Last updated on January 10, 2021
Back in December 2020, I began to expound on the understanding of imagination that animates my research, pedagogy (my teaching philosophy and method), and political thought. You can find those posts here and here. In a basic sense, I argue that the imagination is a pre-rational intuition of reality – of what is good, true, and beautiful. For the most part, that imagination or intuition (I use the terms synonymously) manifests itself in a manner similar to a story of which we are a part. Hopefully, the stories that help us make sense of our lives and which shape our behavior are attuned to reality in the broadest sense. While we may want to escape and live in a fantasy at times, we cannot remain there. We must live and act with reality; not against it. When we do rebel against reality, the inevitable result is death, violence, and destruction. So, understandably, we would want to follow those “stories” that shape an imagination characterized by affection, peace, order, justice, beauty, goodness, kindness and the other Fruits of the Spirit. Now, it’s just as much a fantasy to think we can escape the darker parts of reality as it is to run from reality in general. So we want to fill our lives with the kind of narratives that have proven themselves, historically, to consistently elucidate and advance that which is good, true, and beautiful. We don’t want to live in an echo-chamber nor do we want to fall into a nihilistic relativism, but we ought to will reality and genuinely seek it through spiritual disciplines, study, community, and cultural engagement.
The task is even harder to do than it is to explain. Even if our more naïve idealism has been chastened by reality, the temptation to escape or to follow the path of least resistance remains. This difficulty is, in part, why some give up and submit to nihilism, even when they don’t seem to realize it. It’s tempting to follow the simplest narrative, the one that demands the least personal responsibility, or the one that reliably reinforces your preexisting prejudices. We’d rather follow those stories than risk the uncomfortable need to change our mind.
And this brings us back to the documentary I mentioned at the end of the last Imagination blog, The Architecture of Doom. Here we see a dark example in which the vacuum left by nihilism and an identity crisis is filled by the Nazi’s story of German superiority and desire for racial purity. WWI had left the German People feeling like an empty canvas betrayed by their leaders. A cultural crisis ensued that was exacerbated by economic turmoil and a perceived need to re-capture what it meant to be German and to be proud of that identity. Hitler and the Nazis saw this as an opportunity and they turned to everything from doctors and documentaries to architecture and art shows to tell a different story for the German people. They created a myth of the “German volk,” and appealed to an underlying “general will” of the German people that cried out for political expression. And, in keeping with many of the most well-known stories, the Nazis also introduced a struggle and a set of enemies, including the Jews, as well as all non-Aryan races, along with homosexuals and the mentally handicapped.
The Nazis’ ability to seemingly resolve Germans’ identity crisis and fill in this nihilistic void gave them tremendous power. They captured the imaginations of a nation that began to embrace the story fed to them through their media, universities, museums, medical professionals, and public officials. Over a relatively brief period, the Nazi story became Germany’s story and the ideas that animated the narrative took on a life of their own. And this is what makes National Socialism and any other kind of totalitarianism so horrifying. It’s a government that is no longer, in Aristotle’s classification, ruled by the one, the few, or the many. It’s rule by an idea, or by a set of ideas. And that idea or, we might say, that story, is indifferent to human dignity when it becomes divorced from reality, or from anything objectively good, true, and beautiful. Yes, Hitler viewed himself as the Artist in Chief, painting on a canvas that he hoped would come to resemble a world sympathetic to his vision. But his ideas became so powerful that even he would have to submit to them in suicide. This is what makes totalitarianism so violent. Ideas, unmoored from historical and moral reality, are indifferent to human life, to traditions, and liberty.
But ideas themselves lack agency. They need the submission of willing people to embrace them and bring them to full realization. Moreover, reality cannot be ignored forever. The vision of the Nazis and their defenders would be exposed as fraudulent, genocidal, and incoherent. Without the National Socialist leaders to perpetuate the story, the ideas lacked political power – though they certainly did not die. Instead, other storytellers fulfilled the imagination’s need for a compelling narrative. In Germany’s case, that took the post-war form of a struggle between Communism and Liberalism, though ideas of national socialism have continued to persuade small fringe groups around the world for nearly a century. (Indeed, several contemporary Nazi sympathizers just stormed the U.S. Capitol). Nazi Germany is among the most dramatic examples of how, when the circumstances are right, governments and political movements can have a profound impact on the people. They can exploit uncertainty, frustration, resentment, and fear to make a story where their ideas take center stage and command loyalty and direct action. They can, in other words, control our imagination…if we let them.
Our job, if we desire to be free and attuned to the Good, the true, and the beautiful, is to resist the extremes of an absolutist, ideological imagination – like that of the Nazis – on the one hand, and the radical relativism or nihilism that made Hitler’s success possible. To put it another way, our struggle is to know reality and to will the good so that we recognize evil when we see it. This is a permanent task of human civilization. No human being, other than Jesus Christ, can gain access to truth in its entirety, nor will moral order ever be realized completely. The fundamental limitations of human existence present an obstacle to a full understanding of reality, but, again, such an admission must not be construed as a concession to radical subjectivism, skepticism or relativism. The moral and philosophical life – not to mention, politics – constantly involves a struggle between an attunement or will to reality and a revolt against, or an evasion of, reality. At the core of this moral and philosophical life, then, is a tension between what I and several others call the moral and idyllic imagination.
The Nazis were animated by an idyllic imagination, or, as T.S. Eliot would say, a “diabolical imagination.” The response, though, ought not to be a call for less imagination, as if that were possible, but for a moral imagination.
Next time, I’ll elaborate on what I mean by the moral and idyllic imagination and why it matters for politics and more.
Comments are closed.