“Until the day breaks and the shadows flee…”
– Song of Solomon 2:17
“The moral imagination,” Russel Kirk wrote, “aspires to the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth.” He resurrected the Burkean moral imagination and maybe modernized it in the process. Jonathan Leamon Jones, similar to Gerald Russello and William F. Byrne, argues that Kirk’s moral imagination wasn’t modern but postmodern in its mistrust of metanarratives, including those of mainstream conservatives and radical right-wingers (others such as Peter Augustine Lawler go further in declaring that all of “conservative thought today is authentic postmodernism.”).
Modernity is always the frame of the reactionary mind, as conservatism in operating within the liberal paradigm can’t help but be an endless response to and borrowing from liberalism. The attempt to speak for the pre-modern inevitably leads to a post-modern attitude, even as modernity remains securely in place. There is no ‘pre-modern’ and ‘post-modern’ without the modern that defines and frames it all.
Such is the case with the development of moral imagination, but as a consciously articulated notion it took form in conjunction with the mature rise of modernity. The French Revolution symbolized the end of the ancien regime. Edmund Burke wasn’t postmodern, that is for sure, since modernity was only then taking hold. And moral imagination has its roots in the distant past. One important difference to keep in mind is that Kirk’s moral imagination, as opposed for example to the reactionary imagination of a conservative-minded classical liberal like Jordan Peterson, included the social or sociological imagination (Peterson is so post-post-modern that he is all the more modern for it). Burke did speak of the social, but of course he lived long before social science and social constructivism. “I contend that,” Jonathan Leamon Jones writes,
“Kirk, as a figure more concerned with culture than politics, attempted to negotiate his conservatism as a denial of the “autonomous self” and as an acceptance of the social construction of life (guided by, in his case, religious and socially traditionalist norms developed over extended periods of time). What is shared with Lyotard is that his postmodernism rejects the “grand narratives” of liberalism (such as “autonomy” and “progress”) as well as collectivism (such as fascism, socialism, and communism). Even so, Kirk is grounded in what might be termed a metaphysical master narrative, one of divine interaction with humanity. And because human beings are sinful and severely lacking in knowledge, their statements about the world can only be provisional, subject to revision and circumstance.”
Burke was a professional politician of a partisan variety. Kirk was not, as he was more wary of formal politics, it ironically being in part because of his own interpretation of Burkean moral imagination that he avoided following Burke’s political example. It was Kirk’s moral imagination as a conservative that actually allowed him to vote for those who didn’t identify as conservative, since his moral imagination allowed him to put moral character and personal concerns above both narrow ideological dogmas and lockstep political partisanship.
Where Kirk resonates with Burke is maybe along the line of the Burke’s denial of natural law as a human-imposed abstraction that risked idealism and radicalism. This is an attitude that he shared with John Dickinson’s worldview of Quaker constitutionalism (a constitution not as a paper document, espoused dogma, or mission statement but as a living pact between God and a specific people). Natural law has been cited by conservatives in making claims of traditionalism, but it was used even more persuasively and powerfully by radicals and revolutionaries seeking divine authority above human law.
One might note that Burke came from a family that was originally Catholic whereas Kirk converted to Catholicism as an adult. And one might note that both Burke and Dickinson were educated by Quakers. The commonality between Catholicism and Quakerism is the heavy emphasis on the social, specifically the social imagination as expressed through social theology and social action, including social activism. The moral imagination ultimately is a social imagination, overlapping with what some simply call culture or what Daniel Everett describes as the dark matter of the mind (i.e., the sociocultural unconscious). The social component isn’t only about what defines imagination but also what constrains or focuses it. Enculturation as with conversion is all about moral imagination, as are social control measures from propaganda to perception management.
To continue with Jones’ analysis: “Kirk sought to guide the reader to that place where he made his “home” – the small, local networks of associations that echo Burke’s well-known “little platoons” of society. Set against the “modern” in ways at once superficial and philosophical, such guidance was placement in an uncertain yet transcendently-grounded “postmodern” time and place.”
This is where, I’d argue, Burke lost the thread of his own narrative. With the French Revolution, his fevered rantings and detached fantasies about distant royalty had nothing to do with human-sized “little platoons” at the local level of comunity, certainly nothing to do with the lived experience and real world concerns of the average person in France or England — as Thomas Paine put it: “He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.”
A major point Paine made was that modernity had destroyed those “little platoons” and that the remnants of that loss required moral re-imagining to compensate for what was stolen for that loss was intentionally caused by those who gained from it. Those in power had intentionally and actively targeted the destruction of those “little platoons” (the communities and commons of feudalism) and on the rubble they built the British Empire.
This created an insurmountable problem for the burgeoning conservative mind. Burke’s moral imagination had become untethered since, for whatever reason, he lacked Paine’s urgent sense of the living memory of the disappearing past. Maybe that is because Paine, in having come to the colonies as Burke never did, saw with his own eyes the Indian tribes living within their “little platoons” and so this concrete experience that no longer could be found in England ensured that Paine didn’t get mired in idealistic fantasies and ideological abstractions. In speaking of common sense, Paine was turning to the common past and gave voice to the most powerful vision of moral imagination of his generation.
Kirk’s moral imagination is the perception of others as moral beings as part of a moral community. That much I agree with and so would the likes of Thomas Paine. It is reminiscent of a distinction I often point to. Germanic freedom embraces this kind of moral imagination whereas Latin liberty does not, as freedom is etymologically related to friend and means being a free member of a free people whereas liberty originally meant just not being a slave in a slave-based society. This concern over a moral community is where Burke’s moral imagination met Paine’s common sense, not that either of them saw the connection.
Kirk’s ultimate failure as with Burke’s was a too limited imagining of moral imagination in that over time conservatism despite all its protestations to the contrary had shackled itself to ideological dogmatism and so denied the radical challenge (radical, etymologically-speaking, as going to the ‘root’) of moral imagination as it operates in the human mind and human society, an unwillingness to follow negative capability into the dark unseen realms of the collective psyche. In relation to the likes of Julian Jaynes and Lewis Hyde, I might argue that Burke and Kirk were comparably superficial thinkers which is not entirely their fault since, in being products of a specific place and time, they both lacked education in such fields as linguistic relativism, anthropology, social constructivism, consciousness studies, etc; although Kirk seems to have had a broader a liberal education.
These two had an intuitively astute sense of the moral imagination while lacking the cognitive frame to fully and consciously articulate it, such is the sense I get from reading their writings and reading about their lives. In the end, there is something lacking and dissatisfying about the conservative constraints placed not just on the enactment of moral imagination but on its very definition and explication. Before beginning to explore it, moral imagination in these earlier texts had already been made into something small and manageable. In constructing a moral imagination into something usable for the modern conservative mind, maybe a few important parts get left and forgotten on the shop floor.
In looking for what has been lost, let’s return to the issue of modernity. For all that post-Enlightenment modernity gets blamed, the seeds of modernity including autonomous individuality and vast meta-narratives were planted during the Axial Age. The entire civilizational project following the Bronze Age has been a suppression and retooling of the moral imagination. According to Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind, earlier humanity was fully immersed in the moral imagination such that it was their entire lived reality, even to the point that the imagination was taken for (superimposed upon) reality and this imagination spoke to them in clear voices. The archaic moral imagination is no longer part of our paltry consciousness with ego boundary-walls that keep it all safely contained and controlled, such that the gods no longer are even a small inner voice to be heard at all.
