When the moral imagination leads to a spiritual non-materialism it leads away from reality, but not necessarily away from religion

T.S. Eliot and Russell Kirk rightly worried that the humanities and literature were turning away from the traditional Western “moral imagination,” and things certainly have gone that way. They worried that literature wasn't doing its job of adjusting to the conditions of human existence by adjustment to the traditional norms of Christian and Western tradition and was instead adjusting to weird norms or not adjusting at all.

But the “norms” are really related to human nature and so the judgment comes first from defining human nature and then from seeing how humans have socially and culturally adjusted to real human nature. It so happens that traditional religions did a good job of defining human nature the way the non-religious evolutionary sciences much later defined human nature as being basically kin-centered, gender defined, age-graded, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, among other things, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection.

But you'll notice no spiritualism in that sociobiological definition other than the general tendency of humans to create religions for successful survival and reproductive purposes. And it is from here that we can see the modern moral imagination go jumping off from the traditional norms of the Christian and Western imagination. This was not due to an “idyllic” or “demonic” imagination infiltrating into our cultures, as Eliot and and Kirk defined it, but was basically due to the natural biological will to power of the “usurpers.”

I know that philosophers tend to think their thinking is beyond the pedestrian drives of biology but they are deeply biased by it. You will notice that many of the pre and postmodern philosophers were not Christian: Husserl, Leo Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, etc. and they felt no compunction biologically or culturally to adjust to the conditions of human existence by adjusting to the norms of the traditional Western Christian moral imagination, and instead adjusted to ethnic norms, weird norms, no norms at all, or a relativity of all values.

None of them adjusted to the biological origin of social behavior, and that explains their biases. The work now of literature and the humanities is to take the dusty physical and biological sciences and give them a moral imagination which is not dusty. For example, psychological novels can apply the moral imagination to adjusting to human nature as defined by evolutionary psychology and sociobiology. When the moral imagination leads to a spiritual non-materialism it leads away from reality, but not necessarily away from religion (see theological materialism), so futurist novels can deal with the moral dilemmas of materially involving to real supermaterial Godhood.