November 26, 2021
On November 11, David Brooks, Opinion Columnist for the New York Times, published a column titled “The Awesome Importance of Imagination.” I am happy to compare notes on my primary subject with Brooks, whom I respect and whose column I have read for years—which is not to say that I always agree with him. He defines himself as a conservative, and I define myself as a progressive, but we are both moderate in our positions, so I thought it was worth exploring where we might find common ground. Mind you, finding common ground is a moderate’s instinct, and not one always respected by the more polarized members of both right and left. Brooks’s moderate stance is regularly lambasted from both sides: he is too conservative for some progressives and liberals, too liberal for some conservatives. Moderation has its limits: it can easily fall into wishy-washy “can’t we all just be nice” kind of evasion, and Brooks perhaps does not entirely avoid that in the present column. But I do not want to be condescending: it is informed, and written with his usual warmth and humanity, and that counts for something in this Age of Intransigence.
Conservatism hardly exists as a philosophy any longer: in the United States at present the word refers either to the quite unphilosophical interests of the ultra-rich or to a far-right radicalism that is anything but conservative. But since Brooks approaches conservatism intellectually, we may follow suit and define traditional conservatism roughly as the belief that society is presently in possession of an ideal system of values, manifested in its political, cultural, and religious institutions. These values and institutions are threatened, and society must struggle to “conserve” them. Conserve them against what? Against an uneducated, unsocialized anarchism, an unruly chaos of impulses thrusting up from below. Such impulses are typically projected socially upon the lower orders, but the resemblance to the later Freudian psychological system is readily apparent. A ruling elite, knowing and embodying the proper values, are in the top-dog position of the superego. The lower class, especially the part of it that is not white, not native born, not “respectable,” are a collective, always potentially rampaging id.
In modern times, which means roughly since the 18th century, conservatism has sometimes projected its ideal as a nostalgia for a vanished or vanishing aristocracy and an absolutist, infallible church, generally the Roman Catholic. Traditional conservatism allows that both law and doctrine have undergone change through the centuries, but the process was not so much an evolution as an unfolding of what was already latent in the tradition. At any rate, the process is now finished, and the structures perfected: we have all the answers. Even today it is possible to encounter what might be called summa envy, the idealization of a Catholic Church whose brilliant theologians over two thousand years have articulated a system that has definitive, intellectually-rigorous answers for all possible questions—as opposed to the ragtag, DIY quality of Protestantism.
Similarly, law and the state have broadened down the years from precedent to precedent, arriving at our present enlightened state. The conservative conclusion is that we are not striving for but actually live in, although not perfection, at least the best of all possible worlds, that “Whatever is, is right,” as Alexander Pope put it in his Essay on Man. Conservatism has a tendency to be, not just indifferent to the marginalized and oppressed, but resentful of them. In a just society embodying “traditional values,” they should not exist—yet here they are. It must be their fault. It is they and not society that has failed. Actual homeless people or hypothetical “welfare queens” at times provoke fierce resentment in respectable people because they call the perfection of the social system into question. Denialism of the “They could get jobs if they wanted to” variety is a way of defending our just society against parasites who would batten on it like barnacles. The more vehement the denials, the easier it is to see that they are attempts to shout down secret doubts.
As the traditional aristocracy in England became increasingly vestigial, its influence was supplanted by that of the landed gentry, and the ideal of university education in the writings of theorists like Cardinal Newman was the production of the “gentleman,” socially conditioned to rule an expanding British Empire. In the United States, conservative elitism produced the WASP pseudo-aristocracy, both the Harvard and Yale men of the North and the southern gentlemen of the plantation South. But the growth of capitalism slowly transformed the social elite in a way captured by Max Weber’s famous phrase, the “Protestant work ethic.” Originally, disciplined, productive work was a religious virtue, a sign that one was among the Elect. But with increasing secularization brought about by capitalistic materialism, the religious sanction was lost. Hard work generated money and privilege that are one’s reward in this world, not the next one, but are also proof of one’s superiority. Protestantism gave way to Social Darwinism, to a libertarianism of the Ayn Rand variety, which had its apotheosis in the Reagan era. We are still hearing, despite all evidence to the contrary, that we are beholden to the wealthy “job creators” for whatever may “trickle down” of their hard-earned profits. If you are poor and profitless, it is your own fault. You have a choice to become the next Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or else to be weeded out. Such elitism thus managed to incorporate at least the illusion of upward mobility, of the American Dream of rising to the elite level, thus avoiding the appearance of a fixed class system like that of the Old World. The Reaganite remake of conservatism was so successful that it forced Bill Clinton and other New Democrats to invent a toned-down version of it that has become known as neoliberalism. He has been fiercely attacked for dragging the Democratic party rightward, but I still think that if he had not done so, it would presently be in the position of some of the niche European parties, getting ten percent of the vote. Of course, to do so, he made a deal with the devil, and finally the devil came to collect. That devil’s name is legion, but one version of it is Donald Trump.