For all its florid and flaunted fantasizing, Burke’s moral imagination is a pathetic, weak creature that is chained, beaten and starved if not yet fully subdued and domesticated. Burke wonders how moral imagination might serve us, but for archaic humanity they served at the behest of moral imagination. Burke’s censures of radicals was the replaying of Plato’s banishment of the ancient poets whose wild and unruly more-than-human imaginings threatened that aspiring civilizational order. Revolution wasn’t caused by a lack but by an excess of moral imagination, as it had become unleashed from millennia of oppression. Burke felt the necessity to philosophize about this fearsome moral imagination in order to safely put it back in its cage and then to lock the door to that Burkean wardrobe.
What Burke’s moral imagination and Kirk’s conservatism touched upon but never quite grasped is that Eric Hobsbawm’s invented traditions didn’t merely replace but were used as weapons to destroy and dismantle the traditions that came before, erasing the living memory of them from the the public mind. Conservatism, as a modern phenomenon, is a non-traditional tradition (within the liberal tradition itself that is the paradigmatic framework dominating and defining all of modernity). As such, conservatism inherently is a reactionary persuasion and there is no way to escape this for all the attempts at philosophical diversion and special pleading. There is no going back for the revolution, once begun, can’t be stopped. Moral imagination is a living fire that consumes the world and remakes it. And conservatives have played a key role in radically creating something entirely new.
Paine’s radical liberalism acknowledges the dire situation of tragic loss, not getting deluded in the process by nostalgic fantasies. And so Paine’s moral imagination seeks to engage the world rather than evade the situation. Kirk, in his friendship with the sociologist Richard Nisbett, maybe comes closer to seeing what Paine was pointing toward, the loss of community. But what Kirk didn’t understand is what community once meant, not just in the near past but centuries earlier. Consider the Jeffersonian freedom proclaiming each generation’s right to self-governance which seems like a radical and revolutionary ideal of the Enlightenment but in actuality was built on the Anglo-Saxon (and Scandinavian) tribal tradition in Britain, as written laws and constitutions were as abstractly modern as was ethno-nationalism and colonial imperialism. Jefferson was invoking the traditional moral imagination of a once free people and, such as his referencing the fight against Norman invasion, was quite explicit about it.
Burke ran up against this issue. He struggled to admit the problems of colonial and corporatist imperialism and to admit the impotence of his moral imagination in dealing with those problems, stating in a 1783 speech about the British East India Company that, “it is an arduous thing to plead against abuses of a power which originates from your own country, and affects those whom we are used to consider as strangers.” This caused Burke to switch back and forth between progressive reformer and reactionary counterrevolutionary, at one moment criticizing empire and at the next reverencing its authority, at one moment defending the rights of corporations and next demanding a corporation be put under government control. Moral imagination, however it was dressed up, offered little guidance for making sense of the radical character of imperialism that was forcefully remaking the world. Rather than inducing moral clarity in Burke’s mind, the only thing moral imagination made easy was moral rationalization.
Kirk had an idiosyncratic take on conservatism, and such idiosyncrasy is common among conservatives because of the underlying reactionary impulse. Kirk’s conservatism wasn’t easily defined. It was a mindset, temperament, attitude, tendency, or even just a mood. He sometimes spoke in Catholic terms of a canon which simply means an argument made, one argument among many and so not conclusive. This conservatism was a supposed “negation of ideology,” a claim that is never convincing for anyone who has given much thought to the topic. The real issue, as I describe with symbolic conflation, is that the power of conservative ideology is precisely dependent on it being hidden. This is the purpose of obfuscation to which Burke applied moral imagination and Kirk found it likewise useful. Burkean moral imagination uses the mental wardrobe to veil the tender naked skin of truth, to keep it from the prurient eyes of the conscious mind and the harsh glare of Enlightenment thought. This is political ideology transformed into a vague and shifting theology of mysticification.
Right-wing ideologues, interestingly, are always attacking ideology because only other people’s beliefs and values (and not their own) are ideological — this kind of anti-ideological ideology goes at least back to the 1800s, such as the defense slaveholders used against the -isms of the North: abolitionism, feminism, Marxism, etc (and yes Lincoln was friends with all kinds of radicals such as free labor advocates and there was a Marxist in Lincoln’s administration). Moral imagination when cut off from ideological worldview (in Louis Althusser’s sense) becomes an ideological realism that closes down the mind, as the eyes are drawn to the shadows cast on the cave wall.
Related to this, Kirk wrote that “a conservative impulse, if denied intelligent leadership and moral imagination, may be diverted banefully into ideological fanaticism.” Not quite right. Moral imagination is never denied for it is always present, if typically below the threshold of consciousness. Between Burke and Paine, the disagreement wasn’t over being for or against moral imagination but about what kind of moral imagination and to what end. Paine’s complaint was that Burke’s horror fantasies were abstractions of suffering disconnected from the real world experience of living humans. Kirk was less guilty of this, so it seems to me. Being a professional politician muddied Burke’s thinking, a problem Kirk tried to avoid in maintaining a more philosophical position.
Some have talked about moral imagination and more generally about the mind in terms of closed vs open, constrained vs unconstrained, thick boundary vs thin boundary, and similar categorizations that loosely correlate to conservative-mindedness and liberal-mindedness. Both serve purposes for the survival of the species and the functioning of society, but to be trapped in either one is problematic. Flexibility is the key, although this is a biased position for flexibility is a trait of the latter and not the former.
I’ve made the argument that the liberal mind can only operate during times of peace and tolerance. And this relates to how the liberal mind can allow space for the conservative mind in a way that is not possible the other way around, which is why liberalism can only operate under optimal conditions. And maybe liberal-mindedness is more common among tribal people with their low stress lifestyles, indicated by relaxed attitudes about sexuality among most hunter-gatherers. Consider my favorite example the Piraha who are extremely laid back and anti-authoritarian, disregarding hierarchical authority altogether.
This has to do with the circle of concern and the capacity to empathize. We can only empathize with those we perceive as moral beings, as humans like us. This is determined by our moral imagination. It is unsurprising that Edmund Burke, a professional politician operating in fear during a revolutionary era when his beloved British Empire was under threat, had a severely constrained attitude that did not only disallowed him to experience more openness toward others but made it hard for him to even imagine that such openness could be a part of human nature. His conservative-minded imagination excluded liberal-mindedness from his conception of moral imagination. We never know moral imagination in general for we can never step outside of our own moral imagination which typically is shared by those immediately around us.
What has changed over time is the expansion of moral imagination. Even those who identify as conservatives today are more liberal-minded than those who identified as liberals in the early 1800s, a time when liberals were divided over issues such as slavery. Much of what Burke complained about as dangerously radical has since become mainstream thought, even among conservatives today. Thomas Paine’s moral imagination won the struggle over hearts and minds, even as the struggle over Paine’s politics lags behind.
