The Revolt of the Imagination
The Revolt of the Imagination
Part One: Notes on Belbury Syndrome
Maybe it’s true that life really does imitate literature. Over the last week or so, certainly, a detail from one of my favorite works of imaginative fiction played out at least twice in the real world, with microphones live and cameras rolling. I’m thinking here first of German Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, who promoted vaccine mandates with this bit of fascinating logic: “No one will be vaccinated against their will; the vaccine mandates will simply lead people, ultimately, to accept voluntary vaccination.” See if you can find a way to parse those words that makes sense of them. I can tell you already that it doesn’t help to read them in the original German.
Then there’s Jen Psaki, spokesflack-in-chief for poor bumbling Joe Biden. She was asked by a reporter at a recent presser about the people, and of course there are a great many of them, who are increasingly worried about the future of the United States under Biden’s inept leadership. Her response? “My advice to everyone out there who’s frustrated, sad, angry, pissed off, feel those emotions, go to a kickboxing class, have a margarita.” For sheer crazed detachment from the world the rest of us inhabit, that’s hard to beat, especially when you recall that her boss campaigned saying he would, you know, fix the country’s problems. Maybe her words make more sense in German, or for that matter in pig Latin, but I doubt it.
What all this brings to mind, of course, is the climactic scene in C.S. Lewis’s tremendous fantasy That Hideous Strength. The villains of the piece, a collection of arrogant technocrats among whom Psaki and Lauterbach would fit in seamlessly, are gathered at their headquarters at Belbury for a banquet. What they don’t know is that their attempts to get control of certain supernatural forces have stirred up old strong magics from the Arthurian era, and Merlin—yes, that Merlin—is on the scene. The first spell he casts on them is the same one that made life so interesting for the construction crews at the Tower of Babel. While this is taking effect, and their speech is turning into the kind of absurdity we were just discussing, Merlin works his second spell, which makes good use of the well-stocked collection of experimental animals at the facility. Some of these are decidedly large, fierce, and hungry. The survival rate for the villains—well, we don’t have to get into that; let’s just say the beasts go away well fed.
Literary parallels are always chancy things, and I’m by no means sure just how far to take this one. Certainly if any sixth-century Roman-British wizards have been revived recently, my contacts in the British occult community haven’t let me know about it yet, and our current crop of arrogant technocrats haven’t actually gotten around to naming themselves the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, though doubtless Klaus Schwab will get to that shortly. That said, there’s enough in common between the utterances of Lewis’s villains and those we’ve just surveyed that we might as well describe the latter as cases of Belbury Syndrome. After all, if Jen Psaki were to get up in front of the microphones next week and confidently announce, “The madrigore of verjuice must be talithibianised,” I can’t say I’d be surprised. If I were her or Lauterbach, I’d keep an eye out for hungry beasts.
All jesting aside, the two remarks quoted earlier are worth keeping in mind, not least because they’re anything but unique. We’ve all heard politicians and media flacks insisting with straight faces, for example, that the Covid-19 pandemic can only be stopped by getting more people to take vaccines that don’t stop anyone from catching the virus or transmitting it to others. Other examples are as close as your nearest corporate media venue. I’ve written about this from various angles in the past, of course, suggesting various ways to get out from under the weird collective trance that grips the managerial aristocracy of the modern industrial world these days. It seems to me just now, however, that there’s a very simple way to talk about the accelerating collapse of meaning that’s afflicting our self-proclaimed lords and masters. What we’re seeing is a terminal failure of the imagination.
Modern industrial society’s attitude toward imagination is frankly weird, a volatile mixture of nostalgia, condescension, and contempt. Children, artists, and “primitive” peoples—this latter label is slapped on those ethnic groups that are less dependent on factory-made technological gimmickry than the rest of us—are expected or even encouraged to be imaginative. The same label of “imaginative,” and the same expectations and encouragement, used to be applied to women not that many decades ago, and it’s been instructive to watch the way that women in the comfortable classes of modern industrial society have gone out of their way to shed that label on their way to their current level of wealth and influence. If you needed a hint that “imaginative” is not a compliment in modern society, well, there you have it.
