Good Imagination in a Culture of Poor Fantasy

This essay wouldn’t make sense without a personal confession. I got a Facebook account when I was twelve years old. Technically you’re supposed to wait until you’re thirteen, but it was at that age I started hearing the buzz about the site from friends, and before long, my profile was all set up: I had a photo of a squirrel as my profile picture and suffered from severe social unawareness about what I posted. You probably know the sensation of looking back through “memories” on Facebook and cringing at what posts you allowed your brain to produce. Now, of course, I know better. Now I know that Facebook is a center for identity formation, not just a silliness factory. Beyond the comedy of having a squirrel as a profile picture and typing “Peter Biles is feeling….sad” Facebook became the curator of a certain kind of image for me. Instagram, owned by Facebook, is an even sexier curator, no doubt, but Facebook. Facebook was, and still can be, like mental candy for me. One profile photo change, one quasi-honest post about my spiritual condition, may or may not instigate a few likes that affirm the goodness (or badness) of the post. You probably have heard this before from various technological Luddites. Social media is built to be addictive. The engineers are taking tips from gambling centers in Las Vegas in their quest to capitalize your attention.  These sites are fragmenting our attention like crazy, blotting out any hopes of doing one thing with focus and excellence. And all that is profoundly true and has frightening implications, particularly on our younger generations. Our attention is literally being stolen, and we’re giving it away in exchange for the same chemical release afforded by nicotine and marijuana. But beyond merely the effects social media may have on deep concentration, I noticed another trend developing in my own life, and it was compounded by a bigger modern monster: online pornography.

            I got Facebook at twelve and stumbled into pornography at fifteen. Surprisingly, this age is well beyond the average in exposure to porn. Kids are running into it on accident while doing their science homework. These are fifth graders. The demographic, like social media’s own reach into childhood, has come to include our most vulnerable. Now clearly pornography is evil, while the case can be made that social media is a “neutral” technology, able to be used for good or ill. But what I came to understand in college is that the two platforms, capturing the imaginations of literally billions of people every day, promise one simple thing: a fundamentally false life that nevertheless feels “more real” than the real one. What began to dawn on me is the difference between good imagination and poor fantasy. Real life includes the use of a good imagination, or right vision, but fantasy worlds operate on an axiom opposed to imagination. A good imagination never seeks to transcend the real world but recognizes the potential redemption in even the worst of the world’s conditions. It is “incarnational,” getting its hands dirty, armed with a vision that real love and real relationship might afford. It is a poisoned imagination, a perverted means of attaining an ideal, which makes these two cyber trolls so appealing. It’s a failure of the imagination that despises the intimacy and sacredness of actual people.

            In studying this, I didn’t want to settle on contemporary categories for identifying the problems in social media and pornography. Clearly whole fields of psychologists are tapping into the mental, physical, and social ramifications of our obsessive internet habits. Being, as I am, a reader of the Bible, I was more interested to find an archaic rendition of our modern dilemma in the book of Genesis. Besides being part of the biblical canon, Genesis is often heralded by believers and skeptics alike as containing incredible depths of psychological and anthropological meaning. It’s not surprising, then, that we should look here to find some clues to our modern behavior. Genesis begins with a world that includes everything in it. It was a rightly ordered vision of the good, beautiful, and true. It was imaginatively complete. That is, life within this world complimented the vision it had begun with. Nothing had to be strived for, only sustained through a steady trust in God. The vision was concrete and real. It was Life Himself walking through the gardens with the man and woman, who had little other directive other than to enjoy each other, the fruits of the land, and work hard to culture the place they’d been given. Most readers know, however, that things take a terrible turn in chapter three. Adam and Eve trespass the single prohibition they were warned about and eat from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. What’s that mean? Many theologians, literaries, and philosophers have offered their takes, but I found an interesting verse preceding this passage that helped me understand it to a much deeper degree. In Genesis 2:9, we see that “Out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”

Here, the text indicates that God made a glorious array of vegetation. There was absolutely no deprivation of joy and pleasure. Nothing inaccessible. We notice, however, that this attractive description of the garden is not applied to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Compared to the rest of the garden, in fact, it appears quite ordinary, perhaps even bland or shadowy. However, jumping ahead to chapter three, the serpent in the tree says to the couple in response to Eve’s case against eating the fruit, “You will surely not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The verse following this deception stunned me: “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate.” What I found so fascinating about this is that the exact same language formerly used to describe the garden is now being attributed specifically to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. How and when? By believing something false about the tree. This tree was not, when Eve’s imagination was still informed by the truth, a beautiful sight to behold. It was only when she imagined the existence of another ideal entirely, one opposed to God’s good kingdom, that the beautiful became hideous and the hideous became attractive.

It’s a very, very old story. But the relevance becomes clear. When we are convinced of the good of a bad or a false beauty, we lose good imagination and devolve into poor fantasy. We lose the kingdom and replace it with an empire of our choosing. Pornography is an alluring ideal. But the truth about pornography, however potent the lie about it may be, is hideous. It isn’t real intimacy. It isn’t what you really want. According to Genesis, what we want is what we originally had: everything. We wanted, and had, a relationship with God himself. God’s Presence, in which all gods become gifts and life becomes one enormous gift to receive and then to share.

I needed a corrective surgery on my imagination. I still do. The images, the likes, the absence thereof, is an exhausting and infinite engine. Jonathan Franzen, in his essay “Farther Away,” writes of this infinite quest for stimulation poignantly: “To try to add more to what is already everything is to risk having nothing: to become boring to yourself.”

To have everything does not mean attaining the perfect image and to follow through with intensely intimate desires. To have everything is to accept, with gratitude, the life you’ve been given, because that’s the one God actually occupies. For in his image we are made, and that’s glory enough, and in him are pleasures forevermore, and that’s joy enough. My own addictions surfaced because I had become bored and discontent and anxious with my life the way it was. I forgot God was even in it. I forgot he even existed. When he was “out” of it, nothing could fill it, because nothing is supposed to! I omitted the blessings and began to focus on the lack. I started plucking bad apples because I thought they were good. But the lie is just that: to believe we lack something we must attain by our own efforts, by our own vision of what’s good and what’s evil. In this way, social media and pornography are new costumes acting out an age-old play: the tension between the ideal and the real. If we’d imaginatively give the real world a chance, however, in all its glory and brokenness, maybe it really would surprise us.