Why the New Conservatism Needs the Old Moral Imagination
Triumph of Virtue Over Vice, by Paolo Veresone, (1554-1556)
Edmund Burke is often credited with being the first person to enlist the use of ‘moral imagination’ as a tool with which to critique a culture. In his case it was the French Revolution being critiqued. By gleaning from tradition and guarding the inherited artifacts of virtue that are passed down to the present from its predecessors, any given generation might be capable of practicing both stewardship and criticism, of knowing what is worth keeping and what one ought to throw out. Burke saw this as a necessary ingredient if one desired societal cohesion and thriving.
Conservatism is often hailed, by its constituents at least, as the unrivaled defender of that which must not be lost in the fire. The job, however, isn’t accomplished by merely getting the entire contents of the house out into the yard. It must be that the valuable things are saved. The things not worth the time it takes to save must be left in the house. Any conservatism that prides itself on its ability to simply ‘not get rid of stuff’ has rightly confessed that it is not a curator of civilization, but is merely a hoarder of historical artifacts. The new conservatism does not simply need permission to pause a flawed version of progress, it needs a moral imagination to discern what is virtuous.
The new rush of preservation that conservatives have been given the chance to enact may have some positive lasting results, but it will, undeniably, only leave a society-shaped hole for the next generation to fill at will if it does not show its math on how it discerns what is good, true, and beautiful. As T.S. Eliot once said, “Yet, if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’, should positively be discouraged.”
In Eliot’s conceptualization of the moral imagination, art, specifically poetry, is the opportunity for appreciation to be aimed at the poetry and not the poet. This, by necessity, renders cults of personality and influencers something of a bane to true conservatism, rather than the scaffolding they believe themselves to be. Tradition may be having a momentary comeback, but it must be for the sake of the virtuous, not simply for what, in logic, is called a fallacy of chronology. Anything that is better merely because it is older creates a necessary antithesis of being despised, at some point, because it is not new.
Even though the moral imagination narrows in on the virtue in art, rather than genius of the artist, it does not necessitate the elimination of the self; rather, it calls for the elimination of the self as the center. This is a direct hit on much of the undergirding of the conservatism’s recent success: citizen journalists, online influencers, and countless purveyors of all things trad. The over-commodification of the sacred, not least of which is knowledge, has procured for the dispensers of knowledge the illusion of indispensability. Eliot and many of his co-belligerents saw through this kind of preservation of tradition for tradition’s sake as a flawed cult of personality, even if the personality was institutional.
If conservatism is to effect meaningful change, it must recover the moral imagination as understood by Burke and Eliot. One of the greatest qualities these men shared was their ability to frame a window looking out upon the world and getting out of the way so the reader could look through it. Let the handing down be done with a bit more sapience and a lot less spectacle.
