When hope is lost we must imagine a future
By Noel Pearson
The Weekend Australian
5-6 May 2006
“Alienation at its most essential level is not poverty or unemployment. It is the inability to imagine
your society and therefore to imagine yourself in it.” John Ralston Saul, On Equilibrium
Canadian writer and philosopher John Ralston Saul is the most excoriating critic of what he calls the
“tyranny of reason”. In his most famous book, Voltaire’s Bastards, Saul argues that from the
breakthrough of Voltaire and Jefferson and the other classical figures of the Enlightenment, reason
degenerated into a kind of fundamentalist ideology. Reason became the handmaiden of power: the
Nazi extermination camps and the Soviet gulags are testament to the evil towards which reason could
be harnessed.
Napoleon’s megalomania became reason’s most archetypal (and aspirational) figure of heroic
leadership in the West, and Saul parades a pantheon of examples of ideological rationalisms and
rationalists. Given Saul’s coming of age in the 1960s, Robert McNamara and his follies in Vietnam
ends up being the most egregious of all of the technocratic bastards. That is, excepting the economic
rationalists of the neo-liberal ascendancy, who assumed the commanding heights of policy throughout
the West and beyond, in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
It is not that Saul disparages reason. It is his humanist thesis that there are other human qualities that
must be “recognized as of equal, universal value and…integrated into our normal life”. In his later
book On Equilibrium Saul discusses these six qualities: Common Sense, Ethics, Imagination, Intuition,
Memory and Reason. Saul argues the need for all six qualities to be kept in a dynamic balance. He is
seeking to make the case that reason must be understood as only one of a number of fundamental
qualities that we have as humans – and it needs to be balanced against these other qualities. Saul’s
humanist thesis is on the whole, compelling, and in places, a bit thin. But here I will only refer to one
thought in the book.
In the chapter on “Imagination” there is an interesting passage reflecting on the difficulties of our
people living in the remote margins of Australian society. Talking about normalising imagination
(“creating the social conditions which will allow imagination to flower for whatever reason”) he writes:
Look…at the most isolated communities in our societies. The aboriginal settlements in
Australia, Canada and the United States come to mind. But look at other isolations – the small
towns deep in the hinterlands; the nineteenth century industrial centres without economic
purpose in parts of the old East Germany and northern France; the poor shapeless suburbs
which lie on the edge of our cities; the slums which surround most developing-world
cities…Each of these is different, yet each is faced by the same problem: how to imagine
itself.
The utilitarian will say of the people in these communities that if they got jobs they wouldn’t
have their problems of alcoholism, drug addiction, violence and suicide. And that a proper
education – by which they usually mean training – would get them a proper job. But every
study done shows that the real barrier to academic success in these places is social
inadaptation. And what are these barriers? Essentially that the old industrial centres, the
isolated towns and the aboriginal communities and the new slums, have lost a reflection of
who they are and why. Or they have had it smashed by others. And so they can only imagine
themselves in models delivered by civil servants, economists, businessmen and television
from elsewhere. And these models, if people in East Germany or Labrador or central
Australia try to fit them into their imagination, make no sense at all.
For a start, the chief effect of the education offered is to oblige the person to leave where they
live. Alienation at its most essential level is not poverty or unemployment. It is the inability
to imagine your society and therefore to imagine yourself in it…The core of the problem…is
how to normalize imagination as an expression of each community, in a way which makes
sense for itself…
1
I think the lack of economic purpose in these marginal communities, to which he makes reference in
respect of the depressed former industrial centres, has a greater, more universal, relevance than Saul
thinks. But I do think that he has some important insights here. The disconnection between the life
and society of our remote communities and the life and society of the wider world – which our people
see through the media and the permeation of popular culture – we know is very real.
And our problem does involve a lack of imagination about the possibilities for our people. We cannot
seem to imagine how a successful biculturalism and bilingualism could work for us (though successful
multilingualism can be seen in many countries). We cannot seem to imagine how we could maintain
our cultures and yet engage successfully in the wider world. We cannot seem to imagine how our
children could move between the two worlds creatively and successfully, without leaving home and
identity forever, or without being confined to life in remote communities. In fact our expectations
about engagement in the wider world are downwardly skewed: our place is at the very bottom end of
society, riddled with problems like grog, drugs and violence. These are the results and possibilities that
we know most about.
Individuals occasionally manage to imagine a future life and path that is out of the ordinary. But this is
rare. There is almost no imagination that is free (and ambitious) about our social future as a people.
Apart from the mantra that we will one day have our own black doctors and lawyers et cetera, we do
not actually start to visualise how our traditional society could again be successful in our modern
predicaments.
I keep being reminded by the life story of one of our most famous Cape York land rights fighters, now
deceased. Long before he got dragged into the struggle for land rights he was trained as a mechanic
and wanted to work in that trade. A traditional man, he would have gone out into the world with the
dream of being a mechanic at a time when our people were briefly hopeful about their place in the
wider society. The era of assimilation and the granting of full citizenship in the 1960s seemed to
promise possibilities for our people to integrate into the wider society and pursue their dreams and
hopes. Many families from my home community of Hope Vale in Cape York Peninsula, went out and
lived and worked in centres of economic growth southeast Queensland during the 1960s. All of them
worked in some labouring capacity, they participated in their local churches, they had white friends,
and their kids went to school.
Eventually they all came back to Hope Vale, the last of them by the late 1980s. What was their
experience? I suspect that the wider world was a lot harsher and colder than they had perhaps first
imagined. On the whole their children have not done better than the children of families who stayed in
Hope Vale. Did the hopes and imaginings of their parents meet with disappointment? Was the world,
and the place that they and their children were expected to take in that world, more limited and more
racially hostile than they had hoped? If these hopes were based on assimilation then it is little wonder
they failed – they could not deny their identity, their language, their home.
After the disappointment experienced by our people during the assimilation phase, we stopped thinking
about what the possibilities might be. We returned to the cocoons of our homes which increasingly
turned into outback ghettoes.
Perhaps we could succeed if we could imagine a bicultural and multilingual engagement with rather
than assimilation into the wider world.
Noel Pearson is director of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership.
2