Reflections on Imaginative Conservativism
by Eva Brann
Reprinted with permission from The Imaginative Conservative. See the full essay here.
Author’s Note: I wish to dedicate this essay to a writer of books whose greatness is at once utterly at home in America and quite without spatio-temporal boundaries, Marilynne Robinson, who produces in reality the images I only analyze, and thereby not only saves but augments the tradition I love—the aboriginal imaginative conservative, one who celebrates the glory of the commonplace.
When Winston Elliott invited me to become a Senior Contributor to The Imaginative Conservative I had misgivings. “Is this an honor honestly come by?” I asked myself. Am I a conservative, true blue and staunch? A conservative at all? Would a political conservative have twice voted for our current president, and for my reasons? Because he could speak both in the faith-borne periods of a black preacher and the consideringly correct paragraphs of a Harvard professor. Because he was physically graceful and young. (My disapproving conservative friends claim I fell in love with his ears—and I had no deniability.) Because he was half-black (a way of putting it that suppresses, absurdly, that he is half-white) and I felt this to be great cause for national pride. But, then again, that I thought he was a pragmatic crypto-conservative (in which I turned out to be half-wrong, though all too right if you ask his Left). And because nothing has more eroded my political conservatism than the mulish obstructionism he’s met with in the Far Right, that miserable simulacrum of conservatism.1[1]
Yet, “imaginative conservative” does just about describe me. Let me put “political” conservatism aside for a–long–moment. Later I’ll want to show why an “imaginative” conservative might be all over the political map, as occasion arises: right, center, left–reactionary (disgustedly oppositional), moderate (prudently dithering), and radical (exuberantly reformist).
So, as always in life, having found the phrase that wins my adherence, it’s time to figure out what it means. What’s “imaginative?” What’s “conservative?” And how does the adjective modify the noun and the noun support its adjective? For my basic assumption is that—let other persuasions appeal to bleeding hearts, Christian conscience, or political realism—a conservative should have, first of all, recourse to self-awareness, mindfulness, reflection. One last confession before I get to it: none of the subjoined lucubrations are anything but second editions, so to speak, recollections and rephrasings of thoughts thought and re-thought over the decades. But perhaps that is in itself a sort of conservatism—to allow one’s convictions to modify and self-reform, but not to be given to swoops and loops and U-turns.
…
Eleventh: Imagination
In my penultimate consideration, I come to the term closest to my heart—imaginative, for me the dominant term in this phrase “imaginative conservative;” I’m a conservative primarily because this adjective, I’ll claim, correctly modifies its noun, though the converse also has its force: imaginativeness tends towards conservatism. For example, imagination gives political ideas their concreteness and forestalls, to some degree, unintended consequences. You have a cure-all program: tell me in concretely imagined detail how it will work out in real life, and also where you may get exactly what you don’t want. That takes imagination of the literal sort I’m about to lay out. I was talking to a sympathetic friend about this essay, and by way of keeping me from one-sidedness, he said: “But the others [liberals, he meant] also have imagination.” “For instance?” I said. “Well, they envision a better world, a world free of… [a litany of ills].” We both began to laugh, because neither of us could see a thing—neither anyone’s real land (there being some three-hundred plus countries, as I recall), nor any specific desire (there being an infinity of those), nor any concrete plan (with escape routes). These goodhearted wishings were not imaginations but ideations, resulting in “ideas,” bright ones. Once, long ago, “idea” did indeed connote ultimate repleteness; now it mostly means mental fixation on a gift-wrapped thought-package.
