What Has Happened To The Public Imagination, and Why?

I originally highlighted this article in the March 7 edition of my newsletter.

The way forward for all of us–Black folks, especially, but the nation as a whole–is through imagination. Economist Umair Haque and Senator Elizabeth Warren write and talk often about the idea of “public goods”, i.e., “a commodity or service that is provided without profit to all members of a society”. But for public goods to flourish, we need public imagination, something that’s been deeply curtailed by our hyper-partisan media and political environment.

This 2017 article by scholars Drucilla Cornell and Stephen Seely argues that shared meaning is crucial to democracy. They write: “…Trump’s movement—as well as similar fascist, xenophobic, nationalist movements arising throughout Europe—is tied to the collapse of any ethical horizon or sense of shared meaning within neoliberal capitalism: its distorted myths of superiority are an attempt to overcome this nihilism and cultivate a sense of collective belonging.”

They root their analysis in the writings of Dutch philosopher Baruch de Spinoza:

…Spinoza teaches us that the imagination is always collective. For him, mind and matter are two attributes of the same substance—two sides of the same coin, so to speak. Every material encounter produces a corresponding image in the mind (and vice versa). For Spinoza, the imagination is just as real as atoms…As the material world is collective, so is the mind: our own imagination is inextricably tied into a collective imagination shared by those with whom we share material encounters. For Spinoza, the more we open ourselves to being affected by others, the more we allow ourselves to engage in complex situations, the richer our imagination becomes and the more we move away from our own inevitably “inadequate” ideas toward a rational commons.

We can blame the pandemic for exacerbating even further the decline public spaces. The scholars note that “shared meanings have collapsed with the death of important public spaces [union halls, for example]; in their place we have a nihilistic universe in which people are desperate to find some kind of values in their own lives. Rather than democratic engagement, which is the basis of an ever-enriched and complex commons that facilitates maximal individual and collective flourishing, we have the nihilistic hole filled in with distorted myths that provide an inadequate imaginary fueled by simple-minded fantasies that heterosexual white men are superior and should govern the world.”

There’s much more to dig into and you can read it all here.