Imagination Is the Essence of Humankind

“When you've come face-to-face with the dark side of the school yard, life doesn't hold many surprises.”

― Eoin Colfer, Half-Moon Investigations

Many of my posts the past eighteen months have included updates about or references to the Covid-19 pandemic. It's been a constant source of ever-present anxiety.

I realized recently that the last time I mentioned covid was seven posts ago, in mid-September. That was A Quarantine Tale, in which I shared some of my family's experience of being infected with the virus. Part of the realization was that the anxiety is now largely gone. We've had the sickness and lived through it. We were vaccinated before, we're scheduled for boosters, and a vaccine has just been approved for ages 5-11, which means we'll get our kids scheduled anytime. Our chances of catching this virus again are miniscule, so our fear of it has grown similarly minimal.

We're still wearing masks, being careful with contact, and observing other measures, so our behaviors haven't really changed, but our emotions have. It's made a huge difference.

Last post, Backward Phrenology, I shared the book What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund, in which he argues that readers co-create the stories in books they read. This fascinating essay argues that humans co-create existence by automatically supplementing our perceptions with imagination and story--what we perceive is only half of what we understand about the world, and our imaginations fill in the rest.

Homo Imaginatus

A collection of neuroscientists, philosophers and linguists is converging on the notion that imagination, far from a kind of mental superfluity, sits at the heart of human cognition. It might be the very attribute at which our minds have evolved to excel, and which gives us such powerfully effective cognitive fluidity for navigating our world. . . . 

The one mental capacity that might truly set us apart isn’t exactly a skill at all, but more a quality of mind. We should perhaps have called ourselves instead Homo imaginatus: it could be imagination that makes us human. The more we understand about the minds of other animals, and the more we try (and fail) to build machines that can ‘think’ like us, the clearer it becomes that imagination is a candidate for our most valuable and most distinctive attribute. . . . 

What we hold in mind are necessarily patchy, sketchy and wonky versions of ‘reality’ – good enough for most purposes, but full of gaps, false assumptions and recollections. What’s surprising is not the imperfections, but how little we notice them. That’s precisely because we are Homo imaginatus, the master fabulators. Craving narratives that help us make sense of the world, we unconsciously and effortlessly fill in or revise the details until the story works. In this sense, imagination is a normal part of what we do all the time.

Moments of rumination, reflection and goal-free ‘thinking’ occupy much of our inner life. In these moments, our brains are in a default state that looks unfocused and dreamy, but in fact is highly active – planning supper, recalling an argument with our partner, humming a tune we heard last night. This way of thinking correlates with a well-defined pattern of activity in the brain, involving various parts of the cortex and the hippocampus. Known as the default mode network, it’s also engaged when we remember past events (episodic memory); when we imagine future ones; and when we think ahead, adopt another person’s perspective, or consider social scenarios. . . . 

Imagined and remembered events both arise by the brain doing the same thing: what Addis calls ‘the mental rendering of experience’. Imagination and memory use a cognitive network for ‘simulation’ that turns the raw ingredients of sensory experience into a kind of internal movie, filled not just with sound and action but with emotional responses, interpretation and evaluation. Not only is that happening when we think about yesterday or tomorrow, says Addis – it’s what we’re doing right now as we experience the present. This simply is the world of the mind. The imaginative capacity, she says, is the key to the fluidity with which we turn threads of experience into a tapestry. . . . 

It would be quite wrong to suppose that the artistic imagination is just an evolutionary overdevelopment of an ability to plan how we’ll get tomorrow’s meal. On the contrary, the imaginative dimensions of the arts could be the paradigmatic expression of our skills at prediction and anticipation. The literary scholar Brian Boyd of the University of Auckland thinks this is where our predilection for inventing stories comes from. Specifically, he thinks they serve to flex the muscles of our social cognition. . . . 

Boyd thinks that stories are a training ground for that network. In his book On the Origin of Stories (2009), he argues that fictional storytelling is thus not merely a byproduct of our genes but an adaptive trait. ‘Narrative, especially fiction – story as make-believe, as play – saturates and dominates literature, because it engages the social mind,’ he wrote in 2013. As the critical theorist Walter Benjamin put it, the fairy tale is ‘the first tutor of mankind’.