That is how it always happens, the revolution of mind preceding the revolution of society and politics, sometimes the one preceding the other by centuries. Heck, it took the Axial Age revolution of mind a couple of millennia to more fully take hold. And I might add that moral imagination in how we understand it as part of an intentional civilizational project (as opposed to an implicit experience of social reality) began with the Axial Age, as it was in the late Axial Age that religion and politics began to be thought about in explicit terms and as distinct categories, coinciding with the invention of rhetoric proper. Burke’s openly philosophizing about and questioning the modern moral imagination demonstrated how far that millennia old revolution of mind had gone.
In explaining this phenomenon, Kwame Anthony Appiah notes that the arguments for something being right, true, or necessary become common knowledge long before public opinion and political will emerges to cause change to happen (such that most of the arguments against slavery used during the Civil War were widespread and well known prior to the American Revolution). It can take a long time for a society to assimilate new ideas and implement new ways of thinking, but eventually a change is triggered and the once unimaginable quickly becomes the new reality. Then as memory fades, the altered status quo dominates the collective moral imagination, as if it had always been that way.
We project our moral imagination onto reality without giving it much if any thought. No matter how philosophical we get about it, moral imagination can’t be disentangled from our experience of being in the world and being in relation with others. It is the substructure of our entire sense of reality. Our ideas about moral imagination are as likely to delude us as to enlighten us about how our moral imagination actually operates. That is because moral imagination is the territory of rhetoric and rationalization. It’s the stories we tell so often that we no longer realize they are stories, making us ripe for indoctrination and propaganda. But there is nothing inherently sinister about it, as this is simply the process of enculturation that is the basis of every society that has ever existed.
An early philosopher on moral imagination was Blaise Pascal. I don’t know that he ever specifically spoke of ‘moral imagination’, but he wrote extensively about morality and imagination. He appears to have been ahead of his time in many ways, having been born more than a century before Burke (some conservatives claim the both of them as ideological ancestors). Maybe his writings influenced Burke for it is highly probable that Pascal’s writings would have been familiar to many well educated English-speaking individuals in the 18th century. Pascal was one of the earliest thinkers to take seriously the impact of modernity, Jack Sherefkin claiming that he was “the first to face and express the experience of living in this new universe without center or limits.”
Sherefkin goes on to say that, “Most pre-modern societies identified with and felt a part of an orderly, purposeful universe. That is no longer believable. We now find ourselves lost in an infinite universe.” The ancient experience of reality was unraveling and so moral imagination was let loose. Pascal lived during the English Civil War, what some consider the first modern revolution because of the radical ideas (e.g., socialism) that emerged at the time. I’ve often thought that what Burke most feared wasn’t the foreign threat of the French Revolution but the homegrown tradition of British radicalism. It was the English, not the French, who first had the idea of beheading a king in order to establish a revolutionary ideal of social and political order. What Burke couldn’t admit was that, long before his birth, revolution and regicide had become established as part of the British moral imagination.
There is an interesting anecdote about the power of moral imagination. “During his final illness,” Mark Malvasi writes, “Pascal often refused the care of his physician, saying: “Sickness is the natural state of Christians.” He believed that human beings had been created to suffer. Misery was the condition of life in this world. His was a hard doctrine.” It’s similar to Burke’s view of the British Empire and monarchy for, though he could imagine reforming it, he couldn’t imagine a world without it. To Burke, imperialism and monarchism was the natural state of the British; despite the fact that both were foreign systems imported by the French Normans.
There is what has been called the banality of evil. It’s what blinds us to evil in normalizing it, often by way of the slow boiling frog effect. Describing his own experience and observations as a German during the Nazi rise to power, Milton Mayer shows how moral imagination operates:
“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next.”
What is so shocking about the Nazi regime is how normal life continued to be for the average German, right up to the point when war began. Nazism slowly became apart of the German moral imagination. This was only possible because there had been a long history that had already embedded authoritarian tendencies, anti-semitism, and such within the German psyche. The veneer of a free, democratic society kept obscure this dark underbelly. There was never a right moment for a German like Milton Mayer to revolt against German Nazism, as there never was a right moment for a British subject like Edmund Burke to revolt against the British Empire.
The same goes for Americans today with the American Empire. It has become inseparably a part of American identity, largely because American culture emerged from the British Empire with its moral imagination of White Man’s Burden and Manifest Destiny. It doesn’t matter that most Americans find it impossible to imagine their society as an empire. The relationship between collective imagination and objective reality tends to be tenuous at best, specifically in such a vast society that requires a vast meta-narrative.
Moral imagination is as much or more about what it denies than what it affirms. This includes how the moral imagination denies the claims of any competing moral imagination. As such, American conservatives deny the moral imagination of Native Americans and Hispanics whose traditional relationship to the land is far older than the ideological abstractions drawn and written on paper that American conservatives are mesmerized by. Most Mexicans are a mix of Spanish and Indigenous ancestry. With a long history of traveling ranch workers and migrant farm workers, the moral imagination of Latinos in North America is rooted in a profound living memory that can’t be erased by legal and ideological abstractions. Well into the 20th century, Mexicans continued to freely cross the ‘border’ as their ancestors had been doing for centuries or millennia before there was any border. This demonstrates the absolute polarized conflict and contradiction between conservatism and traditionalism. The conservative mind is enthralled by imagined abstractions such as lines drawn on maps, no matter what is asserted by traditional authority of local organic communities.
Consider an even more contentious issue. Abortion has become a defining feature of modern American conservatism. But abortion wasn’t a central concern, even for Christians, until quite recently. In fact, abortions used to be quite common. Not that long ago, any American woman could find a local doctor who would perform an abortion (my great great grandfather was a rural abortion doctor). Even when there were some laws about abortion, they were rarely enforced and everyone in communities knew doctors performed abortions. Abortion is a practice that has early origins in Anglo-American and English society. One can go back even further in reading about how common was not only abortion but infanticide and exposure in much of the ancient world. Sickly and unwanted babies were a potentially dangerous liability prior to modern medicine and the modern welfare state.
If conservative moral imagination is supposed to be about tradition, there is no ancient established social norm about abortion. So, what is the moral imagination about for an issue like abortion? Conservatives often say it is about the sanctity of life. But that is obviously bullshit. Countries that ban abortions have higher rates of abortions, albeit illegal, than do countries that don’t ban them. This is because liberal policies effectively decrease unwanted pregnancies and so eliminate much of the need for abortions. As often is the case, there is a severe disconnect between moral imagination and moral realities. In the end, moral imagination is about social control in enforcing a particular moral order. It’s not that babies shouldn’t die but that loose women who get pregnant should be punished as sinners for that is the divine decree within the moral imagination of contemporary conservatives — such a god-tyrant still haunting the imaginations for many on the political right even after their formal religious faith is lost or weakened.
This fundamentalist deity, as with all of fundamentalism, is a modern invention. As with conservatism in general, fundamentalism didn’t exist prior to modernity. The reactionary mind that provokes this re-imagining only comes into being once the traditional power and authority of the ancien regime was in decline, and that ancien regime experienced its fatal blow centuries before the modern American culture warriors decided to obsess over sexuality. Burke had more of an insight into this. He clearly demarcated moral imagination and natural law, not mistaking the one for the other, as he didn’t believe in natural law. What Burke admitted that many modern conservatives won’t is that moral imagination is built on human customs accruing over time, not on divine commandment decreed at the beginning of time. Burke was a devout Christian but at a time when fundamentalism hadn’t yet fully formed.
