The moral imagination

I have long taken an interest in questions about human nature, culture, and the meaning of existence, having studied classics and then earning a doctorate in political theory. But lately I’ve been homeschooling my four children, and I’ve come to appreciate the cultural significance of children’s literature. It might be surprising to hear that one can find in the pages of Charlotte’s Web, Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, and even Mother Goose insights about human nature, good and evil, and the nature of existence. But not all books are created equal, and as I seek to create in our home a bulwark against the spiritually destructive elements of modernity, I’ve thought carefully about our home library.

Competing Imaginations

The books that inform my understanding of what makes a children’s story high quality or low quality—or even potentially dangerous—are the same ones that most influenced my graduate studies. The book that first opened my eyes to a new view of reality and, in my estimation, explained a great deal about modern social and political ailments, was Irving Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership (1924). Despite its mundane-­sounding title, it has a brilliant and original thesis about the role of imagination in culture and politics. Babbitt argues that there are two kinds of imagination that characterize a person and an era: the romantic and the moral. The romantic imagination bloomed during the Romantic period (roughly the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries), and it continues to dominate in the West. Babbitt argues that this romantic imagination is particularly dangerous for its tendency toward an abstract dreaminess that rejects the world as it is. It envisions a future (or past) golden age radically different from all of human history. This type of idealism, Babbitt says, points toward violence and almost always masks the will to power. The idealist anoints himself as the prophet of the age, the one to overhaul existing society. The moral imagination, on the other hand, views man as ethically dualistic, forever struggling between his higher and lower natures, and it rejects once-and-for-all political or institutional “solutions.” The moral imagination is historical and concrete, rather than abstract and wishful.

Babbitt believed that it is not reason that corrects the fallacies and excesses of the romantic imagination but a competing quality of imagination—the moral imagination. We must therefore cultivate this other type of imagination, especially as the allure of romantic dreaming becomes more culturally entrenched. Babbitt argues that romanticism has profoundly influenced the Western mind—from the literature and art to education and foreign policy.

Children’s literature can be especially prone to romantic imaginings, especially as the genre did not emerge until the Romantic period. Modern picture books, even seemingly innocuous ones such as Where the Wild Things Are or the more recent Llama Llama series betray an underlying commitment to the types of romantic fancies against which Babbitt warns. Instead, children need stories that illustrate the truth of reality—man’s ethical duality, the limits of existence, the significance of the choices that we make, the nature of the good and beautiful—while nonetheless being imaginative and engaging. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien have accomplished much on this front.

History As Tutor

A well-narrated history or biography is as valuable as good fables and fairy tales for the child’s developing imagination. My appreciation for the role of history in shaping a moral imagination was guided by the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce’s History as the Story of Liberty (1938). Croce argues that history teaches us about the present and about ourselves, and he says that the imagination is indispensable to this task. A good historian is one who doesn’t simply provide a dry chronology but synthesizes events and their universal meaning.

How We See The World

The work of Claes G. Ryn, the contemporary political theorist (and my dissertation adviser), synthesizes Babbitt’s dichotomy of imagination and Croce’s understanding of history and the role of the historian. In Will, Imagination, and Reason (1986) Ryn argues that the interplay of these three faculties form our understanding of reality. Reason, he argues, contrary to the long-held belief in Western philosophy, plays a supporting rather than a guiding role. He elaborates on Babbitt and Croce’s philosophies, explaining how the imagination organizes, shapes, and guides our sense of what life is like and how we should act.

The Purpose of Education

Wendell Berry’s novel Hannah Coulter (2004) is an excellent example of a work of the moral imagination. It profoundly shaped my view of the purpose of education and, more specifically, of home education. As the titular character looks back over her life, from the vantage of old age, she recalls the love between her and her husband and for her children and the farm that they built. But as she ages, she thinks about the infrequent contact she has with her few grandchildren, the divorce of her daughter and its aftermath for her grandson, and the choice of her sons to pursue their careers at the expense of children and stable family life. Hannah feels she unwittingly pointed her children away from their humble yet fulfilling life and toward “better” opportunities that, in the end, resulted in spiritual emptiness and unhappiness.

Berry offers the example of another family in the novel, the Branches, who are content making their livelihood together and giving “no thought of the morrow.” Their life isn’t easy, but it is full, evident in the abundant love and growing “branches” of the family line.

—Emily Finley writes The Christian Imagination on Substack