Imagining John Lennon's Utopia

(Also published by acuf.org)

Imagining John Lennon's Utopia
By Byron Matthews

John Lennon, a famously prolific songwriter, today is most remembered for his 1971 utopian anthem, "Imagine". The song appeared as the title track on Lennon's second post-Beatles album, and it represents the pop icon's deepest musical foray into the realm of political and economic philosophy. Just how strongly Lennon is identified with the song is suggested by the title chosen for his 1988 film portrait, Imagine: John Lennon. Then there was the 2000 release Gimme Some Truth – The Making of John Lennon's "Imagine", which included scenes from an earlier film by Lennon and wife Yoko Ono, entitled – you guessed it – Imagine. The unpopular War in Viet Nam made the song an immediate hit, and it remains the best-loved number in the pacifist hymnal more than thirty years later. It's a good bet that more candles and Bic lighters have been waved in the air to "Imagine" than to all else combined, "Kumbaya" included. In the plaintive voice of the since tragically murdered Lennon, "Imagine" can carry an emotional punch, especially when experienced as the reverent keening of a solemn nighttime gathering of believers in the dream. In the midst of so much hopeful sincerity, even an inveterate cynic could find himself fumbling for his Bic somewhere in the second verse. But what, exactly, was Lennon asking us to imagine? The answer leaves no doubt that Lennon should have stuck to singing about yellow submarines.

A sort of musical What Is To Be Done?, "Imagine" is Lennon's prescription for dragging ourselves out of the bloody trenches of war, at long last to "live as one" in the Brotherhood of Man. The secret is to get rid of the three things that have been putting us at each other's throats: religion, countries, and possessions. (How Lennon missed using "A Modest Proposal" as a prankish subtitle remains a mystery to this day.) A website devoted to John Lennon and "Imagine" once asked readers what they thought the song was about. Not exactly a stumper, the answers were about what you'd predict, only with worse spelling. But someone posted this Socratic bucket of cold water: "Are these lyrics not the promise made by communism?" Hmm. Maybe it's time for a dry-eyed look at Lennon's program. Do history and everyday experience suggest that abolishing religion, nations, and private property is the road to a world of peace and plenty? Or did Lennon actually write a prescription for political oppression and economic failure, for a society opposite in every important respect from the enticing vision he intended to promote?

"Imagine" envisions a world made more peaceful, first, by the disappearance of religion, an old idea that may have gained new resonance on September 11, 2001. Besides such excesses of what Gibbon drolly referred to as "enthusiasm", religion has frequently shown a willingness to support an unsavory status quo, often at the side of unappetizing allies. It is seems fair to concede that if fanaticism and reaction were religion's sole products, few would hesitate to join Lennon in his wish to see it gone. But religion may have other effects worth considering before it's tossed over the side. For example, it's often claimed that people commonly have a need to invest themselves in some transcendent purpose, with religion providing a relatively benign outlet. Better to sing "Amazing Grace" in church than the "Horst Wessel Song" at a torchlight rally, the argument goes. But Quakerism does not exhaust the range of religious possibilities, so without consideration of, say, Jihadist Islam, the argument falls a bit short. There are other ways, though, that religion may resist the demise of liberal democracy and the development of oppressive rule.

For one thing, religion can present a barrier, or at least a hurdle, to moral opportunism. Absolute political power requires the flexibility to redefine good and evil according to the needs of the moment. Lenin said that "morality for us is subordinated to the interests of the class struggle", but religion inconveniently resists the claim that good ends should trump any ethical concern about means. As hypocritical or servile as religion can be in the short term, its moral stance, being based in traditional texts and teachings, can be stretched and twisted only so far. The Vatican of the 1930s could avert its eyes, but it could never have proclaimed the slaughter of European Jewry to be a moral act. Quips about eggs and omelets could not have led religious leaders to support Stalin's starvation murder of Ukrainian "kulaks".

Religion may also challenge oppressive government simply by virtue of its sheer political existence as a competing center of power. A monopoly of power is prevented when different interests are strong enough to restrain each other, so that no interest or narrow coalition can dominate. Its cultural reservoir of traditional authority and its ability to mobilize the faithful give religion some potent political resources in the political arena. The Catholic Church's role in the upheavals in Poland during the 1980s showed how effective those resources can be against government power. By abolishing religion, "Imagine" would simply eliminate a potentially critical source of resistance to the one-party state.