Moral imagination isn’t about the world itself, rather about our place in the world. As the world shifts, so does our moral imagination and the entire context for what we are able to imagine. It is a constant process of forgetting about what came before. Living memory is a flame in the darkness and imagination is the shadows on the cave wall. The most radical act of imagination may not be in imagining something entirely new but remembering something forgotten in order to see what was unseen, which happens when moral imagination turns back toward the source of light. It is only in emerging awareness that we can challenge the stories that possess our minds and then tell a different story that speaks more honestly about our shared origins. How we imagine the past determines how we imagine all else.
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Hume’s Theory of Moral Imagination
by Mark Collier
David Hume endorses three statements that are difficult to reconcile: (1) sympathy with those in distress is sufficient to produce compassion toward their plight, (2) adopting the moral point of view often requires us to sympathize with the pain and suffering of distant strangers, but (3) our care and concern is limited to those in our close circle. Hume manages to resolve this tension, however, by distinguishing two types of sympathy. We feel compassion toward those we perceive to be in distress because associative sympathy leads us to mirror their emotions, but our ability to enter into the afflictions of distant strangers involves cognitive sympathy and merely requires us to reflect on how we would feel in their shoes. This hybrid theory of sympathy receives a good deal of support from recent work on affective mirroring and cognitive pretense. Hume’s account should appeal to contemporary researchers, therefore, who are interested in the nature of moral imagination
Why We Think They Hate Us: Moral Imagination and the Possibility of Peace
by Robert Wright
It’s about “the moral imagination”—a term that has been used in various ways but, in my usage, refers to the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of other people, especially people in circumstances very different from our own. I argue that the moral imagination naturally tends to expand when we perceive our relations with other people as non-zero-sum and to contract when we perceive those relations as zero-sum. […]
In general, when a religious groups sees its relations with another religious group as non-zero-sum, it is more likely to evince tolerance of that group’s religion. When the perception is instead of a zero-sum dynamic, tolerance is less likely to ensue. (For an essay-length version of the argument, see this article, based on the book, that I wrote for Time magazine.) The moral imagination, I contend, is involved in this adaptive process. […]
Moral Imagination
The way hatred blocks comprehension is by cramping our “moral imagination,” our capacity to put ourselves in the shoes of another person. This cramping isn’t unnatural. Indeed, the tendency of the moral imagination to shrink in the presence of enemies is built into our brains by natural selection. It’s part of the machinery that leads us to grant tolerance and understanding to people we see in non-zero-sum terms and deny it to those we consign to the zero-sum category. We’re naturally pretty good at putting ourselves in the shoes of close relatives and good friends (people who tend to have non-zero-sum links with us), and naturally bad at putting ourselves in the shoes of rivals and enemies (where zero-sumness is more common). We can’t understand these people from the inside. […]
[T]he point is just that the ability to intimately comprehend someone’s motivation—to share their experience virtually, and know it from the inside—depends on a moral imagination that naturally contracts in the case of people we consider rivals or enemies.
In other words, we have trouble achieving comprehension without achieving sympathy. And this puts us in a fix because, as we’ve seen, some people it is in our profound interest to comprehend—terrorists, for example—are people we’re understandably reluctant to sympathize with. Enmity’s natural impediment to understanding is, in a way, public enemy number one.
It’s easy to explain the origins of this impediment in a conjectural way. Our brains evolved in a world of hunter-gatherer societies. In that world, morally charged disputes had Darwinian consequence. If you were in a bitter and public argument with a rival over who had wronged whom, the audience’s verdict could affect your social status and your access to resources, both of which could affect your chances of getting genes into the next generation. So the ability to argue persuasively that your rival had no valid grounds for grievance would have been favored by natural selection, as would tendencies abetting this ability—such as a tendency to believe that your rival had no valid grounds for grievance, a belief that could infuse your argument with conviction. And nothing would so threaten this belief as the ability to look at things from a rival’s point of view.
In dealing with allies, on the other hand, a more expansive moral imagination makes sense. Since their fortunes are tied to yours—since you’re in a non-zero-sum relationship—lending your support to their cause can be self-serving (and besides, it’s part of the implicit deal through which they support your cause). So on some occasions, at least, we’re pretty good at seeing the perspective of friends or relatives. It helps us argue for their interests—which, after all, overlap with our interests—and helps us bond with them by voicing sympathy for their plight.
In short, the moral imagination, like other parts of the human mind, is designed to steer us through the successful playing of games—to realize the gains of non-zero-sum games when those gains are to be had, and to get the better of the other party in zero-sum games. Indeed, the moral imagination is one of the main drivers of the pattern we’ve seen throughout the book: the tendency to find tolerance in one’s religion when the people in question are people you can do business with and to find intolerance or even belligerence when you perceive the relationship to be instead zero-sum.
And now we see one curious residue of this machinery: our “understanding” of the motivations of others tends to come with a prepackaged moral judgment. Either we understand their motivation internally, even intimately—relate to them, extend moral imagination to them, and judge their grievances leniently—or we understand their motivation externally and in terms that imply the illegitimacy of their grievances. Pure understanding, uncolored by judgment, is hard to come by.
It might be nice if we could sever this link between comprehension and judgment, if we could understand people’s behavior in more clinical terms—just see things from their point of view without attaching a verdict to their grievances. That might more closely approach the perspective of God and might also, to boot, allow us to better pursue our interests. We could coolly see when we’re in a non-zero-sum relationship with someone, coolly appraise their perspective, and coolly decide to make those changes in our own behavior that could realize non-zero-sumness. But those of us who fail to attain Buddhahood will spend much of our lives locked into a more human perspective: we extend moral imagination to people to the extent that we see win-win possibilities with them.
Given this fact, the least we can do is ask that the machinery work as designed: that when we are in a non-zero-sum relationship with someone we do extend moral imagination to them. That would better serve the interests of both parties and would steer us toward a truer understanding of the other—toward an understanding of what their world looks like from the inside.
Nietzsche on Truth, Lies, the Power and Peril of Metaphor, and How We Use Language to Reveal and Conceal Reality
Brain Pickings
Two centuries after Pascal, whom Nietzsche greatly admired, examined the difference between the intuitive and the logical mind, he ends by considering the tradeoffs between these two orientations of being — the rational and the intuitive — as mechanisms for inhabiting reality with minimal dissimilation and maximal truthfulness:
There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principle needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an “overjoyed hero,” counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty… The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption — in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch. He is then just as irrational in sorrow as he is in happiness: he cries aloud and will not be consoled. How differently the stoical man who learns from experience and governs himself by concepts is affected by the same misfortunes! This man, who at other times seeks nothing but sincerity, truth, freedom from deception, and protection against ensnaring surprise attacks, now executes a masterpiece of deception: he executes his masterpiece of deception in misfortune, as the other type of man executes his in times of happiness. He wears no quivering and changeable human face, but, as it were, a mask with dignified, symmetrical features. He does not cry; he does not even alter his voice. When a real storm cloud thunders above him, he wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps he walks from beneath it.
Blaise Pascal on the Intuitive vs. the Logical Mind and How We Come to Know Truth
Brain Pickings
Pascal argues that our failure to understand the principles of reality is due to both our impatience and a certain lack of moral imagination:
Those who are accustomed to judge by feeling do not understand the process of reasoning, for they would understand at first sight, and are not used to seek for principles. And others, on the contrary, who are accustomed to reason from principles, do not at all understand matters of feeling, seeking principles, and being unable to see at a glance.
