If you remember, the first in our series on the Long Game identified the three “endgames” of wealth: Division, Preservation and Growth. The second told of the development of powerful structures and the need to create a family culture sufficient to counterbalance these structures and the advisors who support them. This piece serves as a pivot: it describes one way of seeing the seminal reality of creating a robust and resilient culture. This part of the series may feel abstract, but it lays a critical foundation for what is to come.
There is a little piece on the homepage of my website entitled “Imagine.” It goes:
Imagine
Your family is working together in ways they never have before.
Conflicts that you thought were not going to be solved are firmly in the past. Your children are holding one another accountable. Your success is empowering their success, not simply breeding entitlement. Your family is not only realizing your hopes but is planning together and is excited about the future.
This need not be a fantasy – we help to make this a reality for the families who engage us.
At first blush, this seems a flight of fancy. It seems impossible; as though it exists in a dream or an alternate universe. It seems saccharine and unrealistic. It may be true of other families, but not the family you are in. Yet in my experience, that is not the case at all – this piece of imagination reflects the hardest edges of the realities of shifting family culture. It expresses an in-breaking of an emergent future.
Otto Scharmer suggests that how we shape our collective attention determines outcome. Another way of saying this is what is possible is determined by how we see things – that how we construct or fabricate our individual and collective lives depends on the limits of our capacity to see and, more importantly, to imagine. The more we lock up our perception, the less range of motion we tend to have. The less range of motion, the more stuck we become. Opening to a wider future – creating new ways of seeing the ongoing development of our individual and collective lives – actually creates possibility and can even be seen as a core essence of what we call potential. As the poet David Whyte says in his poem Mameen: “recall the way you are all possibilities you can see and how you live best as an appreciator of horizons.” Potential, from this vantage point, is that which could plausibly unfurl from conditions as they now exist.
In this sense, all change begins as an act of creative imagination. I cannot intentionally move into a better future unless I can first imagine – in my mind’s eye – that better future.
I have written often of moral imagination. The emphasis most people put on this phrase comes on first word – moral. It is a strong word that evokes visceral responses. Many think of “morality” as constraining – harkening back to Puritanical or Victorian notions of buttoned-down propriety. They see it as a reactionary term consigned to a bygone age. Even the dictionary defines it in terms of principles and codes of conduct. I thoroughly understand the response and in many ways I am sympathetic to it.
Yet there is a part of me that believes we too quickly consign powerful ideas (in the form of powerful words) to antiquated ways of thinking and thereby limit our ability to see things that could be important. Words like grace, redemption, penitence and moral were coined and used in the context of a mythic age and cast aside in the collective zeitgeist of rational modernity and post-modernity. Perhaps to leave these words behind leaves us impoverished and cut off from aspects of our deepest humanity. These words, after all, described essential human experiences. Babies could be lying in the street along with the bathwater we tossed out in our headlong rush to the future. Turning away from such words with visceral disgust could reflect our societal shadow, but playing with them might bring us face to face with important aspects of a disowned self.
Our aversive reaction to the term “moral” makes visible something worthy of reflection. This reactivity might mean we are running from what we just don’t want to see. In an age of dissection, cold rationality and relativity – and the apotheosis of individual freedom – words of soul and character can empower us to move towards hosting the future in different ways. Ancient words – reimagined and stripped of their religious overtones but recast with the deeply human truths they carry – can restore meaning and deep relatedness in a social fabric. What if “moral” doesn’t have to do with a code of conduct or rules – but rather is rooted in the ability to see one another as human beings and to understand that our collective futures are entwined? What if our fates require us to see beyond words such as sustainability, civility and pluralism to ask the deeper question of what does it mean to be a moral agent in a world of relatedness? To ask the moral question becomes, “How can you and I, who are so different, stand and continue to stand in an ongoing relationship with each other.” Orland Bishop suggests that a central question in his life is “Who must I be for you to be free?” That is a deeply moral question – and it begs for a creative answer.
“Moral imagination” is something quite different from a moribund constraint or tired moral codes that serve only to limit individuality, freedom and self-expression. “Moral imagination” cannot truly be dissected into two parts – the moral part and the imaginal part. Rather it describes a gestalt where the whole is different than the sum of its parts. It could be written “moral-imagination.”
