Fancy, for Coleridge, takes what is already created and combines it in odd ways with other things. A unicorn and a flying pig are examples of Fancy but not, for Coleridge, Imagination, because they are only the result of an unusual combination of otherwise commonplace items. They add nothing “original” to reality, unlike, as Coleridge believed, true imagination does. In a sense, Coleridge relegates art movements such as Surrealism, which produced scores of sophisticated flying pigs and unicorns, into the category of Fancy. Others, I suspect, could find a place there too.
All of these scenarios, even the bleakest, presume some new political equilibrium. There is also, of course, the possibility of disequilibrium—or what you would normally call “disorder” and “conflict.” This is the analysis put forward by Harald Welzer, in Climate Wars, which predicts a “renaissance” of violent conflict in the decades to come. His evocative subtitle is What People Will Be Killed For in the 21st Century.
Already, in local spheres, political collapse is a quite common outcome of climate crisis—we just call it “civil war.” And we tend to analyze it ideologically—as we did in Darfur, in Syria, in Yemen. Those kinds of collapses are likely to remain technically “local” rather than truly “global,” though in a time of climate crisis they would have an easier time metastasizing beyond old borders than they have in the recent past. In other words, a completely Mad Max world is not around the bend, since even catastrophic climate change won’t undermine all political power—in fact, it will produce some winners, relatively speaking. Some of them with quite large armies and rapidly expanding surveillance states—China now pulls criminals out of pop concerts with facial recognition software and deploys domestic-spy drones indistinguishable from birds. This is not an aspiring empire likely to tolerate no-man’s-lands within its sphere.
If you have a healthy ego—designed by you for successful interaction with society and other egos—you can use it consciously to achieve goals and keep commitments. You can also preserve your spirit and soul in the process, being in this world but not of it.
Croesus addresses Solon not because he has seen so many lands but because he is famous for philosophizing, reflecting upon what he sees; and Solon’s answer, though based on experience, is clearly beyond experience. For the question, Who is the happiest of all?, he had substituted the question, What is happiness for mortals? And his answer to this question was a philosophoumenon, a reflection on human affairs (anthrōpeiōn pragmatōn) and on the length of human life, in which not one day is “like the other,” so that “man is wholly chance.”
“Neither Rousseau nor Robespierre was capable of dreaming of a goodness beyond virtue, just as they were unable to imagine that radical evil would ‘partake nothing of the sordid or sensual’ (Melville), that there could be wickedness beyond vice.”
