The Importance of Imagination to Social Change

I’ve been reading Ma’Ikwe Ludwig’s book Together Resilient: Building Community in the Age of Climate Disruption, an interesting discussion of the best practices of successful intentional communities. In it, Ludwig references Joanna Macy’s work on social movements, especially World as lover, world as self : courage for global justice and planetary awakening, in which Macy describes the three types of activism in every social movement:

1. Holding actions: basically, stopping more bad things from happening. This includes protests, civil disobedience, petitions, boycotts, and legal actions. If you have political power, it might include things like President Obama’s halting of new leases on public lands for fossil fuel exploitation. None of these alone solve the problem, and most of them are temporary, but they do two things: they buy time, and they draw attention to the issue because holding actions are almost always acts that are outside of the norms of polite behavior or business as usual, and therefore draw attention.

2. Systems change: changing how we act within the current system, changing how the system is fundamentally set up, and/or embodying an entirely new system.

3. Worldview changes: reinventing our values and fundamental relationship to ourselves and others, including consciousness work. This is foundational for even getting started on real social change: we have to revision where we are headed and what we want. We simply can’t embody a new system when we are operating out of old consciousness.

Ludwig explains that “not every person is going to participate in all three of these approaches” but an overall movement “can’t prosper and really progress without all three of these happening: we need to change our consciousness, and buy time, and use that time to create news systems embodying fundamentally different values, techniques, and technologies.”

In regards to our current political situation, it seems to me that we have focused our attention almost entirely on holding actions: protests, civil disobedience, petitions, boycotts, and legal actions. All of which are undeniably important. But I see very little evidence of ideas concerning systems change and worldview changes. Most pundits operate on the belief that everything's all right if we could only get the criminals out of power, so resist and look forward to the 2026 midterms. But there are some, and I include myself in this group, who want more than simply a return to the way things were pre-Trump. We need both a systems change and a worldview change if we hope to survive, and this, it seems to me, is where artists are crucially important.

When I wrote [_Building a Sustainable Theater_](https://theaterskunkworks.com/books/building-a-sustainable-theater/index), I was addressing the need for a systems change in the way theater is made, and proposing the embodiment of a new system. But when I finished the book, it became clear that without "reinventing our values and fundamental relationships to ourselves and others," i.e., without a worldview change, the new system would forever be undermined by inherited values of the old way of doing things, by which I mean the competitive, individualistic, capitalist ideas that define our beliefs about success, career, and our role as artists.

And yet, it is within the category of worldview changes that artists find their greatest purpose and power. Trump knows this, which is why he took over the Kennedy Center and, to the surprise of many, did not dissolve the NEA but instead imposed upon it ideological requirements for grant recipients. He's trying to change worldviews through propaganda. The problem is that, if an artist accepts those strictures, they almost by definition give up their role as artists and become politicians. It isn't that artists can't create "patriotic" art in the sense of art that celebrates traditional values and events (see Aeschylus's _Oresteia_, which celebrates the establishment of a Greek justice system), or even art that mourns past tragedies (e.g., Aeschylus's _The Persians_), but doing so must be an individual _choice_ made by the artist and not one imposed by a political party or leader. The value of an artist lies in their unique way of seeing the world, and the way that they reflect our time through the prism of their soul. Even artists with a strong desire to support a particular ideology -- Bertolt Brecht in Germany, Vsevelod Meyerhold in the USSR -- very quickly find that their creative vision falls afoul of those who wish them to submit to the party line. They can't do so and remain an artist.

But I see very few artists, especially in theater and film, who are engaged in imagining and dramatizing a new way of being in the world. I'm not talking about those artists who use their work didactically to preach and teach -- that kind of work primarily falls within the realm of holding actions, necessary but insufficient. Ursula K. Le Guin did this kind of work in many of her novels, as more recently did Becky Chambers in [_Psalm for the Wild-Bilt_](https://search.worldcat.org/title/1240266570) and [_A Prayer for the Crown-Shy_](https://search.worldcat.org/title/1300756362). Perhaps it is easier to do in the science fiction and fantasy genre, but theater seems to be almost incapable of seeing beyond today's values. One sees possibilities, perhaps, in a musical like _Come from Away_ with its vision of how people might interact differently as a result of a tragedy (9/11, in this case). Rebecca Solnit's _Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities_ examines similar stories. Both Solnit's book and the musical were highly successful, suggesting a desire within the general public for a vision of another way to live life as part of a community.

Nevertheless, such stories provide one vision of the purpose of the arts in our society, and possibly a justification for support: the arts encourage us to imagine new ways of living in the world, and does so in a way that touches not only the mind but the emotions as well. Michael Rushton has pretty much [debunked the economic reasons](https://substack.com/home/post/p-161091067?source=queue) for support, and has similarly [destroyed the idea of an ideological purpose](https://michaelrushton.substack.com/p/what-to-do-with-the-national-endowment-dc4). And the idea that being exposed to the arts somehow make us "better people" has effectively been shown to be nonsense, no matter how much Lin-Manuel Miranda and Phylicia Rashad want to trot that old chestnut out. But the idea that the arts provide an opportunity for us to broaden our imaginations and visualize a different way of being seems to me to be undeniable. But is it valuable? Not to those who are comfortably embedded in the status quo, of course, but to those who suffer within a culture of greed, competition, misinformation, and meaninglessness, stories and beauty provide a lifeline, a reminder of David Greaber's hidden truth of the world, which is that the world "is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently."

But first we must imagine it.