Calling some person or group of people imaginative, rather, allows them to be treated by the mainstream as second-class human beings whose insights and perceptions can be dismissed out of hand. Serious, mature, respectable people are supposed to keep whatever stray scraps of imagination they might have left neatly ghettoized in some isolated corner of their lives where it doesn’t get in the way of serious, mature, respectable discussion and decision. In many contexts today, to call someone’s ideas “imaginative” is to dismiss them as wrong. To call something “imaginary” is to say that it doesn’t exist.
All this begs a galaxy of questions, and we can start with the most basic of them. What exactly is this thing that we’re calling “imagination”?
There are various ways that we can approach that question. I trust none of my readers will be too surprised, however, if I start with an option that doesn’t share the usual modern prejudices on the subject. The image above is one of the famous engravings from Robert Fludd’s great 1617 encyclopedia of Renaissance occultism, Utriusque Cosmi Historia (A History of Both Worlds—the two worlds in question being the world around us and the world within us.) It’s a schematic diagram that sums up everything that human beings can experience or think about. The set of nested circles on the far left, up in front of the forehead, is the mundus sensibilis, the realm of perceptions brought to us by the five material senses—notice the lines running from that set of circles to the eye, ear, nose, and so on. That’s what most people call the “real world;” right now we don’t have to get into the reasons why it’s much less real than it looks.
The set above and to the right of the mundus sensibilis is the mundus imaginabilis, the realm of perceptions brought to us by the imaginative equivalents of the ordinary senses. It’s divided into rings identical to those of the mundus sensibilis, and each of these rings is labeled as a shadow of one of the rings of the mundus sensibilis. That’s the key to the imagination in Fludd’s view. For him, and for the many other psychologists of his time and the centuries before then, the imaginative world is made up of sensations that don’t come to you by way of your five material senses, but they have the same forms as the products of those senses.
You can put this to the test easily enough. Take a moment, right now, to imagine a bright blue, slightly luminous cat walking past you. Each of its footfalls makes a crunching noise, and from it radiates a pervasive feeling of cold and a scent of peppermint. This isn’t something you’re ever likely to perceive with your material senses—if it is, you may want to get your glasses checked in a hurry!—but you just imagined it as I described it, didn’t you? Every detail you assigned to it, from the blue color to the scent of peppermints, was borrowed via memory from sensations you’ve previously experienced. You simply took these remembered sensations (blue, crunch, etc.) and assembled them in a new way.
If you want to test the limits of imagination, try imagining a new primary color: not a blend of any other colors you have ever seen, but a color different from all other colors, as different as red is from blue. I’ll offer you a hint: you can’t. You might be able to come up with the abstract notion of another primary color—David Lindsay, a brilliant and mostly forgotten author of imaginative fiction, did this with fine effect in his 1920 novel A Voyage to Arcturus, giving the distant world on which his story is set the two additional primary colors of jale and ulfire—but it remains an abstraction. You can’t even really imagine the extra colors seen by bees, whose eyes reach parts of the spectrum ours can’t: that’s why those extra colors are called “bee purple” and the like, to give a metaphoric label to something humans can’t actually imagine.
What all this means, to use a term I’ve referenced several times in recent posts, is that imagination is a mode of figuration. Figuration, as you may recall from those earlier posts, is Owen Barfield’s term for the process by which we assemble the raw material of sensation into a set of objects that, for us, comprise the world. We learn to turn sensations into figurations in earliest infancy by a process of trial and error, and after many corrections and mistakes get sufficiently good at it that we scarcely notice doing it. Thereafter, only certain optical illusions and the occasional experience of mistaking one thing for another shows us just how much mental effort goes into creating what we think of as objective reality.
To imagine something, in turn, is to use the same process on remembered sensations to construct figurations of things that don’t happen to be present. We learn this in earliest infancy, too, and get just as good at it. If you think about what you’re going to do tomorrow, and call to mind the errands you plan on running, the people you hope to meet, and the glass of hot buttered rum you plan on drinking to take off the chill once you drag yourself home again, you’re using your imagination. If, without turning your head, you turn your attention to the room behind you, you’re using your imagination then, too. Anything that’s part of your world, but isn’t actually in range of your five material senses? Once again, when you turn your mind to them, you’re using your imagination. Most of the time, again, you don’t notice that you’re doing it. Deliberate efforts to imagine something fill the same role here as optical illusions and mistaken identities do for sensory figurations: they show us that something we take for granted as “out there” really is constructed by our own thinking.
