Death & the Collective Imagination: why do we need better endings?
This blog post is part of a series documenting a peer learning journey exploring death & the collective imagination. You can find out more about the journey here & meet our cohort here.
This post offers a deeper dive into the organising purpose of our huddle and our early processes mapping our limited imaginaries around death.
Limited imaginaries: the problem behind our problems
Our learning journey is rooted in a belief that building the muscle of collective imagination is critical for navigating the many crises we face today.
Collective imagination is a rich and growing field with no clear boundaries. But a core tenet is an acknowledgement that we operate from limited imaginaries — the sets of values, beliefs, institutions, laws and symbols through which we imagine our reality. These limited imaginaries may keep us stuck, spinning vainly through cycles of problems & solutions while inadvertently reproducing deeper patterns of harm, because we can’t see what else is possible. This isn’t in itself a novel idea: Einstein famously declared “no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it”, or in Audre Lorde’s words, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” But in 2024, as we find ourselves ricocheting between social & environmental crises, it’s a lens that feels evermore critical.
Canopy, a social imagination project who have mentored this initiative, provide a useful ecological metaphor for this field. We can see the imaginaries we operate from as the soil from which all our ideas and actions grow. Perhaps the soil is low in minerals, preventing certain plants or ideas from taking root; perhaps it is high in microbes and fungal networks, helpfully breaking redundant ideas down, and connecting different imaginaries to each other. Supporting healthy soil is critical: if we live in an imaginary monoculture, depleted of nutrients, it is unlikely we can support the healthy, resilient systems we need.
Sadly this image of a depleted monoculture comes close to describing conditions of modern Western life today. If it feels hard to imagine another world is possible, it is: we’re living through what academics call a “crisis of imagination” or “imagination recession”.
“I’m convinced that we’re suffering from an ‘imaginary crisis’. By this, I don’t mean that the various crises around us aren’t real, but rather that there’s a deep malaise affecting our capacity for imagination, whether social or political. We can more easily imagine the end of the world than a better future.”
— Geoff Mulgan
“Why are we having a crisis of the imagination when our survival depends on our imagination to reimagine and rebuild everything? We’re in a perfect storm of media, politics, austerity; anxiety and trauma, that is causing our imagination to shrink when we need it to expand.”
— Rob Hopkins
So how might we take on the work of cultivating new ecologies of possibility? Our cohort has spent three months attending to this question, by co-designing our own practice-led curriculum as we go. Like the other CIPC huddles, we have a particular area of focus: enriching the imaginaries we hold around death, loss and endings.
Why focus on death, loss & endings?
The imaginaries we operate from offer invisible scripts about what desirable change looks like, and for whom. Those scripts favour stories of growth, progress, advancement and novelty. They condition us to turn ourselves towards youth & freshness, and gloss over age, decline, decomposition and death. Grief is incompatible with the expectations of modern life.
We know these scripts to be active in our collective field because we can sense them playing out in our own individual bodies and psyches. As an example, I can trace these scripts across all kinds of my own life experiences:
- Caring for a dying relative and feeling utterly culturally untrained in how to accompany them in their transition.
- Being told that referencing ecological collapse isn’t “useful” or “appropriate”.
- As a relationship ends, receiving (and trying to practice) advice to keep distracted rather than experiencing grief.
- Reading friends’ tarot cards and being on alert to reassure them that getting the Death card isn’t a bad thing.
- As a child, encountering anything moulding, rotting, or dead in the natural world, and being told to keep away.
- Hearing about other cultures’ rich death & grief practices, and experiencing a bone-felt sense of longing for something I’m missing.
If the imaginaries we operate from are the soil of our lives, sensing into these personal stories can be a kind of soil testing exercise that shows up the conditions we’re working with. Our kickoff session centred sharing these personal stories, using them as diagnostic tools for our learning terrain.
Do you have “soil testing” signals of your own to share? We’d love to hear in the comments.
Drawing the boundaries of our shared imaginaries around death
Led by our felt experience, we spent our kickoff sessions identifying and naming the collective imaginaries constraining us in our relationships around death, decline and endings. We share five recurrent themes here as statements (while appreciating they may not resonate with everyone). Under each broad imaginary we’ve added linking threads or variations.
- Death is a failure of life
Rather than a guaranteed event and defining part of a life cycle.
Linking threads: Death is always a bad thing / dying means you’ve “lost” / death is a relinquishment of power / death marks an end to your usefulness or influence
Must the end of life be the worst part? And what if it can be made a constructive experience or even the best part of life?”
— Eugene O’Kelly
2. Death is something someone else (a professional) deals with, not me
As a layperson I have a limited role to play in accompanying death.
Linking threads: planning for a good death or ending is presumptuous, interfering, indulgent | the dead and dying should maintain a healthy distance from the living | those who choose to deal with death are different from us
“We live in a society with little regard for matters of soul. As a consequence, we need books and workshops on grief… These are symptoms of a great loss. We have forgotten the commons of the soul — the primary satisfactions that sustained and nourished the community and the individual for tens of thousands of years.”
— Francis Weller
3. Grief is a solitary experience that requires withdrawal
People in grief need leaving alone until they are ready to resurface
Linking threads: distancing oneself from the grieving is a gesture of respect | people should try not to infect others with grief | grief is a condition to recover / bounce back from
“Metabolize your losses with grief and feed the resulting beauty to life.”
— Martin Pretchel
4. Engaging with grief can be dangerous and keep you stuck
Your progress through life will be better if you can skirt around or avoid it entirely
Linking threads: It’s easier to depart / distract than live with the void that is left after death | if you’re grieving you’re not useful to society | grieving brings risk of permanent injury or fallowness
“Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.” — Oscar Wilde
5. The dead and dying are not useful to us
The living world can provide all we need
Linking threads: a death marks the end of that person’s relationship to the world | only the living are appropriate collaborators in our ventures | nothing good or fruitful can come of death
“Only in death is there rebirth. The balance is not a stillness, it is a movement, an eternal becoming.” — Ursula Le Guin
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
These were five imaginaries that surfaced most strongly in our limited discussion time, but we appreciate how many more there are to uncover. What are the limiting imaginaries you can sense from where you stand? Do share with us in the comments.
In our next blog posts, we’ll share the curriculum of practices developed by the huddle cohort to grow the ecology of possibilities around death & endings.
Bringing grief and death out of the shadow is our spiritual responsibility, our sacred duty. By so doing, we may be able to feel our desire for life once again and remember who we are, where we belong, and what is sacred.
— Francis Weller
Dive deeper
Here are a few key resources we’ve found helpful in framing our explorations. We’ll share a fuller list of resources at the end of this blog series.
WATCH: Canopy | The Forest of Social Imagination
READ: Rob Hopkins | Overcoming the Crisis of Imagination
READ: Geoff Mulgan | The Imaginary Crisis (and how we might quicken social & public imagination)
READ: Will Bull | Building the Infrastructure of Possibility
PRACTICE: Collective Imagination Practice Community | Collective Imagination: A Playbook
