Ask composer Burt Bacharach what the world needs now, and he would compose a song that answered “love, sweet love.” Good and truthful answer, of course.
But I am thinking that the world also needs more imagination. Einstein once said that
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
He also said
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
Indeed, his own imagination drastically changed our thinking about the world. He allowed himself to imagine space as a web of space-time, where both were tightly interwoven. And, he pictured space-time as being something that could be warped by the influence of gravity. From this imaginative exercise, he then developed equations that represented the imaginations, and that were testable. Tests have confirmed that these equations accurately describe reality. In fact, without Einstein’s equations, we would not have GPS systems today: Newton’s laws are just not adequate for the operation of GPS because they do not account for the compaction of time that impacts the chronometers on the GPS satellites.
We see imagination in our children and our grandchildren, and we kill it. We tell them that their imaginary friends do not really exist. When they set down next to us with their science books and try to reinterpret what the books are saying, we tell them that scientists have determined that the books describe reality “as it really is” and that we need to accept that. We are not brutal, of course … we think we are doing the best thing.
John Foster Dulles once said
The measure of success isn’t whether you have a tough problem, but whether it’s the same problem you had last year.
While that is such a good point that it deserves a separate discussion, I use the quote as a springboard to say that we still have a lot of the same problems that we have had for centuries. That will continue to be the case until our imaginations help us find different ways of looking at the problems, ways that lead to solutions.
Maybe someday the cognitive psychologists will find ways to help us all be more imaginative and more accepting of imagination. Maybe techniques will even be taught in school to sharpen our ability to imagine. In the interim, it’s up to us individually to build our own imaginative talent and to foster its development in our children and grandchildren.
Take it from an old man who wishes he had been more imaginative in his life: this is something you’d be better served doing sooner rather than later.