Imagination

Imagination is not always encouraged in our culture

PAUL STRICKLAND
CONTRIBUTOR

Imagination could be loosely defined as the capacity for creating new ideas or stories
through contemplation. It's not always encouraged in our culture.

Some scholars have tried to investigate the reasons for this. In his important book,
Locations of the Sacred: Essays on Religion, Literature and Canadian Culture, Queen’s
University Professor William Closson James refers to a survey conducted in the 1980s
by Reginald Bibby, a University of Lethbridge sociology professor. It asked Canadians
what they thought “traditional middle-class virtues” were and to rank them in importance.
Respondents put honesty, reliability, cleanliness and politeness near the top. “By contrast,
imagination was valued much less, scoring lowest on the list,” James says.

“While more than 90 per cent of Canadians in general, as well as those with ties to the
major religious groups, view honesty as “very important”, only 33 per cent of United Church
people value imagination highly,” James observes. The view of imagination was only slightly
better among non-religious Canadians: Just 51 per cent saw it as an important value.

“While Bibby offers no explanation as to how those surveyed might have interpreted

the word ‘imagination,’ we might wonder if people took it as referring to daydreaming,

idle wishes, and fancy rather than to, say, creativity, inventiveness, and vision,” James
continues. He also refers to Arthur R.M. Lower, the noted Canadian historian, for his

views on the impact of the Methodist Church, most of which joined with certain other
denominations to form the United Church in 1925, on Canadian literature: “He says it gave
rise to ‘religious and descriptive’ prose, while providing ‘discouraging soil for the imaginative
writer, whom it could easily put down as a mere dreamer, or worse, a teller of tales that
weren't true!” James also sees a pragmatic if not consciously sectarian Calvinism that leads
to praise of practical work and discouragement of imagination. He qualifies his observations
by noting that, while religious structures may imprison the mind in some ways, they can
also sometimes provide a basis for new, imaginative literary structures derived from a
religious tradition.

American educator James J. Gallagher refers to a study which showed that American
students started losing creativity and imagination around Grade Four. It was surprising that
“the average nine-year-old was actually performing more poorly on tests of originality than
was the average eight-year-old,” he says. Such a dip in imaginative ability was not noted

in cultures outside North America selected for comparison. One student pointed out to him
that, in many schools, students in Grade Four must for the first time sit in orderly rows in
the classroom for extended periods of time, are required to keep their feet on the floor on a
continuous basis, and must conform more closely to methods of rote learning.

Gallagher looked into whether teachers could act as inhibitors of imagination. A group

of teachers themselves were asked what they would do if they deliberately wanted to
discourage imagination. They suggested: 1) Establish a rigid curriculum, together with a
limited time in which the curriculum can be presented; 2) Have teachers teach in content
areas in which they are not well versed, so that they will tend to turn away questions calling
for too much detail or analysis of an issue; 3) Accept one source, such as a textbook, as
valid, and only one; and 4) Do not allow discussion or evaluative statements on the part of
the students. Yet teachers cannot always be blamed: What are they to do in classes of 30
or more where the students’ tendency to resist and undermine unreasonable power is also
visited on even the most well meaning, kindly teacher?

Gallagher also refers to American funding priorities in education as a gauge of how
important literary creativity and artistic imagination are regarded in the United States. In
comparison with “support to the physical sciences and their research and development
programs, the areas of the humanities have been poor cousins,” he says. “This differential
treatment can be seen at every level. The college professors in the humanities draw lower _
salaries; there are fewer foundations to give financial encouragement; and there is less
attention given to the upgrading of elementary and secondary instruction in these areas.”
Unfortunately, many professors in the humanities, under pressure from the ‘Publish or
Perish’ form of the work ethic dominant in the academic world, use what little funding and
free time they do obtain to engage in writing articles or books on trendy literary theories:
These articles usually are either incomprehensible or can only be understood by a small
group of like-minded professors doing research in a narrow segment of literature.

The situation in the business and corporate worlds is not very good for use of the
imagination either. In their book on toxic downsizing corporate workplaces and bullying
bosses, Corporate Abuse: “How Lean and Mean” Robs People and Profits’, management
theorists Lesley Wright and Marti Smye say dictatorial bosses and a culture of too much
unpaid and unrecognized sacrifice lead to burnout and the destruction of the creative
soul in too many employees. They say the corporate world is changing but there are a lot
of executives who build up their power on people’s insecurities and force workers into
situations where they constantly have to “prove their worth” if they want to keep their jobs.

