By David Warren.

In John Lennon's ever-popular "Hymn to Mediocrity" (my un-title for this asinine song) the advantages of a non-dramatic, uninteresting life are quickly enumerated:

Imagine there's no heaven

It's easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky. . .

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace. . .

And so forth. Hatred would be abolished, along with wars of all kinds, for instance that "war on drugs." And with no religion, there could of course be no wars of religion. Evil would, furthermore, disappear upon this "end of history," depicted by all utopian schemers; thus, no punishments or war-crimes trials.

The hippie-trippie should note that Karma will also disappear, along with everything else that has ceased to be necessary. That should, in itself, obviate most of the irritating YouTube videos.

Et in Arcadia ego. . .I, too, was a child in the Sixties, once upon a time.

Or, as readers of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited discover, this classical and Christian message in Latin is inscribed on a sarcophagus in the family crypt, upon which a human skull is depicted.

For even in Arcadia, and in the Sixties, death was there; and even at the very center of mediocrity, there is death, impatiently waiting.

But back to the juke-box:

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will live as one.

Yes, the hymn is declaring, you will and must join us, in a sleepy death. The whole universe is waiting for your extinction. For that is all it comes to, in the end: the "heat death of the universe," or at some other temperature, according to fluctuating physics theories. But whichever, we won't have to feel pain, for all feeling is illusory or transient, according to the experts.

Something may seem to be happening now, but it is all in your head, and will leave no trace after just a few centuries. It won't even be imagined.

And yet I defiantly imagine a dark night of the soul, which, one gathers from Meister Eckhart and Saint John of the Cross, is not a celebration of mediocrity, or even, truth be told, a celebration.

This remains the chief alternative to "Imagine," except that the song does not follow on the mystical way. Its worthlessness appears in this context, and we are perfectly free to hate it, and to hate many other things that we will leave behind, when we make the transition, into a mystical death.

It is something that we perhaps cannot imagine, even though we survive, in an earthly living that anticipates the immortal.

Now, if we immediately turn, away from the "Hymn to Mediocrity" to the sometimes unpleasant Christian reality it rejects, and look through this lens at history generally, we return, delightfully, to hatred.

Indeed, we get it from all sides, as Christ got it from all sides, and from every direction, except from Himself.

His fate was the very opposite of the "peace, love, groovy" that we are promised in pop songs, and that is often presented by other flourishes of "religious mediocrity."

For when Love is presented by itself as if it were the whole story, the whole story retreats into nothingburger empty space.

It is in the contrast with hate that love becomes visible, or as it were, imaginable. Too, I would say, that a nothingburger universe cannot be creative, unlike one made by God.

Hatred is as necessary as love, and viewed from down here, it is just as ineradicable. This is also true within every creature down here, since the Fall of Man, and if that were forgotten while we walked once again though the Edenic paradise, we would be bitten by the snakes.

Indeed, one might say, Hatred would be impossible without Love, and vice versa, as Evil is impossible without Good.

It has a dialectical part to play, in this sublunary sphere, where opposites both attract and repel, and this has been the case from the beginning. Or to quote an ever-popular American hymn, "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free" (which has been mediocritized to: "Le...