The Imagination of Disaster
Horizons have shrunk. Novelists and filmmakers seem far more at home with dystopias than with the possibility that the world might get better. The institutions that once fuelled our shared imagination have, for different reasons, given up, leaving public intellectual culture recycling old ideas, while much of politics has drifted into nostalgia.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.
Rebecca Solnit • Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
One thing I’ve also noticed is the gradual loss of the understanding of “imagination” as a category; it can sound a little Reading Rainbow to talk about, but wouldn’t you know imagination is actually an essential part of the human condition. In so far as the words “spirit” or “spirituality” mean anything beyond woo-woo or cliché they must include t... See more
John Ganz • Why Culture Sucks
As those movies attest, we excel at imagining future scenarios, including awful ones. But such apocalyptic visions are a form of escapism, not a moral summons, and still less a plan of action. Where we stumble is in conjuring up grim futures in a way that helps to avert them.