He considers what mediates the relationship between our intellect and our intuition:
The understanding and the feelings are moulded by intercourse; the understanding and feelings are corrupted by intercourse. Thus good or bad society improves or corrupts them. It is, then, all-important to know how to choose in order to improve and not to corrupt them; and we cannot make this choice, if they be not already improved and not corrupted. Thus a circle is formed, and those are fortunate who escape it.
Blaise Pascal on Duplicity, Sin, and the Fall
by William Wood
pp. 137-139
The Imagination Bestows Value
The preceding analysis raises an important question. If the heart produces immediate moral sentiments, and if those sentiments are both true and compelling, then why does anyone ever act immorally? Why do we not always act in accordance with our sentiments? Pascal’s response to this question leads back to his famous critique of the imagination. Even though our moral sentiments have the felt sense of truth, according to Pascal, we are also strongly motivated to believe that our imaginative fantasies are true. If it is the heart that responds to the perceived value of moral goods, it is the imagination that bestows value on them in the first place. As a result, even though we do respond immediately to moral goods, we typically perceive those goods only after they have already been filtered through a haze of imaginative fantasy. Without repeating the discussion of the imagination in Chapter 2, recall that, according to Pascal, the imagination can “fix the price of things” and so invest moral goods with value. Moreover, “Imagination decides everything: it creates beauty, justice and happiness which is the world’s supreme good” (L44/S78).
Pascal’s account of the socially constructed imagination reveals that he is not just an ethical intuitionist but a social intuitionist. A social intuitionist recognizes that people are “intensely social creatures whose moral judgments are strongly shaped by the judgments of those around them.” While moral intuitions may be innate to everyone, social intuitionists claim that people acquire most of their particular moral intuitions through custom and habituation — that is, through their participation in thick cultural webs of moral practice. Once again, although social intuitionism currently enjoys pride of place among empirically oriented moral psychologists, there has been no recognition that Pascal is an early advocate of its key claims. Social intuitionists often look for inspiration from David Hume, or even Aristotle, without ever recognizing that Pascal is an even closer cousin to their own work. Moreover, Pascal is able to wed a social-intuitionist ethics to a full-blooded account of moral and axiological realism, something that contemporary social intuitionists often find themselves unwilling or unable to do.
Both the imagination and the heart are cognitive and affective faculties. The heart intuitively grasps moral and spiritual goods, and perceives moral beauty (L308/S339). Yet it is also an affective faculty associated with loving and desiring. Like the heart, the imagination also unites various cognitive and affective functions into a single faculty. In its cognitive aspect, the imagination allows us to form mental representations. These representations include theeveryday images by which we inwardly grasp the things that we perceive with our external senses. In its affective dimension, the imagination bestows value on goods. Although Pascal does not directly speculate about how the heart and the imagination would work if human beings had not fallen, it seems clear that the heart should perceive moral goods accurately, leading us to love and desire them according to their true value. Similarly, the imagination should also correspond to the world as it is, and supply us with accurate mental representations. In both cases, there should be no conflict between what is true and what we find beautiful. A moral agent that is not fallen would accurately perceive the beauty of spiritual goods and would love them as a result.
Instead, after the Fall, the imagination has become a “proud power” that oversteps its bounds and creates moral value independently, setting “the same mark on true and false alike” (L44/S78), and the heart has become “hollow and foul” (L139/S171). The sinner rejects the sentiments of the heart — the seat of conscience — and instead acts on the basis of the false, self-serving fantasies of the imagination.
Although Pascal usually focuses on the way we excessively magnify the value of our own selves, any object may be imaginatively invested with more value than it can bear: one may build up a fantasy about a commodity (a new car, for example), a specific self-understanding (of oneself as being just the kind of dashing person who would drive such a car), or some other pursued goal (making enough money to buy the car). The possibilities are endless. In each case, however, the perceived value of the object sought is a function of how it is imaginatively construed.
Although Pascal recognizes that the imagination is central to the moral life, his thought challenges the sometimes facile claims of contemporary narrative ethicists and those who would look to the “narrative imagination” for moral renewal. Pascal reminds us that the imagination is not just the locus of individual creative genius and speculative possibility. It is also a socially constructed repository for the (often immoral) dispositions and values of the wider world. Far from being the initial launching pad for moral critique, the imagination is often itself the faculty most in need of such critique. Furthermore, Pascal would remind us that reorienting the moral imagination is no simple matter. Certainly it is not just a matter of reading the right novels or passages from scripture, imaginatively identifying with the right moral exemplars, or trying to dream up new possibilities for moral community. Because the imagination is socially constructed, reorienting the imagination requires something like a massive program of counter-habituation, comparable to becoming a native member of a wholly new society. In short, reorienting the imagination would require something that looks quite a lot like an ongoing program of religious conversion. Pascal therefore sounds an important note of caution about the moral possibilities of imagination.
* * *
Inconsistency of Burkean Conservatism
Poised on a Knife Edge
The Haunted Moral Imagination
A Phantom of the Mind
The Fantasy of Creative Destruction
Violent Fantasy of Reactionary Intellectuals
Freedom From Want, Freedom to Imagine
Orderliness and Animals
On Rodents and Conservatives
Imagination: Moral, Dark, and Radical
The Monstrous, the Impure, & the Imaginal
Lock Without a Key
On Truth and Bullshit
Sincere Bullshit
Racism, Proto-Racism, and Social Constructs
Race & Racism: Reality & Imagination, Fear & Hope
Racial Reality Tunnel
Race Is Not Real, Except In Our Minds
Race Realism and Symbolic Conflation
Symbolic Conflation & Empathic Imagination
Liberal-mindedness, Empathetic Imagination, and Capitalist Realism
Rationalizing the Rat Race, Imagining the Rat Park
Delirium of Hyper-Individualism
The Group Conformity of Hyper-Individualism
Ideological Realism & Scarcity of Imagination
Foundations and Frameworks
The Iron Lady: The View of a Bleeding Heart
A Conflict of the Conservative Vision
Avatar: Imagination & Culture
Our Shared Imagination
The Way of Radical Imagination
Imagination, a Force to Be Reckoned With
Vision and Transformation
The Master’s Tools Are Those Closest At Hand
Imagined Worlds, Radical Visions
A Neverending Revolution of the Mind
The World that Inhabits Our Mind
Beyond Our Present Knowledge
Revolution and Apocalypse
To Imagine and Understand
Fantasyland, An American Tradition
Memetic Narratives of War and Paranoia
Cold War Ideology and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
Of Dreamers and Sleepwalkers
The Living Apocalypse, A Lived Reality Tunnel
The Elephant That Wasn’t There
Stories: Personal & Collective
The Stories We Tell
The Stories We Know
A Compelling Story
A Storyteller’s Experienced Meaning
A Story of Walking Away
Conscious Dreaming, Conscious Self
Dark Matter of the Mind
Marmalade 
This is a topic that has been on my mind for many years. I’ve touched upon it a few times before. But I always meant to write a more extensive post like this. I finally got around to it and it took me a couple of days.