‘We become engrossed in stories through our predisposition and ability to track other agents, and our readiness to share their perspective in pursuing their goals,’ continues Boyd, ‘so that their aims become ours.’ While we’re under the story’s spell, what happens to the imaginary characters can seem more real for us than the world we inhabit.

Imagination is valuable here because it creates a safe space for learning. If instead we wait to learn from actual lived experience, we risk making costly mistakes. Imagination – whether literary, musical, visual, even scientific – supplies material for rehearsing the brain’s inexorable search for pattern and meaning. That’s why our stories don’t have to respect laws of nature: they needn’t just ponderously rehearse possible real futures. Rather, they’re often at their most valuable when they are liberating from the shackles of reality, literally mind-expanding in their capacity to instil neural connections. In the fantasies of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, we can find tools for thinking with.

If imagination is then our USP, it might also catalyse a trait that seems unique to humans: language. . . . 

Through language, we supply the implements by which a listener can put together the experience of what is described. It’s a way of passing actual experiences between us, and thereby ‘opens a venue for human sociality that would otherwise remain closed.’

What this means is that language is ‘basically for telling stories’, in the words of the psychologist Merlin Donald at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Of course, we use it for a lot of other things too: for greetings, requests, advice, warning and argument. But even there, language is often deeply imprinted with narrative and metaphor: it’s not a mere labelling with sound, but refers to things beyond the immediate object. To imagine etymologically implies to form a picture, image or copy – but also carries the connotation that this is a private, internal activity. The Latin root imaginari carries the sense that oneself is a part of the picture. The word itself tells a story in which we inhabit a possible world. . . . 

For if Boyd is right that stories do vital cultural work by rehearsing social dilemmas, contemplating fears and anxieties, and indulging forbidden desires, it would make sense for them to take extreme forms. . . . 

People aren’t born being innately ‘good at imagination’, as if it’s a single thing for which you need the right configuration of grey matter. It is a multidimensional attribute, and we all possess the potential for it. Some people are good at visualisation, some at association, some at rich world-building or social empathy. And like any mental skill (such as musicianship), imagination can be developed and nurtured, as well as inhibited and obstructed by poor education. . . . 

Imagination is the essence of humankind. It’s what our brains do, and in large part it may be what they are for.

Language is ‘basically for telling stories.’

We innately, automatically create stories to explain everything we experience. And the stories we tell matter.

The stories we tell matter.

Built on the Bodies of Slaves: How Africa Was Erased from the History of the Modern World

Although these famous feats of discovery dominate the popular imagination, they obscure the true beginnings of the story of how the globe became permanently stitched together and thus became “modern”. If we look more closely at the evidence, it will become clear that Africa played a central role in this history. By miscasting the role of Africa, generations have been taught a profoundly misleading story about the origins of modernity. . . . 

The elision of these three pivotal decades is merely one example of a centuries-long process of diminishment, trivialisation and erasure of Africans and people of African descent from the story of the modern world. It is not that the basic facts are unknown; it is that they have been siloed, overlooked or swept into dark corners. It is essential to restore key chapters such as these to their proper place of prominence in our common narrative of modernity.

Starting in the 15th century, encounters between Africans and Europeans set the most Atlantic-oriented Europeans on a path that would eventually propel their continent past the great civilisational centres of Asia and the Islamic world in wealth and power. The rise of Europe was not founded on any innate or permanent characteristics that produced superiority. To a degree that remains unrecognised, it was built on Europe’s economic and political relations with Africa. The heart of the matter here, of course, was the massive, centuries-long transatlantic trade in enslaved people who were put to work growing sugar, tobacco, cotton and other cash crops on the plantations of the New World. . . . 

The fateful engagement between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa produced civilisational transformations in both regions, as well as in the wider world – ones that, looking back today, produced an exceptionally crisp division between “before” and “after”. . . . 

