John Lennon’s hopeless humanist hymn, “Imagine”, is the wrong song for the Olympics
by David Robertson, theweeflea:
It happened again. First it was the Olympics in 1996, then the Winter Olympics in 2006, then back to the Olympics in 2012, then the Winters in 2018; and this year the Olympic opening ceremony did it again. They sang John Lennon’s “Imagine”. It seems as though this has become the secular humanist hymn for our times, the godless prayer that must be uttered on any occasion – sometimes even by Christian clergy.
It is an appropriate anthem/prayer because it reflects the hubris, hypocrisy and hopelessness of secular humanistic values.
Hubris
Ten years ago, as I was recovering from a serious illness, I received hundreds of cards from all over the world. I couldn’t reply to them all, but one I had to respond to was from a couple of proud atheists who told me that despite our differences they were praying for me! To whom?
When we pray “Imagine” we are praying to ourselves. We are saying that we are the ‘Bob the Builder’ of the universe. We can fix it. All we have to do is imagine. John Lennon was an intelligent man. He didn’t write emotional guff. At the time of “Imagine”, he was going through his revolutionary socialist, Mao T-shirt-wearing phase.
He knew the teachings of Marcuse, the progressive philosopher who argued that the first step to change is to imagine it. Yoko Ono was a devotee of this kind of thinking. John and Yoko sang “Happy Xmas War Is Over” – “if you want it”. That’s the way to end war apparently – to want it, imagine it. That kind of fanciful thinking is now deeply ingrained in our culture. I believe I can fly. I believe I can touch the sky.
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