There is one thing I left out. The post was already long enough. I briefly mentioned Jordan Peterson. In thinking about moral imagination again, what popped into my mind was a recent article about Peterson. One of things that Peterson gets accused of is lacking a sociological imagination.
I find the argument compelling. It fits my own sense of dissatisfaction with Peterson’s views. Assuming there is this lack, it would mean that his moral imagination is to that degree stunted and crippled. And this would explain why he often doesn’t seem to comprehend what his critics are going on about whenever social concerns are raised.
From my own perspective, I’d put this into the context of the radical imagination. Actually, the radical is component or at least a potential in all imaginative capacity. This is how even conservatives, by way of the reactionary mind, end up enacting radical visions that remake the world.
The sociological imagination simply brings the radical imagination into consciousness, instead of projecting radicalism onto opponents in order to scapegoat them. So maybe only something like the sociological imagination could possibly bridge the divide in mind between moral imagination and radical imagination, a divide itself that is created through imagination and hence can only be unmade through imagination.
Here is the link to the article and following it the relevant section:
View at Medium.com
Rowdy Rowson vs. Prickly Peterson
Out of the entire table above, the most I have seen Peterson pressed and the closest anyone has come to respectfully challenging Peterson’s blanket rejection of sociology is by Jonathan Rowson, who personally thanked me for drawing some inspiration from my critique. Even then, in what was supposed to be a conversation, Peterson treated it like yet another hostile interview, where the ideas of the questioner could be casually dismissed or countered. The window of opportunity came and went like a soap bubble on a windy day.
One particular phrase Rowson used was a “sociological imagination,” asking Peterson to respond to his critics (like me) who say that he doesn’t have one. The Sociological Imagination is one of the most groundbreaking foundational sociology books that Peterson has never read, so naturally its a very apt critique (not an insult) to say that he lacks that certain research methodology. I could be wrong, but I don’t see how anyone can behold that book and Peterson’s anti-sociological sentiments at the same time.
Sadly, Peterson missed the question twice in a row.
I was thinking that we might learn more about moral imagination from the study of societies that would never think in terms of moral imagination. Burke claimed to want to avoid abstractions and yet he turned moral imagination into an abstract philosophy. That maybe was inevitable considering he was born into a society that had lost its own thriving tradition of moral imagination. This meant that Burke was performing an autopsy.
Paine, instead, saw a moral imagination on life support, sickly but maybe could still be healed and revived. The difference could be what I mentioned in the post. Paine saw a viable living tradition of moral imagination among the nearby native tribes. Many of the colonists were refugees of the decimation and desecration of the British and European moral imagination. Some hoped to save a sense of community that was quickly disappearing in their post-feudal homelands. Like Paine, they interacted with the natives and it was a reminder of what needed to be saved.
The larger context to my thought includes Julian Jaynes, of course. I do wonder what it means for people to be inseparable parts of living organic communities. Even in the Roman Empire, the remnants of the former lifestyle persisted. In a post about Galen, I noted how at least still in the early empire Romans went about their lives as groups and not individuals: eating together, going to the bathroom together, working together, going to the doctor together, etc. Even religion and politics hadn’t yet become entirely distinct categories and were more enmeshed in daily life.
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2016/03/03/galen-and-the-roman-empire/
In that context, what comes to mind most specifically is what John Beebe says about integrity, that we only seek it once it is already lost. A society with fully functioning integrity doesn’t even require a word for the notion for it would permanently be in the background. From another post, I connected this to Lynn Kelley’s writing on indigenous mnemonic practices, most specifically the Australian Aborigines. Such traditional societies would have lifestyles that were integral in all ways, including mythologies embedded in the landscape and their way of being in the world.
That is a moral imagination that has been lost to modernity. Elements of that kind society survived into feudalism but for the most people not since then. This is not included in Burke’s abstract philosophizing in reaction to Enlightenment thought and the revolutionary era.
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2017/05/21/first-came-the-temple-then-the-city/
“That is how authority operated long ago, by what an individual embodied and represented. Both Jaynes and Kelly see ancient authority as having originally been less hierarchical or else based on different forms of power, such as voices and knowledge. What makes knowledge into power isn’t just that it is information controlled by the few but because it is knowledge given form and voice through the force of personal presence. Ancient knowledge systems were visceral, not abstract, although incipient forms of abstraction had emerged, such as how physical mnemonics once learned could be accessed in the mind without the external triggers.
“In these societies, the individual is so fully enmeshed within the world that the world is exists within the individual. These aren’t just systems of memory and knowledge. They are entire lived and embodied worldviews. The person is inseparble from the place. Everything would be integrated in such a community: tradition, knowledge, language, culture, ritual, religion, worldview, environment, etc. […]
“There is often the assumption that people in other societies are basically like us with the differences being mostly superficial. So, for example, behaviors and motivations are interpreted according to modern Western experience. But we know from research, that WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) subjects are among the least representative populations in the world, which is problematic as they are the most commonly used in scientific studies.
“Related to this is when Lynne Kelly discusses the power held by those who control knowledge in indigenous societies, It occurs to me that this is very much a WEIRD way of understanding human nature. That is projecting an intention onto others that she cannot possibly know. She is arguing, so it seems, that they lack sincerity in performing their ritual. But maybe sincerity and insincerity is not a standard framework for the oral cultures of indigenous tribes.
“John Beebe defines sincerity as the aspiration toward integrity, by which he means that you can only aspire toward what you lack. In that case, sincerity and hence insincerity can only exist among those who have lost the ancient inheritance of an integrated worldview (i.e., integrity). This would make sense, if indigenous mnemonics actually is an inseparable structure to a cultural experience of reality, rather than being a mere memory technique. That is what the Australian Aborigines appear to be claiming when they state that they sing the world into existence.
“This is not to romanticize tribal people, but it is a serious consideration of the possibility that we modern Westerners would not recognize full integrity if we saw it. If anything, this is to counter the romanticized ideal of integrity that sincerity evokes, as differentiated from the lived experience of integrity. A number of thinkers have seen an opposition between cultures of ritual and cultures of sincerity, sometimes used to contrast Catholicism and Protestantism but maybe it goes much deeper when considering societies where ritual is entirely dominant.”
Here is why I was thinking of Burke’s writing on moral imagination as an autopsy. He was nostalgically romanticizing the ancien regime. But by the time Burke was born, the ancien regime had been collapsing and retreating for centuries.
The privatization and enclosure of the commons and the destruction of the villages was a stake in the heart of feudalism, as capitalism and corporatism became not only the new economic system but began to invade every aspect of society and governance. The centralized monarchy that had developed in late feudalism was also destroying the local communities of feudalism as it required the aristocracy to become more distant to the communities they once were connected to, spending their time instead in the distant royal court.
It stands out that the plight of peasants and the poor never caught Burke’s moral imagination. Nor did the destruction of the actual ancien regime that Burke apparently was unaware of, maybe because of a lack of personal experience and historical knowledge. But I’m not sure that is an excuse. The last of the commons were being eliminated during Burke’s lifetime. This may have been easily ignored by Burke because he was of the upper classes. Unlike Paine, Burke didn’t see the waves of landless peasants heading into cities like London looking for work, homes, and food but finding little.
