To make the world better, we must imagine better. The future is made when we all become artists.
‘Why can’t things be how they used to be?”
‘I remember the good old days…’
‘Everything was better when we were kids…….’
A brief glance at literature from the last thousand years suggests people have been lamenting nostalgically for ‘the old days’ for as long as they’ve had someone to listen to them.
I do it too.
I’m not sure it does a lot of good.
Things back then weren’t great either.
‘Human beings tend to be blind to gradual changes in their environment, assuming that the way things are right now is how they always have been and always will be.’
(Climate: A New Story. Charles Eisenstein. p166)
Eisenstein refers to this phenomenon as ‘Change Blindness’
This reminded me of a passage in George Monbiot’s great book Feral. He writes that though people wax lyrical about the wild, unspoiled beauty of the Welsh mountains, he sees how much that landscape has been altered, spoiled even, by earlier generations of human habitation:
‘The ancient character of the land, the forests that covered it and the animals that lived in them — which until historical times included wolves, bears, lynx, wildcats, boars and beavers — have been forgotten by almost everyone. The open treeless hills are widely seen as natural.’
(Feral. George Monbiot. p.69)
He calls ‘Change Blindness’, ‘Shifting Baseline Syndrome’.
‘The people of every generation perceive the state of the ecosystem they encountered in their childhood as normal…. They often appear to be unaware that what they considered normal when they were children was in fact a state of extreme depletion’.
(Ibid)
While Monbiot and Eisenstein are both writing about the environment, Shifting Baseline Syndrome or Change Blindness afflicts every area of life.
We accept brutal warfare against civilians as ‘just how it is’ because it’s become increasingly familiar. When a war comes along that’s even more brutal than those that came before, where hospitals, journalists, and children are prime targets, we’re outraged. But that outrage fades, or gets explained away because it’s not so much worse than what’s come before, is it?
Depressingly the next generation, for whom this is their baseline, will react to future, worse (if that’s imaginable) atrocities, with a weary ‘that’s how the world’s always been…’
We assume an economic system that obscenely enriches some by committing daily violence against the many, is acceptable. We’re used to it. We’ve grown up being told it’s the natural order, justified by the spurious pseudo-science of Social Darwinism.
We tolerate health-destroying levels of stress because our parents lived under stress that was almost as bad.
Capitalism was once a relatively progressive alternative to the tyranny of Absolute Monarchy. Generation after generation accepted each step in its degradation. Now, we burn out and break down. Obscene wealth and preventable hunger coexist. Mental collapse and addictive behaviours are the norms — even in the most affluent and ostensibly prosperous nations in the world.
We accept the gradual degradation of our inner and outer landscapes because each small act of violence is not much worse than the one that came before. Each step only moves us a little beyond what we’re habituated to.
So we walk the path to an uninhabitable world — ecologically despoiled, violently oligarchic, where most of us live in an inner landscape of stress, mental illness, or wilful self-centered ignorance.
Not a pretty picture is it?
Step by blinded step towards a self-constructed hell.
Inevitable?
Absolutely not.
Anyone who tells you you’ve no power, no agency, and no hope is either justifying their cowardice or trying to exploit and enslave you.
Thatcher’s great rallying cry, “There is no alternative’ is a LIE.
A disgraceful, cynical LIE.
There are always alternatives.
How do we find them?
Our greatest tool is this: imagination.
Individually and collectively we can imagine things differently.
If we can imagine things differently, we can steer a different course.
Perhaps the best start though might not be to imagine a better future. It might be to observe our past and imagine from there.
Can you think back to your remembered baseline?
Then, can you imagine back from there?
Can you imagine a time when social relations, communities, the natural environment, and the economic system, were all healthier?
Can we start, not from what we know, but from what, even back then, could have been better?
Even though we must, of course, take action in the here and now, we can imagine the corruptions and degradations that created this here and now.
When we trace the fault lines of contemporary life, back beyond our individual baselines, we see the turnings society took, that led to terrible, often unintended consequences.
Let’s imagine from there.
This isn’t about some naive sense of ‘the old days were better’.
Some things have improved — life expectancy, general health (for many of us), access to food for significant parts of the world population, and general levels of education.
Let’s celebrate and build on those achievements.
We face catastrophes. Not just climate change, but poverty, species loss, ice melt, political tyranny, racism, colonialism, gender violence, and wealth inequality. They’re all part of the same interconnected crisis and we’ll not solve one unless we face them all.
Let’s imagine back to choices deep-time ancestors made.
Let’s imagine how the world would have been, had they made different choices.
Let’s imagine what new choices we might make.
Imagination.
The tool of the artist.
The power and importance of creativity is so beautifully expressed by one of the great writers of recent times, Ursula Le Guin:
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.
Or as Theatre Director, Anne Bogart writes:
Revolutions begin in small rooms
We don’t have to accept things just because, within the span of our memory, they’ve always been this way.
What’s familiar to us may not be a ‘natural condition’. It may be a condition already corrupted by the unintended consequences of human development over millennia.
We can, if we dare, imagine differently.
We can, if we dare, imagine wildly.
It’s not naive, utopian, or pointless. It’s acknowledging that we can transcend anything we’ve ever known if only we’re brave enough.
Of course, Le Guin’s quote doesn’t suggest imagination, in itself, is sufficient.
Imagination needs translation into words, deeds, actions, communities, relationships, and ecological regeneration.
Grow some trees.
Talk to a neighbour.
Protest the war.
Support Indigenous peoples.
Dismantle capitalism.
Work on your inner pain.
Tithe money to the traumatised victims of war.
Make compassion more than a meme you sometimes share.
Feed the birds.
Say a kind word to a stranger.
Do!
DO with imagination.
If we do without imagination, the best we’ll achieve is to slow the pace at which we walk our collective path to hell.
Let’s imagine a new path.
Every. Single. One. Of. Us.
Today.
Take action based on imaginative daring.
Choice.
Freed from the belief that the totality of what we know is the totality of what could be.
We’re artists.
What no longer serves us, even if it’s all we’ve ever known, we leave behind and imagine something new.
Today.
In every single action.