Malachy Postlethwayt, a leading 18th-century British expert on commerce, called the rents and revenues of plantation slave labour “the fundamental prop and support” of his country’s prosperity. He described the British empire as “a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power [built] on an African foundation”. Around the same time, an equally prominent French thinker, Guillaume-Thomas-François de Raynal, described Europe’s plantations worked by African enslaved people as “the principal cause of the rapid motion which now agitates the universe”. Daniel Defoe, the English author of Robinson Crusoe, but also a trader, pamphleteer and spy, bested both when he wrote: “No African trade, no negroes; no negroes, no sugars, gingers, indicoes [sic] etc; no sugar etc, no islands, no continent; no continent, no trade.”

Postlethwayt, Raynal and Defoe were surely right, even if they did not comprehend all of the reasons why. More than any other part of the world, Africa has been the linchpin of the machine of modernity. Without African peoples trafficked from its shores, the Americas would have counted for little in the ascendance of the west. African labour, in the form of enslaved people, was what made the very development of the Americas possible. Without it, Europe’s colonial projects in the New World are unimaginable.

Through the development of plantation agriculture and a succession of history-altering commercial crops – tobacco, coffee, cacao, indigo, rice and, above all, sugar – Europe’s deep and often brutal ties with Africa drove the birth of a truly global capitalist economy. Slave-grown sugar hastened the coming together of the processes we call industrialisation. It radically transformed diets, making possible much higher worker productivity. And in doing so, sugar revolutionised European society.

In sugar’s wake, cotton grown by enslaved people in the American south helped launch formal industrialisation, along with a second wave of consumerism. Abundant and varied clothing for the masses became a reality for the first time in human history. The scale of the American antebellum cotton boom, which made this possible, was nothing short of astonishing. The value derived from the trade and ownership of enslaved people in the US alone – as distinct from the cotton and other products they produced – was greater than that of all of the country’s factories, railroads and canals combined. . . . 

Amid this story of military struggles for control of land and slaves, and of the economic miracles they produced, another kind of conflict is visible: a war on Black people themselves. This involved the consistent pursuit of strategies for beating Africans into submission, for making them enslave one another, and for recruiting Black people as proxies and auxiliaries, whether to secure territories from native populations of the New World or joust with European rivals in the Americas. . . . 

The most important site of erasure, by far, has been the minds of people in the rich world. . . . 

For these gestures to have more lasting meaning, an even bigger and more challenging task remains for us. It requires that we transform how we understand the history of the last six centuries and, specifically, of Africa’s central role in making possible nearly everything that is today familiar to us. This will involve rewriting school lessons about history just as much as it will require the reinvention of university curricula. It will challenge journalists to rethink the way we describe and explain the world we all inhabit. It will require all of us to re-examine what we know or think we know about how the present-day world was built, and to begin incorporating this new understanding into our everyday discussions.

In this task, we can no longer hide behind ignorance. Nearly a century ago, WEB Du Bois had already affirmed much of what we needed to know on this topic. “It was black labour that established the modern world commerce, which began first as a commerce in the bodies of the slaves themselves,” he wrote. Now is the time to finally acknowledge this.

The most important site of erasure, by far, has been the minds of people in the rich world.

There is a narrative opposed to antiracism that claims those of us involved in this work want to "rewrite history." That's true, in a sense, in that we want to more accurately tell the stories that have been intentionally written out of what we know. We want to tell a truer story.

The stories we tell matter.

How Decades of Disinformation About Fossil Fuels Halted U.S. Climate Policy

It's the most recent in a string of defeats to aggressive climate action that stretches back more than 25 years.

The U.S. has contributed more heat-trapping pollution than any country over time and has been the prime driver of global climate change. The national debate about how to address the problem has raged for decades, but progress toward a solution has been slow. Whenever presidents or Congress have introduced measures to slash emissions to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, they've been repeatedly derailed. . . . 

The same headwinds have stopped nearly every effort, including Biden's, to make systemic cuts to emissions: a powerful fossil fuel lobby that has spent vast sums of money to influence lawmakers while simultaneously sowing public doubt about the science of climate change.