They propose that corporate leaders change course and promote “the creative
organization” encouraging employees to imagine new ideas, translate those ideas into
actions and be able to deliver the actions. “In order to imagine, we must explore and dream.
This is the stage in which people are opening their minds and looking at the world in new
and even risky ways. ‘What if . . .?’ is the beginning of the imaginative state.

“Once we have imagined the ultimate desires and dreams, we internalize that idea by
asking what's possible,” they continue. “Finally, we postulate. By that, we mean putting

the internalized idea into concrete terms. Have you ever heard the expression, ‘An idea
doesn’t exist until it's down on paper’? . ..When you look at something concrete, vivid, and
quantifiable, then you really do have to acknowledge the potential barriers and rewards.”

To promote imagination, the idea-generating leader of a forward-looking corporation must

Logic will get you from

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imagination will take you

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guarantee an office culture of peace and freedom from fear. Yet in too many corporations,
there is a rush to cut short any use of the imagination in order to see immediate results

or make a profit. “And that is one of the fundamental reasons why change is so badly
managed and why abusive cultures take root,” Wright and Smye observe. “Organizations
have a bias toward action. They feel they must look as though they are doing something all
the time.”

Even after being downsized or strongly encouraged into early retirement, a writer finds
North American culture allows little time or peace of mind for using imagination and
creativity. If one isn’t punching in at a time clock before beginning an activity and punching
out afterwards at the end of the day, it's not only not considered real work but is also
condemned as absolutely meaningless to society. One is called lazy and useless, or is
pressed into endless volunteering. Academics in universities are allowed to take year-long
sabbaticals to do research or write fiction, but an ordinary worker who does this between
jobs is called down and harassed, even when he is using his own savings or an eamed
pension to pay for his free time to write or otherwise be creative. One hears, “When are you
going to get a new job?”, “When are you going to get a real job?”, or “What have you been
doing with your time to make yourself useful?”

Then there is the phenomenon of what | call Mental Health McCarthyism. In the original
McCarthyite 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy accused many government employees of
being Marxist-Leninist Communists or homosexuals who were actually only non-doctrinaire,
non-communist socialists or reform-minded left-liberals who meant no harm to the United
States and whose private lives harmed no one. During this period, an effective way of
discrediting a professor, an economist or someone running for public office was to call him
a communist, a pinko, a comsymp or a commie pinko fag. Imagining a better future was
discouraged, except in a narrow technological or real-estate-development context.

Now, with Mental Health McCarthyism, the tendency is to use labels from the mental health
field to smear someone who points to problems with the economy, for example, or the
impact on labour of the reckless drive toward globalization at all costs. There should be no
stigma applied to people who suffer genuine mental illness and seek help from qualified
professionals. However, political opponents, co-workers and angry family members who
have few or no qualifications in psychology or psychiatry often fling labels like “depressed,”
“paranoid” or “unable to manage his stress” at people who are concerned about social
conditions that require change or at authors who write imaginatively in fiction about the
impacts of a new piece of legislation or of government or corporate surveillance measures.
In the late 1950s, after McCarthy was discredited, left-liberals began condemning anyone
who merely criticized Stalinism in the Eastern Bloc as “paranoid.” More recently right-wing
columnists like Anne Coulter have been saying Liberalism in the U.S. is a mental illness.

If you are an historian who promotes altemative ideas and has a good memory for dates,
you're accused of being a high-functioning autistic person or someone with Asperger's
Syndrome.

| went to a poetry reading at Cafe Voltaire in late August 2001. One student prefaced his
poem with the observation that only 15 per cent of accountants, surveyors and laboratory
technicians have mental health problems but more than two-thirds of writers and other
artists do. He threw in the observation as a kind of a joke before beginning his reading. |
can't recail for certain whether it was based on facts in a publication of the day or was just
the retelling of an urban legend. If it was from a reliable publication, that would unfortunately
tend to lend credence to the utterances of some of the people who engage in Mental
Health McCarthyism. In any case, the student's observation focused attention on the low
view society in general has of creative people, which wears on them over the years and
brings them down. A great deal must be done to restore imagination to its proper role in our
culture. :