life lightly are the real masters of it: the lavish givers have the most to give. p. 138 !!!!!!
Essay of Poverty, Chastity, Obedience -- the vows the Catholic monks and Nuns take as the discipline of authority. . . . Unfit for self-government, they are the most easily led, the most easily fooled, and the most easily corrupted. p. 141
But in the main, modern democrats recognize that the abolition of poverty is the most immediate question before the world today, and they have imagination enough to know that the success of the war against poverty will be the conquest of new territory for civilized life. p. 143 !!!!!!
Nietszche's advice that we should live not for our fatherland but for our children's land. p. 147
. . . miseducating . . . . p. 152
Santayana . . . "The gods are demonstrable only as hypotheses but as hypotheses they are not gods." p. 162
. . . men . . . They think of pedants in closed university ground, walled in from all enthusiasm, tangled in the creepers that shackle with their beauty. * * *Merely to realize that your way of living is not the only way, is to free yourself from its authority. It brings a kind of lucidity in which society is rocked by a devastating Why? p. 163
For the conservative is not devoted to a real past. He is devoted to his own comfortable image of it. p. 164 !!!!!
. . . a crusted society that had no use for disturbing invention p. 166
. . . there is actually ground for supposing that love of country is coming to mean love of country and not hatred of other countries. p. 167
What is this man's dearest wish? * * * six weeks convert * * * . . . adding confusion to difficulty. p. 169
If thinking did not serve desire, it would be the most useless occupation in the world. ***
. . .. . . vision of an ideal commonwealth. . . . p. 170
. . . each man confesses by his dreams that he and his world are at odds. . . . p. 172
. . . the find myth that the block of marble imprisoned a statue which the sculptor released. * * * . . . to draw out of each child the promise that is in it. . . . . social forces that lead to a better one(time). p. 173
. . . invincible ignorance. * * *
The way out of corrupt and inept politics is to use the political state for interesting and important purposes. p. 174
Everyone has met the man who approached life eagerly and tapered off to a middle age where the effort is over, his opinions formed, his habits immutable, with nothing to do but live in the house he has built, and sip what he has brewed. p 175

[Rifat Islam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lippmann is a perceptive and prescient writer who writes with gusto and humor, even though he can be at times puzzling. He's hard to place on a binary between labor and capital– he sympathizes with laborers and the union movement but dismisses the antiquated thinking of William Jennings Bryan, he challenges consumerism but relates to a consumer inundated in a deluge of advertising and media, he expresses an awe for the efficiency of big trusts but recognizes their harms toward small businesses and communities.

[Sharla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for American Imagination: From the Gilded Age to the Cold War. Makes sense as a philosophy of progressivism, fails to defend progressivism as a whole. If tradition is disregarded, Lippmann offers the best next action.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mini-review: Drift and Mastery is an intellectual's view into American society one hundred years ago. It's dense, but short and worth reading for the perspective alone. This book tackled "current" issues at the time, largely around how society should transition from a farming life "where the only immigrants were babies and only emigrants the dead" to a modern, technologically-driven, scientifically-informed society where women have independent roles and business is a newly larger entity.

Assorted ideas of Lippmann's that have not come to pass:
* Predicting that most household work (cooking, cleaning, raising kids <5 yo) will go the division-of-labor route and become "cooperative"
* Advocating for a safety net that frees people from economic concern as the best way to both enable better citizens and to rationalize public debate
* Religion having a diminished role in societal thought

[Tracey Duncan · Rating 1 out of 5]

fascist.

[Tori]

Drift and Mastery (Spectrum Book: Classics in History Series) by Walter Lippmann (1986)