About a year ago I happened to read Russell Kirk's definition of the moral imagination. It went something like, "the apprehension of right order in the soul and in the commonwealth." This struck me at the time and has stayed with me ever since. Recent working through a lot of Southern Lit has brought this definition back to mind, and I have tried in what follows to put down some hazy thoughts, in an effort toward clarifying in my own mind what are some of the problems surrounding the destruction of the South in 1865 and its attendant cultural results.
As I take it, the moral imagination before the twentieth century was exhibited in its highest form by that old-fashioned species, the gentleman. (Since then it appears to have become the province of the artist and writer, albeit less concrete and certainly less lived out.) The gentlemen was heir to centuries of the western pursuit of "right order," and at the height of Protestant culture he could be said to have attained a fair degree of right order both in his soul and in the entire "commonwealth" that surrounded and supported him. In the South, which is my particular concern, this was most fully realized in the plantation--it was, said Richard Weaver, "a little cosmos in which things were arranged by a well understood principle giving coherence to the whole." (The Southern Tradition at Bay, pp. 33-34.) The gentleman of the South governed a small commonwealth of his own; the right order in his soul had come to maturity and now flowed out of him to give order to that part of the world that was given over to his care. In biblical terms, he was fulfilling the mandate given to Adam to live in fellowship with God and to arrange, cultivate, and give shape to his garden-kingdom.
In other words, the ideal of the gentleman is the condition in which his surroundings have been put in harmony with his own nature and purpose as a human being. The requirements of his moral nature have become consonant with the pressures of his environment.
Now slavery, it must be said, was one of the foundations of this way of life in the South (for good or ill; and we will not enter upon that discussion just now). The early difficulty of bringing right order to a society that now irrevocably comprehended a large, alien, and lately barbaric class of men, was solved by the institution of slavery. In the case of the South it truly was a domestic institution, not a commercial-imperial system as with the great European powers of the preceding centuries. Slaves in the South fulfilled more or less the role of the peasant classes of Europe--classes which depended on the right ordering of the gentlemen above them
All moral agents are also economic agents, and every institution with moral qualities must inevitably have economic qualities. Thus there is no necessary conflict between the economics and the ethics of slaveholding. The mere fact that bound labor was a source of wealth for the Southern planters does not mean the relationship was one-sided or exploitative.
I say all that as a lead-up to my next point, that the end of slavery unavoidably entailed the end of the gentleman. A fundamental principle of social order had been upended, and in the bloody Reconstruction that followed the War nothing less than a complete economic and political revolution was effected, with inevitable social and moral consequences. The South was now placed in the predicament of an Adam with no garden to tend. Without an economic basis for his moral identity, without the properly ordered environment in which to live out his given nature, Adam cannot be Adam. This must entail catastrophic psychic consequences, and it is more or less what happened in the South. Within a few generations of the fall, the inevitable train of events began to emerge.
In our modern society nearly every field in which the gentleman once exercised his task has been barred to him. He is now alienated from his environment, and if he remains true to his ideal his soul must be nearly rent in half, for his created nature demands one thing, but his environment demands another. He no longer has a garden to set in order; he is prisoner in a system that nearly forces him, if he wishes to survive, into actions that threaten to eventually destroy him.*
This is the tragical state of the South after 1865--a recapitulation, as it were, of the original fall, and a reliving of the psychic violence Adam suffered when he was driven from the Garden. The literary flowering of the South occurred just as it was passing out of the garden, harried by the angel with his flaming (or shall I say terrible swift) sword. Caught in the tension, men like Ransom, Faulkner, and Warren could not quite bring themselves to deny what their grandfathers stood for, but neither could they see their way to living out the principles they had inherited--so they stood in alienation and anguish, within sight of the garden but unable to attain it, haunted by Christ but somehow unable to lay hold of Him again.
*This is essentially the burden of Wendell Berry's writings.
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