Imagine There's No Imagination

Philip Slater, a writer worth reading, observes:

Daniel Pink's recent book, A Whole New Mind points out that left-brain abilities, like physical ones, have been automated and outsourced, that IQ tests predict career success about as well as astrology, and that the important abilities in the future will be things like pattern recognition, empathy, and imagination. This is very unfortunate for us.

Worst of all, we seem to be losing our capacity for imagination.

Slater's evidence is anecdotal but chilling in a Jay Leno sort of way. For example, these examples of high school students struggling with an assignment to use simile and metaphor:

"Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center."
"The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon."
"John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met."

If imagination is endangered, so is the future. Pattern recognition is imagination applied to past, present or future, but all we have of the future is what we can imagine. Jung comes close to saying--and James Hillman says it outright--that the human imagination and the human soul are the same. From imagination come empathy, altruism and the cooperation that enables civilization and the continued life of the planet. Imagination is how we understand our feelings of kinship with each other and the world that sustains us.

Here's another writer definitely worth reading, Barry Lopez, from a terrific interview in The Sun Magazine:

How can I help? The one thing I know how to do, I think, is turn a pattern I see into language. I like to go a long ways away, try to recognize a human pattern there, and then put it in an accessible form for people at home, so they might recognize the outline of what’s been troubling them and figure out what to do about it.

That's the function of imagination that we use in very practical ways all the time.

It's hard however to look at the extreme rabid rightists and fault them for complete lack of imagination. Among their current fantasies is believing the moron in chief when he refers to a group of stem cells smaller than the period at the end of this sentence, which have no independent life and are destined for disposal, as "boys and girls."

That's his reason for exercising his first veto, to prevent stem cells from being used in research that is likely to mitigate suffering and save actual lives of real boys and girls. But then that's the chief use, or misuse, of the imagination on the Rabid Right: to lie, cynically and often, for the political advantage that keeps them in power and puts money in the hands of their pals and themselves. It doesn't take much imagination to see that.