There are many signs—which we’ll talk about in future blogs—that show we may be returning to an appreciation of Imagination. The kind that makes the world a better place
Nothing much changes, except that the world is less simple. There are actually two worlds. One is the changing world of technology and marketing; the other is the unchanging world of poverty, hunger, war, and natural disasters. We keep studying poverty, hunger, war and so forth. There are thousands upon thousands of studies. With every new manifestation, we have new studies. We’re either stupid or unwilling to find a solution. How can it be that we have not yet figured out world hunger? Hunger has remained because it is always treated as an isolated phenomenon, something that just happens to the less fortunate, rather than as a collective condition belonging to everyone.
It’s not really that hard. If you spend your lunch money on a movie you’ll go hungry. If you take someone else’s lunch money, you’re making that person hungry. It’s not rocket science. We have to be honest and see how we are taking or have taken the resources and the money from developing countries for no conscionable reason. But for every major problem like hunger, there will be a hundred people in power who will say—further studies need to be done.
The two worlds will never be reconciled at the nation level. There’s only one way: through you, and through me. I don’t mean that we should give organizations a pass. Oh no, in fact we should put more pressure on organizations, but that can only happen effectively when we say of ourselves, what can I do? And that ‘s not easy. We have lost the ability as individuals to find solutions. We have to find a way to change things that doesn’t require us to be rich or to be genius-level smart. Otherwise, the big changes will never happen.
Is it possible? Yes. We need a certain kind of imagination. Not the imagination of escape or fantasy, but the imagination of creation and invention. Corporations will tell you that they support innovation as never before. But the innovation that corporations support is designed to make them wealthier and not to solve world problems. We also need vision. Vision connected to values and ethics. Vision will tell us that the science that reinforces the divisions between rich and poor is not the science that we should be getting behind. Vision can tell us that fundamentally we have One World, and science can choose to work on solutions to disease that are not about pharmaceutical industry profits, solutions to food scarcity that are not about trade agreement or agro-business, solutions to war that are not about political power or military might. There is no science without scientists, and scientists are human beings. Engineers are human beings. Accountants are human beings.
When the Berlin Wall fell, that wasn’t the result of government will, diplomatic maneuvering, or corporate pressure. It was the people saying: Enough. When the Civil Rights Movement arose in America, it wasn’t government that did the trick, but a religious figure named Martin Luther King who inspired enough people that a movement was born. The growing ecological movement comes not from government millions or corporate initiative, but from individual scientists, farmers, activists, small-business people doing stuff that gets others inspired and involved.
Do you have stories that show you were successful beating odds and overcoming obstacles to find a fair solution to a big problem? Or even the beginnings of a solution- in a group, on a street, in a community?
Here is a beautiful essay by Susan Griffin first published in 1996 in Whole Earth Review, and here reprinted in Common Dreams. It speaks about a certain kind of imagination that’s possible even when everything cries out impossible! Read it to the end:
“In Paris recently I went to see a small exhibit of photographs taken by Tina Modotti in the twenties and thirties in Mexico. Upstairs in the gallery, the harried mood of the Rue de Rennes rapidly peeled away. I was startled by the beauty of the images Modotti made and the impact of her life story. In one photograph, a line of Mexican men, mostly workers or peasants, stand staring at the camera. They have assembled at the headquarters of the Communist party in Mexico. One of them is holding a flag taken from the United States Army by the first Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The moment is a victory and you can see this in the men’s faces. But the camera’s eye also catches a tender quality of innocence and hope, an expression one so seldom sees any longer even on the faces of any but the youngest children.
One might say that life is so difficult now, or that there has been so much violence in this century that innocence is no longer possible. But this explanation is too easy. The lives of the men in this photograph were undoubtedly very difficult and violence was palpably present — another series of newspaper photographs in this show depicts Tina Modotti as she is questioned by police just after her lover, a militant organizer, was assassinated. She was with him on the street when he was shot. He died in her arms.
Saturated with the beauty and sorrow of these images, my mood changes again as I descend the stairs. I join a line that is flanked by police who check everyone’s bags. Throughout the summer a number of bombs have exploded in public places in Paris. The randomness of this violence is as much a part of modern life as the lone skyscraper of Montparnasse, which towers over me as I step out onto the street, reminding me once more that this is a different age than the one Modotti recorded.
Outwardly the most obvious change is technological. Like surrounding armies, steel and glass structures can be seen at the edge of this old city of Paris. Efficiency with its faster cars and airplanes, television, computers, e-mail, faxes, defines modern life here. Yet strangely, in this brave new world with its promise of every possible sensation and comfort, one feels diminished. The unapproachable immensity of the skyscraper in front of me, blotting out the immensity of the sky, appears now as an icon of an anonymous power, in whose shadow I feel powerless.
Among those who would seek or want social change, despair is endemic now. A lack of hope that is tied to many kinds of powerlessness. Repeating patterns of suffering. Burgeoning philosophies of fear and hatred. Not to speak of the failure of dreams. Where once there were societies that served as models for a better future, grand plans, utopias, now there is distrust and dissatisfaction with any form of politics, a sense of powerlessness edging into nihilism.
Yet Modotti’s beautiful images still speak in me. The eye of her camera is so fresh. A bunch of roses, encountered, almost as if caressed, come alive as if never before in the frame of her camera. And it’s the same with a typewriter or a crowd standing under umbrellas in the rain, her vision original, allowing one to see the familiar again in a fuller dimension. Even in her photograph of the Mexican Communist Party, one sees a layer of existence beneath theory; a desire for a better life and for justice that is radiantly evident among those she photographed. Perhaps it’s precisely now, as old systems of meaning perish, that new meanings can be revealed. In these years after the end of the Cold War, a time of the failure of old paradigms and systems of thought, perhaps hope lies less in the direction of grand theories than in the capacity to see, to look past old theories that may obscure understanding and even promise. To assume what the Buddhists call beginner’s mind. And to see what exists freshly and without prejudice clears the path for seeing what might exist in the future, or what is possible…
READ THE REST HERE:
