How Wonderful The World Could Be
Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and survivor of World War II concentration camps, recounts how another prisoner exclaimed one evening in front of a beautiful sunset: “How wonderful the world could be”. Thinking about climate change, I remember this story, as I tell myself that it might be time to re-enchant the world (to go in the opposite direction of the process of disenchantment, which was announced by Max Weber in 1917), and begin to imagine the new possibilities. Our perception of things and our imagination are inseparable and could considerably affect our way of dealing with situations that sometimes shake up our lives. The imagination allows us to see the animation of the world around us with its colors and mystery and avoid reducing it to a mass of inert and lifeless matter. It is difficult to come to exploit nature when it appears to us to be inhabited by a “soul” and a presence of spirit and intelligence, some would even say.
Adam Fetterman and his colleagues' study shows that people who approach the world through metaphors and who are creative obtain more significant emotional benefit and interact differently with their environment. Myths (such as those created amongst Indigenous people), poetry, and the arts, for example, not only color the natural world in which we live but also help us to perceive the meanings and subtleties that shape our experience of reality. The scientific knowledge we have acquired about the environment or nature can undoubtedly combine with our ability to imagine a better world and make it a source of inspiration and motivation to change things.
In the journal Global and Planetary Change (April 2018), Kari Marie Norgaard's article talks about the importance of developing a sociological and ecological imagination in the age of climate change:
The changing climate poses an unprecedented challenge to the human imagination. It seems impossible to imagine the reality of what is happening to the natural world to visualize the social, political, and economic consequences of these changes, and to envision a changing course.
To perceive our place in the world and the consequences of our actions on the various ecosystems, we need to visualize and imagine the different possible scenarios clearly. In other words, it seems helpful to consider that the world that we perceive is formed in part by our individual and collective imagination. The fact that our imagination can be based fundamentally on our perceptions of the world reveals by this very fact an affective (and subjective) link that we all have within, which is not only cognitive (and objective). As Kathleen Lennon proposes, “The imaginary shapes the world takes for us is therefore constitutively tied up with ways of responding to and acting in relation to our environment.” Imagining that the world could be wonderful will help us make it possible now and for generations to come.
