by Matthew Chominski

As I slowly searched — since that’s how it seems to work for me — for a topic to write about in this post, I mentally meandered toward the moral imagination. This was no doubt elicited by my present reading of Eliot and His Age: T.S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century, by Russell Kirk.

In turn, I couldn’t help but be surprised by Mattias Caro’s recent post which explored the same concept and reality. The surprise and the post were not unwelcome, as the moral imagination is greatly deserving of attention — something there is a dearth of in contemporary conversation. This dearth has its clear effects, though the very absence of the moral imagination in so many corners leads to an inability to assess, recognize, and respond to our desertion of it, and this desertion’s disastrous depths.

Before I lay out a little more about the moral imagination, though, some attention to its name might defuse the initial reticence felt by some readers.  For, if we think about the two words that make up the name, we see two words often denigrated in a not dissimilar way to the title they make up: moral and imagination.

I assume that to many the word “moral” comes off with both an antiquated and eccentric air. And “imagination,” well, come now, that’s rather childish isn’t it? But making mistakes about meaning allows us to miss quite a bit of reality — how things really are, that is in the sense of permanent things.

The term “moral imagination” is found in the words of Edmund Burke: “By the ‘moral imagination,’ Kirk says, ‘Burke meant the power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and events of the moment’” (Eliot and His Age, xx).

As Benjamin Lockerd describes in the Introduction to the already mentioned book, this moral imagination is to be contrasted with “what Irving Babbitt called (in reference to Rousseau) the ‘idyllic imagination,’ which ignores the tragic experience of the past and concocts visions of human perfection to be brought about by rational ideological programs” (ibid., xx-xxi).

An understanding of, and appreciation for  the moral imagination will usher us past the technocratic order about us, beyond the politico-economic “experts,” to a deeper reverence for the task of the author of fiction, and the poet. As “Kirk implies…the imagination of a great writer sees and describes the truths of nature and of human nature, whereas liberal political ideology tends to ignore those hard truths” (ibid., xxiii). (The just mentioned “liberal political ideology” finds adherents of various stripes in both major political parties).

As the moral imagination is no system ideological in nature, it doesn’t lend itself to quick, knee-jerk reactions of the shallow, stunted sort. It can, however, enable us to have a more human understanding of the world about us, while lending us a richer language and imagery that, in turn, can be employed to untangle the ever-present problems before us.

[As a closing note, I highly recommended encountering the moral imagination through the work of Russell Kirk.]