Walter Lippmann

Yet another book that I first read around age 16 and that had a profound effect upon the way that I continue to think is Walter Lippmann's A Preface to Morals (1929).

Like Wallace Stevens, Lippmann was a student of George Santayana. He also studied with William James. His thought displays an interesting confluence of those two Harvard colleagues.

From reading Lippmann I discovered that, while modernity is a fact, modernism is an ideal. I am not certain that Lippmann himself was very clear on the distinction, but his very lack of clarity may have made the distinction obvious to me. It is for this reason that I have long cherished Bruno Latour's observation that "We have never been modern." My riff on Latour is that all of us are modern--whether we like it or not--but few of us are modernists, i.e., are among those who have considered the advantages and disadvantages of modernity (casting a cold eye on both) and have made conscious choices about what to embrace and what to resist in the modern condition.

Reading Lippmann's Preface convinced me that modernist religion need not be rational, but it must be reasonable. Moreover, his discussion of "high religion" as a modern, humanistic mode makes the case (possibly without knowing it) that tasawwuf has all the credentials it needs to be the modernist religion par excellence.

As Lippmann himself would say: "The stone that the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner" (Luke 20:17).