ON IMAGINATION. – This is a response to the recent dialogue between Mr. Rachel and Mr. Whittle on the topic of imagination. The word imagination has for me a wholly positive connotation. I would describe the liberal fixation on “racism” or “climate change,” not as imagination but as fixation. Imagination is an expansive function of consciousness; fixation is a narrowing of consciousness. In my decades of college teaching, in English departments in California, Michigan, and New York, I saw the imagination of undergraduates shrink down to almost nothing and their tendency to fixate take over their minds. The main sign of this is the cell phone, which swallows the total attention of young people – and of many adults. The cell phone has accelerated the slide into post-literacy that radio, the movies, and then television precipitated during the previous century. Imagination and literacy maintain a strong connection: Novelists, short-story writers, poets, and playwrights create from their minds whole worlds and by doing so they explore human nature. That we have a sophisticated sense of our own nature – at least potentially available to us – is primarily a literary phenomenon. The epic, lyric, and tragic poets of antiquity established in writing not only the models of every possible human behavior, but also of those factors, personal and cosmic, that influence individual and social causality.
Homer and the Bible, Sophocles and Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and Henry James are as much anthropologists as they are literary artists. In the era of post-literacy, young people are cut off from these resources of self-understanding and consequently their own imaginations never develop. I would extend this claim to Jack London and Edgar Rice Burroughs – the “entertainment literature” of the early Twentieth Century operated at a high linguistic level and in reading Call of the Wild or Tarzan of the Apes one can learn a great deal about the nature of society and the justification of an inherited ethical tradition. (Never underestimate the value of “pulp” fiction.) The U.S.A. probably reached peak literacy in 1950. It has been downhill, both intellectually and morally, ever since.
Are leftists and he “woke” victims of the imagination? No – they are self-inflicted victims of a loss of imagination, which has been replaced in contemporary society by petty slogans. These slogans are characteristically few in number, use an impoverished vocabulary, and encourage fixation. A man who pretends to be a woman, for example, is not exercising imagination, but succumbing to neurosis. The crudeness of this mental diminution finds reflection in the bodily self-mutilation that accompanies it. People of imagination create things; the activity of sloganeers is confined to vandalizing things and tearing them down. It is no coincidence that Greta Thunberg has garnered notoriety in our time. She personifies (not quite the right word) the autism and literal-mindedness of an age entirely without imagination.