Facts - the enemy of vision?

I’ve always had an ambiguous relationship with facts. While fully committed to the principle that we must speak from the truth, I have shunned the process of actually establishing the objective reality of the situation into/out of which I speak. This is justified by categorising my offerings as ‘visionary’, and therefore it would be a poor thing to clutter up such oratory with endless statistics. The visionary must be immunised against bland utility.

But recently I’ve found myself questioning the validity of this dichotomy, as it dawned on me that many of the articles that I find most convincing are those which are insistent on uncovering the truth of a situation, which nearly always entails statistics of some sort. Now, I don’t promise to overhaul the tone of my posts overnight, for two reasons – firstly, I’m incredibly lazy with regards to doing the hard graft of proving my points, as I prefer to let unadulterated prose wing them to their destination. Secondly, even if I do overhaul this laziness, I would still struggle to dedicated the necessary time to researching and establishing the objective reality into which I speak on a regular basis. Perhaps this is the remaining distinction between true journalism and whatever this is…

Yet I do not think the essence of the dichotomy is entirely false, but that it is wrong to locate the antithesis of vision in the realm of ‘fact’. Rather, I would suggest the true enemy of vision is ‘functionality’. The visionary says “this is how things are, this is where we should go, let’s get there!”, whereas the functionist says “this thing is not working, let’s make it work”. Now of course there is nothing wrong with solving problems and fixing things that are broken, but when this is the driving philosophy of change rather than a consequence of a bigger vision of life, functionality triumphs. And this should not be so – humans are beings of imagination, aspiration, desire and spirituality as well as creatures of a physical environment, thus we need vision as well as order.

This has application across most realms of humanity, and certainly in politics. No doubt the low state of engagement in national life is due to a lack of visionary politicians – who is there in comparison to (the albeit fictional) President Bartlett? But there are application for our churches as well – do we make decisions about the future that flow from a vision to actualise a radical Christ-shaped community, or from a sense of the need to ‘keep things going’, or to employ each latest whim of culture to ensure we are not ‘left behind’? (no pun intended)

So, where does this leave Words of 50? In short, the visionary tradition will not be abandoned, but, when possible, I shall endeavour to prove that I do have a clue to what I’m talking about a little more diligently than in the past. That is, of course, if do have a clue…