Our Moral Crisis

We find ourselves facing a serious political crisis in this country. But this crisis cuts deeper than the nonsense of politicians and the absurdity of what is going on in Washington, D.C. To be sure, Donald Trump is a serious problem. But he isn’t the problem. Ours is a deep moral crisis – where our way of life has been overrun by selfishness, greed, and hatred, and calloused hearts (made possible by that way of life) have seized the reins of power.

In many ways, what we are experiencing is unprecedented and, in many ways, it is wholly familiar. The country has had to grapple with the madness at its heart since the founding. America imagines itself, at once, as a beacon of freedom and as a white Republic. The two views cannot be held together without contradiction, and the result has distorted and disfigured not only the polity but the people who claim freedom as their possession and theirs alone. This heresy sits at the heart of the American project.

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I think this account offers a general framing of the malaise of our current days. Anti-democratic forces have always threatened to overwhelm democracy in this place. If we are honest, we would have to admit that we have only been a democracy since 1965, and barely then. But despite that reality, or perhaps because of it, we have abundant examples of people speaking back, of ordinary people striking the blow for freedom by risking everything for a more just order. In short, we have a vast tradition of counter examples of how to respond to the moral crises that have threatened this place, over and over again.

From the Stono Rebellion in 1739 to the extraordinary courage of people in the twin cities, we see the audacity to refuse consent – to stand up to authoritarian forces that seek to make us cower in fear and to stand by silently and be complicit, in that silence, to the evils of our day.

I certainly don’t want to minimize the uniqueness of our political and moral crisis today. And I certainly don’t want to obscure the particular features of this iteration of authoritarianism in this country. I understand the rhetorical utility of phrases like the “afterlife of slavery” and “the new Jim Crow,” but I always want to be mindful of the innovations and distinctive forms of new regimes of racist power. I want to keep track of the shifts that come with certain victories in struggle, no matter how fleeting those victories may be (We are not slaves, and that matters. And the formal system of Jim Crow has been dismantled even as we acknowledge the residual traces of its logics).

That said, we can still draw on the past, as funded experience (to use the language of John Dewey), that will allow us to address the problems of our time with a bit more than luck. Lessons learned, experiences had, traditions and methods come to us as tools in our efforts to address the crises we confront. When we look back to past struggles, what we see, among many things, are the traditions/examples that offer a more democratic view of American life – a moral vision that assumes the dignity and standing of human beings – and how they faltered or failed.

Abolitionism, the women’s movement, the labor movement, the Black freedom struggle of the 20^th century, the gay liberation movement, etc. what connects them all – a throughline of sorts – is a refusal to concede to the terms of domination that insists that certain human beings matter more than others.

Each, in their own complicated way, sought to expand the imagination of not only those fighting for a more just America, but of those committed to an unjust order.

And this is important: the imagination has always been a critical battleground of struggle. To get us to see beyond the constraints of now – to imagine the “as yet” as a form of radical critique of the present order. They wanted people to believe that slavery was natural, that the place of women as the property of men was divinely sanctioned, that race determined the value of life, that surplus value defined the good, and that love could only come in one form. Movements sought to expand the possible, because those committed to domination aimed to constrict and confine what we could imagine. They want us all to look through a glass darkly

One of the important aims of struggle was to offer “the collyrium” to clear the eyes of ordinary people so that we might see the vice and follies that block the way to substantive change—so that we might do the imaginative work of imagining ourselves otherwise.

And it is here that the arts play such an important role. They help provide what the historian Nell Painter called “elbow room” to imagine ourselves differently: the space where the techniques of domination run up against the techniques of self-making.

Of course, song and image can document our times, offer a commentary on our miseries, and fortify the spirit as we ready the self to engage the powers that be. But the power of art is so much more than a reflection of the times, a mirror of our days. Art excites the imagination, which is a critical feature of moral struggle. It works that muscle in the darkest of hours. One can see it at work on the chain gang. Can hear it in the humming of an elderly woman, rocking back and forth, as a memory threatens to flood in. One can see it in the hands of someone who takes discarded pieces of thread, scraps of thrown away items and makes something beautiful. Or, in the language of the poet that erupts out of the mouths of people in unexpected places.

The exercise of that muscle says to the person who may be trapped in the bowels of a slave ship or locked away in an immigration detention center that God is NOT dead, because God speaks to us through our imaginations.

If we are to look to past traditions of struggle, let’s scour them for, among other things, their imaginative work: how they oriented people to the long durée of the fight. How they sought to cultivate the soil for a different kind of human being to emerge on the other side of madness. How they created the elbow room. That work is critically important for our time. Ours is a moral crisis. What is desperately needed is a new humanism, a different way of conceiving of what it means to be human rooted in Imago Dei.

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