This demonstrates the falsity, blindness, and impotence of Burke’s moral imagination. He had some basic sense of the purpose of a moral imagination. Even so, he couldn’t make the connection of moral imagination to his own society in terms of the lives and communities of actual people. In trying to fight Enlightenment abstractions, he got loss in counter-Enlightenment abstractions.
What he didn’t understand was that it wasn’t abstractions per se destroying the ancien regime, as that destruction began before the Enlightenment began. The enclosure movement, for example, began around the 1300s and from there worsened over time. It was increased profitability of sheep herding, not the power of abstract ideals, that drove that change.
If anything, the destruction that was weakening the ancien regime made the Enlightenment possible and made revolution inevitable. It was only after concrete agrarian communities and lifestyles went missing for so many that abstractions became more necessary during mass urbanization and colonization. This has been measured scientifically for, as populations become urbanized, their fluid intelligence increases drastically and fluid intelligence is largely about abstract thinking.
There was one element of feudalism that has long fascinated me. It is the ancient ritual of beating the bounds which originated in early Roman society but in England got mixed up with local customs and was incorporated into Catholicism, surviving to some extent in the Church of England. Beating the bounds seems quite similar to some of the practices among indigenous societies, as described by Lynne Kelly. Originally, beating the bounds was probably a mnemonic device and it still is used that way, although the original meanings and mythology are forgotten.
I was listening again to some of the audio version of Kelly’s second book on the traditional practices of mnemonics. In the section I was listening to, she talked about how societies would bury, topple, or destroy their ritual sites. Her conjecture, based on some known records, is that the mnemonic systems were no longer practiced sometimes because of the death (plague, genocide, etc) of the ritual practitioners who possessed the knowledge. I’d add that other things might have disturbed the social order causing the bicameral voices to stop speaking. Either way, the living moral imagination became a corpse and so the once sacred sites became meaningless and powerless.
When moral imagination dies, an entire way of life dies and at best all that remains is an empty shell. A community might still continue in some form but it has loss something core to its existence. When that happens, a society can become self-destructive, not just to its own former sacred sites but to all other aspects of their society, culture, and tradition.
This could lead as well to their becoming destructive to others as well, such as the development of colonial imperialism that destroys other societies in turn. It becomes a disease of the moral imagination when all that people can imagine is destruction. With the decline of feudalism and prior to the Enlightenment age, there was first the Protestant Reformation with the religious wars and apocalyptic cults that followed.
Burke was writing in the aftermath of this destruction, centuries after it had begun.
I should add a clarification. It really doesn’t matter how one labels Burke.
Following Russel Kirk’s example, many American conservatives have claimed Burke. Then again, there has been a history of liberals claiming him as well, considering he was a liberal Whig for his entire political career, was a lifelong progressive reformer, and was for revolution before he was against it.
Much of my suspicion toward Burke is equally applicable toward the good liberals of the liberal class. Honestly, it doesn’t make any more sense when conservatives try to claim Burke than when libertarians try to claim Paine (or Thoreau).
We all live in the modern age. And so the reactionary potential exists within all of us, as does the radical. The reactionary, I’d argue, is the radical unacknowledged (repressed and projected). In modernity, our only two choices are to be consciously radical or unconsciously radical. Most Americans, including most liberals, tend toward the latter but not everyone to the same degree.
So the failed modern imagination can’t be blamed solely on the political right. It’s similar to how the problems of modernity can’t be blamed solely on the Enlightenment. These issues are pervasively systemic and the forces behind them go far back in history.
First for some reason your posts haven’t been showing up in my inbox so I’m just catching up on them. Second: coincidentally I just read a review by Hitchens on a book about Burke and of course it mentioned Paine and the plumage/dead bird quote. Third: fantastic article! Well done! I came to Kirk via his relationship with Eliot – speaking of reactionary thinkers. I’m going to reread your post – fascinating piece. Thanks!
I just now retrieved this comment that WordPress threw in the trash. It’s amusing that in this comment you mention another WordPress failure. I had to look in the WordPress trash to find out that you weren’t getting post notifications from WordPress. I think WordPress needs to fix a few things.
There are probably more books about Burke than about Paine. But even in books about Burke (and reviews of them), it is far from unusual for Paine to get discussed. And the plumage/dead bird quote typically comes up, if nothing else is discussed about Paine. That one quote probably has been seen by more people than any quote by Burke. In general, Paine is quoted regularly, even as he is not as well remembered.
I’m glad you liked the post. I enjoyed writing it. There is something tricksy about moral imagination. It seems like such a simple thing, but it involves some complexity and confusion when you dig down into it. My take on it is more or less unique. Most people who bother to take an interest in moral imagination simply go by Burke’s explanation or Kirk’s interpretation. Few bother to consider what it means on a broader and deeper level, beyond the narrow confines of the modern reactionary mind.
WordPress does indeed have some issues and I wish they would fix them as i generally like the platform and have found it easy to use.
Your comments are interesting.
I’m not as up on Burke as I’d like. I come around to him from time because he’s one of those people who sooner or later comes up and also because so many other roads lead back to that era.
Paine i think tends to get avoided because he was a genuine radical and the slow but steady anti-radical side of the American revolution has won out rhetorically.
Moral imagination is a fascinating topic. The pre-modern is as well and the ways in which it lingered.
It still lingers or is periodically resurgent.
Kirk, as I mentioned I know of slightly because of his friendship with T.S. Eliot and if one drills into the American conservative psyche (sic!) eventually Kirk comes up.
More to follow!
The main filter for my view of Burke and moral imagination would be Corey Robin. But I’ve broadened the frame a bit. I also take a slightly more psychological/sociological perspective. Robin is a political historian and so focuses more on the development of ideas and ideologies.
I take that as a jumping off point to explore what it means to be human in how our social nature took the form it did in the modern West. In other posts, I’d explore more of the pre-modern aspect. This post is about that interesting period where the pre-modern was disappearing and being forgotten.
Burke could only discuss moral imagination in explicit terms because some of its traditional power had faded. The full glory of moral imagination can only exist when it can’t be spoken of directly or at least it doesn’t occur to anyone to try do so. As a modern thinker, Burke turned moral imagination into yet another abstract ideological construct. His metaphors such as a ‘wardrobe’ were overly self-conscious.
The ancient moral imagination, I argue, would have been emblazoned upon the world.
To continue: Your point about the moral imagination being something that can’t be discussed directly is quite interesting. It resonates for several reasons but of particular interest is that I’ve recently been writing and considering the triumph of the logical view vs the intuitive in how historical narratives are constructed. The logoical view being that the world is required to make sense – a view I find illogical;-)
Also, I just took a look at Kirk again and remembered why he irritates me. In his essay on Burke and the Moral imagination he mentions Eliot and his (in)famous essay, After Strange Gods.
This was a collection of Eliot’s essays delivered at U. Virginia in which he said among other things that the safety of scoiety depended upon locking up/segragating Jews and Eliot could not ever really understand why some people found that problematic let alone offensive.
But the thing about Kirk in this instance is that he mentions the essays and doesn’t mention that Eliot was a race-baiting fascist.
That in turn put me in mind of a Hitchens essay in which he mentions ebing asked by the usually irritating Chris Mathews why people think conservatives are dumb.
