The most beguiling and vexing phrase associated with 9/11 was “Failure Of Imagination.” It’s an extraordinary phrase with wide-reaching implications. “Who could imagine etc.?” Ms. Rice wondered aloud into the universal camera. To imagine means vision. Lack of vision is at the root of disasters that swoop out of control.
The extent of wildfires in southern California might well eventually (or immediately) be traced to a lack of vision - to a failure to imagine what a house here and a road there and power lines overhead and undergrowth there and proximity of water sources all might mean. The houses built in the hills were acts of will and deferred city planning. They want it - we can build it - we can finance it - what else do we need to know - or imagine? Were the consequences of these fires imagined and then ignored? Or not imagined at all as houses, neighborhoods and clusters of structures sprouted on landscapes of kindling?
As people sit in traffic and on runways - for hours - who could imagine it would be like this? Was it failure of imagination that had money diverted and designs denied for smart growth and mass transit? Were there other priorities at work in decision-making? If so, something different than imagination failed.
In the coming days there will be high drama and public prayers - the governor will be praised as a man of action even as half of his national guard are in Iraq - comparisons to Katrina will be made - fingers will try to be pointed but the noble smiles and stifled tears of the good-hearted homeless homeowners and the irritated squint of the governor will put a stop to that. We will rebuild. Intrepid - forward - and most likely without vision or imagination.
Failure of Imagination tries to forgive a multitude of sins. Did anyone imagine what an American army on the Arabian peninsula might mean? Or what an invasion of Iraq would mean? Did imagination fail when the government sent paid armies to the frontlines? Who could imagine it would cause increased rage and resentment or that anymore rage and resentment in Iraq was even possible?
After election 2000 many of us succeeded in imagining what was in store for us. We did not get a seat at the table where decisions were bought and paid for. We were put into free speech zones and dubbed focus groups. Our imaginations did not fail - but what good has it done?
Failure of Imagination is conscious failure. The shrug and the responsorial hymn of “who knew?” has expired. Does anyone need to imagine what bombing Iran will do?
The perfect storm that the governor of California referred to is not a passive reality. Smart collective decision-making and wise, imaginative leadership should collaborate with all neutral and hostile realities to minimize damage and hardship to the people being led. What might lurk beneath the “failure of imagination” is our leaders’ indifference or political expedience or the unconscious need for catastrophe - or the perfect storm of all three. Something besides imagination is failing us - and failing within us.
Bill C. Davis is a playwright. www.billcdavis.com
Good piece.
I do civil engineering for a living, a creative profession (like playwright), but suffers from a misconception of being just the the opposite. So, I likewise am amazed at the stunning failure of imagination with regard to solutions for social, political and environmental problems facing us.
I support the ideal of moving toward design of car-free cities and totally electric transportaton infrastructure, and a phase out of commercial aviation. So, I see this lack if imaginaton all the time when i bring this issue up. People (notably suburbanites) invariable blurt out non-sequiters like “So you want to regress to living like the Amish? or “You want people to die because there are no ambulances?” Or, even “How would we get to the food store?”. In their unimaginativeness, they even somehow conflate things like modern medicine, communications and information technology with the car, and accuse me of being a luddite who would eliminate those too.
I’m with you PJD, and I guess you’d call that “long suffering.” I am currently in a car about 20 to 25 times a year. Somebody else’s.
I will until my dieing day profess that the bicycle is one of the most perfect and beautiful of human inventions.
If every one of you had started riding your bikes when I told you to 30 years ago, you’d be in pretty good shape, and we might have avoided many of these problems. Unfortunately, you didn’t take my advice so I have kept quiet until today.
Oh, and you elected Reagan too.
Imagine that.
Lack of planning and short term profits for sure. But more than that, it’s the lack of input from We the People who will be affected by leaders’ decisions.
In a direct democracy, the people can restrain destructive market forces. In a plutocracy, the people are given no say and the market careens along like a speeding bus on a cliff road with a drunken driver and We the People inside.
The thing we had better not “fail to imagine” again anytime soon is that in the absence of UNIFIED efforts by liberals and moderates of every stripe, staunch conservatives buy ads and win elections. (Or, in a play on words, they buy elections and win the right to run more ads.)
Author Bill Davis above says “Failure of Imagination is conscious failure.” And he’s right.
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”–Albert Einstein
Yes, The “failure of imagination” is quite a deliberate one, I’m sure of that.
This is a thought-provoking article, and it reminds me of William McDonough’s lecture on the intention of design. When the engineers were tasked with building detention camps and gas chambers for humans in Nazi Germany, why were the engineers only thinking about creating the facility, and not what the facility entailed or the intention behind it?
It’s time to look at things in terms of life cycles, which takes into consideration all the variables, not just efficiency and profit.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7987612343225687713
Bill Davis is certainly one of those who is able to think outside the box and that makes him an intersting read. Naomi Klein’s The shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism does a lot to bring some logic and order to the chaos with which we are surrounded.
Not that these disasters are necessarily planned, but that the response (or lack thereof) is intentional and designed to produce a situation in which people can be fleeced of their ortunes and freedoms.
When it’s a matter of life or death the purse strings loosen. The important inquiry to be made is not how much?, but to whom and for what? Similarly, ordinarily free people will allow their freedoms to be subordinated to needs of an emergency situation and here the important question is not how much but for how long will “emergency measures” remain enforced and by whom?
Here there is no “lack of imagination” on the part of the various “powers that be”. They want as much wealth as they can loot from the public treasurery as the disasters in Iraq and southern Louisiana and Mississippi make evident and as (no doubt) the Southern California mess will also reveal.
