Bromwich - Moral Imagination : essays

MORAL IMAGINATION

MORAL

IMAGINATION

DAVID
BROMWICH

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright 2014 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press,
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In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bromwich, David, 1951

[Essays. Selections]

Moral Imagination : essays / David Bromwich.

pages cm

Summary: Spanning many historical and literary contexts, Moral Imagination brings together a dozen recent essays by one of Americas premier cultural critics. David Bromwich explores the importance of imagination and sympathy to suggest how these faculties may illuminate the motives of human action and the reality of justice. These wide-ranging essays address thinkers and topics from Gandhi and Martin Luther King on nonviolent resistance, to the dangers of identity politics, to the psychology of the heroes of classic American literature. Bromwich demonstrates that moral imagination allows us to judge the right and wrong of actions apart from any benefit to ourselves, and he argues that this ability is an innate individual strength, rather than a socially conditioned habit. Political topics addressed here include Edmund Burke and Richard Prices efforts to define patriotism in the first year of the French Revolution, Abraham Lincolns principled work of persuasion against slavery in the 1850s, the erosion of privacy in America under the influence of social media, and the use of euphemism to shade and anesthetize reactions to the global war on terror. Throughout, Bromwich considers the relationship between language and power, and the insights language may offer into the corruptions of power. Moral Imagination captures the singular voice of one of the most forceful thinkers working in America today Provided by publisher.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-691-16141-9 (hardback : acid-free paper)

I. Title. PS3552.R637A6 2014

813.54dc23 2013038596

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in
Baskerville 10 Pro and Bodoni At Home

Printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To Jeffrey Stout

Thabuse of greatness is when it disjoins Remorse from power.

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

CONTENTS

PREFACE

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT WORKS OF THE MIND OF VARIOUS sorts, and the people who wrote or spoke them. The common subject of the essays is the relationship between power and conscience. A politician like Lincoln or a political writer like Burke, as much as the author of a novel or a poem, is engaged in acts of imagination for good or ill. At the same time, he is answerable to the canons of accuracy that prevail in the world of judgment between person and person. These writers and several others whom I deal with recognize that the will of the powerful can induce a blindness to the nature of their actions which is one of the mysteries of human life. All of the essays in this book are concerned with that mystery, too.

Much of my subject matter was dictated by the end of the Cold War. I have been troubled by the thought that America, in these years, was bypassing an opportunity to resume a connection with our most generous ideals: respect for the dignity of the person, and a commitment to improve the justice of a society that looks to its own welfare and liberty. The United States has at times sought to be exemplary. We have unfortunately become evangelical; and part of the reason is the wish to stand unopposed at the center of the world. This ambition is conventional, not particularly democratic, and in no way imaginative. It is driven by energetic fantasies.

I write to defend the human faculty which several of the writers I most admireWordsworth, Ruskin, Gandhi, Virginia Woolf, and Martin Luther King, among othershave made us think of as moral imagination. This is the power that compels us to grant the highest possible reality and the largest conceivable claim to a thought, action, or person that is not our own, and not close to us in any obvious way. The force of the idea of moral imagination is to deny that we can ever know ourselves sufficiently to settle on a named identity that prescribes our conduct or affiliations. Moral imagination therefore seems to me inseparable from the freedom that is possible in society.

Cultural identity, on the other handthe subject of the second essay herepresumes and works to reinforce a social fixity that obstructs imagination. Accordingly, I would rank it among the fictions that Francis Bacon described as idols. He divided them in his New Organon into four kinds: Idols of the Tribe, Idols of the Cave, Idols of the Market Place, and Idols of the Theater. Idols of the tribe are the offspring of the human love of order: the conceit that man is the measure of all things and confidence that the world is more orderly than it actually is. Idols of the cave, market place, and theater are the products of distortions of mind that spring from personal disposition or preoccupation; from vacuous belief induced by the vulgar and fanciful misuse of words to convey a counterfeit sense; and from systems of religion and metaphysical philosophy, abetted by false science. It will be seen that in Bacons view, the idols of the tribe command all the rest; and I concentrate on the idols of the tribe in their contemporary forms. In our time, when the measure of man is subdivided into ethnic, racial, or national man, idols of the race, nation, and ethnic group enjoy a special authority. Everyone, it is said, needs to belong to a tribe of some sort. I give reasons to doubt the truth of this as a premise of sociology, or as an insight into psychology.

The Meaning of Patriotism in 1789 offers a pertinent comment on a related theme: the recent acceptance of the inevitability of nationalist loyalties. At the moment that marked the launching of the highest hope for individual rights and democracy, an argument for sympathy without regard to nation or person, and an argument for loyalty to a significant group, were debated by Richard Price and Edmund Burke at a memorable depth on both sides. Price and Burke asked whether loyalty to one nation could matter as it once had, now that democratic rights appeared on the verge of obtaining general assent. A merely national loyaltywhich Burke defended more subtly than is often realized, and which Price ranked below the impartial love of libertywas not, in 1789, lightly supposed to deserve the assent of free minds.

The next three essays concern some particulars of American morale that emerged forcibly in the 1850s. Lincoln and Whitman are the heroes of this part: I write about them at length because I believe that the debates of the 1850s in America, like those of the 1790s in Britain, by force of historical circumstance and the accidents of genius produced discoveries of lasting value concerning the relations of men and women in society. The accurate imaginings of Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, and many others still run ahead of our own conventions of thought; but many Americans feel a peculiar closeness to Lincoln and Whitman. I think this order of affection is justified, and, beginning with Lincoln and Whitman as Representative Americans, the essays joined in this section offer a provisional attempt to say why.

Lincolns Constitutional Necessity looks at his political thought in the context of an ideal of individual freedom and a principled belief in equalityideals to which Lincoln held firmly and which he did much to interpret definitively for his time and our own. The essay also tries to account for the potency of a leader at a moment of choice, and for Lincolns apparent belief in historical necessity as an impersonal force. Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Ambition puts to the test of practical criticism my belief that the versions of imagination employed in politics and in literature are not separable. It shows Lincoln exemplifying in words and action, whether consciously or not, a self-knowledge and a wariness that were a resource available to him from Shakespeares tragedies.