At this near-last moment, I ought to define the conservatism whose imaginativeness I have wanted to analyze. Definition is dictionary business, and I often have recourse to Partridge’s Origins (an etymological dictionary), in part because he’s not overscrupulous about morphological fact, but very attached to what words mean or meant to their speakers. So: con– is an intensifier to servare, Latin for “to keep safe.” Conservatives, then, are people deeply concerned with preserving, with keeping things safe. I go on from there: because they know things worthy of safekeeping; the implication here is that there might be a kind of conservatism attached to unworthy preservation, or to holding on for the sake of holding on. To some degree, hold-outs are, as I’ve said, to be respected, first, because it is the way of the world that what goes round comes round and what seems retrograde this day may be progressive another day. But more importantly, these folks try to protect stability, and without stability the soul goes blindly shallow with anxious hustle, and the imagination fails in the face of a life oscillating between fast-forward and rewind. That is not to deny that being dug in can also be grave-like and suffer its own obliviousness. Some kinds of conservatives can only chant destructive slogans; the living sense is gone; reactionary movements are the clattering dance of the dead.
The bridge, a long one, between past and present is memory—the memory bridge is a figure for my more literal claim above, that memory is all the past there is. Along this long bridge, some of the past worth saving may, by a misapplication of the memory-mode called memorizing, be turned into sallow ghosts, thence into petrified effigies; the latter particularly in our public or external memory. Similarly, moving thoughts can become rigid abstractions (as in philosophy textbooks that trade in “isms,” idealism, realism, rationalism, empiricism, etc., etc.). Poignant visions can become inert abridgments (as in those infamous Study Notes students don’t admit to using.)2 This whole educational cemetery is laid out, I think, according to misguided notions concerning the afterlife of human works, the most acute case of wrongheadedness being that so-called delivery systems are separable from their content, that the concrete specificity of the original texts (in which I include responsible translations) is not inextricably involved in what is said, and that our students’ fictional or philosophical imagination can be aroused by informational abstractions. Derivates are not only failure-prone in finance.
Now to that imagination itself. It is a power and has products. Our souls imagine and bring about works, works of two sorts, mental imagery and external images. Most external images, verbal, visual, even auditory are—the ins and outs of this would be worthy of a big book—imitations of interior imagery, although some external images have no internal originals. (Example: conceptual art; some artists [egged on by their estheticians] claim to visualize only as they are drawing, that is, ex post facto; so they are not imitating psychic pictures but originating manual gestures. Some people say they relish such productions.)
There is behind this account of the imagination a deeper view of the soul, called “epistemological,” that is, “giving an account of knowledge.” In this account, which has ancient and modern versions, imagination has a Hermes-like function. (Hermes, recall, is the conductor-god who transfers souls from earth to the underworld.) Thus the imagination takes delivery from the senses, which give us the world in its solidity and gravity, and rarifies their content into transparent weightless images (sometimes taking these even further down to the mere schemata, the idea-diagrams just mentioned) until they are fit to be presented to the intellect—de-materialized, quasi-spatial presences, on which the mind can think, or, in neuro-peak, which the brain can further process.3
Images themselves have a wonderful ontology, mentioned above and implied in my description of image-formation. They are and are not what they represent. Pull a picture from your wallet and say, “That’s my grandson.” If I responded, “No, it isn’t,” I’d be infuriating, but I wouldn’t be wrong. For an analysis of image-nature yields that very melding of Being and Non-being which so attracts and astounds the intellect attempting to think comprehensively: An image is a present absence—or an absent presence. It is a mystery of disincarnation, of which the willing mind, cunningly compromising its logical requirements, just manages to take hold.4 (Cognitive science and neuroscience provide explanations of mental imagery that are more sharp-edged but less illuminating in my context.)
Memory, the imaginative conservative’s special domain (since, as I claimed above, it makes the past have being and the present vitality), is the imagination’s supply house and workspace, for imaginative material is, I would say, basically memorial; who can imagine anything, even a futuristic prospect, that is not a modification of the past?
The imagination, then, is the worker within this memorial store; it transmutes, transfigures, and transforms memories. Sometimes it falsifies, but I think that in its invention it is less liar than interpreter. I’ll put it this way: the well-conditioned imagination is a myth-recalling and myth-making imagination. It puts a background of meaning to present experience. Human meaningfulness almost always has, I think, a sense of depth to it, which in memorial space acquires the feel of “out of the past.”
So it’s time to meditate on the sources of memory. There are basic external origins, of course, sensory experiences and their evaluations—reality-derived memories. Among these are external images, crafted by painters and other visual artists or developed by cameras and other recording devices, snapshot-style or posed, unretouched or doctored, intended as honest testimony or passed out with a deceitful agenda—true or lying imitations.
