A preface to morals

by Walter Lippmann

"A preface to morals" by Walter Lippmann is a work of social and moral philosophy written in the early 20th century. It examines the modern loss of religious certainty and authority, the emptiness that can follow emancipation from orthodoxy, and the need to find a credible, disciplined humanism to guide conduct in a secular world. Lippmann probes why both triumphant disbelief and nostalgic return fail to satisfy, and why moral life requires more than taste, mood, or fashion. The opening of the book traces the “problem of unbelief”: those no longer anchored by ancestral faith feel aimless despite newfound freedoms, and the liberal prophecy of deliverance has disappointed, leaving people nervously credulous and tempted by new cults. Lippmann contrasts modernist redefinitions of God (abstract, symbolic, or metaphysical) that lack compelling authority with fundamentalist demands for literal historical facts; he shows how the former cannot sustain popular devotion, while the latter, lacking a sure arbiter, collapses into schism—Catholic critique included. He argues that higher criticism and “decoding” Scripture (e.g., turning immortality into a platonic ideal) strip religion of the certainty and external sanction that once consoled, commanded, and unified ordinary believers. Finally, he sketches the “acids of modernity”: shifting political analogies for God, urbanization, mobility, media-driven novelty, and the loss of familiar landmarks all corrode piety; fundamentalist agitation appears as anxious compensation for a confidence that has already ebbed.