When we place the emphasis on the idea of the imaginal, it shifts something in our understanding. In our modern and post-modern world, we live in a place where distinction and dissociation reigns. The scientific world view lulls us into a sense that if we can rationally tear things apart and understand the constituent parts, we can solve the problems of the universe. In the West, we are all children of Aristotle. The notion of rational dissection of wholes into parts is a powerful tool, and it yields profoundly useful results – but it also looses something in the translation. I remember sitting in a biology class where we killed a frog (with ether) and then dissected it. The dissection purported to teach us how the frog “worked.” The irony of this exercise was utterly lost on the teacher and on me at the time. To understand “life”, we had to kill the living thing and thereby rob ourselves of any understanding of the “whole” of the frog. It turned out that the frog could not be reduced to its constituent parts – there was something “experiential” or “subjective” going on in the frog that killing took away. That subjective experience of “frogness” may have arisen from its biology and undoubtedly doesn’t exist without it (I am not suggesting some Cartesian dualism here), but this “aliveness” was clearly something in its own right, not mere epiphenomena. The whole was indeed different from the sum of its parts.
So too with moral imagination. Using moral imagination we conceive a future in which the fabric of relationships – the connected web of being – is different and better than it is today. This notion presupposes that we cannot be fully autonomous, but that we are inherently connected at some level to other people. We have options in how we fabricate that social tapestry. We can imagine a future that is much like the present – the same patterns and behaviors going forward in cyclic stuckness. Or we can imagine a future that is worse – a descending spiral of acrimony and anger. Or we can imagine a future of evolution and growth. Each of these imagines us in a web of relationships. And in each case these relationships have an experiential quality. That experiential quality – the living process of relationship – is fundamentally a moral state. In this sense “morality” has to do with the intersubjective (or shared) sense of what the relationship is. How I relate to you IS moral. I chose to be authentic or disingenuous. I chose to act with compassion or cruelty. I either listen or dictate. All of these things are expressions of my capacity for moral imagination. These are the easy cases.
In the harder cases, we face ever deepening levels of complexity where we must engage and then act. If you and I come to agreements (what I might call covenants to reclaim and re-purpose another ancient word), we can choose how we will construct the fabric of our relationships. This level of fabrication of our collective future becomes a gateway for creativity in the midst of ambiguity and complexity. This is a decidedly post-postmodern notion of morality – not that there is a morality that has been given to us and exists independently of us (by divine fiat or natural law) or even one that is relative (your morality is as good as mine and so who am I to judge?), but one that is co-constructed with a view to maintaining and sustaining relationship. In this sense, we are building the future together.
I suggested in the last piece that there is a primal contradiction in the planning for wealth that occurs in most cases, namely: “A strong individual leaves an organizational legacy that has radically and utterly failed to come to terms with the hard phenomena of collectivity.” This hard phenomenon of collectivity is the “frogness” of a family – the whole – which is rarely taken into account in the planning process. Planning, in most cases, is akin to vivisection. It is coldly rational and supremely technical and, in its implementation, it can kill the frog – or, in this case, the vibrancy of family.
I find that working with families from the standpoint of moral imagination is critical to success. Helping them fabricate a future – to see differently and with greater fluidity – is essential. Of course, we don’t approach this task head on. We don’t ask “How do you imagine a moral future of relatedness to each other?” That is too abstract and too contrived. Instead, we start small with very concrete steps. We make visible what is already happening. We ask some big but grounded questions – all premised on the stems of “How do we…?” or “What would happen if…?” or “Why should we…?” These types of questions – and others like them – open up imaginal space. They get the juices flowing. We often tell stories of possible futures (scenario planning) because stories open imagination of what is possible. We come to tentative agreements that we test out. We co-design and co-deploy prototypes and probes to see if we can adopt new patterns of behavior. As so, from this vantage of point of moral imagination, we begin to make progress.
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Our next piece in the Long Game series will look at individuality and why the creation of unified visions are counterproductive for families. We will see that the mission statements and the values statements that are the techniques du jour with families are potentially dangerous. We will look at what is required instead to shape and form a family culture.
© 2016. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.
— March 30, 2016