The close connection between sensory figuration and imaginative figuration is why Fludd’s diagram shows the mundus sensibilis and the mundus imaginabilis projected from a pair of overlapping circles in the front of the head. They’re not the same, but they can’t be separated: the matrix of representations that you think of as the world is figurated partly using the things your senses tell you, and partly using the things your imagination tells you. Your emotions and your body, by the way, respond equally strongly to figurations from both sources. If you think the noises you hear outside the window were made by a wild beast, or for that matter by Karl Lauterbach skulking outside with a syringe in his hand and a maniacal cackle on his lips, that will get your heart pounding and your adrenaline going whether the noises are caused by a hungry wild beast, a crazed technocrat, or just the wind rattling branches against the wall.
From the overlapping circles of sensation and imagination, in turn, a link goes back to the more complex structure at the middle of the head, which is the human capacity for thought. Fludd, like the other psychologists of his time, divides that into two factors, understanding and judgment. On top of those are three additional circles—reason, intuition, and enlightenment—which, in the view of Fludd and the other psychologists of his time, were the products of education rather than nature. The highest of those, and only the highest of them, comes close to the complex flurry of shapes above, which represents the spiritual world. (Fludd, like most Renaissance occultists, was a Christian, and so he portrayed this in standard Christian terms as the Trinity and the nine choirs of angels.) You’ll notice that the band descending from this doesn’t actually go into the head: even enlightenment, in this way of thinking, doesn’t breach the inescapable barrier between representation and reality or, in Fludd’s terms, between the creature and the Creator.
The third set of overlapping circles further back? Those are the purely mechanical operations of the brain, which Fludd calls its memorative and motive functions: in our somewhat more ungainly terms, the storage of memories and the coordination of physical motion. The three overlapping circles above the back of the head, linked by a band to the memorative circle, are the subjective functions of memory; the band descending from the motive circle is the spinal cord, which takes the motor impulses to the muscles of the body. Yes, Renaissance occultists knew about that. Our current notion that nobody knew anything about the human body before scientists got into the act is just as dishonest as the claim that in 1492, everyone but Christopher Columbus thought that the world was flat.
If we turn back to what’s going on further forward in the head, you’ll notice that the link between perception and thought goes from imagination to cognition. Here again Fludd is quite correct. We understand only what we can imagine. Consider Copernicus, looking up at the sky. People had been doing that for many millennia, and with few exceptions they assembled their sense data into a cosmos in which the Earth sat in the middle and the Sun, planets, and stars went around it. Copernicus, with a mighty leap of the imagination, put the Sun at the center and spun everything else around it. That wasn’t an exercise of the understanding or the reason; again, millions of people for thousands of years had applied their cognitive capacities and their learned ability to reason to the question of how to make sense of the cosmos, and all they’d done was come up with ever more elaborate ways of making sense of an Earth-centered cosmos.
That’s what they did, and that’s all they could have done, because thinking can’t go beyond its own presuppositions. Reason can show you when your presuppositions conflict with one another, and that’s an enormous gain: the ancient Greek thinkers who first figured out how to do that systematically made a hefty contribution to human life by that act. Science can show you when your presuppositions conflict with your figurations, and that’s another enormous gain, but science in the modern sense of the word hadn’t been invented in Copernicus’s time—or, for that matter, in Fludd’s. Neither of them can provide you with new constellations of imagery and ideas that you can try out as a new presupposition and see how it works.
That’s what the imagination does. It creates an image or, in Fludd’s language, a shadow of the world experienced by the senses, and then plays with it, tossing the Sun from the fourth heaven to the center of the cosmos and seeing what the universe looks like in that novel configuration. It creates wholly new presuppositions and asks, “what if this were true?” The secret of the imagination is that it’s a generator of novelty. It creates new combinations for the other functions of your mind to explore. It can work with sensations, as you found out when I had you imagine that luminous blue cat a little while back. It can work with figurations, as Copernicus showed—the Sun and the Earth are figurations each of us learns to construct from a gallimaufry of sensations. It can work with abstractions, as David Lindsay demonstrated by coming up with the impossible-yet-vivid idea of two more primary colors. It can also work with other mental phenomena—in fact, it can work with any kind of experience a human being can have.
