The moral imagination in practical politics

Printed from: https://newbostonpost.com/2016/01/23/the-moral-imagination-in-practical-politics/

Conservatives often speak of the primacy of imagination in politics and culture, but its connection to policy is often shrouded in confusion.

What, then, is the imagination and why is it important to the public discourse?

Is it merely a slogan meant to rally a particular political cause or is it something of greater consequence?

Irving Babbitt observed nearly a century ago, “when studied with any degree of thoroughness, the economic problem will be found to run into the political problem, the political problem in turn into the philosophical problem, and the philosophical problem itself to be almost indissolubly bound up at last with the religious problem.” While the political, philosophical, and religious are all bound to one another in a great, interconnected matrix known as culture, the adhesive which holds these disparate elements together is what we call imagination.

An ethical understanding of society grounded in tradition and experience, in contrast to a narrow self-indulgence conceived in abstraction and private judgement, the moral imagination is that faculty of distinction that properly shapes our private and public judgment. It is the capacity to strive for order, justice, and freedom through the prism of custom and prejudice. It recognizes that while the individual is dumb, the species is wise, and that our own appetites and passions must yield to the judgment of long experience. It chastises reason while directing the soul toward a higher ethical norm, which, ultimately, allows the commonwealth to exist as a tolerably ordered reality.

If culture is ordered toward the ugly, the violent, the perverse, and the self-indulgent, we must expect our politics to be similarly directed.

How, then, do we develop a moral imagination in a world dominated by violence, permissiveness, and pride? Does imagination truly govern culture, and as a result, the dynamics of practical politics? Does the triumph of an idyllic or diabolical imagination equate to a debased political order?

“Imagination rules the word,” said Napoleon Bonaparte, whose diabolical imagination eclipsed Europe for nearly two decades. If culture is ordered toward the ugly, the violent, the perverse, and the self-indulgent, we must expect our politics to be similarly directed. This is particularly so in a democracy with near-universal suffrage, as a politician who fails to flatter the voter is more likely to be sent back to his law office than elected to any office of public trust. When culture is corrupted by acquiescence to the idyllic and diabolical, the political order will soon follow.

In contrast, to cultivate a moral imagination, it is necessary to furnish a wardrobe of virtues from the best literary, historical, and philosophical traditions that have enlivened the Western mind since the time of Plato. These virtues are not necessarily taught, but are incorporated into our lives from the time we are infants through example and convention.

To cultivate a moral imagination, it is necessary to furnish a wardrobe of virtues from the best literary, historical, and philosophical traditions that have enlivened the Western mind since the time of Plato.

Moreover, in Western literature – from the writings of Vergil and Dante to Shakespeare and Evelyn Waugh – we find exemplars of those aspects of culture that make society gentle and life worth living. Through the power of myth and imagination, we can come to more fully understand the value of life, the centrality of religion, the importance of family, and the significance of self-sacrifice. From great literature, we can glimpse the heroic and incorporate it into our own lives. We can understand what it means to be human, to be more than mere animals governed by appetite and desire.  We can know the beautiful and the sublime in contrast to the horrible and the diabolic. Through the moral imagination, we can know what it means to live and be free, rather than to endure as slaves to passion in a state of eternal boredom.

The moral imagination acts as our compass to discern and acknowledge the dignity of human persons and the frail realities of human nature. It provides a link among the generations so that we can understand our place among our predecessors and appreciate the responsibility we have to preserve the best of our world for the rising generation. It is the cultural adhesive that binds generations together in a great primeval contract in which the living, the dead, and the unborn partake in an eternal society. As Babbitt noted, the “wisdom of life consists in an imaginative assumption of the experience of the past in such a fashion as to bring it to bear as a living force upon the present.” The moral imagination is the embodiment of that wisdom.

The moral imagination acts as our compass to discern and acknowledge the dignity of human persons and … to discern right from wrong.

It is, then, this faculty of discernment that allows us to draw upon generations of experience to discern right from wrong, the beautiful from the ugly, and the lofty from the base. Engaged in a perpetual struggle with the idyllic and diabolical, the moral imagination is the ethical perception that allows the individual to achieve right reason within the soul and to participate in a tolerable order within the community. For Russell Kirk, the moral imagination “can raise us on high, as did Dante’s high dream.”

In that sense, without the moral imagination, we are the sordid prisoners of Whirl – tossed about in a world of uncertain chaos, subject to the brutality of our naked, shivering natures. Our souls hunger and our culture dissolves under the pressures of materialism, lust, and vanity. All the while, the forces of Mordor remain real, but do we have the imagination to see the Orcs approach and to reject the seductive temptations of Sauron? Do our politicians?

Glen A. Sproviero is a commercial litigator in New York. Read his previous columns here.