The Israeli writer Amos Oz tells an anecdote that his friend and colleague Sami Michael once told him. One day in a taxi he overheard the taxi driver say that the only solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict would be for the Israelis to exterminate all the Arabs one by one: “Each of us should kill some.” Instead of being outraged, Michael opted for a method he hadn’t tried before: the Imagination method. He asked the taxi driver to imagine the moment when he comes to kill his first victim. It turns out that she is a woman. It doesn’t matter: the taxi driver kills her. Then it turns out that in the back of the apartment a baby is crying.
“Would you kill the newborn?” Michael asked. Here the taxi driver interrupted him. “Knows? He told her. You are a very cruel man.” Fanatics, Oz says, are people who have no imagination. When they are forced to imagine the other, to go a little further in the imagination of someone else’s life, a gap is opened in fanaticism.
Novels, fictional writings, do a bit of the same thing: they force us to imagine. To understand the other. They are memories of our human intimacy that are not given to us by essays, journalistic accounts, reports loaded with data, or – of course – the statements of our leaders. Fernando Savater commented on it when talking about Homeland: “Now Fernando Aramburu’s novel has given many people the story of what happened there. In this post-truth era, perhaps the truest thing is fiction… a well-oriented fiction can be the best substitute for that truth that no one bothers to look for anymore”.
Novels and also movies tell us a reality that cannot be told in any other way and that is why fiction goes beyond entertainment and is an irreplaceable form of knowledge.
The failure of imagination is also the failure of language: the lack of words to name reality reduces the space for imagining it. But it also works the other way around, the less we imagine, the more impoverished we are when we explain ourselves. Grossman tells it, better than anyone, in a reflection on the cheapening of language in conflict: “What remains are the clichés that we use to describe the enemy or ourselves.”
And they will wonder what all this is about, rightly so. But it is that it has given me to build a kind of ranking on the propensity to read novels and to imagine our leaders. Also in his way of speaking: dense or simple. Blunt or nuanced. Direct or sophisticated. Can you imagine Putin imagining? Xi Jinping? Trump reading a novel? To any of our spokespersons using subordinate phrases, irony, nuances?
In these hectic times that we live in, but also formidable, where we test ChatGPT for free from our sofa, every day I realize that the overabundance of reality, data and information combined with the acceleration of networks leaves too little space for fiction and to the imagination. And that this, more than other problems, impoverishes our politics and our coexistence.
I was in Barcelona this week talking, together with Mayor Hereu, about the future of the city. I left the talk thinking that maybe this contradiction between what the rankings tell us and the discomfort of the citizens has to do with the ability to imagine (common futures) of mayors like Maragall and the ability to only sentence (present conflicts) of the mayor Colau. I call it imagination, but you could call it leadership.