And then there are internal images, imaginative images, effects of the productive imagination working on its psychic material. And these images of the soul raise the most acutely wonderful of all questions concerning the imagination: What are the originals of imaginative images? Whence comes the material that the working imagination contributes on its own, drawing on presences not found in experiential, this-worldly memory? Most quasi-sensory elements of inner images must, for such as we are, indeed be world-derived. But there are beings, events, atmospheres that have never yet eventuated in this world, or at least were never within our sensory reach. When poets and novelists make them external for us (and we in turn internalize them) we call them fictions, but falsely, because we may find them more actual than merely real facts.
The question concerning the originals of imaginative images is, I think, ultimately theological. Explanations in terms of the sub- or unconscious are subterfuges—no one can actually locate these limbos; explaining away is not explaining. When I say “theological,” I have in mind the Muses who live on Olympus and are invoked by poets from Homer to Milton, who both had access to the realm of divinity, where the Muses are quartered. So also great novelists express, more prosaically, some sense of being visited from Beyond. And it is no accident that the greatest phenomenologist (that is, an account-giver of inner appearances, in this case of memory and imagination, in his Confessions) was also among the greatest theologians, namely Augustine of Hippo (354-430). In sum, the originals of memories are mostly external and come to us largely through the frontal doors of perception, but the originals of the imagination on its own are imparted—who knows whence?—to some hinterland of the soul—which, once again, it’s no use to call the unconscious, for if it’s just neural, how does it issue as “conscious,” and if it’s conscious, how is it “un?”
So much for the ontology, activity, sources, and originals of the imagination; as I said, a culpably condensed treatment worth a big book.5 And now, one last time: Why is the imagination a specifically conservative concern so that it is rightly attached adjectivally to the noun “conservative?”
The imagination should be anybody’s interest, a common interest, for just as articulateness damps rage, so imaginativeness relieves alienation. Thus, as the preservation of expressive (non-twittering) language should be a social concern, the saving of the imagination should be everyone’s care. I will argue below for the implication that nothing matters more to our psychological security than the protection of children from degraded speech and vulgarized images.
What are the dangers? First, the outsourcing of the imagination, the riffing, as it were, of the in-house working imagination, to be replaced by the inundating hyper-productivity of an industrial image-source. Next, the loss of worldly originals, particularly the paving over of nature, the systematic replacement of what is given to us, is of slow growth, is deep and mysterious, by what is made by us, is quickly produced, and is complex and so completely analyzable—without being at all understood. The practical business of resisting the transmogrification of first into second nature belongs to those uncomfortable kin of conservatives, the conservationists; they are lately learning not to ride rough-shod over people’s livelihoods in their enthusiasm and to find mutually satisfactory accommodations, so that conservation can become a win-win game—in the conservative mode, one might say, chuckling.
A final slew of dangers I can think of is the concentration of physical vision into the field of a miniscule window, where occurs “texting” with its digital modes: literal fingering, calculational figuring, verbal frittering. Concurrently, imaginative visioning is overwhelmed by image-inundation, and keen intellectual appetite is spoiled by a surfeit of information.6
But then, what’s all this to the imaginative conservative in particular? Well, we ought to be glad and close observers of all givenness, green nature above all, great sniffers-out of the corrosive vapors issuing from the excessive ingestion of the original world, the world that is, for faith, God’s creation, or for philosophy, Being’s appearance. Another way to put it: Imaginative conservatism means, to me at least, a grounded flexibility functioning between ideal and real, the imaginative space in which concrete specificity and universal essentiality meet—the twice-lived world, once in experienced fact and again in imaginative reflection.
