Moral Imagination

Essays

David Bromwich

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781400850013
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Compelling essays from one of today's most esteemed cultural critics Spanning many historical and literary contexts, Moral Imagination brings together a dozen recent essays by one of America's 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 Price's efforts to define patriotism in the first year of the French Revolution, Abraham Lincoln's 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.

TWO

CHAPTER 4

LINCOLN AND WHITMAN AS REPRESENTATIVE AMERICANS

A WAY OF LIFE LIKE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY HAS NO PREDES-tined shape, and when we call historical persons representative, because they helped to make us what we are, we generally mean that in their time they were exceptional. Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer, state legislator in Illinois, and one-term congressman who became president, and Walter Whitman, a journeyman printer, newspaper editor, and journalist who became a great poet, were extraordinary in what they achieved. They were extraordinary, too, in the marks of personality that they left on their smallest gestures. Yet the thing about both men that strikes an unprejudiced eye on first acquaintance is their ordinariness. This is an impression that persists, and that affects our deeper knowledge of both. By being visibly part of a common world which they inherited, even as they were movers of a change the world had only begun to imagine, they enlarged our idea of the discipline and imagination of democracy. But the accomplishment in all its intensity belongs to a particular moment of American history. The great works of Lincoln and Whitman begin in the 1850s—Lincoln’s emergence as a national figure comes in the speech of 1854 on the Kansas-Nebraska Act; Whitman’s self-discovery comes in 1855 with the first edition of Leaves of Grass. What was special about those years?

In the 1850s in America, the feelings of citizens were turned back with a shock again and again, to one terrible, magnetic, and central issue. This was the national argument—already in places a violent struggle—over the possibility of the spread of slavery. The future of slavery and freedom had been an issue from the founding of the Republic, but it took on a new urgency in the 1840s, when people asked how to dispose of the lands taken in the war with Mexico: a debate in which Lincoln participated as a congressman, strongly and eloquently dissenting from the war policy of President James K. Polk. The same issue confronted the nation again and more starkly with the Kansas-Nebraska legislation of 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and opened free territories to the owners of slaves. All through these years, the free citizens of the Union had felt the weight of the Fugitive Slave Law, which required law-abiding persons in the free states to return escaped slaves to their masters. The law raised a question for the accomplice as well as the master and the slave. Am I free in a country that uses the power of the state to compel me to assist in the capture of a human being who has risked his life for freedom? These things were sifted deeply in those years. There has not been another time when so searching an inquest drew so many ingenuous minds to discuss the basis in law and morality of the life we Americans share.

Both Lincoln and Whitman were part of a radical current of opinion that started out in dissent. In reading about their lives, you sometimes sense a peculiar self-confidence, as of people who know they have company in their beliefs. You can feel it plainly when you read their writings, if you listen to the pitch of the words. Though the thunder comes when they need it, they are both of them, by practice and almost by temperament, soft-spoken writers. But they know that they are not alone; they know that someone is listening. A text from Whitman: “Whoever degrades another degrades me.” And from Lincoln: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.” The two statements have morally the same meaning. American slavery, they say, is a concomitant of American democracy and is its degradation and betrayal. The work of democracy in these years will be to resist that betrayal and save the constitutional system from destruction. In this contest the enemy is a selfishness so perfect that it would preserve a freedom to treat other persons as property. This then is the cause; but the motive of resistance is deeper. It comes from an idea of the self that—like the sense of property cherished by the Slave Power—could have arisen only in a democracy.

Both Lincoln and Whitman were familiar with an older and largely hostile tradition of response to the democratic character. Plato, who did not invent that tradition, gave it memorable formulation in book 8 of the Republic and elsewhere, and the echoes can be felt as late as Alexis de Tocqueville’s strictures on the propensity of Americans for bargaining and mutual adaptation. The typical dweller in a democracy is gregarious, good-natured, conciliatory, socialized, enormously apt in the use of language (perhaps in a way that cheapens language by rendering it always negotiable), self-absorbed and yet commonly attuned to the pleasures and pains of others, full of seductiveness and a curious readiness to be seduced. This is a partial portrait, with enough truth to suggest a likeness in the personality of many Americans. And yet, whomever I call to mind as an example, I find on analysis that a part of me appreciates the very trait another part despises. The reason is that people in a democratic culture aspire to something besides democracy, something even beyond the fulfillment of the democratic character.

