John Lennon and the Crooked Timber of Humanity
Kant inspects the “crooked timber of humanity.”
I like The Beatles. I like the band, each member, and their music. But I don’t like Lennon’s Imagine. When I mention this to others, they tend to respond as though I’m committing heresy of some kind [1], and they draw the non sequitur that I don’t like Lennon or The Beatles. (I recognize that the song was written and released during his solo career.) Or they say: “You pay too much attention to words! Don’t be so serious!”
Let me explain what I don’t like about Imagine. The melody and other elements are fine. I like Lennon’s voice. However, I object to the lyrics and to the fact that the song has become a cultural anthem of what is construed as an ideal of human existence; it’s a set of lyrics folks rehearse every New Year’s Eve as if to say: “We hope that the new year will be as Lennon imagines it.”
I don’t object to Lennon’s being a dreamer, and I support his stated goal, namely, “a brotherhood of man.” I.e., his goal was that we live according to the truth that all human beings are members of a universal community of ends, as Kant might put it. Moreover, I agree with Lennon that there is a human predicament that needs a solution. Yet I object to his diagnosis of the human problem and to his proposed means for solving it. They are insufficient.
Lennon’s lyrics suggest that the human problem is entirely external such that if we were to eliminate the institutions that he believed divide us, such as religion, nations, and possessions, and if the world were entirely naturalistic (no heaven above, no hell below, etc.), then there would be peace and goodwill across the globe. What he seems to have missed, at least at the time of Imagine, was the internal problem of the human condition. [2] Our condition is such that there is a propensity to moral evil inherent to the human will and also a weakness of human intellect and reason; these would remain serious problems even if we were to eliminate the institutions that Lennon calls for us to imagine as non-existent. Thus his proposal for solving the human problem is unwise.
If we were to go to the great trouble of abolishing religions, nations, and possessions – endeavors that would produce their own set of miseries, we would still face the source of our problem: the benighted human mind, the impurity of the human will, and the multitude of disordered human desires. Moreover, our natural inclinations for order, meaning, and transcendence would remain, and we’d likely start promptly to seek new religions, states, possessions, rules of law, etc. A genuine solution to the human predicament requires dealing with its source, which is within us and not merely external. Probably, this mess is not fixable by our own efforts alone. We need help from something beyond us – a point that religion at its best is designed to address.
These are some reasons for my disapproval of the lyrics of Imagine. Don’t draw the invalid conclusion that I dislike Lennon and The Beatles. Here are 15 of my faves:
(Who rattles off 15 favorite songs by a band he doesn’t like?)
In My Life
Blackbird
Eleanor Rigby
Help!
Revolution
Yesterday
Here Comes the Sun
I Wanna Hold Your Hand
Let It Be
Can’t Buy Me Love
Twist and Shout!
Day Tripper
Ticket to Ride
Eight Days a Week
Nowhere Man
[1] Think about that! It’s as if they have something like a religious devotion to a song asking them to imagine favorably a world without religion.
[2] Interestingly, he seems to have recognized this internal problem in Revolution, noting that changes of mind and heart are required to improve the human predicament, and not merely the changing of externals such as constitutions and institutions:
You say you’ll change the constitution
Well, you know
We’d all love to change your head
You tell me it’s the institution
Well, you know
You better free your mind instead