The possible hazards of eradicating religion may have eluded John Lennon, but not George Orwell. A nonbeliever known for his low opinion of the Catholic Church even before the Spanish Civil War, Orwell was nevertheless critical of intellectuals who had sought, largely successfully he believed, to debunk religion. The problem was that they had not thought very hard about what might happen next. Writing in 1940, with the horrific nature of the Nazi and Soviet regimes no longer a matter of doubt in most quarters, and nine years before the publication of his anti-totalitarian novel 1984, Orwell described the enemies of religion as sawing away at a supporting branch until suddenly "down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire".

Next, Lennon asked us to set grammar aside and "imagine there's no countries".

With religion gone, eliminating nations would leave "nothing to kill or die for", thus marking the advent of a peaceful world. This is an astonishingly unrealistic formulation, even for a utopian-pacifist. Depredation and warfare were a constant condition of tribal and village life long before nation states existed. Many armed conflicts occur within nations, not between them, and they are no less brutal and bloody for that. Our species has always shown remarkable ingenuity in finding excuses other than religion and nationalism to have at it. Were those sources of conflict somehow permanently resolved, the most plausible inference from prehistory onward is that people would simply find something else to fight about.

But suppose we accept Lennon's invitation to join the dreamers and imagine that peace would break out once national boundaries were erased. Who would be running things in this de-nationalized world? Simpler administrative tasks and responsibilities might devolve to local communities, but that wouldn't work for administering power grids and transportation networks. Those functions and many more would have to be relocated to some overarching political entity. The image is of a vastly expanded and enhanced European Union, so exhaustively comprehensive in its planning, coordinating, regulating, and enforcing that its constituent states, left with nothing important to do, could be required to wither away. Unavoidably, enormous amounts of power would be concentrated in distant managerial elites, the formerly pluralistic and competitive international power structure replaced by a monolithic one. Historical experience is brutally clear that such over-centralized power, no matter how well intentioned to begin with, becomes progressively more oligarchic and oppressive. "Imagine" is depressingly consistent in its naiveté about the likely outcomes of its own recommendations.

Finally, Lennon asked us to imagine a world with no possessions, a world of sharing where greed has become pointless. Proudhon declared that property is theft, but "Imagine" never brands ownership as a criminal act. That's just as well since "Imagine" was released with the full panoply of copyright protections, and to this day has not been placed in the public domain to be freely shared. Lennon might be faulted for missing a perfect opportunity for the grand gesture, but whether it's fair to brand him a hypocrite depends on what kinds of possessions he wanted to do away with. After all, if we take his lyrics literally, having no possessions would mean not owning your own toothbrush, which we suspect is not what Lennon was singing about.

By some coincidence, Lennon's other two targets, religion and countries, were similarly opposed by Karl Marx, so we could perhaps do worse than look there for clues about what Lennon had in mind. In their Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that communism "may be summed up in one sentence: Abolition of private property". But by "private property" they meant "bourgeois property": the land, factories, and railroads that were, according to the oxymoron known as Marxist economics, making a few people rich from other people's surplus labor. They weren't concerned with personal property like toothbrushes, things that are simply used or consumed, nor with the "self-earned" property of an artisan – like a songwriter's song, which gets Lennon off the hook. Clearly, the kind of private property "Imagine" wants to abolish is the bourgeois kind

One objection to abolishing private property is that economic activity would become less democratic, less creative, and therefore less productive. Marx and Engels had nothing but scorn for the claim that private property is "the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity, and independence", but they would have a difficult time maintaining that position today. According to Hernando de Soto in The Mystery of Capital, the most important source of startup funds for new U.S. businesses is "a mortgage on the on the entrepreneur's house", making bourgeois property in the form of privately owned real estate an independent source of ready credit for small business projects of every variety. Many of these efforts are far too risky for an unsecured loan or grant of public funds, let alone approval by a board of economic planners, yet some prove to be wildly successful. This source of economic vitality is simply unavailable where people aren't bourgeois enough to own their homes.