Twelfth: Eccentric Centrality
Finally, an imaginative conservative will have, against all odds, an abiding faith in eccentric centrality. A nun I used to know once explained to me that the energy which moves the world has its center in out-of-the-way places, remote from the mere epicenters of secular power. I agree. The spirit lives in the sticks, in backwaters, small towns, in self-sufficiently recalcitrant, contentedly unregarded places, in local orchestras, neighborhood groceries, in libraries that still have books on shelves—not multiple copies of best-sellers but accumulated collections of middlingly good novels—and, above all, in face-to-face schools that transmit the tradition, its treasures of beauty and of reflection. Of course, they all must scramble, accommodate themselves to “current conditions”—a potently polymorphous notion, the correct discerning of which takes more practical wisdom than most of us possess. Thus the imaginative conservative’s practical project is survival without loss of soul.
So that’s the imaginative conservative I’m willing to own up to being—call it “modified Burkean,” if it’s better off with a label.7 Do I then have “the Conservative Mind?” I hope not. A mind-set is a major liability for a person wanting to be thoughtful—and a premature fixative of imaginative reflection to boot.
In fact, it is legitimate history to claim that an imaginative—let it be said, a Burkean—conservative will be politically a classical Liberal in the nineteenth-century English sense: of Lockean ancestry, believing in the ultimacy of individuals over groups; ready to trust elected representatives with projects for political reform but resistant to administrative compulsions of social justice; attached to private associations as loci of excellence; and, above all, cherishing liberty over the forcible equality of ideological egalitarianism—as opposed to the equality grounded in our common nature or creation. This is the merest sketch of a politics that seems to me compatible with imaginative conservatism.
My first and last care, however, is not politics (a late-learned duty) but education (an abiding passion). Education seems to me inherently conservative, being the transmission, and thus the saving, of a tradition’s treasures of fiction and thought. (I can’t think the desperately “innovative” gimmickry which diverts attention from contents to delivery systems is able to reconstitute failing communities of learning.)
But education is also inherently imaginative, because from pre-school to graduate school, it consists, or should consist, primarily of learning to read books (in whatever format), books of words, symbols, diagrams, musical notes. For entry into all of these, but perhaps books of words above all, imagination is indispensable. Great poetry requires visualization to be interpretable; the word has to become a vision to be realized. (Specific example, perhaps the greatest moment of any: at the climax of the Iliad, Achilles is searching for the vulnerable spot in Hector’s armor-encased body. The armor Hector is wearing is the suit he has stripped from the body of Patroclus, the friend of Achilles’ heart, whom Achilles has sent heedlessly into battle to fight in his stead, clothed in his own armor. Now he drives his spear into Hector’s gullet. Whom is he killing? Homer is silent. See it and shudder.)
Similarly, works of reflection require a kind of reverse imagination, since practically all speech about non-physical being is by bodily metaphor: The transfiguration, the transcending, of such philosophical figures is practically the same as thinking reflectively. (A not so very specific an example, but perhaps among the grandest: Hegel tells of the Spirit coming into time, of God entering the world, through a “gallery of figures,” human incarnations, even identifiable as historical individuals. But, he says, that’s not how we are to understand his Phenomenology of Spirit, meaning his account of the phenomena by which divinity becomes manifest in the world; he is not presenting imagined figures but incarnate truths. It is the most hellishly difficult but most rewarding of image-interpretations known to me; it requires ascending from visualizable images to purely thinkable originals.)
That’s imaginative conservatism for a college and its students, my particular venue and charge. But what matters most is, as I must repeat, the education of children. Looking at them from the vantage point of their future teacher, I would wish this for us: that their memories be stocked with the finest products of the tradition and their minds be—gently—turned toward the outside in close looking and articulate verbalizing and toward the inside in absorbed reading and ready visualizing. Just forget for a while about “preparing them for tomorrow” and “for being productive members of today’s society”—all that routine drivel deserves scare quotes since it’s meant to turn us into sacrificial victims on the altar of utility. It doesn’t work anyhow, since tomorrow is anybody’s guess and actual producing may be by then passé. And while I’m at it: Teach children mathematics for what it is, not dreary, opaquely operational formulas, but the most immediately intelligible language in which Nature speaks to us—and the spare armature of our vision-invested imagination.
