Science & Tech Quote by Walter Lippmann

Lippmann’s line lands like a cold splash: modern science isn’t “new” because it discovered more stuff, but because it withdrew the universe from our emotional jurisdiction. He’s naming a psychological demotion. For most of human history, explaining nature meant negotiating with it - gods to appease, omens to read, destinies to bargain with. The “radical novelty” is the refusal to treat reality as a mirror of our wishes, fears, or moral bookkeeping. Stars don’t care if we’re righteous. Atoms don’t behave better when we’re hopeful.

The intent is quietly polemical. Lippmann, a journalist who spent his career watching mass opinion, propaganda, and democratic mythmaking collide, is defending an epistemic discipline against the seductions of sentiment. “Preferences of the human heart” isn’t romantic; it’s accusatory. He’s pointing at the persistent urge to make facts consoling, to demand that the world confirm our values. That urge doesn’t vanish with modernity; it just changes costume - it becomes ideological certainty, therapeutic politics, and the expectation that institutions (including science) should validate identity and meaning.

The subtext is also a warning about the cost of this demotion. If nature is indifferent, then authority can’t come from cosmic endorsement; it has to come from method, evidence, and fallible consensus. That’s liberating and destabilizing. Lippmann is arguing that science’s real revolution is emotional: it trains us to tolerate a universe that won’t flatter us, and a public life that can’t be built on wishful thinking.