A Failure of Imagination

Primacy of Imagination

Imagination is one of the things that sets us apart from other species. It allows us to empathize by imagining what it’s like to be in somebody else’s shoes. Our imagination lets us see a future. We gain a capacity for sacrifice and so we stockpile, we keep records, we invest. This allows us turn scarcity into abundance. There is something about this that is, in some sense, magical. The matter and energy in the material world is fixed. In contrast, Dorothy Sayers observed that the world of imagination increases “by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction or rearrangement of what went before.”¹Dorothy Sayers, Mind of the Maker

Imagination touches on the divine. It’s the closest we get to an act of absolute creation ex nihilo, i.e. creation out of nothing. It’s this quality, more than any other, that bears resemblance to the Creator. The creative idea is the one force capable of generating the physical out of the intellect. It is in this sense that we are made in the image of God. One could argue that artistic endeavor is primary to everything else. Scientific laws are bound to be discovered. The identity of the discoverer is somewhat incidental. Not so with the arts. Wendel Berry points out, “We must assume that we had one chance each for The Divine Comedy and King Lear. If Dante and Shakespeare had died before they wrote those poems, nobody ever would have written them.”²Wendell Berry, Faustian Economics (2006), The World-Ending Fire Collection, pg. 233 Unlike with science, there are no second chances with these fundamentally creative endeavors.

Failure to Imagine

The imagination gives form to our experience. It takes images and sees correspondences that give shape to our experiences. It’s how we organize the content of our experience and apprehend it as significant. This shapes how we perceive the world. As Thomas Howard put it, imagination “is what makes us refuse to accept experience as mere random clutter, and makes us try without ceasing to shape that experience so that we can manage it.”³Thomas Howard, Chance or Dance: A Critique of Modern Secularism Allow me to illustrate this. I have a friend who is a geologist. He sometimes points out interesting geologic features that we encounter in the landscape. I can never spot any of these features on my own. But after my friend points out a particular glacial landform and explains how it came to be I cannot look at this feature without seeing its long ago interaction with a now receded glacier. This was in front of me the whole time, but I had no framework to make sense of it. Matthew Crawford describes something similar in an experience he had rebuilding an engine with a master mechanic.⁴Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft There were subtle wear patterns on a few of the parts. From that the veteran mechanic correctly diagnosed a valve spring that was out of spec. To Crawford the problem was completely hidden. Like me, he lacked the intimate understanding that only the expert possessed to unlock the mystery. But once provided with adequate context for what we were seeing, these things became obvious. Seemingly random patterns begin to make sense as the imagination gives form to these experiences.

Powerful as it is, the human imagination can still fail us. History if full of surprises. Causes and effects seem obvious looking back. But history only looks inevitable in hindsight. The future is indeterminate. We fail to imagine Hannibal crossing of the Alps or the events on 9/11. These events were practically unimaginable. Likewise, we do not recognize the vulnerabilities in our technological creations. We inevitably end up with disasters like the Titanic and Chernobyl. There is a price to pay when we fail to properly imagine the world as it is.

Even more concerning than these isolated failures of imagination is the meta-failure of not recognizing the inherent limitations of the human imagination. It is impossible for us to imagine what the world would look like in the context of knowledge we do not possess. And we cannot imagine what the world would look like if we didn’t possess the knowledge that we already have.⁵This is an assertion made by English poet Kathleen Raine. She wrote, “we cannot imagine how the world might appear if we did not possess the groundwork of knowledge which we do possess; nor can we in the nature of things imagine how reality would appear in the light of knowledge which we do not possess.”
-Kathleen Raine, ‘On the Symbol’ from That Wondrous Pattern: Essays on Poetry and Poets. To not recognize this is the ultimate failure of imagination. Anyone who smugly dismisses another person’s viewpoint, regardless whether it comes from a neighbor or an ancestor, suffers this type of failure of imagination.⁶It’s too easy to dismiss the possibility that, under certain conditions, we might succumb to the obvious failings we see in others. Everyone likes to think they would have behaved like Oskar Schindler. But the chances of us being a concentration camp guard are infinitely greater.

We need to recognize that the modern perception of reality is based on a sixteenth century theological invention known as natura pura which views the natural world as entirely self-standing. This way of looking at reality isolates “real” objective things from their “constructed” subjective meanings. Modern knowledge eventually became embedded in this “pure nature” vision of reality. This came to dominate the modern imagination, giving us license to stand over nature with an instrumental and controlling intent. As a self-imposed constraint this is useful. It allows the flourishing of scientific discovery. But as a metaphysics this concept is dangerously impoverished. No one actually lives in a purely naturalistic reality. Consciousness plays a key role in how the world reveals itself. The world manifests itself to us through attention. Attention requires us to value one thing over another. It’s as if the world of objective facts is overlaid with value. Yes, we live in a world of objects. But we can just as easily say the world is a stage for action. Every time we act with intention, whether we are conscious of it or not, we are responding to some system of value by choosing ‘this’ over ‘that’.

