Imagine

“Embedding disabled by request…” Oh, well.

Imagine no possessions, Yoko, Inc. I wonder if you can. Lennon estate: $300+ million.

How seriously should we take this song? Obviously greed and war are things we’d love to do away with. But, no countries? Do countries serve no good purpose? Can man live without government? If no countries, then the alternative is one world government. What might be the consequences of an even greater concentration of power in universal government than we see in big national governments like the US? More power, more temptation, more corruption, more oppression.

No religion? What then is the basis of morality? Has science solved our problems? Can it explain the miracle of the first living cell? Because there are mysteries, there will be religions, some good and some bad. As Jesus said, by their fruits shall you know them. By that standard, many Christian sects will not fare well in judgment. Still, our founders said that a republic could stand only if the people were moral, honest, industrious, generous, thankful, and cognizant of the blessings of the Creator.

This is the song most people remember Lennon for. Because it expresses a dream that is unworkable, I prefer to remember Mr. Lennon for songs like “Woman,” “Beautiful Boy,” “Watching the Wheels,” and great nonsense tunes he did with the Beatles… “Come Together,” “I am the Walrus,” etc. Lennon: a great talent. Not a great philosopher.

Dude, as my brother-in-law likes to say, you could fuck up a wet dream. Now for a slightly less literalist interpretation:

Perhaps, if we begin by imagining no countries, we can respond not by conspiracy-theorizing about one-world government — and by the way, that NAFTA expressway should be rolling into Iowa any day now — but instead by seeing that the differences among peoples of different nations are not so great that we should be so willing to slaughter each other in the name of ideology (or territory, if one goes macro on the concept of “no possessions”).

And perhaps, if we begin by imagining no religion, we can see more clearly that organizing people around the concept of worshiping a particular god with a particular set of rules has exacerbated the profound human flaw of needing to differentiate oneself from, look down upon (and occasionally slaughter) others. Sure, holy books and weekly lectures & fellowship have given billions of individuals assistance and comfort as they contemplate their origins, anticipate death, and go day-to-day in between. But as an organizing principle for sorting one group of people’s “morality” from another’s, religion has been an unmitigated disaster for the human race.

The exclusivity of religious belief too often demands that “believers” reject the possibility that adherents to other faiths, or to no religious faith at all, can live life with purpose and ethics. But I guarantee you there are hundreds of millions of the unchurched who live lives just as good, and noble, and worthy as yours, if not more.

And the notion that one must be “moral” (which too often means “obedient” or “intolerant”) today in order to earn a reward after death — be it a seat in heaven, 72 virgins or reincarnation as a cow — may cause many to lead good lives on the straight and narrow, but it also encourages bigotry and war and all kinds of misguided sacrifice (and, occasionally, the ramming of airplanes into buildings and such). So “imagine there’s no heaven,” and “all the people living for today,” and you might be able to envision not immoral chaos, but a world in which people do good so that they can be happy NOW, and make others happy NOW, and in which one group of people isn’t set against another out of some ridiculous notion that “my god is better than your god, which isn’t a god at all.”

“Imagine no possessions” is perhaps the most difficult of all, because it is human nature to possess things and to desire more possessions. But if you begin by imagining having nothing (or practically nothing) of your own, you’re not being unrealistic — you’re imagining the real-life existences of hundreds of millions around the world. So now imagine having a little less than you do now — or, at least, not acquiring too much more, or refraining from using too many more of the earth’s resources to satisfy your individual desires. Imagine what good might be had by all if you were willing to accept just a little less. It’s not quite “sharing all the world,” but it might be a start.

Lennon’s vision was utopian, to be sure — dystopian to you, perhaps — and I’ve never heard of a utopian vision that actually came to pass. Lennon didn’t exactly live his vision out himself. But all he was asking us to do was to imagine … and maybe, by implication, to take a couple of small steps to bring the world slightly closer to an ideal that certainly would be an improvement on the way things are today.

So much prattling. Sorry. Merry Christmas, Autodidact, and may you enjoy the benefits of those tax cuts for the wealthy in years to come.

The Los Angeles Times just had a story about some of the controversies surrounding the song. The article is here: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-wiener-lennon-20101207,0,1276295.story?track=rss (I also posted some other similar Lennon links on my chimesfreedom.com blog too). The Times story focuses on controversies that have come up in schools when students have wanted to sing the song.

My problem is that I don’t imagine that it means something other than it actually says it means. The goals are correct, but the means proposed are faulty.