NOTE: This was originally posted last summer. But since it was lost in the transition to the new NRO and a new post of mine is going to be refer back to it, I present it again today.
While New York City’s Central Park contains many statues celebrating various champions of democracy and the arts, such as Simón Bolívar, Alexander Hamilton, Daniel Webster, Ludwig van Beethoven, and William Shakespeare, the memorial which seems to attract the most enthusiasm from visitors is a sidewalk mosaic dedicated to John Lennon, located near the building he and his wife Yoko Ono lived in at the time of his 1980 assassination. All it consists of is the title of his song “Imagine.”
Given everything Lennon accomplished, it’s an interesting instance of a single work being made to stand for an artist’s entire life. For memorial purposes, the rest of his songs apparently didn’t have a chance against “Imagine,” and in particular, against the dream it represents. I suspect it was Yoko’s decision. It hardly matters that there is evidence, although of an uncertain weight since it rests upon one man’s report, that John was toying with conservative ideas in the year or so before his murder. For however complicated a man Lennon was, there is something appropriate, or at least inevitable, about “Imagine” becoming the world’s epitaph for him. It is a song of such strong symbolic resonance, that it threatens to overshadow its songwriter.
As a historian has rightly called the words of the U.S. Declaration of Independence “American Scripture,” we should acknowledge that the words of “Imagine” have become canonized as Cosmopolitan Progressivist scripture. But since to believers in older religions its open recommendation of an atheist faith cannot but sound lamentable and threatening, it is unlike the Continental Congress’s bid, through Jefferson’s pen and their own editing, to reflect the range of American republican sentiment, and to “harmonize” it, particularly with their invocation of a Deity that could be read as either the God of the Bible or as a symbol of “Nature” merely. “Imagine,” alas, partakes more of the divisive spirit of revolutionary Paris, than of the prudentially compromising mindset of revolutionary Philadelphia. It is only the latter that proves truly fraternal.
Mytho-poetically speaking, the Sixties begin with Dylan’s 1962 “Blowin’ in Wind” and its wistful, and even a bit desperate, half-belief in the possibility of a world without war (which the songbook examined here). So it’s striking that Lennon’s 1971 “Imagine,” which seems to be his summation of the Counter-Cultural creed that had developed over the course of the decade, rather confidently calls for belief in the possibility of a world not simply without war, but also without religion, nations, or property. Indeed, the song teaches that to truly arrive at the world without war, we have to ditch those three seemingly unavoidable aspects of the human condition.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RwUGSYDKUxU%3Frel%3D0%26controls%3D0%26showinfo%3D0
Verse one urges us to imagine there’s no heaven, verse two a future life with no countries, and verse three one with no possessions. The imagined future life thus replaces heaven: Imagine all the people, sharing all the world.
Lennon later said that some of his songs, such as “All You Need Is Love,” and this one, were attempts at a kind of propaganda. But whereas our consideration of the former’s lyrics in Songbook No. 73 found them to be intellectually contemptible, that is, to be resting upon an unserious pantheism and a conflation of several distinct kinds of love, the lyrics of “Imagine” are in a different class. They pose a genuine challenge. For if human nature is plastic enough to get beyond its usual reliance upon religion, political communities, and private property, and if there really is no God, then what else would we want to strive for than the dream it presents?
Of course, a good deal of what philosophers, political philosophers and philosophic theologians in particular, have debated over the ages is caught up in those two ifs. And admittedly, a philosopher like Nietzsche can suggest other things at least some of us might want to strive for if the two ifs are to be answered affirmatively.
My main point here is that if we simply set that aside the fact that “Imagine” is propaganda, which means we must also ignore the feeling its music conveys that of course its hopes will be realized, its words can serve as useful tool for prodding one into philosophy. And by “philosophy,” I pretty much mean scholarly learning generally, for in the questions posed by the first if, one has to turn to the best that ethology, anthropology, sociology, history, and literature have to teach.
In my judgment, philosophy in this sense teaches that human nature is not plastic enough to get beyond the continuing existence of separate political communities, private property, and an attraction to religion. It says the same about the existence of some form of family relations, an issue Lennon passes over in this song, although he certainly must have been alive to the Counter-Culture’s experiments with communes and with relations that defy or radically expand marriage bonds. Moreover, wherever the best political philosophers admit a smidgen of doubt about how far one could push human nature’s plasticity in these four areas, they seem inclined to caution us with visions of dystopia.
And finally, in my judgment, philosophy cannot rule out either the possibility of God’s existence, or of His choosing to reveal Himself to mankind through special interactions.
Passing by the task of giving reasons for that last judgment, the really momentous one, my intention is to suggest some of the texts and ideas that lead me reject the first if, on all three heads. I’ll be doing this in three separate posts tied to the three stanzas of “Imagine,” and I invite readers to add their own recommendations.
This mini-series of posts on “Imagine” will serve, I should note, as a penultimate finale upon a theme I’ve considered over a whole number of Songbook entries over the last year or so, connected back to posts like the one on “All You Need is Love,” but particularly beginning with No. 88 on “Let’s Get Together” by Jefferson Airplane. That theme is the hippie recommendation and cultivation of fraternal love. While my consideration of it through rock song involved a number of critical notes from a conservative perspective, it also drew attention to its more appealing aspects. My posts have shown, for example, the way such fraternal love worked at Woodstock and how it was the most serious element in hippie communalism. But in my last Songbook post for First Thoughts, on Jefferson Airplane’s “We Can Be Together,” we also saw how easily the Counter-Culture’s call to love all mankind could curdle into a call to only love the half of mankind on your side. That call was wild and undisciplined in “We Can Be Together,” but “Imagine” has the exact same spirit, but with a more patient “long-march” attitude. Indeed, it is the more radical song by far. Few songs are more divisive, or more chillingly insistent upon the division in question. Like Jesus telling his disciples they will have to leave their families and possession behind to follow him, Lennon is prodding his international audience to realize they have to choose: it’s either your Nation or The Cause, either your career/possessions/entire way of life or The Cause, and either your Biblical God or The Cause. Demanding that last choice was a particularly significant and aggressive move, even if it had many leftist precedents.
What Lennon didn’t know, at least in 1971, is that no daring faith in the possibility of The Cause, in his “political imaginary,” could alter the fact that it was nothing less than the cause of dividing man from his very nature, as the coming posts on this song will demonstrate.