No doubt I am oversimplifying and exaggerating some of its features, but it is fair to insist that conservatism is at least by tendency undemocratic. It believes, and sometimes openly says, that the masses are hopeless, herd animals that have to be shepherded for their own good lest they fall prey in their ignorance and lack of discipline to the first wolfish demagogue who gets to them. Domestically, this paternalistic attitude leads to oligarchy; internationally, it leads towards empire, the white man’s burden, although in the United States that can never be admitted. Even if we admit that the elites often do good, and are often genuinely well intentioned, their reality is that of power and privilege dependent upon the exploitation of the larger population. The terrible irony is that the lower classes (middle, lower middle, working class, unemployed) do not care, at least do not care primarily, about inequality. If they are reasonably comfortable and secure, they cheerfully accept the existence of the upper class. In fact, the upper-class soap opera fascinates them, becoming a combination of escapist entertainment and wish-fulfilment dream. But what they do care about is survival. If the elite oligarchy would only provide moderate comfort and a strong social safety net, the lower classes might let them dominate forever. In fact, that is exactly what happened in the 50’s and 60’s as an aftereffect of the New Deal.
It repeatedly confounds me that the elite are unable to see this, unable to recognize, despite clear warning signs, that their increasingly rapacious exploitation, and especially the slow but increasing destruction of the social safety net, is producing a dangerous situation. But because of the projection that we have described earlier, they are tempted to see the mass population as an id, as a seething mass of desire that can never be satisfied until it erupts into chaos and violence—give ‘em an inch and they’ll ask for a mile, and want it paved for free. So all the elite can think to do is try to keep people so exhausted, overworked, stressed out, bureaucratically regulated, and insecure that they are unable to think about revolt. Hence the elite tend to create, or at least allow the growth of, conditions so intolerable that finally the oppressed do erupt, driven beyond endurance—and that seems to confirm the paranoia of the privileged. The 60’s race riots and student demonstrations; Stonewall; Black Lives Matter; radical feminists portrayed as “feminazis”: each of these disruptions provoked the same kind of hysterical paranoid backlash that swept Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
In the present moment, the 1% have become so isolated that they have simply withdrawn from social life and live on some gated Mt. Olympus, some of them dreaming of escaping into space colonies or cryogenic storage. It is the petty bourgeois, the small business owner and middle management types, that react with fear and hate to the exploited people not so far below them in the ranks of privilege, and are gravitating towards authoritarian leaders in order to combat the uprising of what they are terrified by, whether they see it in the ghettos or at the borders.
Hence David Brooks’s description of the imagination mainly as the power of empathy. He quotes the novelist Zadie Smith as saying “I never entered a friend’s home without wondering what it might be like to never leave…. That is, what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian or Irish or Bengali, to be richer or poorer, to say these prayers or hold those politics. I was an equal-opportunity voyeur. I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody. Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe.” He links this with an anecdote about Zora Neale Hurston hitching rides on carriages with strangers simply to have conversations with them. It is no accident that his examples are two women of color, for his moral is, “What an awesome way to prepare the imagination for the kind of society we all live in now.” Such imaginative empathy on a social level has a parallel in an imaginative identification with nature: “the most enchanted form of imagination” in the visual art of a painter like William Blake, “perceives the inner vitality of a world” and thus “bridges the subjective and the objective,” his example being the starry-night paintings of Van Gogh, described in a way very much akin to my description last week of Matisse’s “Open Window, Collioure.”
