Identity Politics and the Death of Moral Imagination

“The problem—as has been said so many times before—is that identity politics takes a kernel of truth about embodied human experience and pushes it to its destructive conclusion.”

Identity politics has gone from a niche intellectual fetish on university campuses to capturing the heights of our culture, directing the course of travel for media sense-making organizations, as well as corporations eager to be seen as adhering to the latest moral dispensation.

The problem—as has been said so many times before—is that identity politics takes a kernel of truth about embodied human experience and pushes it to its destructive conclusion. What used to be called our moral imagination is killed in its sleep. Only a recovery of this will enable us to avert greater degrees of conflict and strife.

The founder of New Humanism, Irving Babbitt (1865-1933) argued that the conflict in our 20th century culture and politics was symbolic of a conflict between worldviews: what he called the “spirit of Edmund Burke” and the “spirit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” In other words, this was Rousseau’s reductionist and radical idyllic imagination pitted against Burke’s moral imagination rooted in moral and historical truth.

Moral imagination is the idea that our minds are capable of creating or using ideas, images, and metaphors to recognize moral truths and develop moral responses between people. For thinkers such as Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, ethics are rooted in the particularities of history, narrative, and contingency and are best understood through metaphor and literary frames.