In my current research, I am exploring how children and young people, and their families, were supported to imagine a future for themselves during times of crisis and uncertainty.
The capacity to imagine a future is important for many reasons. At a practical level, if we can’t see a pathway forward, then it is difficult to direct our steps. Being able to imagine a future is also an important dimension of feeling safe. When the future appears so uncertain that we struggle to imagine what our life will look like, we might also experience anxiety, fear, even despair. Helping young people (and adults) imagine possibilities for themselves in a rapidly changing world is critical to wellbeing.
Two central questions then arise: what sorts of things should we put our effort into imagining and what do we need to imagine well?
Futurists, psychologists & imagination
In the twentieth century, especially after the cataclysmic disaster of World War Two, a movement of people, who we now call futurists, put themselves to work trying not only to imagine a future for themselves but to predict the pathway of new technologies, discoveries, and the futures of work, health, and life that would arise from them.
Futurists were worried that their predictions might make them look fanciful or too utopian, and so they saw their domain as that of scientific research and policy making. This shaped what they valued and what they they argued governments should when preparing for the future – namely scientific and technological research. Their arguments played an important role in the growing emphasis placed on science as key to a prosperous future.
Also important was a body of research being produced by a group known as the ‘positive psychology’ movement. Early psychological research had concerned itself with people who were in mental distress or unwell. From the mid-twentieth century, researchers also became interested in supporting wellbeing and human flourishing – ‘positive’ health.
The work of Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist, was especially influential. Maslow argued that wellbeing first required basic needs like food and shelter to be met, and other needs – like safety, belonging and esteem – built upon them, creating a ‘hierarchy of needs’. At the top of his pyramid was ‘self-actualisation’, a category associated with creativity, personal growth and the pursuit of meaning. Other psychologists adapted and reordered this hierarchy of needs, but it became a remarkably influential lens through which human flourishing was evaluated.
Imagination & creativity in government policy
As western countries became wealthier and put in place systems to help ensure that basic needs were met, they became more interested in directing their policy to support wellbeing and to measuring its impact. The famous ‘happiness’ indexes, that rank countries against each other, were produced against this backdrop. Influenced by people like Maslow, government policy tended to reaffirm a hierarchy of needs where support for things like creativity, imagination, and the pursuit of meaning were placed last in the list of priorities.
This ‘technocratic’ approach to government policy, as has been well covered elsewhere, has had recursive impacts on arts and humanities research. Perhaps most evident at this moment is the ways these ideas underpinned claims that a humanities education was of less economic and social value to Australia than degrees in the sciences. The problems with this approach however are much more fundamental than just underfunding a valuable area of research.
Treating creativity and imagination as the last point on a hierarchy of needs – a luxury – fails to recognise that these capacities are central to the production of new ideas, new technologies, and new visions of the future. Even in the 1950s, as the positive psychology movement gained momentum, scholars were concerned about the de-prioritisation of these skills. The German philosopher Ernst Bloch explained that what distinguished the worst human builder from the best worker bee was that ‘he has built the cell in his head before he builds it in wax, at the end of the work process there is a result which already existed in the imagination of the worker’. Daydreaming, concluded Bloch, ‘activates and galvanises us towards the goal of a better life’. Imagination is the first step in meeting our basic needs.
Imagining better futures
Investment in the imagination appears to be on the decline. Individuals are encouraged to outsource their exploratory thinking to new technologies, despite rapidly expanding evidence of the long-term damage to creativity. At best, imagination is assumed to be a basic human capacity that will always be with us, and so able to be ignored by policy makers and government. If imagination can atrophy, as these new studies show, we should also consider it as a skill that can be built and developed. Moreover, studies of imagination across the globe highlight this human capacity as one that takes cultural form – how we imagine, not just what, varies across time and place. People can not only be taught how to imagine better, but also to imagine in new ways.
As we try to respond to a rapidly changing world, being able to imagine better – more effectively, more innovatively – will become increasingly important. The arts and humanities, the traditional subjects where imagination and creativity have been honed, are particularly well equipped to support the development of imagination as a human capacity. And to do that, they deserve the same care and investment as we have placed on our other future-orientated disciplines. Imagination and creative practices are not luxuries; they are the foundation of human flourishing. Being able to imagine well will be vital to our youth building a better future.
