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Howard Anglin: Imagine? No thanks, John

Commentary

President Joe Biden touches the casket of former president Jimmy Carter at the National Cathedral, Jan. 9, 2025, in Washington. Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times via AP, Pool.

What the playlist at Jimmy Carter’s funeral says about the spirit of our age

As far as heresies go, John Lennon’s “Imagine” has to be the most hummable, but the ex-Beatle’s gentle ode to nihilism is no less sinister for that. It is especially jarring when played at a Christian service, as it was for Jimmy Carter’s funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC last week. I’m genuinely surprised the dean approved it, even if he is Episcopalian.

Even those inured to the quotidian blasphemies of an irreligious age must have seen the irony of singing “Imagine there’s no heaven…” before transitioning smoothly into the solemn invocation of “Our Father, who art in heaven.” And if the hypocrisy didn’t bother them, a moment’s serious reflection on the song’s message should have.

“Imagine there’s no heaven” is what Eric Voegelin would have called “an immanentist hypostasis of a Christian eschatological symbol.” Or, as Belinda Carlisle put it, a promise that “we’ll make heaven a place on earth.” But when you eliminate the idea of divine justice, you don’t get mortal justice, you end up with men who think their private vision of justice is divine.

The problem will be obvious to anyone with an unvarnished view of human nature. Take away ultimate consequences—call it heaven and hell, karma, cosmic justice, or FAFO—and men get pretty nasty very quickly. Existentialism is a groovy philosophy on the patio of a Parisian cafe, but you really don’t want to live in an existentialist world. If you doubt it, read an existentialist novel.

No existence beyond this world means no soul, no telos, no meaning, just inconsequential particles forming, breaking, and reforming in a sterile universe until everything cools to eternal death. For life to have meaning beyond raw sensation requires a goal and movement towards it; for it to be sanctified requires a purpose beyond life, one that is literally supernatural.

“Imagine there’s no countries.” Now imagine the world’s biggest coordination problem and a bureaucracy that makes the European Union look like a meeting of the Mont Pelerin society. We have enough trouble managing relatively homogenous countries under generally agreed laws; good luck managing a single world state of cacophonous diversity and clashing metaphysics.

Erase the lines from the map and the world won’t “live as one,” you’ll have a Hobbesian free-for-all in which the strongest and most ruthless tribes dominate. No countries means no roots, no rituals, no shared identities or bonds of kinship and loyalty, nothing to bring us together except our common humanity. Which may sound good, but has never been enough to unite large groups of strangers for long because essential to our humanity is our love of the local and familiar.

“Imagine no possessions.” The most benign of Lennon’s lyrical exhortations is still impossible to picture in practice. We can imagine small communities sharing things in common: monasteries, kibbutzim, communes, and cults do this with decreasing degrees of success. But you don’t have to be a Lockean to recognise that these are exceptional arrangements and they still have possessions, they are just held under a different ownership model.

“Imagine all the people / Living for today.” Unfortunately, we don’t have to. We see the consequences of selfish impatience all around us: polluted oceans, clear-cut old growth, depleted soil, cheap construction, deficits and debts, the credit card lifestyle, materialism, consumerism…all things that Lennon should have been against. Live for today, sure, but you’ll still pay for it tomorrow.

And what if you knew tomorrow would never come? This was the subject of PD James’s novel, Children of Men, which imagined how people would live in a society without children and without a future. It is literally a hopeless world, solipsistic, impatient, and self-destructive. When there is “nothing to kill or die for”, it turns out that doesn’t stop people doing both anyway.

Civilisation presupposes endurance. Hannah Arendt rightly saw that politics, which is the activity of humans being human, requires an apprehension of immortality. That the tragedy otherwise inherent in the human condition–finite rectilinear lives within an infinitely cyclical world–is transcended by our ability to produce work that carries the past into a shared future.

It is only when individual life and death takes place within a recognisable order that it makes sense. This is why we have such reverence for those who sacrifice their lives for the greater good, why the cultivation of the next generation is the highest priority of a healthy society, and why our declining birthrate is the surest sign of an acute civilisational sickness.

So, thanks but no thanks, John. If this is really what you want, you’re not “a dreamer,” you’re a fool or a madman. That this insipid dystopian ditty has become, along with “Hallelujah” (a song once described as “one part biblical, one part the woman that [Leonard] Cohen slept with last night”) an anthem of our secular age says something, but I’m not sure what.

My guess is that it says we are in deep denial about what it takes to preserve the thin film between civilisation and anarchy. Either that or we just don’t pay much attention to lyrics. Hearing crowds sing “imagine there’s no countries” at the Olympics immediately after the parade of nations and hearing “imagine there’s no religion” at the funeral of a famously pious president suggests it’s the latter. I certainly hope so. Otherwise I hate to imagine our future.

Howard Anglin

Howard Anglin is a doctoral student at Oxford University. He was previously Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Principal Secretary to the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, and a lawyer in New York, London, and Washington, DC.

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