They also want as much control for as far into the future as possible. The security state legislation that has been passed under the guise of a “war on terrorism” and its bipartisan support makes this evident.
For years, big trucks laden with cedar shingles rolled down I-5 out of the State of Washington bound for southern California, to be used on roofs, required by many neighborhood covenants. They look really good. They are also excellent fire-starting material (almost everyone on Puget Sound uses cedar splinters to start fires). Anyone could witness the spread of conflagration by flying burning shingles, but no one seemed to care, even as the last of the big cedar snags were being reduced to shingles. (In a dry climate, roof with tile.) What a waste. This wasn’t even a failure of imagination, but a denial of the obvious.
We are less and less who we thought we were as Americans. Whom we saw ourselves as a people, our expectations of who and what we were, that people would not fail New Orleans. When we did it shocks us and cuts loose some of the mooring lines we took for granted defined us. The utter corruption allowed to happen for Bush cronies, Abu Ghraib and the inept leadership of Bush in the Iraq war…that wasn’t us we would have said but saw it was. Warrantless surveillance, data mining, Cheney’s secret energy meetings, Bush’s signing statements and them being accepted like royal decrees by our Congress etc. that couldn’t be us? All americans love their constitution and freedoms and we expected that was a given till we see that it wasn’t for this administration. Exxon makes 75 billion in profits during a war setting the record for any corporation for two years… and still Bush gave them additional tax cuts and rebates on oil pumped from public lands. Could that be us …during a war? It was and more. We borrow ten trillion owe two trillion to social security and two trillion in tax cuts go mostly to the wealthiest? Us? Ten trillion borrowed while the wealthiest get tax cuts? During a war? Huh? Remember when small towns were taking up collections to buy body armor for their sons in Iraq while at the same time a republican controlled Congress and Bush passed another round of tax cuts. Was that us? Troops complain of literally thousands of Saddam’s ammo dumps were left unguarded allowing the explosives to be made into IEDS. Us? Billions shipped to Iraq in bundles of shrink wrapped $100 bills and no records kept on who got what? How does one not keep records on billions?
Yeah we don’t know where to look anymore to find that America we thought we always were. Amongst the barrage of spin, we sense that we are less and less our definition of America.
Americans grow afraid of our own freedoms. We watch our constitution and rights become redefined and those rights explained as if they were privledges which can be taken away by the throne at will. Worse is that this has been going on so long that we are even beginning to forget who we thought we were too. Any longer and the next generation will grow up not expecting rights and freedoms they never saw. Not the ones we grew up with and were passed down to us.
Remember our constitution? We used to have one of those. Why when I was a boy we really had rights and freedoms.
Sure Grandpa …sure.
“Failure” implies an effort was made to imagine in the first place, and also that everyone has the ability to “wear the other shoe” as it were.
The failure is in the willful decision to NOT imagine, not even try to imagine, not dare wonder what it must be like to be illegally invaded by the most powerful military in history, to see your family and friends and country destroyed, year after year. How many, even if they tried, could imagine what it’s like living without electricity, clean water, gasoline or a regular food supply while tanks and choppers and jets of a foreign army are constantly in your face, your house…
There’s a reason why there is such a huge void of creativity from the “right” - because they have been bred not to imagine how their actions may affect others, or their environment; not to imagine what it must be like to be poor, or suffering from a TBI because your company wanted more money, or dying from a disease because your HMO won’t cover the one test that could save you. That’s the stuff the “little people” deal with, not “them.” They like going to the movies, but they do not make them; they like reading fiction and poetry, but rarely if ever produce any; they enjoy music, but are not known for their contribution to jazz or rock or hiphop or dance or trance or reggae or blues or…
It takes no imagination to count money, and very little to imagine how much more money there will be to count if a bunch of bombs fall on those unlucky enough to live near ever-dwindling resources.
Yes, nice piece. The greedy promotional culture is antithetical to imagination - selling brain locking fear or irrational want. It’s amazing to me how many buy into the banality of it all without any apparent critical introspection.
Queasy theme-tracks harmonize and approved thought-bites homogenize all into just another virtualized tableau of no particular value. The ill-alert just blink their OK at the tube to acquire the videographic imprint as the permanent unassailable record. It’s all you need to know. It’s fair and balanced.
The constant pandering of the pseudo-partisan rah-rah subterfuge wrapped around just about every current event devolves thought to this state of detatched spectation.
Watching the California fires I wondered if monolithic domes might have survived - suspecting they would have - or perhaps even straw bale. I imagined also that GWB might do a true public service and hold his bladder til he could fly over and ‘gulliver’ the fire out from a safe distance. Not so, though, it had to be a photogenic touchdown of empathy in the big black whirling chariot chopper. No more worries. How nice.
Imagination is more important than college. Turn on, tune in, drop out.
“Most of the literature of the world has been propagandistic in one way or another…. In a word, the revolutionary critic does not believe that we can have art without craftsmanship; what he does believe is that, granted the craftsmanship, our aim should be to make art serve man as a thing of action and not man serve art as a thing of escape.” - V. F. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature (1932)
The progressive partisan fiction journal Liberation Lit publishes stories geared to social change. Failure of socio-political imagination and more pervades the world of art too. How could it not as part of an FOI culture? FOI art contributes to FOI coups and FOI societies. Lib Lit is working to change that: http://liblit.org/
Who would have imagined so much would be learned from that ‘Failure of Imagination’?