The Moral Imagination

Trawling the Internet in search of a pick-me-up from the overwhelmingly positive media coverage of Obama, conservatives will perhaps stumble upon shock jock Howard Stern’s archived radio programs from Election 2008. In one infamous episode, Stern chats with several supposedly random Obama supporters in Harlem; their ignorant hero-worship is meant to show that any vote for Obama must be based on race or charisma rather than a substantive platform. Abrasive—and methodologically flawed—as Stern’s approach is, there’s some grain of truth to his conclusions. Obama’s winsome personality can at times override his actual policy proposals; after all, he’s not only a president, but also a family man (globetrotting with photogenic wife and daughters), a sex symbol (bodysurfing shirtless in Hawaii), and a stage presence (snagging a Grammy for his “Audacity of Hope” audiotape). If Dubya was the man polls reported America felt most comfortable relaxing over a beer with, it was because by the end, it was clear that he had flaws and insecurities just like the rest of us. But Obama is more than just a prospective pal—he’s the man America wants to be.

A large part of this allure has depended on his remaining inoffensive, even something of a blank slate. That’s why his Nobel acceptance speech last week came as such a shock, eliciting mixed reactions and media confusion. Speaking before a roomful of diplomats in Oslo, Obama defended sending additional troops into Afghanistan, declaring that the unobjectionable soft -power tactics everyone agrees are important—building strong institutions, defending human rights—are not enough. Many of the raised hackles stemmed from the exquisite irony of using a platform for peace for a defense of war. Yet the disconnect goes still deeper. With more clarity than ever before, Obama’s speech peeled away his slick exterior to reveal the inner workings of his moral universe—a universe that is old-fashioned, even unfashionable, and far more controversial than many of his most ardent admirers realize.

For starters, it’s a world divided starkly between good and evil, with very little of the cultural relativism that most liberals hold as a core tenet. “I do not believe that we will have the will, the determination, the staying power, to complete this work without something more—and that’s the continued expansion of our moral imagination, an insistence that there’s something irreducible that we all share,” argued Obama. In his next breath, he spelled it out explicitly: “As the world grows smaller, you might think it would be easier for human beings to recognize how similar we are, to understand that we’re all basically seeking the same things.” In Obama’s eyes, America is good, and it is its responsibility to spread this goodness so that everyone may achieve the universal ideal of happiness.

The Judeo-Christian overtones here are obvious enough. But to me, at least, Obama’s somewhat oblique reference to the “moral imagination” also recalls the title of Lionel Trilling’s 1950 classic, “The Liberal Imagination.” Writing an introduction to a posthumous collection of Trilling’s essays in 2000, Leon Wieseltier praised the literary critic—along with theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin—for remaining clear-eyed in dark times, a “rationalist with night vision.” It’s worth noting that David Brooks also invokes Niebuhr in a New York Times column this week discussing Obama’s “Christian realism,” and that Obama himself has referred to Niebuhr as his “favorite philosopher.” All the rhetorical overlap can be a little surprising—but the web of tightly-linked references is a clear indicator that we’ve come across a particular approach to looking at the world.

Indeed, Obama’s speech speaks to a real, often ignored, distinction between those who think of the world “morally” and those who don’t. It’s an old canard that lumping things in moral categories necessitates a conservative mindset. Some conservatives think this way, and so do some liberals, like Obama. The latter camp, on the other hand, is not “immoral,” but rather “amoral”—for better or worse, it simply doesn’t see the world through these goggles of good and evil. (As one online commenter on Brooks’ piece put it, the president’s logic is pure “Manichaean claptrap.”) This division in outlook helps explain why some have compared Obama’s speech to Bush’s revamped Manifest Destiny—while policy-wise the two presidents may be apples and oranges, they have something far deeper in common.

What this means is that the months ahead call for us to tread very carefully. The distinction sketched out here between the “moral” view and the “amoral” view is essentially the same as that drawn by another reviewer of Trilling’s book, who divides intellectual life between “fundamentalism” and “relativism.” In his speech, Obama warned that “if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint—no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or the Red Cross worker, or even a person of one’s own faith.” Yet in closing, he declared: “Let us reach for the world that ought to be—that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.” The line between these two views of the “divine” is incredibly fine, and requires especially delicate consideration.

Trilling’s point in “The Liberal Imagination” was that part of the role of literature is to challenge status quo liberal ideas; while politicians tend to get carried away in abstractions, literature dwells in the details. As Obama continues to unwrap his political philosophy through his actions and words, the lesson that we must temper our admiration with productive criticism remains more potent than ever.

Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House.