My wife recently quit her job for a whole host of reasons and is taking a break before jumping back into working. Her reasons probably don't align with the general ones prevalent in society at this moment in time, but she is part of a trend. This article does an excellent job making a case that how we tell that story matters.

‘The Great Resignation’ Misses the Point

Taken on its surface, the Great Resignation foregrounds the language of job status, but misses a parallel, arguably bigger story: the radical realignment of values that is fueling people to confront and remake their relationship to life at home, with their families, with their friends, and in their lives outside of labor. . . . 

We are in the midst of massive change and it’s essential that we continue to understand and describe it, rather than grasping for a single, overloaded term. There is tremendous power in a name; it has the potential to shape how a given time in history is processed. And as its primary title, the Great Resignation does not do this period justice. We can derive more from this era if our language centers the underlying causes that are reordering our relationship with work and where it’s leading, rather than an incidental change in job status. To do this, we need to develop a larger vocabulary for how work is evolving in light of the pandemic. Embracing an era of description, even if it isn’t tidy, is crucial for us to find meaning in life in upheaval.

For related content, see my recent post about Devon Price's excellent book Laziness Does Not Exist, The Remedy is Boundless Compassion.

Witch:

How we tell the story matters.

My handwriting has gotten so sloppy from disuse.

10/27/21

Dear Mrs. Williams' Class,

Since he was born, our one word to describe [Younger] has always been "JOY." He loves to smile and laugh and he loves to make others smile and laugh--to bring them joy. [Younger] will always take care of the small and hurt, both human and animal. He is a helper, and when he sees a problem he is eager to help make things once again joyful. No matter how much a situation frustrates [Younger], he will keep trying. He is a tryer. [Younger] is always determined to grow up strong and powerful to be the best helper he can be.

Sincerely,

Mr. & Mrs. [Degolar]

([Younger]'s Mom & Dad)

P.S. He really, really, really loves kitties

The story we told of our six-year-old for his turn to be Student of the Week.

I've mentioned "doomscrolling" before and there are many out there lately telling stories about the evils of social media. While those stories resonate at a certain level, I've never felt they were quite accurate for my experience. I like to think I avoid some of the common pitfalls that make the experience more negative and usually find my selective social media use satisfying.

This story resonates more with me.

You're not doomscrolling, you're hopequesting.

You need those tiny pieces of joy from seeing friends and strangers share their art, their good news, their wacky unique selves.

We need light to live.

And we find it in each other.

I like to think my Facebook posts are somewhat eclectic, striking a mix of positive and negative, news and personal, silly and serious. Recently my entire status was a simple, single question, and my community responded with some wonderful hopequesting.

What do you recommend?

• A cup of hot tea and a novel.
• Astral projection.
• More sleep.
• More tea.
• A nap.
• Grey Poupon.
• I used to tell my daughter, "Every day is a new day, and every moment is a fresh moment." I recommend that philosophy.
• Fostering puppies.
• Never saying no to ice cream.
• Take a walk outside everyday you can.
• Chang's Wok
• Drink more water, eat more organic veggies, walk everyday, do some form of daily meditation and be generous
• Putting your toilet paper in a mini fridge in your bathroom.
• A nap.
• Putting on a good song and dancing to it.
• To remember that even Beyoncé only has 24 hours in a day. 
• Breaaaaaathe.

A related meme that came across my feed.

I love the combination of hope and acceptance of vulnerability in this poem.

Ian Opolski

LIKE DUST

There you are. Were you lost

In the blue reaches of what could be?

It is no small thing to be one

Little person in our many-colored

Cosmos. Seedling, a high destiny

Awaits you. Now you are down

In the dust, sighing skyward for hope

Of a savior. But what is dust

But an opportunity? Wrap yourself

In it. It’s time to grow. There is no earth

That will not nourish. There are no stones

Too dry that you cannot draw water.

Make lights to rival the sky’s. How

Else will you wreath your head in blooms?

A true queen will crown herself. Worm,

Wriggle in the dark. What is the dark

Except creation’s cradle? Build wings there.

