David Bromwich in his career as an essayist has run contrary to most trends among public intellectuals. For one thing, he is one. And not just by today's lax standards either, but by the standards of a time when "public intellectual" did not encompass after-dinner speakers, popularizers, and one-man brands. Equally he is an exception to the decline in the quality of prose that has struck those high- and middlebrow publications where public intellectuals ply their trade. This trend, not coincidentally, has proceeded exactly as rapidly as the man of letters has been supplanted by the tenured academic, who, for all his qualifications, seems to have difficulty expressing himself clearly, much less beautifully. Despite being a tenured professor himself—at Yale University, where, I should disclose, I was briefly a student of his—Bromwich as a stylist belongs to the older, better class.

Moral Imagination is one of two books by Bromwich published this spring and, as a collection of essays, the one in which his work as a public intellectual is most on display. The other is a biography of Edmund Burke, which has been Bromwich's scholarly project for the better part of a decade. Apart from the title "Moral Imagination," a phrase which comes from the Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke is mostly absent from this book. The writers and thinkers treated at length are listed in the preface: Wordsworth, Ruskin, Gandhi, Virginia Woolf, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King. Apart from Ruskin, this sounds discouragingly like the list of people you most admire that one might hear from presidential candidates in a primary debate, but Bromwich is able to turn these authors to more interesting use than a politician would, perhaps because he has been saturating his mind with Burke for so many years, which for a man of the Left was bound to yield uncommon results.

The keystone essay of the first section of Moral Imagination is "A Dissent on Cultural Identity," a title which, like the list of names above, sounds like the prelude to something predictable—almost as if Bromwich intended to rehash his first non-scholarly book, Politics By Other Means (1994), which criticized the proponents of identity politics who were then attempting to subordinate the American university to what he referred to as "their race-class-gender chart." But Moral Imagination goes far beyond its predecessor. Having argued that academia should yield no ground to cultural identities, Bromwich now argues that no other realm should yield them any ground either.

"By every step you take in adding to the prestige of identity cultures, you contribute to make identity a political need with political leverage," he says. "This is never done without a cost to freedom, and it adds to the uneasy sense that a merely individual identity is not enough." The same damage is done whether the need for cultural identity is linked to metaphysics, as in Charles Taylor, or to democracy, as in Michael Walzer. Either way, "liberal culturalism is a lie, a gesture of shrugging off irony adopted late by persons who think habitually as ironists."

No position could be less Burkean, one might think, but even in what is essentially a broadside against "little platoons" we can trace the master's influence. The left-wing journalist H. N. Brailsford once wrote that with Burke, "one must ask not so much 'What did he believe?' as 'Whom did he pity?' " (In his own writings, Bromwich has called this "an acute remark.") Bromwich's turn against identity politics seems to have grown from the same sort of germ. What bothers him is not any general threat from creeping particularism, whether multiculturalist or Islamist or Christian-evangelical, but rather the individual tragedies that play out when a dissenter is trapped within an illiberal culture. His examples are Spinoza, Naipaul, and Rushdie, who made the difficult choice "to cease to belong as reclaimable property to the culture that 'constitutes' them," but one imagines that Bromwich is also thinking of examples closer to home: the tiger child who wants to take it easy and write poetry for a year, the immigrants' son who worked hard and made it to Yale only to be told that his first duty is to the culture he deliberately left behind. Liberalism has a moral duty to such people, Bromwich says, and it betrays them if it can do no more than offer smiling praise for their home culture's robustness.

This sets Bromwich apart from the other type of liberal universalist—alas, the predominant type—who comes to universalism by way of arrogance. This type sneers that he lives quite a moral life without belonging to any particular church, and cares quite seriously about public affairs without feeling patriotism toward any country, so why should any other man born with two legs walk with such crutches? Bromwich is mercifully free of this arrogance, and indeed he faults his opponents for having too much of it themselves. For them, the existential fear that cultural identity assuages is "an other-people's fear," Bromwich says. "We, the argument seems to say, know better … . But as for the others—even 'oppressive' cultures deserve our support for their sake, because those oppressive cultures 'provide many of their members with all that they can have' [Joseph Raz]. All that they can have of what?"

After unleashing all of this hostility toward the communitarians, Bromwich then rounds on the reader and endorses Burke's famous thesis that the process of learning to love humanity at large starts with loving those closest to us—family, neighbors, countrymen. This is not exactly grounds for agreement, however, since much depends on one's definition of "starts with." From long experience, Bromwich has learned that the "little platoons" are usually hauled out for purposes of self-exculpation—a way of saying that our present course of action may disregard the interests of vulnerable people outside our community, but then of course our circle of care is a work in progress and with any luck it will broaden to include even them someday, if perhaps not soon enough to do any good in this instance. This excuse-making is Bromwich's sworn enemy. Still, Burke's magnetic force draws him into acknowledging at least one sense in which it is true to say that moral obligations start near and spread outward.

