Jenny Chen
Professor Mookerjee
Basic Composition 100R
Section QF
October 01, 2015
Paper 2- Final Draft
Imagination vs Reality When it comes to imagination versus reality, the processes in the brain are different. But just how different are they? Our mind can run away with us, leading us to act through suspicion or fear, but we can also use our imagination as a tool to change our life. Humans have tended to draw a line between reality—that which we “actually” experience—and imagination, seen as a frivolous, dreamlike deflection. For ages, spiritual contemplatives and artists have taken flights of imagination much more seriously and challenged the firmness of that line. It is just like how imagination plays a very real role in our decision making. Take for example, our last two US presidential elections, in which one big chunk of the electorate managed to view Barack Obama as a radical socialist, while another saw him as a moderate saint. Both views were heavily based on myth, but they had a real-life effect on how people voted. By understanding Wendell Berry’s text, “God, Science, and Imagination,” and juxtaposing it to Susan Blackmore’s analysis of the “replicator power” of “memes,” it is evident that imagination and meme fear have gained over us. Seeing the two author’s ideas merge can enlighten readers to realize that the “ideals” that Berry presents in his argument of “fundamentalism” versus “knowledge” are only memes of what we want to think instead of the memes that we actually follow through with. This ideal of life has changed from what they used to be, to things that have gone from early-morning home-cooked meals to breakfast substitutions. In the article, “God, Science, and Imagination,” Berry speaks about the idea of fundamentalism and how one thinks. Fundamentalism is the idea of strict support towards a particular belief or idea- which can