It seems like our society is somehow drowning in nonsense, while at the same time ailing badly from a drought of imagination.
The nonsense is simply endemic, as are the variants of dishonesty and disinformation. These themes are familiar here on this blog, and recorded almost every single day in my chronicle of news and events any more.
It seems more and more, though, like the fixation on relatively familiar nonsense is connected with a dismal failure of real imagination.
Most people, I am forced to conclude, may be very eager consumers of conspiracies and myths and fantasy stories of all kinds, but are never much good at really envisioning the world familiar to them becoming significantly better or worse. Doing that is really a specialist role.
I suppose we might say that illiberal specialists are meeting the challenge to seize popular imagination relatively well, while liberalism’s imagination seems largely seized-up.
Read More →