We operate within a matrix of facts overlaid by a matrix of values. Together this provides the impetus for action. Science describes the world of objects. Ethics and morality describe the world as a place to act. In this context, objects are either tools or obstacles for realizing one’s aims or goals. Everything means something. Things have identities, centers, margins, and exceptions.⁷This is a point made persistently by Jonathan Pageau at The Symboloic World. If “all the world’s a stage” as Shakespeare said, then ours is a world of stories saturated with meaning. That was the old story and it served us quite well. But there’s now a new story. This story imagines there is no story. Projecting one thing onto another is seen as nothing more than a communication strategy.⁸Thomas Howard described this contemporary mindset:
“Our inclinations fool us. But we won’t be fooled. We know from scientific research that it is only imagination that leads us to project one thing onto another. To be sure, this is very often useful. It helps us communicate ideas. And it helps us cope with life. But it is just that —imagination —and nothing more. Things look as though they answer one to another, so we may speak of them in that way so long as we do not suppose that we are saying anything true thereby.”
-Thomas Howard, Chance or Dance: A Critique of Modern Secularism In other words, imagination is seen as false as far as it projects meaning and value. It’s a story in which all poets are liars.

A Truncated Imagination

In the old myth everything means something. Imagination was a flight towards actuality. But in the new myth nothing means anything. Imagination is merely a flight into fancy.⁹“Its researches have convinced it that there are indeed boredom and thralldom and ignominy, and that luminescence and sublimity belong only to ages that fled to belief for meanings in things. The re-created world, formed according to the analytic Word, is a world without form, and void, and darkness is upon the face of the Enlightenment.”
-Thomas Howard, Chance or Dance: A Critique of Modern Secularism Paul Tyson summarizes what’s happened. “Ironically, by science we have become magicians standing over nature and bending it to our own will. But this magical power comes at the cost of divorcing subjective human meanings from objective natural things. And this makes subjectivity and imagination false when they are thought of as projecting human meanings and values onto the natural world. Imagination has been excised from natural reality and sundered from truth.”¹⁰Paul Tyson, Seven Brief Lessons on Magic It’s a truncated imagination that imagines imagination as a flight into fancy where anything subjective lies squarely outside of factual reality. Thomas Howard explains:

The old myth, for its part, saw the image-making faculty as a flight toward actuality. That is, it saw all the data of experience precisely as epiphanies of what was true at the heart of the matter, and felt that therein lay their special validity. It would not, I suppose, have quarreled with the modern description of a lion as such and such an organization of muscle, blood, and bone. It would have been delighted and astonished. But it would have been puzzled if we had insisted, “That’s all there is to it.” What? But the lion is the king of beasts! Look at the royal head! Look at that regal pace! Beware its wrath! Of course it is what you say it is—a complex of tissue and blood —and I never would have found that out without your analytic method of inquiry into the lion’s body. But whatever makes you go on and say, “That’s all there is to it”? What a truncated view! What is your world like, anyway, that you flatten it out this way?¹¹Thomas Howard, Chance or Dance: A Critique of Modern Secularism

Annihilation by Imagination

It is as if we’re now trapped in a hall of mirrors. We imagine the world in a particularly mechanistic way. This fantasy strips the imagination away as something fanciful. As a result, we cannot imagine a world in which ideas are more fundamental than objects.¹²Odd as this sounds to a modern person, its an idea that goes back at least to Plato. And this information-theoretic construct is proving much more durable than most physicists ever expected. We cannot imagine something that evolves having been created.¹³This way of thinking afflicts fundamentalist Christians and atheists alike. This wasn’t always so. Consider, John Henry Newman, an orthodox thinker and a contemporary of Darwin, found nothing in evolution that was necessarily contrary to the doctrine of creation. The Anglican theologian Aubrey Moore (1848– 1890) eagerly championed Darwinism in his theological writings largely because he saw evolution contributing to a general recovery of a properly Christian understanding of God and creation. We cannot imagine the self as anything other than an insulated interior ‘mind.’ This ‘buffered,’ individual becomes “sedimented in a social imaginary.”¹⁴James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular And we cannot imagine things being any other way. It’s a world where form is divorced from content.¹⁵The world once furnished rich material for our imagination. There was a correspondence between the appearance of things and the nature of things. But after this divorcing of form from content we are left to seek aesthetic satisfaction apart from meaning and significance. Art is now only about visual experiences and aesthetic exploration. In other words, it’s a world with form that is void. Darkness.

