should have opportunities, like the study of ancient Phoenicia, to experience and imagine how a community is made up of members working together, not of isolated individuals in competition with each other.
Although Dewey thought that social imagination was a seedbed for democracy, not every form of social imagination is similarly constructive. When fascists imagine society, they often describe a ruthless world of ungoverned competition where only the strong survive. That is what the Nazis preached, pledging to take people who felt feeble, unnoticed, and aggrieved and forge them into a powerful nation. The Nazis’ answer to a ruthless world was to turn their nation into something like a living work of art projecting brutal power, pristine purity, unrivalled superiority, and permanence. We must remember where this vision of society led— to smoke rising from gas chambers and to cities lying in rubble.
What do we imagine society to be? Do we imagine it to be more like Dewey’ s social fabric or like the fascist world of ungoverned competition? Our answers matter; what we imagine society to be influences whether we engage fellow citizens with a presumption of kindness or threat. In other words, the social imagination that predominates in our communities affects the moral texture of our society, influencing how we think about each other and how we order our political environment.
We live in troubled times; the question of whether our neighbours might be for or against us matters. If our answer is“ for us,” we can live to make it so.
Lloyd Den Boer is a retired educator who lives in
Edmonton with his spouse, Audrey. Since this is his last article for this magazine, he focused it on issues that, to him, matter most in today’ s political environment.
Editor’ s Note: Lloyd Den Boer first signed on as a regular contributor to news & views in 2019. Through twenty-five issues, Lloyd has given us diverse articles that provoke reflection on how to cultivate a healthy human spirit and reach for something bigger than ourselves. Lloyd has announced that this is his last column for news & views. I hope you’ ve found his columns as enriching as I have. Thank you, Lloyd!
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