Unsustainable Crimes of the Imagination

I do not mean “crime” in a legal sense, but as a moral violation or spiritual offense. Specifically, I mean the failure to honor the demand for reciprocity — an inability or refusal to afford some person, some place, or some thing the respect that you would want and that you require to flourish as a human being.

A “crime of the imagination” is a violation that compromises a person’s power to form ideas and to form new ideas. So it’s not only a failure of respect, and not exactly a failure of imagination, but it is that activity which seeks to limit and direct the imaginative capacity of the human being, or activity which uses the imagination as a vehicle to deny reciprocity and mutual respect.

A “crime of the imagination” is committed when one person says: “You are THIS (and not THAT). You were born as THIS (and not THAT). You can only be THIS (and not THAT), and you should never think yourself as anything other than THIS (and you should especially never think of yourself as THAT). The offender — let’s say it’s me — takes advantage of my position of authority to limit your imagination, in effort to cut off your ability to make your own choice. I am trying to structure the world by violating your imagination.

A “crime of the imagination” is also committed when I say to you: “Do you see that person OVER THERE? You should not talk to THEM. You should not listen to THEM. That person OVER THERE is unworthy of your respect.” Here, the crime is not only committed to against you, but also against “THEM.”

In the first case, I strive to limit your imagination about yourself. In the second case, I strive to limit your imagination about who ‘We’ are and who ‘They’ are. In doing so, I treat You and ‘Them’ without respect by convincing You that ‘They’ do not deserve ‘Our’ respect. In both cases, I am using your imagination as a tool to normalize the failure of reciprocity. In the first case, I limit, direct, and control your imagination so you don’t know yourself, trust yourself, or understand yourself. In the second case, I limit your imagination to create an Us and a Them.

A third “crime of the imagination” — and the predictable outcome of the first two crimes being endlessly repeated — is one in which I imagines that either You or ‘They’ have violated some law or committed some offense for which I have no evidence. Here, the crime of the imagination is that I imagine that you are a criminal, even though I have seen no criminal behavior.

So in all three cases — whether I tell You to imagine yourself in a particular way; 2) I tell you to imagine Us and Them in a particular way; or 3) I imagines You (or Them) in a particular way — the imagination is put in service of limitation. Curiosity is discouraged, mystery and uncertainty are banished, and human reality slides into hearsay, myth, urban legend, unfounded opinion, and unprovable falsehood. These three “crimes of the imagination” inevitably lead us to a dubious and troubled relationship to evidence.

Though the word unsustainable — as in, “unable to be maintained at the current rate or level” — can be said about many processes, it is often encountered in environmental discourse, and that is the sense in which I am using it here. And though I would say that our relationship to the ecological environment is unsustainable, I would add that the processes contributing to our information environment, our social and cultural environment, and our moral and spiritual environment are equally unsustainable. It is not possible to treat people, places, or things as though they are unworthy of our respect endlessly into the future.

An “unsustainable crime of the imagination” is “an offense or violation which limits our imaginative faculties, troubles our relationship to evidence, and poisons our various local and global environments.”