Imagination is thus one of the basic tools of human empathy. Under most circumstances, we don’t perceive the world through anyone else’s eyes and mind but our own. There are ways around that limitation, but the most flexible and expansive of the lot is the imagination. When you were six and your mother told you, “How would you feel if he did that to you?”—if, in fact, she was so unfashionable as to do something so useful to your future mental health—she was trying to get you to use your imagination, to construct from your own memories a figuration of what you would have felt if you had been in the other child’s place. That use of the imagination becomes the basis for moral reflection, and ultimately for one kind of wisdom.
That’s the kind of wisdom, moral reflection, and imagination that is so obviously absent in the two florid cases of Belbury Syndrome with which we started this discussion. If Karl Lauterbach, for example, had been capable of imagining that the people who listened to him might think about his words and try to make sense of them, rather than simply bowing and cringing the way underlings are supposed to do when one of the lords and masters of the industrial world deigns to speak to them, he would have stopped in mid-sentence, slapped himself, and said, “Mein Gott, what am I saying?” It would have been instantly obvious to him that he was spouting nonsense; after all, when you mandate something, you are forcing it on people, and that means that, ahem, it’s not voluntary. He might even have guessed that his words would powerfully remind a great many of his listeners of the slogans from George Orwell’s novel 1984—“War is Peace, Slavery is Freedom, Ignorance is Strength!”
As for Jen Psaki, her case is similar. It never occurs to many people in the upper echelons of the American caste system that the people who support their extravagant lifestyles and suffer from the consequences of their decisions are actually, you know, people. Very many of the privileged these days talk and act as though the only other people in the room are members of their own class. That’s what Psaki did. She offered the kind of helpful advice that one corporate flunkey gives to another when both of them have to put up with the annoyances of working for the same hopelessly incompetent boss. It’s doubtless never entered her imagination that the abstract blobs out there who cast votes and hold down jobs are actual people with their own needs and hopes and dreams, who might reasonably expect Joe Biden to follow through on his campaign promises, or do something about the increasingly dismal state of life in today’s America, or at least stop making things worse. Lacking that foundation for empathy, all she could do was behave like one of the characters to whom C.S. Lewis assigned the role of tiger chow.
The collapse of imagination that stands out so clearly in the case of these two babbling technocrats is by no means limited to the corrupt ruling elite to which they both belong. Belbury Syndrome is a far more general problem just now. Fortunately, like most other mental capacities, the imagination can be fostered and encouraged through certain methods of deliberate practice. Two weeks from now, we’ll talk about those—and about the sweeping cultural and political implications of putting them to work.
Part Two: No More Secondhand Futures
In a post here two weeks ago I discussed the disastrous failure of imagination on the part of the industrial world’s governing classes. Since then—well, let’s just say that for connoisseurs of elite cluelessness, it’s a target-rich environment out there.
We’ll choose one such target more or less at random. Last week’s news was briefly illuminated, if that’s the word, by yet another claim that fusion power is racing to the rescue of the industrial world, bearing “near-limitless clean power” to solve the climate crisis and bail out the otherwise unsustainable lifestyles of our society’s privileged classes. The handwaving this time emanated from the Joint European Torus (JET) in Culham, England, where scientists managed to sustain a fusion reaction for a little more than twice as long as any previous fusion device. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? The excitement may flag a bit if you read the fine print and discover that the new record was around five seconds.
The scientists boasted that during that five seconds, the reaction produced enough energy to power one house for a day. If this seems impressive to you—I have to say it doesn’t do much for me—keep in mind also that the energy they’re talking about is raw heat. They didn’t factor in the inevitable losses that come in when you take that heat, convert it into electricity via steam turbines or the like, and send it out into the grid. Nor did they subtract from their machine’s output the very considerable inputs of energy that had to go into making the reaction happen—fusion only happens at extremely high temperatures, and a tokamak-style reactor like the one in Culham also requires fantastically strong magnetic fields to confine the hot plasma. Both of these take gargantuan amounts of energy—as, of course, does building, maintaining, and operating the exceedingly complex hardware needed for nuclear fusion.
