Over at Intellectual Takeout, Grayson Quay gives voice [1] to something that I have been thinking for 30 years now:
What the former Beatle failed to realize is that a world with “nothing to kill or die for” is a world with nothing to live for.
He would have us subordinate our individual creeds to an amorphous “brotherhood of man,” but that concept is not as simple as it seems.
First we must ask things like, “Why is human life valuable?” and “What does human flourishing look like?” Surely these are theological questions that can only be answered by some sort of transcendent ideal—call it “heaven” if you want—that is, by definition, more valuable than any human life. A belief for which one is unwilling to either kill or die is a belief too weak to provide the vital energy necessary to sustain civilization.
One commentator insightfully calls the song “the antithesis of a call to arms.” How long does Lennon imagine his utopia would last if none of its citizens were willing to take up arms and risk their lives to defend it?
(Shrug)
I consider that Lennon, (never the brightest bulb in the circuit) never took the time to think these matters through to their logical conclusion. Instead, like most leftists of his day, and even today for that matter, he leaned most heavily on emotion not logic. Blame it on Yoko, blame it on the drugs or a combination thereof I don’t care.
There is perhaps an undercurrent in all of this that deserves mentioning. If there is no belief in the Transcendent as Lennon encouraged, nothing hard and fast in terms of the value of human life, perhaps that’s why the starry-eyed left is so ambivalent about the taking of human life in the abortion mills of Planned Parenthood?