My Sons Have Defeated Me: Walter Lippmann, Felix Adler, and Secular Moral Authority

Abstract

In his 1929 A Preface to Morals, American journalist and political philosopher Walter Lippmann wrote, “Modern man who has ceased to believe, without ceasing to be credulous, hangs, as it were, between heaven and earth, and is at rest nowhere." The secular Lippmann located the source of this feeling of unmooredness in the particulars of modernity, where the religions of the past were no longer credible, but men (and also, although not in an identical way, women) still sought something to believe in. If the acids of modernity—in his famous phrase—had dissolved the worldviews that made religions plausible, they had not dissolved the human needs that religion had fulfilled.