His evocation of the imagination’s power to close the alienated gap between self and other is…well, “awesome” is a kind of gosh-wow word. But I’m all for it. However, the progressive feels impelled to add that the kind of empathetic healing Brooks longs for depends upon conditions that will allow the mutual paranoia on both sides to subside. People are not ready to feel empathy until they are feeling relatively secure—in terms of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the physiological and safety needs are “prepotent,” as he liked to say, over the higher needs for love and self-esteem. Joe Biden’s program, then, is moving in exactly the right direction. For the imagination is not only positive. Under adverse conditions it can dream up nightmares, and it will awake and find them true, like a parody of Adam’s dream in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Right now, the privileged class do not need to have read Hegel on the master-slave dialectic and ressentiment to feel they are sitting atop a smoldering volcano of suppressed desire. They are having dreams of home invasion, of horrible people breaking in and doing unspeakable things. And on the left, a radical extremism is developing that knows that power corrupts, and that sees corrupted power everywhere, down to the atomic level of “microaggressions.” It is not, of course, totally wrong, but its demonizing furthers the process of “othering” rather than healing it.
I am an old hippie who comes from the idealistic progressivism of the 60’s, which united itself, in figures like Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and the protest song writers, with the earlier progressivism of the 30’s and 40’s, the progressivism of my dad’s generation, for my dad was a union steward in the steel mill and proud of it. Pete Seeger had a whole career singing pro-union folk songs before he began singing songs against segregation and the Vietnam War. Thus the earlier labor movement joined with the Civil Rights movement, the early stages of the feminist movement, and eventually with the gay pride movement in at least a brief moment of solidarity before it all came apart. Joe Biden’s program is necessary but not sufficient: there will not be enough security to allow empathy to awaken once again on that kind of collective level unless the social system changes. Imaginative empathy will remain a mere feel-good substitute unless it proves itself through real social renovation. And what will it take to produce such renovation?
Liberals and neoliberals are meliorists, wanting incremental change. They become irritated with what they see as the naïve temper tantrums of progressives who prevent limited but real social change because of their refusal to compromise. Often, the liberals are pretty much right. But the progressives are sometimes right when they accuse liberals of an idealism that disappears the minute standing up for and living by those ideals becomes inconvenient. Phil Ochs satirized them scathingly clear back in 1966 in his song “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” in which the liberal speaker loves Puerto Ricans and Negroes until they move next door, and supports the Korean War because every American has to be patriotic. As for Civil Rights marches, “I’ll send all the money you ask for / But don’t ask me to come along.” When I was younger, the liberal says, I learned all the union hymns: “But I’ve grown older and wiser / And that’s why I’m turning you in,” no doubt to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Many conservatives, including Brooks, were liberals when young, but grew older and wiser. I’m not accusing Brooks of any betrayal, but I am pointing out where the danger of his type of position lies.
Brooks mentions Blake with approval, but Blake was a left-winger who supported both the French and American revolutions—unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge, who grew older and wiser. Revisionist historians make much of the elitism of the Founding Fathers, but the American Revolution gave the world, perhaps despite itself, the ideal of a progressive society, necessarily democratic because democracy is the only way so far invented to curb the power of the elites, who never, ever ask who watches the watchmen. Brooks rejects both the selfishness of the elites and the nihilism of the radicals. That puts him in the position of the Romantics contemplating the failure of the French Revolution, and to their forefather Milton contemplating the failure of the English revolution. Political action had failed because of the “mind-forg’d manacles,” as Blake put it in his poem “London.” Those mental chains must be broken first, or revolution will mean only the turning of the wheel of another cycle of hope followed by disillusionment. The Romantics, like Milton, were driven inward to find the source of all liberty and all renewal, the imagination itself.
The conservative Edmund Burke, recoiling from the hubris of the French revolutionaries eager to rip down the whole social order and rebuild it, spoke of an organically-rooted tradition. The mythological image for this is the world tree or axis mundi, rooted in the mysterious depths of both nature and the human mind. To find the root, however, you have to dig in the ground, to get your hands dirty. You have to lie down, Yeats said, “Where all the ladders start, / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” I have not read Brooks’s recent book, The Second Mountain, but the mountain is a modulation of the same archetypal image as the world tree and the ladder. Brooks says that the ascent of the first mountain is a quest to build the ego: the ascent of the second mountain is the quest to shed the ego. That second ascent would be towards something transcendent, beyond the ordinary self and ordinary selfishness. But, if I am understanding his symbolism correctly, you have to descend from the first mountain into the dark valley between them, a valley of decreation. As the conservative T.S. Eliot said, “In order to possess what you do not possess, / You must go by the way of dispossession.” That descent is the task of the imagination in our time.