The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books Read Free

private schools anyway, just as they enjoy the benefits and perks of their jobs as servants of the people—all the more insidious and insincere. Those who can afford private schooling need not worry about their children being deprived of art, music and literature in the classroom: they are more sheltered, for now, from the doctrine of efficiency that has been radically refashioning the public school curriculum.
    American students, we are told, are falling behind in reading and math; on test after test, they score below most European students (at the level of Lithuania), and the solution, rather than seeking to engage their curiosity, has been testing and more testing—a dry and brittle method that produces lackluster results. And so resources are pulled from the “soft” fields that are not being tested. Music teachers are being fired or not replaced; art classes are quietly dropped from the curriculum; history is simplified and moralized, with little expectation that any facts will be learned or retained; and instead of reading short stories, poems and novels, students are invited to read train schedules and EPA reports whose jargon could put even the most committed environmentalist to sleep.
    The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitarian attitude that demonstrates little empathy for people’s actual well-being, that dismisses imagination and thought, branding passion for knowledge as irrelevant. Shrill posturing in the media and among policy makers fosters a boxing-match mentality as we, the citizens, become spectators whose emotions and sensations must be kept high in a sort of adrenaline rush that turns us into passive onlookers, addicted to the game.
    In a recent CNN interview, Mark Zuckerberg suggested, with every good intention, that scientists should be treated as celebrities, remarking that Einstein had been one in his own time. What does the word “celebrity” even mean? We imagine Einstein with his eyes turned inward and not toward the camera, a beautifully absentminded genius with ruffled hair and sandals. But Einstein was articulate and well-read, a lover of classical music, and it was he who said, “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
    The truth of the matter is that scientists do not need to become celebrities. What they need is respect and support for endeavors that might not make money but are important to human knowledge and therefore to humanity. The first favor one could do for both scientists and artists would be to stop pitting them against one another, remembering the words of a great writer and scientist, Nabokov, who used to advise his students, “You need the passion of a scientist and the precision of a poet.”
    I object to the notion that passion and imagination are superfluous, that the humanities have no practical or pragmatic use or relevance and should thus be subservient to other, more “useful” fields. In fact, imaginative knowledge
is
pragmatic: it helps shape our attitude to the world and our place in it and influences our capacity to make decisions. Politicians, educators, businessmen—we are all affected by this vision or its lack. If it is true that in a democracy, imagination and ideas are secondary, a sort of luxury, then what is the purpose of life in such a society? What will make its citizens loyal or concerned about their country’s well-being, and not just their own selfish pursuits? I would argue that imaginative knowledge is, in a very practical sense, indispensable to the formation of a democratic society, its vision of itself and its future, playing an important role in the preservation of the democratic ideal. At some point this state of affairs became an obsession with me, and I began to think that there must be some connection