All of this can happen if schools for all ages stay resolutely local in place and go expansively cosmopolitan in time. I mean that they should preserve themselves as face-to-face communities in particular places, but dedicate themselves to absorbing living heritage from any time. For the present is too thin to live on, and the future too inexistent.
1 “Simulacrum” because “conservative” practically means “moderate”—or should. I’m speaking here of an obtusely aggressive public persona, not of the understandably aggrieved human souls who have donned it; in some respects I sympathize with them.
6. Though they too have a place—as indexes to very long novels.
7. Such as logic and mathematical diagrams which appear, it seems, in a blank internal imaginative field in which reason—how is a mystery—can inscribe its structures. There are, of course, also external images produced by nature, such as reflections.
8. I want to distinguish sharply the Non-being constitutionally inherent in images from virtuality, which is a discretionary mode of reception, hence, as I said, a danger. More accurately, virtuality is an environment, “the virtual world.” When the promise of this virtual world to come is fulfilled, it will divorce its—presumably still voluntary—participants pretty finally (if only in stretches) from the physical world; they will be cocooned in a world-simulacrum that is absolutely immediate, without intervening organs of sensation or physical distances—achieved by direct electronic stimulation of the brain that subserves our perceptions. It will be a complete environment, a replacement world, without reality-resistance and therefore completely manipulable—by the individual for his own pleasure or by the technological provider with alien motives: inactuality as world-principle—otherwise put, an image-world humanly contrived without originals. Here the wondrous element of Non-being is turned against the very images it sustained as images, caused to be images; in the virtual world, not only have mental images cast loose from originals, but instead of being within us, we are within them, as in a super-mind.
9. As Milton’s Satan says, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” Hell, I would think. In sum, virtuality is a term from the devil’s dictionary, a good word, “virtue,” gone ambiguous as in “virtual reality,” potently unreal reality. Conservationists of the imagination should think twice. This term has suction power.
10. See E. Brann, The World of the Imagination (1991).
Here is an omen: The number of visitors to our national parks is on a downward trend; the reason given is in a headline: “Why go outside when you have an iPhone?” (Economist August 17, 2013).
11. Here’s what’s “Burkean.” Edmund Burke (1729-97) is for reform that is not ideologically driven; he is radical when reason-sustained popular opinion requires it (Burke was a supporter of our Revolution); he’s for minimum moralism and conciliatory politics out of respect for tradition and care for stability; he pays deference both to Nature and historical conditions; he supports incremental change and the narrowest tailoring of planned interventions. He’s not for philosophy, mistaking it, I think, for rationalism (or maybe just being an Englishman of a traditional cast of mind)—that’s where my revisionism comes in: I’m for Burke plus philosophy. And certainly, if conservatives may, on occasion, be divided into Burkeans and bullies, I’ll declare for the former.
- “Simulacrum” because “conservative” practically means “moderate”—or should. I’m speaking here of an obtusely aggressive public persona, not of the understandably aggrieved human souls who have donned it; in some respects I sympathize with them. ↩︎
- Though they too have a place—as indexes to very long novels. ↩︎
- Such as logic and mathematical diagrams which appear, it seems, in a blank internal imaginative field in which reason—how is a mystery—can inscribe its structures. There are, of course, also external images produced by nature, such as reflections. ↩︎
- I want to distinguish sharply the Non-being constitutionally inherent in images from virtuality, which is a discretionary mode of reception, hence, as I said, a danger. More accurately, virtuality is an environment, “the virtual world.” When the promise of this virtual world to come is fulfilled, it will divorce its—presumably still voluntary—participants pretty finally (if only in stretches) from the physical world; they will be cocooned in a world-simulacrum that is absolutely immediate, without intervening organs of sensation or physical distances—achieved by direct electronic stimulation of the brain that subserves our perceptions. It will be a complete environment, a replacement world, without reality-resistance and therefore completely manipulable—by the individual for his own pleasure or by the technological provider with alien motives: inactuality as world-principle—otherwise put, an image-world humanly contrived without originals. Here the wondrous element of Non-being is turned against the very images it sustained as images, caused to be images; in the virtual world, not only have mental images cast loose from originals, but instead of being within us, we are within them, as in a super-mind.