This is a paradox of manners that Whitman and Lincoln know well. All of the people want to be respected as the people, yet each wants not to be known merely as one of the people. Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana during the Great Depression and an instinctive and brilliant demagogue, captured the sentiment exuberantly in the campaign slogan “Every man a king.” Do we in no way agree? And if you think that the phrase is sheer sloganeering, consider the satisfaction we take in the sort of democratic scene Whitman describes in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass. Speaking of “the common people,” he praises “the fierceness of their roused resentment—their curiosity and welcome of novelty—their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy—their susceptibility to a slight—the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors.” Then, for illustration, he mentions a democratic custom: “the President’s taking off his hat to them [to the people, that is] and not they to him.” The people do not know what it is to stand in the presence of a superior; it seems to them a natural gesture when the president salutes them. Each of them is a gracious equal to whom he owes an unquestioned deference.

It is an ideal scene, “the President’s taking off his hat to them and not they to him”—and no less ideal for its origin in actual experience. But notice that it exhibits a practice of virtue (chivalric virtue) as much as it does a performance of equality in manners. Readers of Democratic Vistas—the prose work of social criticism Whitman published in 1867 and 1868, in which on the whole he speaks as a friend of modernity—have sometimes wondered at the note of awe with which this modern author speaks of the Crusades. Maybe we have a clue in his appreciation of the president’s taking off his hat to the people. The dignity, the generosity and sensitivity on points of honor, the sense of a grace of life that cannot be bought, all of which belong to chivalry, are to be transplanted into the New World as attributes of the people. The salute will be exchanged not between one exemplar and another of crusading valor, but between the representative of the people and the people themselves. The distance and deference and pride of station that went with the older virtues have all somehow been preserved. Whitman, who was a subtler psychologist than Huey Long, suggests that since kings are beneath us now, the ideal of democratic life may have become “Every man a gentle knight.”

Two traits, says Whitman, essential to the practice of democracy are individuality and what he calls “adhesiveness.” We might translate his terms as self-sufficiency and a comradely sympathy; and under those names they sound like modern qualities. But the pervading virtues that will always accompany them—again, if we can judge by Whitman’s examples—are the older virtues of gentleness and courage. It is because our aspirations have been raised so high that we fear the conduct of the people may grow vicious and their judgments corrupt. For the ruin of the people brings a disgrace more terrible than the ruin of kings. Lincoln, in a letter of 1855, looked at the swelling constituency of the anti-immigrant party of his day and found his thoughts drifting to a gloomy speculation. “I am not a Know-Nothing,” he begins:

That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

So the Old World distrust of the tyranny of democratic opinion can be shared even by so democratic a character as Abraham Lincoln. A democracy, he says, may be as slavish as a despotism, but it has the added evil of hypocrisy.

Much of Lincoln’s writing and speaking between 1854 and 1859 will turn on the question whether the moral right and wrong of slavery can be decided by the will of a majority of voters. He was moved to an unusual show of anger when he thought about Stephen Douglas’s saying that the question of slavery should be simply settled by the rules of popular sovereignty. Douglas liked to say, “I don’t care if they vote slavery up or down,” and as often as he said it, Lincoln would quote the words against him, with derision and a sense of baffled shame. Can the people do as they please in a matter of such interest to the conscience of human nature? Lincoln is compelled to admit that the majority can legally do so. But he thinks the constitutional founders were in principle opposed to slavery, and he finds his main evidence in the Declaration of Independence, in the words “All men are created equal.” The will of the people at a given moment is not the standard of right and wrong. Whitman for his part shows the same readiness to criticize both the practices and the opinions of the majority. He writes in Democratic Vistas: “Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us.” And again: “The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater.” And: “The magician’s serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician’s serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the field.” Lincoln and Whitman respect the people too much to want to flatter them. They agree that democracy—to remedy evils which it has itself brought into being—requires a self-respect more thoroughgoing than can be found in any other system of manners. The maintenance of democracy will be a task different in kind and harder than its founding.

Whitman traces the new democratic self-respect to “an image of completeness in separatism”; and he goes on, choosing his words awkwardly and vividly:

of individual personal dignity, of a single person, either male or female, characterized in the main, not from extrinsic acquirements or position, but in the pride of himself or herself alone; and, as an eventual conclusion and summing up, (or else the entire scheme of things is aimless, a cheat, a crash) the simple idea that the last, best dependence is to be upon humanity itself, and its own inherent, normal, full-grown qualities, without any superstitious support whatever.