"To make sense of Burke's concern for loyalty in a political party, one has to keep in mind his experience of the deeper loyalty of friendship," Bromwich writes in his Intellectual Biography of Edmund Burke, by way of flagging his subject's relationship with Joshua Reynolds. Burke was indeed criticized in his day for having far too exalted a view of the obligations of party membership, largely because his critics assumed all that high-flown talk of loyalty was simply a cover—for resentment that party defectors had weakened his own power, or for jealousy that they had bartered their allegiance so profitably. With any politician but Burke that cynicism might well have been justified, but Burke's experience of personal loyalty, its fruits and its sacrifices, had taught him what his words meant. That is the sense in which moral obligation must begin at the smallest scale. Concepts like charity, mercy, integrity, and all the rest are most properly applied to all mankind without regard for group membership, Bromwich argues (perhaps not entirely convincingly), but if you have only ever thought about them in their universal senses, you run the risk of throwing around words without grasping what they mean.

Speaking of knowing what words mean before you use them: Bromwich must be one of the few writers to wade into the Facebook wars who knows firsthand the possibilities foreclosed by digital distraction. Unlike most people who hymn the value of learning how to be alone in a room with oneself, contemplative alone-in-a-room-ness is for him a mental dwelling place and not a highly recommended vacation spot. Modern semi-Luddism is well-worn territory—though it wasn't when that section of the book was written; the essay "How Publicity Makes People Real" was first published years before Facebook went online—but Bromwich's personal authority makes his contribution valuable. He also discerns, as few others have, that the compulsion to confess our every deed to a digital audience has its roots in a religious impulse, and he may be the only writer who has correctly identified which religious impulse our online parrhesia is heir to: not the sacrament of confession, but prayers of supplication:

Broadcast therapy and reality TV had accustomed people to finding themselves most real when most revealed. The confessing person is spared anonymity and what is said to be the loneliness that makes anonymity a curse. Also, he or she is put in immediate and visible contact with a circle of helpers … . We have yet to reckon with the novel fact that the media have been so naturalized in the lives of many that they are now widely understood to intercede for us. They confer on experience a reality it would otherwise lack.

Social media have become false gods to which we send up prayers asking for our lives to be made better or our souls to be made better at bearing up. Many readers, when confronting the prospect of an unpublicized moment, will have felt the silence and the chill of loneliness Bromwich speaks of here. It is good to have someone of his stature to reassure us that the silence and the chill, far from indicating that you have wandered far from the road and deep into the woods, mean you have found the path at last.

The tour de force of the book is Bromwich's chapter on Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Self-Deceptions of Empire." It is also the book's most Burkean chapter, as well as the chapter where Bromwich's Burkeanism diverges most from the caricature now commonly understood by that term. But first, a word from our sitting president. The 2008 reissue of The Irony of American History, to the delight of the University of Chicago Press sales department, bore a blurb from Senator Barack Obama: "There's serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things."

"A fair digest considering it was extracted by a columnist on the run," judges Bromwich, "but in Obama's comment something is missing, and the something is not small. Niebuhr said that there is evil in the world; also, that there is evil in ourselves." He points out that the same people who nod along with Obama's blurb also nodded along when President Clinton refused to sign on to the International Criminal Court, on the grounds that Americans should have to answer to no law but their own. "America is to the world of nations what the right people are to the world of people," is how Bromwich summarizes this mindset, and no prizes for guessing who the right people are.

This, to bring Bromwich's themes full circle, is precisely the same fallacy committed by shallow Burkeans. Yuval Levin's recent study of Burke, The Great Debate, to take one example, paraphrases Burke's opposition to revolution as a belief that, however corrupt society may be, "there must always be a better option" than total revolt. This locates Burkean humility in a man's attitude to his circumstances and not his attitude to himself. Burke did want would-be revolutionaries to ask themselves empirical questions like whether things were really so awful and whether radical change really stood much chance of making matters better in the long run, but just as important were questions of self-examination: Can I honestly say that I am not showing contempt for those older and wiser? Am I being sufficiently humble about my abilities?

In the same way, Obama thinks he is being a clear-eyed Niebuhrite when he admits that some of his opponents are irredeemably wicked. Bromwich would prefer him to ask whether he might not himself be responsible for actions that cannot be redeemed just by pointing out that we live in a world of gray, not black and white. The reader may or may not endorse Bromwich's list of U.S. actions worth questioning: NSA surveillance, Guantanamo Bay, interference in Syria, militarism in general. But his request of the president is eminently credible in light of Moral Imagination, which, among its many virtues, is clearly a product of exactly such bracing self-reflection.

Helen Andrews is a policy analyst at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, Australia. She has written for First Things, The American Spectator, National Review, and other publications.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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