Do ideas change the world?

Even in the hellscape of modern America, moral imagination remains the most important engine of progress

Do ideas matter, when it comes to politics? In theory, the outcomes of elections reflect, with only minor distortions, the political preferences – the ideas – of the electorate. That’s what representative democracy is supposed to mean. Only it doesn’t work out that way. The range of choices over which the American electorate, at least, is allowed to exercise its preference is sharply and systematically constrained. Electoral politics is dominated by two major parties, whose programmes, to the extent they differ, correspond to the needs and goals of opposing sectors of the business community. The goals and ground rules that all sectors of business agree on constitute the framework of public policy, rarely or never challenged in the electoral arena. Policy proposals – especially from the left – that fall outside this framework remain invisible and inaudible.

This is not a conspiracy theory. Business leaders do not meet in secret to decide how best to delude the public mind and thwart the public will. They don’t need to. In a capitalist democracy, business control over the state is assured structurally, in two ways. First, since most people are economically vulnerable – they depend on employment rather than on ownership or some other entitlement to survive – the best predictor of their voting behaviour is likely to be the state of the economy at election time. Overall, the state of the economy is determined by the level of investment. Since investment decisions in a capitalist economy are made privately, governments must nurture that most delicate of blossoms, “investor confidence”.

The second reason for business dominance is that political participation in a mass society costs a lot of money. Voting may be free, but setting the agenda is enormously expensive. To work out and put forth a detailed political programme at the national level requires information, organization, and publicity, and all these require cash. Since most of the people with a great deal of spare money are capitalists, they have an effective monopoly on public political speech.

There are even finer meshes. Just as the traditional rebelliousness of Parisians depended on the city’s maze-like character and was tamed by Baron Haussmann’s mid-19th-century renovations, the living conditions of 20th-century American left-wing intellectuals were disrupted, as Russell Jacoby wrote in The Last Intellectuals, by “the restructuring of the cities, the passing of bohemia, the expansion of the university”. Cheap, comfortable urban space, where the temporarily marginal can congregate, no longer exists. Print or online, little magazines can rarely afford to pay their contributors more than nominally. The spectacular postwar growth of higher education sucked virtually an entire generation of intellectuals into college teaching; a contracting job market reinforced their academic socialisation, which emphasised specialisation and deference and subtly discouraged ideological explicitness. The panic currently raging among the young about their career prospects could not be a more effective de-radicalising agent if it had been designed for that purpose by the US Chamber of Commerce.

The foregoing, as the ideologically literate will recognize, is a precis of Historical Materialism 101. It can be compressed still further, into a sentence by Marx: “In every society, the ideas of the rulers are the ruling ideas.” But though historical materialism may be true, it can’t be the whole truth, or else why write about ideas? True, “ideas are material forces”, says the sophisticated historical materialist, meaning that they matter. But what are ideas, actually? Are they material or immaterial? What does that distinction even mean – how would the world look different if we decided the question in one way or the other? And do we need to answer it at all – do we really require a philosophical theory about ideas?

As the reader of my new collection will discover, I prefer critics to theorists. Political theory seems to me largely – though not entirely, of course – an elaboration, as often as not unnecessary, of moral intuitions and imaginative identifications. Even John Rawls, the greatest political philosopher of the last hundred years, did not really improve on Matthew 25:18-31. Much as I respect Marx (himself as much a critic as a theorist), my theory of social change comes from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Defense of Poetry: “The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.”

Imagination, sympathy, solidarity – by whatever name: this is the true engine of political progress. Of course, imagination, too, needs criticism – it must not put reason to sleep. We know what the sleep of reason produces. It’s tempting to say that imagination is the accelerator, reason the brake; that imagination supplies the force and reason the form; imagination the motive and reason the means. But the very neatness of the dichotomy should make us suspicious. If they’re wholly distinct, how can passion subvert reason or reason subdue passion?

A humane politics starts with the fact of unnecessary suffering. We need a moral imagination to notice it and care about it; we need reason and knowledge to figure out what to do about it. (Though we can overdo the latter; as Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out, the one surefire way to reduce poverty is to give poor people money.) But whatever our favourite theory of moral psychology and of the relationship between imagination and reason, it’s clear that noticing and minding come first. The impulse of sympathy, and the emotive identification with another person on which it rests, are the origin of moral imagination. Most of my subjects – Christopher Lasch, Richard Rorty, Dwight Macdonald, Barbara Ehrenreich, and others – are exemplars of moral imagination. The exceptions – William F Buckley, Henry Kissinger, Irving Kristol, Thomas Friedman – are exemplary failures of moral imagination.

I finished my new book in the wake of the 2024 US election. A majority of voters chose to vest the executive power of the US government in a chronic liar and sociopath, a man denounced by 200 of his former colleagues in government as dangerously incompetent and authoritarian, and whose party is intent on razing to the ground the social and political architecture – the New Deal – that produced the most prosperous and equitable period in American history. The disdain of Trump voters for the Democratic Party is understandable, but their inability to perceive the far worse toxicity of the Republican Party is unaccountable and will condemn millions of their fellow citizens – and themselves – to economic hardship and environmental catastrophe.

Before a disaster of this magnitude, an essay collection seems quixotic. I began publishing in 1980; my entire writing life has been shadowed by the baneful ascendancy of the New Right. What sustains hope, for me, is a metaphor of Rilke’s. In Letters to a Young Poet, he writes that love is a form of knowledge, and that a single act of creation is the fruit of “a thousand forgotten nights of love”. He hopes lovers will be solemn and responsible as well as joyful but reassures his youthful correspondent that, even when they are not, their passion is not wholly dissipated but is passed down to the future, despite themselves, as though “in a sealed envelope”. That is as much as I hope for these fragments of mine.

This is an edited extract from The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia by George Scialabba

[Further reading: On the responsibility of intellectuals]