Anyway, abolishing private property only eliminates certain rights and obligations with respect to things, not the things themselves. The land, railroads, and factories would still be sitting there exactly as before. What would change is where the rights to use, improve, or dispose of them are held, and Lennon's preference here would almost certainly be some form of collective ownership. But people today seem no more eager to turn over their land, for example, than were the peasants who died by the millions resisting Stalin's collectivization efforts in the 1930s. The real-world choice always comes down to either confiscating private property by force or forgetting the whole idea.

"Imagine" soars safely above devilish details of this sort.

If people could be somehow persuaded to toss their property into the collective pot, they would find themselves facing questions of power and control that "Imagine" slides past. Collective ownership is egalitarian in how title is held, but no organization can be run successfully by a large group, let alone by the amorphous general public. As the ownership of an enterprise is diluted, powers of command and control inevitably must flow to a managerial elite. When the Soviet Union abolished private property in favor of collective ownership, the theoretical Dictatorship of the Proletariat, with its wide and egalitarian distribution of power, never saw the light of day. Instead, power quickly coalesced in a highly centralized and oligarchic Dictatorship of the Party, an arrangement Robert Conquest ironically described as "private ownership of the state itself", with power concentrated in a ruling bureaucratic class, or in the case of Stalin, in a single entrepreneur. Meanwhile the workers, who owned it all in theory, became in practice industrial serfs, stripped of any hope of organizational independence and even of their right to strike.

Abolishing private property has the further effect of eliminating any possibility of genuine markets. When the state owns everything, it's been pointed out, any "market” can be no more than an absurd analog of playing chess against yourself. More than 80 years ago, Ludwig von Mises persuasively argued that without competitive markets to establish prices for productive resources, there could be no way to allocation them rationally among their myriad alternative uses. Central planning, even in principle, could never be more than sailing blind without a rudder, with all the inevitability of doom that implies. Neither Mises nor Lennon lived to see the Soviet system's final sinking, but we can be sure that one of these two men would not have been surprised at all.

The unavoidable historical conclusion implied by the events of the 20th Century is that centralizing political and economic power will culminate in what Max Eastman called "its direct and normal consequence: the usurpation of power by a tyrant."
Similarly, Martin Malia concludes that the overriding lesson of the Soviet experiment is that "concentrating both political and economic power in one set of hand, leads inevitably to monstrous crimes against the individual and the people at large". As that was everywhere and without exception the trajectory of what Hayek disparagingly called "The Great Utopia", it seems incredible that the events of the last century should have failed to convey that lesson, at least. Maintaining competing centers of power at every level, insuring wide participation in the ownership of private property, and preferring reform to revolutionary destruction when it comes to traditional institutions all are things that specifically work against the concentration of government power. None of them, furthermore, would interfere with any reasonable path to attaining other progressive or humanitarian goals, including a more peaceful world. And, unlike what "Imagine" advocates, this approach does not require us to ignore historical experience, deny everyday observation, and abandon common sense.

With "Imagine", John Lennon believed he was showing the way to a better and more peaceful world. Instead, he succeeded in combining three supremely bad ideas as main ingredients in a musical recipe for political and economic disaster. If the goal were to produce an inexorable destruction of liberal democracy and economic productivity, it would be hard to improve on Lennon's triple whammy of abolishing religion, nations, and private property. Compared with the oppressed and mean existence promised by Lennon's utopia, life in a yellow submarine seems positively attractive. While we may hope that his dream of peace will always be widely shared, Lennon's program for getting there is not one that any thinking person should want to join.

Communism killed around 100 million people in less than 75 years, Nazism led to the deaths of another 20 million or so in fewer than twelve. That grisly record of the wages of absolute power is plain to see, which makes it the more troubling that so many refuse to take its lessons seriously, preferring the platitudes and wishful thinking of utopian reveries like "Imagine" instead. But good intentions and high ideals can never substitute for thoughtful skepticism in general and careful analysis of history in particular. To be fair, John Lennon was, like all of us, a person of his time, and only 30 years old when "Imagine" was released. Much has happened and much has been revealed since then, enough that we should want a better, truer song. Had he lived, perhaps an older, wiser John Lennon would eventually have provided it. And, who knows, that new song might even have included the word 'freedom' somewhere in it.

[Song lyrics follow below]

"Imagine" by John Lennon

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one.