The Power of Imagination: One People in a Shared Homeland

By Temily Tavangar

A Governance Befitting is a sobering yet hopeful wake-up call to the real and urgent challenges that face humanity in its current state of global interdependence. How, it asks, do we redefine our collective values in the face of present turbulence? How do we reorient our outlook, goals, and processes so that our identity as one people in a shared homeland permeates all aspects of our lives? 

These questions call for the power of imagination—the ability to look beyond the challenges of our time. Imagination requires hope; hope propels action. As noted author Azar Nafisi wrote, “imaginative knowledge is pragmatic: it helps shape our attitude to the world and our place in it and influences our capacity to make decisions.”

The establishment of the United Nations was a signaling moment in human history, of a new era of global interdependence. Three quarters of a century later, it is clear that national sovereignty continues to stand in the way of the realization of a truly global civic ethic. 

We don’t have to look far for examples: the inequality of access to Covid-19 vaccines is evidence enough. Some countries hoard excess supply while others helplessly watch hundreds die each day as they wait for vaccines to arrive. The writer Arundhati Roy beautifully describes the pandemic as “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world.”

As long as our minds remain shaped by territorial thinking and outdated hierarchies of power, the true potentialities of a commitment to global unity will remain elusive. It is in this light that we are called to “a conscious orientation toward experimentation, search, innovation, and creativity.” 

One promising area of search is examples of communities and collectivities that have imagined alternative, inclusive, cooperative ways of life, and sought to realize them. On every continent, a wide spectrum of these communities has existed, and continues to exist, on the margins. These range from indigenous tribes to urban cooperatives, religious movements to secular organizations. These collectivities have lived outside the sphere of the mainstream order and dared to imagine a different vision of society. 

Each of these microcosms have something to teach us about the qualities that individuals, institutions, and communities need to cultivate in order to see the spectrum of humanity with the eyes of inclusion. Questions to explore might include: What worldviews inform and guide individuals that live in these societies? How do they define power and make collective decisions? How do they treat nature? How do they see themselves in relation to others?

A research agenda focused on the compilation and analysis of these examples is a promising and unifying starting point. They are a validation that cooperative visions of life are possible, and that territorial boundaries do not define us. They can provide insights into the individual and collective qualities necessary for leadership and for seeing beyond current modes of jurisdictional thinking. 

The point is not to judge the success or failure of these examples, but rather to understand the motivations, aims, and processes in a spirit of collective, intergenerational experimentation and imagination. These efforts constitute the ongoing experiment that is our collective life on earth. Learning more about these alternative approaches is a small step that can propel us towards viewing all of humanity as our sphere of responsibility.

Technical solutions, no matter how sophisticated, can never replace the role of imagination, which bestows on every individual a sense of identity and purpose. Realizing the vision of one people in a shared homeland requires the exercise of our uniquely human gifts of imagination, curiosity, and open-heartedness. Ultimately, it is these powers of the human spirit that galvanize us to arise with conviction to advance the collective and to see beyond all forms of otherness.  

Temily Tavangar is a former television journalist who has worked for local and international news outlets across Hong Kong and Malaysia. She holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Hong Kong and is currently engaged in postdoctoral research with the Institute for Studies in Global Prosperity.