This is a type of annihilation by imagination. It’s the opposite of ex nihilo creation from nothing. It’s an unmaking of something into nothing. Not only do we loose the ability to believe in the supernatural¹⁶For example, there are many people today who want to believe in God but simply find this too unbelievable. Whereas, in the past it would’ve been almost impossible to imagine a world without God., we loose the ability to pursue meaning and significance. Valuing something beyond material well being becomes unimaginable. What emerges is “a new self-understanding of our social existence, one which gave an unprecedented primacy to the individual.”¹⁷Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 146 Iain McGilchrist views the modern atomistic society as the natural outgrowth from this mechanistic view of reality. It’s “a world in which competition is more important than collaboration; a world in which nature is a heap of resource there for our exploitation, in which only humans count, and yet humans are only machines – not even very good ones, at that; a world curiously stripped of depth, colour and value. This is not the intelligent, if hard-nosed, view that its espousers comfort themselves by making it out to be; just a sterile fantasy, the product of a lack of imagination, which makes it easier for us to manipulate what we no longer understand. But it is a fantasy that displaces and renders inaccessible the vibrant, living, profoundly creative world that it was our fortune to inherit – until we squandered our inheritance.”¹⁸Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary This unmaking leads to a particular version of hell populated by the remains of former souls completely centered in their own will, slaves to their own passions.¹⁹This brings to mind a discussion of hell by C.S. Lewis in ‘The Problem of Pain’. Lewis remarks that Christ spoke of Hell under three symbols: 1) punishment (Matt. 25:46); 2) destruction (Matthew 10:28), and 3) privation, exclusion, or banishment into the ‘darkness outside’ (parables of the wedding garment or of the wise and foolish virgins). Punishment, or torment, gets most of the attention. But he goes on to ponder what destruction might mean. “Destruction, we should naturally assume, means the unmaking, or cessation, of the destroyed. And people often talk as if the ‘annihilation’ of a soul were intrinsically possible. In all our experience, however, the destruction of one thing means the emergence of something else. Burn a log, and you have gases, heat and ash. To have been a log means now being those three things. If souls can be destroyed, must there not be a state of having been a human soul? And is not that, perhaps, the state which is equally well described as torment, destruction, and privation? …What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is ‘remains’. To be a complete man means to have the passions obedient to the will and the will offered to God: to have been a man – to be an ex-man or ‘damned ghost’ – would presumably mean to consist of a will utterly centered in itself and passions utterly uncontrolled by the will.”
-C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Original Originality

The problem lies in our inability to see the world for what it is. All is not lost though. God, in His great wisdom, made the earth round. When we travel far enough in the wrong direction we end up exactly where we started. Recovery is possible by simply letting go of the fantasy of a purely naturalistic reality. This would allow us to see things again as they really are, as they always have been. It’s a return to the origin, the ground of all being. Is this not what Christ had in mind when he said, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand”?

By returning to the origin, we see ourselves again as created and sustained by a holy and just God who rules on matters of right and wrong. We take our rightful place as “sub-creators,”²⁰“Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind. Though all the crannies of the world we filled with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build Gods and their houses out of dark and light, and sowed the seed of dragons, ’twas our right (used or misused). The right has not decayed. We make still by the law in which we’re made.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf; Smith of Wootton Major; The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth working in harmony with the laws given to us, “using imagination to fashion things of use and beauty”²¹Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes According to McGilchrist we must learn to appreciate “the distinction between fantasy, which presents something novel in the place of the too familiar thing, and imagination, which clears away everything between us and the not familiar enough thing so that we see it itself, new, as it is.”²²Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary The relentless pursuit of novelty, the pressure to constantly invent, and the disproportionate value we place on originality are all hallmarks of fantastical thinking. The fantasy culminates in the idea of the perfectly-enclosed hermetically-sealed world of the mechanistic mind which envisions man as the “the autonomous ruler of himself, able to define right and wrong and frame statutes according to whatever he defines as just.”²³ Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for DestructionBy rooting ourselves in God, the origin of all being, we discover the world anew. We find a world saturated with meaning. For example, shaking hands, dressing up, preparing a table setting, taking off our hat before we eat. These all mean something. Even the idea of nothingness means something.

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^{Photo Credit: “Valve Springs” by duncan.j is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0}