Oh, and having achieved that record, the JET will probably have to be scrapped, because the titanic heat and pressure needed to get a few seconds of fusion energy out of it have caused so much damage to the hardware that the machine won’t be able to do the same thing again. How will the same technology stand up to the 24/7 demands of generating power for the grid, so that fossil fuels can be retired and carbon emissions can start to decline? You can read the adulatory stories in the corporate media all day and not see anybody addressing that.
Plenty of useful lessons can be drawn from those same news stories, but the one that strikes me just at the moment is the remarkable mismatch between what’s being said about the imminence of climate-driven disaster and the very sedate pace at which fusion research is progressing. The first tokamak-style experimental fusion reactors were built in the 1950s, after all, and the fact that they’ve only just gotten to five seconds of sustained fusion isn’t exactly comforting. Let’s set that aside, however, and speculate that they can set a new record double the old one every single year from here on. Even at that rate of improvement—a rate that no fusion research program has ever been able to reach so far, much less sustain—they won’t be able to run the thing for a full hour at a stretch for another nine years and change, and 24 hours of sustained power isn’t on the schedule until somewhere toward the middle of year 14.
And the uninterrupted flow of power for months and years at a time that a modern power grid needs? If you’ve got a calculator, why, you can do the math as well as I can. Equally, if you note that it took them 70 years to get to five seconds of sustained fusion, and look at the actual pace of fusion research over that lifetime of labor, you can do the math too, and it’s not pretty.
All these dates assume, furthermore, that a society racked by the impacts of climate change can afford to pour effectively limitless amounts of money into building brand new fusion plants, and replacing them promptly with others when the damage from the heat and pressure render them inoperable. It also assumes that no technical difficulties worth noting will come up in the process of scaling up five seconds of fusion to continuous service over months and years, and a galaxy of other far from minor issues of the same kind, but we can let those go for the moment.
One conclusion that might be drawn from all this is that the managerial aristocracy is far less concerned about climate change than it likes to pretend. If in fact we only have a few years to prevent global catastrophe, as pundits and the corporate media insist so loudly, then it’s far from clear why we’re wasting time and resources on a potential power source that won’t be ready to supply power to the grid for decades to come, if it ever does reach commercial viability. There are plenty of other news stories just now that suggest the same lack of concern. I’m not sure how many of my readers are aware, for example, that the EU has quietly exempted private jets and luxury yachts from the carbon restrictions it’s planning to impose on the modes of transport that the rest of us use, or that US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi—during the same period in which she was lecturing everyone else on the dangers of climate change—dropped $500,000 on travel in carbon-spewing private jets.
This sort of mismatch between words and deeds—yes, that’s spelled “hypocrisy” in plain English—has convinced a great many people these days that the climate change narrative is hokum deployed by a kleptocratic ruling class to justify the ongoing consolidation of power and wealth in its own grubby hands. Reasonable as that theory seems at first glance, I can’t agree with it. It’s a mistake to think we can dump billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere without causing changes in climate, not least because the evidence from the past is clear: greenhouse events driven by CO2 releases in the prehistoric past are well documented in the geological record, and the mere fact that the CO2 in question came from volcanoes rather than smokestacks and tailpipes doesn’t change the impact of the gas in question once it gets up into the atmosphere and starts soaking up infrared rays. Nor is climate change purely a matter of abstractions. I’m writing these words in the middle of a New England winter, for instance, and outdoors it’s a bright, warm, sunny day and the thermometer says 58°F.
So why the glaring lack of consistency between words and deeds? Why are our politicians, pundits, and corporate flacks talking as though global warming is going to kill us all in a decade or so if we don’t give them everything they want, and then acting as though there’s nothing to worry about—cheering on fusion projects that might (but might not) pay off fifty years from now, and pursuing carbon-wasting lifestyles as though that couldn’t possibly be a problem?
This is where we cycle back to the theme I began exploring two weeks ago: the catastrophic failure of the imagination in contemporary industrial society.
An exciting new idea, in 1870.
Let’s start once again with nuclear fusion. It’s not a new idea. When Jules Verne decided to come up with a nifty new power source for Captain Nemo’s submarine Nautilus in his 1870 science fiction bestseller Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, he had it powered by nuclear fusion. Once 1901 came and Albert Einstein published his famous equation E=mc2, physicists started trying to figure out how to take Verne at his word. The first prototype fusion reactors were on the drawing boards by 1930, and by the 1950s the tokamak design had already been invented. Since then, entire generations of nuclear physicists have repeated the same failed efforts over and over again, resolutely refusing to learn the lessons of failure.
