I’ve always had a problem with authority’, this is how starts Greg Graffin’s new book ‘Anarchy Evolution’, and I should have asked him if it was the scientist or the punk rocker who was speaking, but I’m pretty sure he would have answered both, as this is the premise of the book: punk rock and science are about the same thing, anarchy and the rejection of authority of all kinds and Greg, unexpectedly, embodies both perfectly. The greatest scientists have been human beings who have rejected some authority to look for other explanations than the ones already served to the public. From Darwin to Einstein, the greatest of them were rebellious punks if you hear by punk, individualism, anti-establishment and non-conformity.
Greg Graffin is a Ph. D college professor, who gives lectures in life sciences and evolution at UCLA, but he is also the lead singer and songwriter of the Los Angeles punk band Bad Religion. He was discussing and signing his book in a famous bookstore on Sunset boulevard and I could not resist checking out this so accomplished gentleman.
Funny that Helen was writing two days ago how music and religion go so well together because this guy is the complete opposite of this. May be I should write a post one day about anti-religious songs, there is a long list. The complete title of Graffin’s book is ‘Anarchy Evolution, Faith, Science and Bad Religion in a World without God’ but, Saturday night, he did not want to be labeled as atheist for many reasons, the main one being he does not want to define himself as against a particular worldview. I think it is a question of semantic, and even though he does not like the word because of the bad reaction it triggers in many people, he is a person who lives his life without the idea of God.
Rather he calls himself a naturalist, and has built a worldview based on his belief (yes, he used that word a lot for a non-believer!) that we can only find the truth in nature. His songwriting has always reflected this view and, far from being a nihilistic punk, he has always subscribed to the other ‘belief’ that our actions, good and bad, matter. He used this term deliberately, but it may be confusing for people!
Of course, as many other evolutionists have said, there is absolutely no basis to draw ethical conclusions from nature, this is not what being a naturalist means. For Greg Graffin, studying nature and evolution were just tools to understand the world in general, or the punk rock world in particular. In a cool way he was constantly drawing parallel between his knowledge about evolution and the evolution of music knowing the limits of this little game.
So a punk rocker, seeing the world through the eyes of an evolutionist, a world with no purpose and no plan for our future? What else could I ask for? It has always been how I see the world too.
However, Graffin has definitely not banned ‘believe’ or ‘faith’ from his vocabulary as he said that human relationships and interactions precisely rely on faith, but that we have to believe wisely.
A person from the audience asked him during the Q&A what the line which mentions a messiah in the song ‘Sorrow’ meant : ‘Or when the only true messiah rescues us from ourselves/It’s easy to imagine’.
Greg Graffin has this optimistic take on life, and he explained that the line meant we are our own messiah and that the meaning of life comes from ourselves. Wise man.
When he was signing my book, in the short amount of time allowed, I told him I was a science teacher, but definitively not in a band, and that made him laugh a little bit.