Imagination, Intellect and Will

I WON'T BORE my visitors by pretending to be shocked by scenes from the Planet Novus Ordo. Every so often though, the radar picks up things from that strange, remote orbit that still have the power to render one speechless (or very nearly).

Paulinus, an English blogger, reveals that consideration is sometimes given to airing John Lennon’s Imagine in the context of the Liturgy. Now call me naïve, but I would have assumed hitherto that a lyric so crass as to be self-debunking would remain beneath the attention even of the most radically disconnected victim of the Hermeneutic of Rupture. Apparently not: Paulinus does the charitable thing, and joins the dots, provoking me to add a bit of colouring-in.

"Nothing to kill or die for…"

Okay – the old canard that people kill or die principally on account of “religion”; take away "religion", nobody will kill or die any more. Right.

People, as long as they are people, will die for (and sometimes kill in defense of) things they love and care about more than themselves. The world of Lennon's Imagine is therefore one in which no-one cares much about anything. It's the earthly paradise of the sublime egotist - an insipid nirvana empty of meaning or even natural human attachments. At best this represents a colossal failure of imagination - at worst it's anti-social, mendacious, self-centred and inhuman.

Let’s call things by their names. Imagine is sub-Rousseaunian mind-rot, packaged as chocolate milk and ardently promoted as wholesome by those who also hail its author as a genius and secular saint (what other promoter of the drug culture has airports named after him?). It’s gulped down eagerly by millions – billions; but the ideology it promotes and nurtures in undernourished imaginations is precisely – absolutely precisely – that of the Khmer Rouge.