The failure that matters here, by the way, isn’t technological. It’s quite possible that sometime in the next century, someone will actually manage to get a sustained fusion reaction going for more than a few seconds at a time. If that happens, however, it won’t make an iota of difference for the survival of industrial society, because of the cost. Seventy years of fusion research have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that fusion can’t produce electricity at a price that anybody can afford to pay. Even if they can be made to work, fusion power plants will be hopelessly unaffordable white elephants. In a future of inescapable economic contraction and resource scarcity, the chance that they will do any good at all is too small to worry about..
These same two points are equally true of the rest of the imaginary hardware that clutters up the notional landscape of the future. Space travel is another good example. As a feature of our canned Tomorrowlands, it’s well into its second century, and as a reality, it’s more than sixty years old. That considerable experience has shown that it’s hugely expensive, it requires gargantuan inputs of energy and nonrenewable resources, and it can’t cover its own costs–every attempt to make it pay for itself has consistently fallen flat on its nose cone. You can make a profit putting satellites into orbit—well, until the available orbits get too crowded and a Kessler syndrome happens—but people? A pointless stunt with costs vastly exceeding its very limited benefits. Yet it stays stuck in the collective fantasies of our age.
Another example? Let’s consider socialism, which is in its third century now—it was invented in 1809 by Charles Fourier. Even more than fusion power and space travel, socialism has been surrounded by a thick cloud of self-aggrandizing ballyhoo, and it’s crucial to clear away some of that in order to make sense of socialism as a historical phenomenon. Though its rhetoric makes a lot of noise about giving the means of production to the people, in practice “the people” always means the government, and “the government” always means a self-perpetuating bureaucracy of middle class functionaries carefully shielded from the consequences of failure. That’s why socialism in practice has turned out to be one of the few systems of political economy in history that’s even less viable than corporate capitalism. Yet an embarrassingly large number of people are still obsessed with trying to reenact this particular two-century-old flop.
The point that’s missed by these arguments is that corporate capitalism and bureaucratic socialism are far from the only games in town. Businesses can be owned and operated by co-ops democratically run by their own workers—that’s syndicalism. The means of production can be gotten into as many individual hands as possible—that’s distributism, and in another key, it’s also Gandhian economics. (Did you know that Gandhi worked out a detailed economic theory? Most people don’t.) Most business can be left in private hands but banking can be made a public monopoly, with every citizen receiving an annual dividend out of interest payments to the national bank—that’s social credit. Corporations can be abolished or stripped of their legal personhood, so that each entrepreneur is personally liable for the debts and criminal acts of the business he or she runs—that doesn’t have a name yet, but don’t be surprised to see it become a significant force in the years ahead. There are more options—many, many more—but they don’t have a place in the imagination of our time.If you want to see total failure of the imagination in practice, in fact, one of the best places to do so is a socialist website. Their arguments for socialism reliably consist of claiming that corporate capitalism is awful and that socialism is the only alternative. I freely grant the first point; so did Adam Smith, for that matter—the author of The Wealth of Nations, the founder of capitalist economic theory, argued that joint-stock companies (the term used for corporations in his day) were the worst possible way to run a business, and an even worse way to run a society. The second point, by contrast, shows not merely an utter lack of imagination but a stunning ignorance about the history of political economy.
I could provide a baker’s dozen of other examples, but why? The point has, I think been made: what counts as “the future” in the collective conversation of the modern world is a collection of clanking, shopworn fantasies that people have been trying to put into practice over and over again for a century or more, and repeated experience has shown that all of them cost vastly more than they’re worth. We’re long past the point at which all of them should have been put out to pasture; at this point it’s time to start talking about the route to the nearest glue factory. Only the feeble imagination of the modern era leaves these geriatric daydreams stuck in place, and keeps fusion researchers and their many equivalents forever pushing on a door marked “pull.”
