Is Imagination Necessary for Depolarization?
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I’ve lost track of the number of times my children have asked me to tell them a story. I imagine it is one of the near universals of childhood. Children like stories.
They like all kinds of stories, whether in books, in TV shows and movies, stories about them when they were younger and about their mum and dad before they were born. Indeed, almost from the moment they can speak (and perhaps even before though they can’t tell us) children make up their own stories and tell them to themselves, their siblings and their friends. Stories, both historical and fictional, are a central way children make sense of the world they find themselves in and how they navigate it as they grow.
Of course there is so much that can be said about story, the story of story would indeed fill many volumes. So I would like to focus on just one part of story, perhaps more associated (rightly or wrongly) with children’s stories: imagination.
It may seem odd to talk about something as seemingly ethereal as imagination in the context of such a pressing need as depolarization, but I want to suggest that in many ways imagination is an essential ingredient and indeed a prerequisite for depolarization. Here are three reasons why this might be the case:
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Imagination Allows Us to See Ourselves from Outside
“The function of imagination [...] is to make settled things strange.” – G.K. Chesterton
The functioning of imagination, particularly through a good story, has the uncanny ability to help us see ourselves “from the outside,” We get immersed in the story and then our imagination allows us to see in one of its characters a part of ourselves as we are, not as we like to think we are. It catches us unaware until the wave of self-realization breaks over us and we find it is too late to swim away. Such self-awareness is most helpful to uncovering common ground because it reveals to us and therefore allows us to examine our own presuppositions and assumptions.
More than that, as Chesterton observes, imagination, by “making settled things strange” allows us to return to these “settled things,” often our deepest convictions, with either a greater conviction of their truth, goodness and beauty, or a greater questioning. Both dispositions, conviction and questioning are necessary for finding common ground – firm convictions and a willingness to question and explore. Too often these are set against each other, that to firmly believe one thing means to cease questioning everything - yet imagination helps us see they are in fact compliments not opposites.
Imagination Enables Us To Be (Sub)Creators
“Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream, or some things fair and others ugly deem?” – J.R.R. Tolkein
J.R.R. Tolkein, Image provided by Public Resource
Common ground often needs to be uncovered, but sometimes it needs to be created. Sometimes a unique opportunity for partnership, for common ground needs to be imagined and its vision communicated. Imagination allows us to see what could be, both in terms of a vision for common ground, but also, as importantly concerning depolarization, imagination enables us to have hope.
It is imagination that allows hope to flourish, imagination that allows us to see a future where an opponent becomes a friend (gasp!), an “irreconcilable” relationship is reconciled or where there is in fact, despite the seeming evidence to the contrary, a “happy ending.” In his masterful and beautiful essay On Fairie Stories Tolkien coined the term “eucatastrophe” (and in my view artfully exemplifies it in The Lord of the Rings) for this.
Imagination Enables Us to See the Other as a Person
“But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” – Luke 10v29, ESVCE
This is the opening to the parable of the Good Samaritan, one of Jesus’ most well-known stories. It’s, among other things, a story that engages our imaginative sense to remind us that the “other” is a person, is a neighbor and that in the Judeo-Christian tradition therefore someone we are explicitly called to love.
Pope Saint John Paul reminds us that love is the only right response to another person. Too often we find it too easy to ignore that insight into humanity by “de-personing” the other. Too often we are tempted to either deny the other’s personhood, justifying our decision because of something we perceive them to have done, or because we question their motives (though less often our own) or because “the stakes are too high.”
All of these justifications, if we let them, fall away when we let our imagination draw us into the story, both as the Samaritan walking along the road, but also realizing at times we may very well be the person lying at the side of the road as well. As Walker Percy observes, “bad books lie. They lie most about the human condition.” Might we say the opposite about good stories, that in some way (and whether intentionally or not) they tell us something true about the human condition?
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Conclusion
If as a society we lose our capacity for imagination, if our ability to imagine atrophies, so too does our capacity to find common ground, to pursue the common good. So I sincerely hope our affinity for good stories hopefully didn't end in childhood. We grown-ups should not grow out of the the good stories that exercise our imagination. If we want to find common ground, and we need to find common ground, we need to imagine, and good stories are an essential way to do this.