The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement (2016)
Close your eyes for a moment and imagine a better world. Let your imagination run wild. Use all your senses. Make your imagined world vivid and tangible and awesome. Create a place in your mind where all that you truly value is realised and you walk through each day with a smile.
What did you see?
I’m sure that most of you ignored me and read on. You didn’t close your eyes because that would be weird. Someone might see you and think you had dozed off at your desk. You didn’t want to look unproductive, or maybe you’re just not in the mood.
Those few that indulged me – what arose in your mind’s eye? Vague, blurry images? Hazy, spectral futures? Maybe you glimpsed solar panels or trees dotted across a familiar urban landscape – a world much like now but greener.
I’m betting most of you found it difficult to imagine a better world. It’s not something we practice very often. But if it’s true that we need to imagine something before we can make it happen, this failure of imagination really matters. As American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez puts it in the film A Message from the Future, ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’.
A growing chorus of scholars and activists argue that failure of imagination is at the heart of our collective failure to address global challenges like biodiversity loss, climate change, conflict and poverty:
There’s a deep malaise affecting our capacity for imagination… We can more easily imagine the end of the world than a better future.
Geoff Mulgan, Another World is Possible (2022)
Even among people who work within the ‘creative industries’, their imagination seems increasingly harnessed to create demand for things nobody really needs, whose production is increasingly pushing our human and ecological systems to the brink of collapse – almost as if imagination has been coopted in the service of our own extinction.
Rob Hopkins, From What is to What If (2019)
I am reluctant to join Mulgan and others and frame this as an imagination crisis. In our time of polycrisis or permacrisis, few terms are more over-used by a breathless media than crisis. When everything is a crisis, nothing is. The latest crisis becomes just another thing to feel helpless about and, ultimately, to ignore.
It’s also more accurate to describe what has happened to our collective imagination as a gradual degradation rather than a sudden crisis. I’m borrowing here from Jake Garber and Hannah McDowell who write about the dominant imaginary and its degrading impact. Let’s explore the structural forces that are degrading our imaginaries.
There is no alternative
The most lasting legacy of neoliberalism is a war on the imagination, the story that tells us there is no other way.
Naomi Klein, Narratives for the Future (2020)
In my opening post, I included the quotation: ‘it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’. Mark Fisher uses this quote to open his book Capitalist Realism (2009) and goes on to describe capitalist realism as:
a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.
In this atmosphere, under this dominant imaginary, only capitalist futures are seriously considered. This has been the case for decades now, captioned by Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that ‘there is no alternative’ in the 1980s and cemented by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The problem is that the rapaciousness of capitalism, its demand for ever more resources, more commodification, more everything, is wrecking the planet and deepening inequity. While much can be achieved by reforming capitalism, limiting our imagination to capitalist futures forecloses a huge possibility space that could help to address global challenges.
Capitalism does not, necessarily, discourage imagination; after all, imagination is at the heart of innovation, the engine of economic growth. Rather, just as it leads to disparities in wealth, it creates imagination inequality. Those with wealth have time and freedom to imagine. Those without are either struggling just to survive or expected to be busy cogs in the machine, actively discouraged and distracted from activities as unproductive as imagination. As Henry Giroux puts it:
State and corporate sponsored ignorance produced primarily through the disimagination machines of the mainstream media and public relations industries in diverse forms now function chiefly to erase selected elements of history, disdain critical thought, reduce dissent to a species of fake news, and undermine the social imagination.
Of course, it is a lie that there is no alternative. Our current capitalist system was imagined into place and other systems can be imagined to take its place. Geoff Mulgan titled his book on imagination ‘Another World is Possible’, borrowing from the slogan of the World Social Forum, as a reminder that there are alternatives.
Negative politics
As long as a society’s image of the future is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full blossom. Once the image of the future begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture cannot long survive.
Fred Polak, The Image of the Future (1954)
The sociologist Andreas Reckwitz argues that Western modernity’s promise of continuing progress cannot be sustained in the face of mounting ecological and social losses. This manifests as a turn to negative politics and populism, looking to the past as a golden age rather than remaining open to the possibilities of the future. The lack of compelling political visions for a better future is palpable.
As trust in institutions and politicians declines and polarisation grows, the spaces for collective imagination also shrink. Fuelled by misinformation, disinformation and a 24/7 news industry eager for conflict, our public sphere has become a toxic, oppositional space rather than a forum for free exchange of ideas. When we are not even able to organise our public sphere to support constructive discussion, how can we possibly imagine better futures together?
The colonisation of imagination
I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own in order to break free.
adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy (2017)
Garber and McDowell describe the dominant imaginary as ‘white, male, capitalist, eurocentric, colonial’. Most of the world did not ask for this imaginary to be forced upon them, to be told there is no alternative, to be sold imaginaries that degrade people and planet. We can understand this as a colonisation of imagination, paralleling the physical colonisation of the Global South by the Global North. Ways of being in the world that do not fit the dominant imaginary are actively marginalised and disparaged; only one world is possible.
Much of this colonisation is perpetuated by education systems that focus on producing productive individuals to serve the economy. Education, in most countries, does little to build imaginative capacity or cultivate diversity.
The world contains a rich tapestry of cultures with different ways of being in the world and different imaginaries. We need this diversity if we are to imagine a way out of our many global challenges. We need a world where many worlds fit, as the Zapatistas said.
The thinning of imagination
We can distinguish what I call ‘thick’ imagination from ‘thin’ imagination. Thin imagination is vague and partial, whereas thick imagination combines ideas, philosophy, programmes and detailed implementation.
Geoff Mulgan, Another World is Possible (2022)
These and other forces have thinned our collective imagination, rendering us short of practical ideas and agency for creating a better future. We can only vaguely imagine a better future and have little idea about the pathways to get there.
I saw this in work I did with Sandra Waddock where we surveyed change agents about their visions for the future. All were able to convincingly critique the present and most could sketch a promising vision for a better future but few could imagine plausible pathways to move towards that future. We seem stuck in a present almost nobody wants, unable to imagine a way out.
Yet we are all capable of imagination. In workshops where participants are given the time, space and support to imagine, they can do it. We all have this capacity and can cultivate it. Rather than thinking of imagination in crisis, I think it is more helpful to recognise how structural forces have slowly eroded our collective ability to imagine over decades. Restoring our collective imaginative capacity will require patient, regenerative work.
In the next post, I will say more about what I mean by regeneration, the other half of my tagline ‘regenerating imagination, imagining regeneration’.
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