Moral Imagination

What is “moral imagination?” It is the network link of self-reflective sensitivity within the web-life continuum. It is the smoldering of deep conscious intuitions that eventually flare in full flame of consciousness—the spontaneous and perpetual process of reflective enlightenment. It is the vitality of internet consciousness and its associative links; it’s a medium for joining individual sensibility with universal enlightenment. It is the interplay of fiction and fact, of fideism and faith, of science and religion, of evolution and fixation, of sense and nonsense—all of which by themselves confound consciousness.

Because we personally experience the hurt of wrongdoing and the benefit of rightdoing we know the difference between right and wrong, good and evil. Moral imagination is the venue of conscious leaps that register the difference between good and evil based on outcomes of choices/ actions. Much of the good and harm we do are of our choosing.

Inherent in symbiotic evolution is a moral dilemma, for the way of individual life is by way of preying on other life. We originate from other life and we are sustained by other life even as other life depends on us for renewal and sustainability. Whatever we do, is with consequence on other life. By our choosing we are blessing and curse to other life.

This reality, this consciousness speaks to the natural and unavoidable ambiguity of life, namely, as to the side-by-side reality of good and evil, of harm and wellbeing from the consumption of other, and of the necessity to suffer diminishment for the wellbeing of other. The latter choice of altruism—willingness to give of ourselves for the wellbeing of other—illustrates what it means to be “Godlike.” The “sacrificial” choice of thinking as God would think, of doing as God would do, is the choosing of “Eucharist.”

Reflection of the “divine” is prompted by the reality of moral ambiguity, of the side-by-side reality of good and evil, of increase and diminishment, of the conscionable and the unconscionable. Eucharist isn’t just thinking Christ-like, it’s doing as Jesus would do. More than ritual representation, more than consciousness in imagination, Eucharist is doing as God would do. Imagination compels us to reflect negatively as well as positively if we would be moral, that is, if we would distinguish the good from the bad and opt for the good, the conscionable. By nature we are divinely confounded to discern self in reflection.

Self-reflection accomplishes conscious enrichment that necessarily deals with thoughts of the absurd (things that confound us) and thoughts of the purposeful, for the realities of both are part and parcel of the seeming mindlessness of nature in processing symbiotic evolution. The absurd, the “evil” of disintegration is a precondition to the purposeful, to reintegration; dark and light strands are woven in the patterns of evolving life, of human thinking. Nature’s ambiguity is awesome and fateful; just when we think we know how it is with nature she challenges our imagined wisdom. While patterns of nature (symbiosis) move in a general direction, they engage the contrarian options of parasitism, pathology, and the survival of the fittest—which episodically blend good and evil.

http://www.secondenlightenment.org/Symbiosis,%20the%20grammar%20of%20evolution.pdf

Nature is always in process of rewriting her script, and as creatures subject to nature’s revisions, we must ever reread and relearn her intentions and confounding ways. 

“It occurs to me, though, that our inability to read the Book of Nature—and yes, I intend the uppercase N in all its Romantic glory—doesn’t necessarily mean there is no book to be read, only that we can’t read it; that the stories we’ve told and the tools we’ve developed to disarticulate it, and the indifference we’ve cultivated to make it go away, won’t do. That we need something different. Why? Because the text still matters, whether we can decipher it or not. Because, as seems increasingly clear, unless we reach some proper accommodation with nature, show it a bit of respect, admit our ignorance of it, it will bury us with as little fan-fare as night follows day. The evolutionary tide of a billion years will wash over us and recede; a few ticks of the clock’s hand, and the scars we made will heal; a paper wasp, moving in the shadow of Lincoln’s lower lip, will tend its soft masticated nest. Which would be a shame: I’ve grown fond of our maudlin, murderous tribe.” Mark Slouka, ECLOGUE On the rich sin of meddling, Harpers Magazine, July 2009, pp 47, 48 (Quoted under terms of the Fair Use Doctrine)

The terror of dealing with the absurd is always with us. “War on terror” is first a war of making sense of the absurd and the purposeful. The war of mindlessness and self-destructive violence is first a “war of words”, of ideas that become ideologies, which start real wars. The mindlessness of violence only adds to the terror of absurdity. By whatever ideology justification is claimed, gratuitous violence is dishonorable, disordered and dishonest—it is the original sin of the waste of human/ natural ecology.

The moral imagination is the intuitional well of mindful choosing. Choices that waste life waste common wellbeing, physically and psychically. The intentional choosing of waste is demonic; choices of wellbeing, of preservation over wasting, are “divine.” Religion is about the purposeful options of humanity in the enlightening ways of the divine over the demonic. The devil lurks in absurd details and foments violence; authentic living is about clarifying purpose in the dark details, avoiding violence and seeking accommodation. Abraham’s tribe chooses to behave demonically toward its own and Nature, which is a shame, for I too am “fond of our maudlin, murderous tribe.”