'A total guillotine on thinking...!'

Amitav Ghosh | On Crisis of Imagination

This post is partly a sequel to yesterday’s post on ‘disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves’!

Quoting Eliot,

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Let’s take some little time off, to ponder over this lovely expression –

The ‘what might have beens’ of life!

I guess, this points to the power of the creative imagination that’s been bestowed on each of us!

By means of our creative imagination, we are able to imagine alternative realities, and make possible brave new worlds.

However, unfortunate as it is, the advances in technology have had a very bad effect on the creative imagination. Giovanni Sartori, eminent Italian political scientist, attests to this gradual loss of the creative imagination amongst children [even 25 years ago] because of the advent of television.

Says he,

If our children no longer have the capacity for abstraction, and if the thing is not seen or ‘seeable’, they are not interested to understand, so that’s a total guillotine on thinking.

Shocking observations, ain’t it?

Today the situation is much more alarming on a variety of counts!

This crisis of imagination, is a crisis that we all experience every day!

A crisis in how we value!

A crisis in what we value!

A crisis in who we value!

In short, a crisis in the ways in which we imagine the beautiful world around us, has resulted in our priorities being manipulated for us by the so-called [Foucauldian] ‘powers’ in a [capitalist] society!

Crisis of Imagination requires an urgent crisis management!

What’s then required - is a radical way of reimagining the beautiful world around us, in terms of the crisis that we face today!

That’s hence Amitav Ghosh (today happens to be his birthday as well!) talks at length about the role of students, writers and philosophers in plugging this Crisis of Imagination!

To Amitav, the climate crisis is a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination!

He follows it up by saying that,

Our inability to grasp the global climate crisis in its totality is really the biggest crisis of our time.

We simply do not seem to be able to understand that the comfortable climate we have lived in for so long can drastically change in a significant amount of time.

And this is exactly where writers and philosophers should step in. They must help people broaden their horizons, to create new links and to offer new perspectives.

Otherwise our gaze remains too narrow and limited, says Ghosh!

In his seminal book titled, The Great Derangement, Ghosh laments on this lack of literary engagement with climate change!

Says he –

That climate change casts a much smaller shadow within the landscape of literary fiction than it does even in the public arena is not hard to establish.

To see that this is so we need only glance through the pages of a few highly regarded literary journals and book reviews, for example, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Literary Journal and the New York Times Review of Books.

Whenever the subject of climate change appears in these publications, it is almost always in relation to non-fiction; novels and short stories are very rarely to be glimpsed within this horizon.

Indeed, it could even be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously by serious literary journals: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction.

It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel, says Ghosh!

To lap it up, what we need today is – to reimagine the ‘what might have beens’ of life, through a lovely literary lens towards mitigating issues concerning climate change and global warming – issues that need immediate attention all across the world!

As Albert Einstein beautifully puts it,

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

How true proves this Einstein-ian dictum on the power of the imagination!

So yes! why wait?

Train up your imagination to reimagine the world with the ‘what might have been’ realities and help mitigate the climate crisis – in your own sweet ways! Will ya? 

The ways of a true blue literary being!

Image: this blogger’s!