As Milton’s Satan says, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” Hell, I would think. In sum, virtuality is a term from the devil’s dictionary, a good word, “virtue,” gone ambiguous as in “virtual reality,” potently unreal reality. Conservationists of the imagination should think twice. This term has suction power. ↩︎ - See E. Brann, The World of the Imagination (1991). ↩︎
- Here is an omen: The number of visitors to our national parks is on a downward trend; the reason given is in a headline: “Why go outside when you have an iPhone?” (Economist August 17, 2013). ↩︎
- Here’s what’s “Burkean.” Edmund Burke (1729-97) is for reform that is not ideologically driven; he is radical when reason-sustained popular opinion requires it (Burke was a supporter of our Revolution); he’s for minimum moralism and conciliatory politics out of respect for tradition and care for stability; he pays deference both to Nature and historical conditions; he supports incremental change and the narrowest tailoring of planned interventions. He’s not for philosophy, mistaking it, I think, for rationalism (or maybe just being an Englishman of a traditional cast of mind)—that’s where my revisionism comes in: I’m for Burke plus philosophy. And certainly, if conservatives may, on occasion, be divided into Burkeans and bullies, I’ll declare for the former. ↩︎
Dear Reader,
ll group of very bright students working towards PhDs in a Great Books program. We have begun each year with a week of in-person classes, grounding our teacher/student relations in personal interaction that is impossible with Zoom meetings alone. We have broken bread together, while having conversations that range from Leiden’s dramatic fight for independence in the 1570s to the character of Cassius in Julius Caesar, to whether equality of opportunity is a good to be desired or perhaps a justice to be insisted upon.
From a review of A Brief Quadrivium and Teaching the Quadrivium: A Guide for Instructors originally published in 
diagrams of the golden ratio projected onto the masterpieces of the Old Masters sandwiched between sessions of mathematics classes hardly distinct from those offered in non-classical educational settings—two excellent starting places are Gary B. Meisner’s Golden Ratio and Mirana Lundy’s Quadrivum. In the end, if the quadrivium enters into our thinking or our teaching, it is at second or third hand, and we and our students at best come to appreciate its historical presence in the past of Western culture without acquiring the intellectual character or skills that would enable us to use the quadrivium productively in our own attempts to make the world more beautiful.
Fortunately for me, a humanist who has not yet mastered the arts of number, 
C.S. Lewis dedicates his classic The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to his goddaughter Lucy with the following words:
But when I returned to children’s literature as an adult, I felt that touch of moralism was a good corrective. Sara Crewe’s patience in A Little Princess, the healing powers of human connection as depicted in The Secret Garden, Anne Shirley’s indefatigable enthusiasm—I felt all these traits reawakening my desire for a beautiful life, just as they are meant to do for children. It was a fruitful moment to reflect on the woman I had meant to become when I had been formed by these incredible characters—and the woman I was actually becoming.
“How strange the graveyard looks by moonlight!” said Ruby suddenly. “How ghostly!” she shuddered. “Anne, it won’t be long now before I’ll be lying over there. You and Diana and all the rest will be going about, full of life—and I’ll be there—in the old graveyard—dead!”
June 1858
I was raised to farm work, which I continued till I was twenty-two. At twenty one I came to Illinois, and passed the first year in Macon County. Then I got to New-Salem (at that time in Sangamon, now in Menard County), where I remained a year as a sort of Clerk in a store. Then came the Black-Hawk war; and I was elected a Captain of Volunteers--a success which gave me more pleasure than any I have had since. I went the campaign, was elated, ran for the Legislature the same year (1832) and was beaten--the only time I ever have been beaten by the people. The next, and three succeeding biennial elections, I was elected to the Legislature. I was not a candidate afterwards. During this Legislative period I had studied law, and removed to Springfield to practise it. In 1846 I was once elected to the lower House of Congress. Was not a candidate for re-election. From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, practiced law more assiduously than ever before. Always a whig in politics, and generally on the whig electoral tickets, making active canvasses--I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.