It’s time you flew. But you knew

That already. That head full of dreams

Dreams on, until all its whorls and veins

Build a heart. That’s the most important

Part. The art is in the arteries. Get

The blood flowing. Go, give that heart

Away. It never belonged to you

Anyway. This is a universe full of

Seeds, after all. It’s your turn to do

Some tending. The making of it

All cannot be done by one pair of hands.

So what do you think you’re doing,

Shaking off all that dust? You are

Meant to use it. Take these sorrowful

Threads and weave a brighter dress.

Meet each murmuring morning

With trumpets of yes, yes, yes.

—from Ekphrastic Challenge

September 2021, Editor’s Choice

Follow the links, of course, to see the image it was responding to. (An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art.)

Another meme:

If we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known. We have to be vulnerable.

The Best Stories Feature Characters with Whom We Can Empathize

We can empathize with them because we see their vulnerabilities. They move us, we connect with them, because we get to really see them. . . .

The Wholehearted identify vulnerability as the catalyst for courage, compassion, and connection. In fact, the willingness to be vulnerable emerged as the single clearest value shared by all women and men whom I would describe as Wholehearted. They attributed everything--from their professional success to their marriages to their proudest parenting moments--to their ability to be vulnerable.

See more at that link or look for anything by Brene Brown.

The stories we tell about ourselves matter.

The True Human Beings.

It's what most people call themselves, to begin with.

And then one day the tribe meets The Enemy.

If only they'd think up a name like Some More True Human Beings,

it'd save a lot of trouble later on.

― Terry Pratchett, The Carpet People

The stories we tell about others matter.

In You Are a Part of Me I Do Not Yet Know, I raved about Valerie Kaur's book See No Stranger. Since writing it, she has started The Revolutionary Love Project based on it. She shared a short video from the project on Facebook not long ago to draw awareness to it. It features Baratunde Thurston, someone else I follow who I've mentioned before (including unrelated content in the post about See No Stranger). Below the image and quote is my transcription of the video.

The Revolutionary Love Project

We've been taught to perceive of this loneliness as a good thing. We valorize it--me against the world.

What if it was you with the world?

What if everyone around you--all the living things around you--were available to you? And if, instead of seeing enemies everywhere and competition everywhere, you saw allies everywhere? Everybody saw that? You know, like, this is not just for, like, brown people. It's not just for poor people. We could all have access to all.

Not all of it at one time. That lights the fires of hoarding; right, isn't that the point? But if we started to flip the perspective to something a little bit more abundant, and it's like how everybody here is potentially on my side--if I'm one with the nation, with the land, with the body, with the family, with the uni--whatever the unit of measurement is--then they've got my back.

We'd feel supported. We'd feel loved. We'd feel held.

And that's mostly what we want. We just want a hug. We just want to be seen. Want to be heard and acknowledged.

And if we started to show up in our institutions that way, if when police entered communities, they didn't enter as warriors, they entered as fellows, as members, as participants, as co-creators of the space. They entered with greater humility--I'm here to learn, I'm going to stay a little curious, I'm not going to jump to an assumption.

And if a prosecutor showed up that way. If the system that incentivizes--or misincentivizes--prosecutors showed up that way. Then we would start to tug at the threads that led this young person, or this "criminal" to choose something that was ultimately about fear of loneliness. And we would hold them.

Institutionally. With a living wage. With housing. With clean air and access to sunlight.

And we would gain their energy as a member of our body politic. When they're feeling seen and loved, they show up differently. And you would see them as a source of offering and not a threat. So we would show up everywhere differently.

And for those of us who felt so embattled it would also allow us to open the hands, unclench the fists, step from behind the shield. Because we wouldn't have to fear so much. Based on a pattern of behavior--"well, the next thing that matches that pattern visually is going to treat me like that so I'm already fired up and ready to fight, and nothing good can come from the other side"--maybe we could learn something too and welcome a different energy too.

It could be pretty magical. It could be dope. Like a "beloved community" kind of vibe.

That's the story I try to tell about the world. Can you imagine it?