J.K. Rowling and the Death of Imagination

The faculty of mind liberalism can't survive without.

J.K. Rowling has done more for children’s reading than any other living author, but the work that matters now is her campaigning for women and girls. Such is her fame that a simple message on a social platform reaches millions, and she uses that opportunity to do one thing above all: tell the truth. It’s the sort of work that has earned her vilification from the cultural establishment, and at the margins, death threats from people lecturing others in empathy while extending none themselves.

If anyone has empathy, the capacity to inhabit minds other than your own, it’s the author of multiple children’s books and novels. Rowling can imagine monsters better than most, but she’s also seen up close the ones that appear when others abandon that imaginative faculty.

In her commencement speech at Harvard, Rowling spoke about her time at Amnesty:

“I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child.”

If she never forgets it, it’s because she can see not just what suffering looks like from the outside, but how it feels from within. Novels probably cultivate this habit of mind more than any other medium, which is why the decline of reading is starting to look like an emergency.

The modern world doesn’t make much time for people to sit alone with a thought, let alone a book. An entire industry is devoted to making each of us think we’re the main character on the stage. Everyone else is playing supporting roles. Followers provide the applause, and enemies supply the outrage. Behind every exchange, the algorithm is taking careful notes, then prodding us one way or the other, although the destination is ultimately the same. Social media is in the business of narcissism after all. It leaves no room for the moral instinct that says the “I” is not the centre of the universe.

The totalitarian mindset has always depended on the collapse of this instinct. Mill, writing in 1859, understood this:

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.”

Enlightenment liberalism depends on this ability to put ourselves inside the head of the person on the other side of an argument, to understand why certain views of the world feel compelling to them. It takes a leap of the imagination, and it’s hard to do. We get attached to our own reasoning. We accept the thoughts of others when they confirm our own biases and reject the ones that don’t. We sort people and things into categories because reality is messy, and humans can tolerate only so much ambiguity. Certainty is comforting and comfort is everything.

It’s a lesson I’ve learned multiple times, which might tell you something about how hard it is to make the habit stick. Twenty years ago, I decided, for reasons I can’t quite remember, that I’d like to spend time in China. I hadn't given the people much thought before arriving, except, quite honestly, to assume most of them would be brainwashed in some way – a billion brains plugged into whatever the Party was broadcasting that week. The theory fell apart as soon as I visited the home of a Chinese colleague. I didn’t know what to expect – maybe a game of Mahjong or something. Instead, she casually put on Friends, a show I’d made a point of avoiding back home on the grounds that it was beneath me. There I was, the Westerner who’d flown in armed with On Liberty and a second-hand phrasebook, being introduced to an American sitcom (which I loved) by someone I’d assumed was incapable of independent thought. The brainwashed person was me.

The novel is the best defence against this sort of insular thinking because it cultivates the discipline of seeing through another person’s eyes. The categories and compartments get dislodged and rearranged. We see things we couldn’t before. The author grants the villain a soul as much as the hero, and shows us, as Solzhenitsyn did, that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”.

The ideologies gaining traction today run in the other direction. They offer prefabricated responses to complex situations, sparing their adherents the work of imagining the people they’re judging. A fundamentalist doesn’t need to inhabit the inner life of his opponent. Much easier to confer labels: “bigot” and “traitor”, “commie” and “fascist”. The person vanishes with the epithet, leaving a problem to be got rid of rather than another self to contend with.

But this is too neat. Most of the people running on borrowed convictions don’t see themselves as failing the test of imagination. Quite the opposite – they believe they’re exercising it on behalf of someone else, the child in Gaza or the trans teenager who thinks they need to be affirmed. And sometimes this response is more than justified. Of course the children caught up in a terrible war deserve our compassion. Who doesn’t feel angry when the innocent are collateral in the wars of people who care nothing for those they claim to protect? Some children genuinely do suffer gender dysphoria and deserve careful treatment. The complexity is real and asks for a real capacity of mind. The trouble is what happens next. The activist sees herself as one of the good ones, and the cognitive dissonance – between her self-image and the cruelty her position licenses – gets anaesthetised by certainty.

But others are not confused. They have no conscience to wake, no imagination to activate. In these cases, terms like “sociopath” and “monster” aren’t a failure of imagination on our part but a recognition of moral reality. The Hamas rapist really is a sadist. The doctor pushing irreversible treatments on confused teenagers for profit really is displaying sociopathic tendencies. Compassion extended to the cruel is one of the ways cruelty wins.

Totalitarianism, or at least the totalitarian mindset, is where the failure of imagination ends. It’s easier to dismiss a whole people because of what their government is doing. Easier to rip down a poster of a hostage when you’ve trained yourself to see a “Zionist entity” rather than a child. Easier still to hurl death threats at a writer when what you see is a “transphobe” rather than the author of the children’s stories that taught a generation to read. In each case, imagination has been switched off, making cruelty not just possible but desirable.

Rowling has spent a lifetime developing the faculty her critics have shut off, distilling in four sentences what too many of us have spent decades undermining:

“If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you’re illiberal.

If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you’re a fundamentalist.

If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you’re a totalitarian.

If you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you’re a terrorist.”

Failing any one of these tests is to fail the imaginative work that liberalism depends on – the willingness to see that others hold their convictions as strongly as you hold yours, that their interior lives are as richly formed, that they are subjects to contend with, not objects to be swept away.

Mill’s argument is wasted on people who have stopped seeing the person on the other side – the African torture victim, the hostage on the poster, the novelist whose books taught a generation to read. It’s a faculty of mind powerfully at work in a novelist like Rowling, which is why she remains so unbearable to those who have traded the person for the label.

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