I of course think: well, if you go around carrying pictures of Russel Kirk…
Anyhow: Burke is interesting and I’ll at some point dive back into him. I read a long peice years ago by a well known Irish pol who defended Burke’s anti-revolutionary fervor but that’s years ago and all I remember is being anoyed by both of them.
The vanishing of the pre-modern puts me in mind of our friend Jaynes. I have the sense that there’s a biological/drug use connection to the Trial of Socrates and that it was a moment when the contest between the pre-modern and modern (bicameral and pre bicameral) mind were at war with each other. Socrates was accused of worshiping the wrong/unoffcial gods – he heard voices that weren’t the right voices;-) And I suspect he was a vestigae of the Jaynes bicameral man and that the trial was a moment where the transformation from pre to modern was accute.
More later.
Imagination being powerful to the degree it is not seen or spoken as imagination is not exactly an original notion. It’s basically what is behind ideological realism and social constructivism. But maybe with a Jaynesian influence, I see a lot more going on than just that.
It is easy to underestimate what imagination is like when it is taken for reality, even more when it is an entire reality tunnel that fully encompasses a civilizational order. We are in the difficult position of only being able to understand imagination that captures other people’s minds and societies, not our own. So, we at best talk around it and maybe fool ourselves into thinking we understand. That is what interests me, how we fool ourselves. Why is it our sense of ‘reality’ feels so real? And yet why are the most real issues those that we don’t look at or that we can’t see even when do look at them? Such is where my own speculations come in about symbolic conflation. We humans have a hard time of saying what we mean, at least when the stakes are high.
You say, “But the thing about Kirk in this instance is that he mentions the essays and doesn’t mention that Eliot was a race-baiting fascist.” That’s the point. So much of the moral imagination is about what isn’t said. It’s a messy and sometimes ugly thing that is best not to scrutinize too closely, an underlying message of Burke’s ideology. Moral imagination is a blinder to be worn. The difference for conservatives is that they are highly sensitive to this because, unlike ancient societies, it is much more challenging in modern societies to keep the blinder from slipping.
I’m not sure what value there is to studying Burke without some specific purpose in mind. A couple of things are of interest about him. He is representative of his place and time during a pivotal moment of a highly influential culture. The other thing is that, in coming at the beginning of conservatism, he was in a position to speak to its more fundamental nature. There can be more raw honesty to the early reactionaries, as their chameleon-like behavior wasn’t yet fully developed.
I’ll throw out something about imagination. To simplify things, I’m inclined to argue that all imagination is fundamentally the same: moral imagination, sociological imagination, radical imagination, mythological imagination, etc. It’s all pointing to the same function within the human psyche. We only speak of specific forms of imagination because we’ve abstracted imagination from lived experience and perception. The main question then is what exactly is imagination, which is the same as asking what is humanity.
Someone like Jaynes would likely be more useful in exploring this, as he gets to the nitty gritty of how consciousness operates. Imagination is very much about consciousness and also about what makes consciousness, in the Jaynesian sense, possible. We imagine our identities into existence.
“We imagine our identities into existence.”
Well that does sum up quite lot of Modernism and PostModernism.
In the Alexandria Quartet Durrell has one character say of another (a novelist” that (paraphrasing) a step in either direction and reality/identity changes.”
How shall we distinguish between imagination and reality? I understand that an idea/an imagined thing is not real in the sence of say an object and yet thought is real…that’s a paradox of some sort and probab;ly I’m not being clear or misunderstand your point? But what comes to mind is the famopus Yeats line: how shall we know the dancer from the dance…
As to how humans avoid things: well, you’re quite right they avoid things all the time and often in the most Jaynesian way – where one feels as if you’re witnessing a pre-bicameral mind at work. Freud of course comes in handy here with repressed cases leading to things like “hysterical paralysis” and so on. As you correctly point out:
“We humans have a hard time of saying what we mean, at least when the stakes are high.”
“…conservatives…highly sencetive…”
Absolutely true. So much avoidence and a tendecny to state only one fact when two or more are true. Thus context is twisted and then they stick the landing and denounce x and support y but sound both rediculous and often crazy though it’s hardly a habit confined to conservatives;-)
Which of course loops right back to your point that it is a human (all too human) trait.
I take your point about Burke and having a purpose in mind but (speaking of imagination) I find that ideas for what to write next or for fiction that reading x y or z with no other “purpose” in mind then to be provoked by a chain of words/rythym is sufficient.
And thinkling of all of this I remembered the Peter Gabriel line: Could not trust the information just had to trust my imagination:-)
“All imagination is the same.’
Could not agree more.
I suspect the differentiations are down to several factors but the demands of capitalism seem especially on point. Everything becomes part of x or y catagory as a means towards marketing and commodification.
Whitman: What I assume you shall assume as well for every atom belonging to me belongs as well to you.
What a radical anti-industrial/anti-capitalist idea now “catorgorized” as “mystical” so as to box it in and control it.
Or Rimbaud: I is another
Such ideas pop up with consistency among writers (and “writer” as opposed to say, shaman) is a recent invention – again having much in common with the advent of the industrial age.
I is another/we imagine our identities into existence
What a wonderfully subversive notion;-)
I could see imagining identities into existence as resonating with some modernism and post-modernism. But I didn’t specifically have that in mind. More in the line with my thoughts, what I was pointing toward was the Songlines where the Australian Aborigines speak of singing the world into existence.
No, I don’t think that ‘reality’, as far as we know and experience it, can ever be separated from imagination. The dancer is the dance, for there is nowhere else to locate the dance except in the dancer dancing. It’s like those who wish to turn consciousness into a soul, a god in the gaps, or some elusive essence. As far as I can tell, consciousness is what it is conscious of.
“I is another.” Yep. That is why it is ‘we’ that imagine identity into existence. Identity, ideology, worldview, etc — it is all social as humans can’t be otherwise. I’m fond of the notion that we develop a theory of mind for others before we do so for ourselves. The ‘I’ in a direct fashion is very much another, comes from the ‘other’. And then we slip the mask on.
“I is another/we imagine our identities into existence.” That is indeed subversive. It’s also fascinating. One of my favorite words is ‘fascinating’. The world is a strange place. And the strangeness is far from being limited to the reactionary tricksiness of the conservative moral imagination.
I’m just stopping by again to this old conversation. Let me throw in another comment about Jaynes. One might compare religion to the bicameral mind, as the former only arises to the extent that the latter has become repressed.
During the rule of bicameral societies in the Bronze Age, there were no words for religion because there was no religion as such. The moral imagination was so pervasive and immersive that it couldn’t be separated out as a distinct category. There was no church, in the way there was no government — just the social order of voice-hearing itself.
One only needs religion when the voices have gone silent for religion is based on texts (i.e., dead word) where are written down the words of the last generations to hear the voices of the gods, spirits, and ancestors. Religion is not a thing but an absence.
The living moral imagination is a living voice of authorization that allows no space of thought between hearing and listening, between experiencing and action. This is why religion is so central to the reactionary mind of modern conservatism; and this is why conservatives turn moral imagination into yet another political tool.
Conservatives seek to control moral imagination for the very reason they fear the radicalism inherent to it. They place the living God in a box like a lamb chained up in an enclosure to make tender veal. The weak constitution of the modern mind can no longer handle the sharp claws and tough hide of the psyche’s wild game.