Imagination and Progress

Originally published (in Spanish): Mundial, Lima, 12 December 1924

Luis Araquistáin writes that "the conservative spirit, in its most disinterested form, if it is not born of a low selfishness but from fear of the unknown and uncertainty, ultimately shows a lack of imagination."¹ To be a revolutionary or reformer is, from this point of view, a consequence of being more or less imaginative. The conservative rejects any idea of change because of a mental incapacity to conceive and accept it. This applies, of course, to a pure conservative, because the attitude of a practical conservative who accommodates ideas for their usefulness and comfort undoubtedly has a different genesis.

Traditionalism and conservatism are defined as a simple spiritual limitation. The traditionalist has no ability except to imagine life as it was. The conservative has no ability except to imagine how it is. The progress of humanity, therefore, is fulfilled in spite of traditionalism and despite conservatism.

Several years ago Oscar Wilde, in The Soul of Man under Socialism, said, "Progress is the realisation of Utopias."² In a parallel to Wilde‘s thought, Luis Araquistáin adds that "without imagination there is no progress of any kind" And, in truth, progress would not be possible if human imagination suddenly suffered a collapse.

History always gives right to imaginative people. In South America, for example, we just commemorated the life and work of the organizers and leaders of the independence revolution. These men seem to be real geniuses. But what is the first condition of being a genius? Undoubtedly, it is a strong power of imagination. The liberators were great because they were, above all, imaginative. They were insurgents against the limited reality, the imperfect reality, of their time.

They worked to create a new reality. Bolívar had futuristic dreams. He imagined a confederation of Indo-Spanish states. Without this ideal, it is likely that Bolívar would not have come to fight for our independence. The fate of the independence of Peru thus depended in large part on the imaginative ability of the Liberator. To celebrate the centennial of the victory of Ayacucho is to celebrate, in fact, the centennial of the victory of the imagination. The sensible reality, evident reality, in the time of the independence revolution was certainly not republican or nationalist. The value of the liberators consists in seeing a potential reality, a higher reality, an imaginary reality.

This is the story of all great human events. Progress has always been made by imaginative people. Posterity has invariably accepted their work. The conservatism of a later era has never had more defenders, more proselytizers than a few quirky romantics. Humanity, with rare exceptions, estimates and studies the men of the French Revolution much more than those of the monarchy and feudalism they defeated. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette seemed to many people, above all, as unfortunate. No one sees them as great.

On the other hand, imagination is generally less free and arbitrary than is often assumed. The poor have been very much maligned and distorted. Some believe them to be more or less crazy; others see them as limitless and infinitely so. In fact, imagination is quite modest. As with all human things, imagination has its limits. All people, from the most brilliant to the most idiotic, are conditioned by circumstances of time and space. The human spirit reacts against contingent reality. But just when one reacts against truth, is when one is more dependent on it. People struggle to change what they see and what they feel, not what they ignore. Later, the only utopias that are valid are those that could be called realistic. Those utopias are born out of the same entrails as reality. Georg Simmel³ once wrote that a collectivist society is moving toward ideals of individualism, and conversely, an individualistic society is moving toward socialist ideals. Hegelian philosophy explains the creative force of an ideal as a result, at the same time, of the resistance and impulse that it found in reality. One could say that people do not foresee or imagine more than that which is already germinating, maturing in the dark entrails of history.

Idealists need to rely on the concrete interests of a broad and conscious social strata. The ideal will not prosper unless it incorporates broad interests. It needs to acquire, in short, useful and convenient characteristics. A class needs to become an instrument of its realization.

In our time, in our civilization, utopias have never been too daring. Modern people have almost always predicted progress. Even the fantasies of novelists many times have been overtaken by reality in a short period of time. Western science has gone faster than what Jules Verne dreamed.⁴ The same has happened in politics. Anatole France predicted the Russian Revolution for the end of this century, and a few years later the revolution opened a new chapter in the history of the world.⁵

Anatole France used omens to predict the future in his novel The White Stone.⁶ He shows how culture and wisdom confer no privileged power over the imagination. Galion, his character in an episode of Roman decadence, was exemplary as a cultured and wise man of his time. This man, however, was completely unaware of the decline of his civilization. Christianity seemed to him to be an absurd and stupid sect. Roman civilization, in his view, could not sink, could not perish. Galion conceived of the future as a mere extension of the present. For this reason, we find his speeches ridiculously sad and lacking in inspiration. He was a very intelligent, very knowledgeable, very refined man, but he had the great misfortune not to be an imaginative man. Hence his attitude toward life was mediocre and conservative.

This thesis about imagination, conservatism, and progress could lead to very interesting and original conclusions. Conclusions could move us, for example, not to categorize people as revolutionaries and conservatives, but as those who are imaginative and those who are not. Distinguishing them as such means perhaps committing the injustice of flattering the vanity of the revolutionaries and, ultimately and with respect, offending a bit the vanity of the conservatives. In addition to academic intelligence and methods, the new classification will seem rather arbitrary, quite unusual. But obviously it is very boring to always classify and qualify people in the same way. And above all, if humanity has not yet found a new name for conservatives and revolutionaries it is also, undoubtedly, due to a lack of imagination.

Notes

1. Luis Araquistáin (1886–1959) was a Spanish socialist and political leader. Mariátegui may here be citing from his Vida y resurrección (Madrid, 1922). ↩
2. Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (Boston: John W. Luce, 1910). ↩
3. Georg Simmel (March 1, 1858–September 28, 1918) was a pioneering German sociologist. ↩
4. Jules Verne (February 8, 1828–March 24, 1905) helped pioneer the science-fiction genre with novels such as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869–1870) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). ↩
5. Anatole France (1844–1924) was a French poet, journalist, and novelist. ↩
6. Anatole France, The White Stone (London, New York: John Lane, 1910). ↩