It’s all very reminiscent of one of the crucial problems that writers of fiction have to contend with on every page. No matter what kind of story you’re writing, there’s a stock of clichés—characters, situations, plot twists, turns of phrase, you name it—that’s been done to death by previous writers. They’re all secondhand goods, well worn by previous owners, which is why they come to mind so easily. What you do with these depends on what you’re trying to do. If you’re content to write the kind of popcorn fiction that makes money and then gets forgotten, your job is to deploy these clichés in some new constellation, so readers can snuggle down comfortably with your book in the serene knowledge that they won’t encounter anything that will make them think. If you want to write something that makes a difference, by contrast, your job is to chase out the clichés, and present the readers with characters and situations (and the rest of it) that they’ve never encountered before.
A genre of fiction becomes senile when it consists of nothing but clichés. A society becomes senile, in turn, when its vision of the future consists of nothing but clichés. It’s precisely because our society is entranced with a pair of shopworn, secondhand futures that it blunders mindlessly ahead, slamming into one preventable crisis after another, because too few people can imagine any future other than the Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber of perpetual progress toward the stars and sudden apocalyptic collapse back to the caves.
There’s an alternative to this. It doesn’t consist of holding up some other canned future as the one and only future we can expect. It consists of developing our imaginations until we can see that there are many potential futures, spanning a dizzying range of untapped possibilities, and we can all play a role in choosing which ones (not “which one”) come into being.A genre of fiction becomes senile when it consists of nothing but clichés. A society becomes senile, in tur, when its vision of the future consists of nothing but clichés. It’s precisely because our society is entranced with a pair of shopworn, secondhand futures that it blunders mindlessly ahead, slamming into one preventable crisis after another, because too few people can imagine any future other than the Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber of perpetual progress toward the stars and sudden apocalyptic collapse back to the caves.
Try the following exercise sometime today when you’ve got half an hour or so to spare. Sit down in a comfortable chair, relax, breathe slowly and deeply for a while, and set aside the concerns of your day. Now imagine that you’re sitting in the laboratory of a friendly mad scientist, who rubs his hands together, cackles in glee, and shows you his latest invention: a device that opens a portal into different futures. There it sits in front of you, the portal like an open doorway made of some strangely colored metal, with cables and oddly shaped protrusions all over the outside, the machinery that makes it work a profusion of weird shapes, flickering lights, eerie low-pitched sounds, and a shimmer like the air over hot pavement in summer filling the space inside the portal, while the scent of ozone tinges the air. Imagine the mad scientist beaming at you and telling you to try it out.
Imagine yourself getting up from your chair and going to the machine. You see that it has a control panel with three buttons on it. One of them is labeled GENERIC TOMORROWLAND FUTURE. The second is labeled GENERIC APOCALPYTIC FUTURE. The third is labeled SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.
Go ahead and push the first button. The space inside the portal shimmers, and all at once you can see through it into the canned future we’ve been talking about: the one with flying cars zooming through the skies, spaceships taking passengers to orbital cities, fusion reactors churning out limitless cheap energy, and all the rest of the notional future of our time. Step through the portal if you like, and check it out, or simply take a good look, before returning to the control panel. It won’t take you long, since you’ve been fed all the details from childhood on.
Now go ahead and push the second button. The space inside the portal shimmers again, and all at once you see through it into the standard apocalyptic wasteland that fills an equal and opposite role in the collective conversation of our time—you know, the horrible thing that’s sure to happen if we don’t let the managerial aristocracy do everything it wants. Once again, step through the portal if you like, and check it out—your friend the mad scientist can hand you a portable oxygen mask and other survival gear if that’s needed. Then go back to the control panel.
Finally, go ahead and push the third button, the one marked SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. The space inside the portal shimmers again, and you see—
I’m not going to tell you what you see. It’s not the Tomorrowland future and it’s not the apocalyptic future, but beyond that, it’s up to you—and of course that’s just it. No law of nature requires us to go stumbling blindly ahead into a future consisting entirely of tired clichés from the early twentieth century or before. More to the point, no law of nature requires us to keep on trying to act as though those tired clichés are innovative new solutions to the problems of our time, when they’ve all been tried repeatedly and none of them work well enough to bother.
It’s time to say no to another warmed-over serving of secondhand futures. The little exercise of the imagination I’ve offered won’t accomplish that on its own, of course, but it might help some of us make a start. Give it a try, and see where it takes you.
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