If the equality of individuals is for Whitman the self-evident truth of democracy, it is a truth we all of us confirm every day by the link between body and soul. What does “individual” mean if not undividable? One body, one soul. “I believe in you my soul,” Whitman writes in Song of Myself, “the other I am must not abase itself to you, / And you must not be abased to the other.” The range of possible reference in these words is wide. It is the body speaking to the soul—the body must not be pressed by the soul to ascetic torments, even as its sensualism must not tamper with the soul’s integrity—but it is also a world of spontaneous impulse addressing a mind informed by high ideals.

In writing as he does about the integrity of body and soul, Whitman stands against a tendency that he calls realism. Democratic Vistas, in a surprising and memorable phrase, deplores “the growing excess and arrogance of realism.” Evidently, Whitman has in mind the imperative to build a railroad and get rich fast, which has its correlatives in our own day. Realism is the voice that tells you to specialize your habits and feelings, to ride your personality in the current of things as they are, to do anything rather than stand and think and look at the world for the sake of looking. By contrast, the “unsophisticated conscience”—for it takes resolve to shed sophistication—is a result of prolonged and partly involuntary exposure to experience. Let me pause here to say a word for the kind of experience Whitman praises. It is the experience of a single person dwelling unseen among others—an experience, in fact, of anonymity. This condition ought to be a blessing in a democracy, where it need not go with material deprivation, yet we are apt to regard it as a curse. Anonymity is a vital condition of individuality—perhaps the only such condition that requires the existence of a mass society. When, in section 42 of Song of Myself, Whitman hears “A call in the midst of the crowd” and feels that he is being summoned by name, and that he must deliver his message with “my own voice, orotund sweeping and final,” it is a profoundly welcome moment because he is being called from an interval of non-recognition and his speaking now will derive power from the time when he was alone in the crowd. Such intervals are not a kind of apprenticeship. They are supposed by Whitman to recur in the lives of the renowned as well as the obscure, and their continual return is to him an assurance of sanity.

The voice of Song of Myself rises from anonymity to the speech of “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,” but this is not to be conceived as an ascent from a humble to an exalted station. It is an emergence of individuality that could happen only to someone nursed in anonymity, and the occasion prompts his speech only because he is sure of passing back to anonymity. During the Civil War, Whitman did not fraternize with the great, did not seek to interview and write up the sage and serious opinions of statesmen, generals, ambassadors. He visited the sick and wounded at New York Hospital and served as a wound-dresser in the military hospitals in Washington, D.C. He eked out a living in the years of war by clerical work in the army paymaster’s office and clerkships in the Department of the Interior and the Office of the Attorney General.

As it happened, he lived on the route that President Lincoln took to and from his summer lodgings, and in his book Specimen Days, Whitman left a record of his impression of Lincoln. It stresses the commonness, almost anonymity, of the president as he passes by, but also his unsearchable depth.

The party makes no great show in uniform or horses. Mr. Lincoln on the saddle generally rides a good-sized, easygoing gray horse, is dress’d in plain black, somewhat rusty and dusty; wears a black stiff hat, and looks about as ordinary in attire, &c., as the commonest man …. I see very plainly ABRAHAM LINCOLN’s dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes, always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones…. Earlier in the summer I occasionally saw the President and his wife, toward the latter part of the afternoon, out in a barouche, on a pleasure ride through the city. Mrs. Lincoln was dress’d in complete black, with a long crape veil. The equipage is of the plainest kind, only two horses, and they nothing extra. They pass’d me once very close, and I saw the President in the face fully, as they were moving slowly, and his look, though abstracted, happen’d to be directed steadily in my eye. He bow’d and smiled, but far beneath his smile I noticed well the expression I have alluded to. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man’s face. There is something else there.

The life that Whitman always went back to, even in the presence of great events and characters, was the life of an observer, an onlooker, with the patience to catch a subtle and indirect expression glimpsed by no one else.

His manner of looking at others has everything to do with his attitude toward himself. “Trippers and askers surround me,” he says in section 4 of Song of Myself, “People I meet …. the effect upon me of my early life …. of the ward and city I live in …. of the nation”; and he says of all these environing facts and circumstances, “They come ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Index