Inner and outer disorder

In Eliot and His Age, a literary biography of T. S. Eliot, Russell Kirk observes:

All about him, in those late years when I knew him, he perceived inner and outer disorder, but was not dismayed. 

For Eliot, it was important that "we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph." Preserve the good, resist evil. As he grew as a writer, Eliot was moved to embrace the idea that

the world is real, but… the self perceives the world only in a glass, darkly A general intention among men to reconcile their different – and fragmentary – points of view throughout common references cannot suffice to avert solipsism; neither can the possession of a common language. For us to catch some glimpse of what we really are, and to act with some apprehension of the human condition, we have to pass beyond abstruse ideas… we must nurture the moral imagination.

 The moral imagination, Kirk explains elsewhere, is "that power of ethical perception" which transcends "the barriers of private experience and momentary events." It is the "apprehending of right order in the soul."

Kirk makes explicit religious appeals in discussing the moral imagination (a phrase borrowed from Edmund Burke), but as I see it, religion or no religion, one must choose optimism over cynicism if one is to possess a moral imagination. That optimism could have its source in Christ, in Buddha, or in existence itself. Whatever the case, the moral imagination acknowledges the lessons that can be learned from history, literature, music, and other art forms, and compels us to use that knowledge so that we may preserve the good and resist the "strange gods" that come with consumerism, apathy, and being, like Prufrock, the "flaccid Everyman."

We are at the intersection of time and the timeless. Ultimately, to possess a moral imagination is to acknowledge that we are all human and should act like and be treated as such. That, I think, is something that has been lost, individually and collectively. But I remain hopeful that that will change.