(Hello, this is Zach Alexander — you may have read my Leaving the Garden post, and this is the first of a few guest articles I’m posting while John is otherwise engaged.)

“The stuff that really brings people together, and makes us happy to live together, originates from a caring and thoughtful mind that’s been exposed to many streams of education.”

That was the key point I took away from a presentation — talk, acoustic concert, and Q&A — by Greg Graffin, frontman and co-songwriter for the seminal punk band Bad Religion, who was honored with an award the Saturday before last at Harvard’s Memorial Church. (A recording is available at the link above, thanks to the Humanist Network News podcast.)

Since last semester, people from the humanist community at Harvard have been planning a ceremony for the Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism, created last year to honor artistic contributions to human culture in a humanistic vein. The first was given to Salman Rushdie, who was a hard act to follow. But the committee, of which I was an occasional part, felt clear in the end that this year’s award should be given to Graffin, who is not only a musician but also a biology lecturer at UCLA.

That might sounds a bit caricatured at first glance — a group of atheist academics giving an award to the singer of a band called Bad Religion, whose logo is a cross with a slash through it! But the band has a more subtle relationship to faith than their name might suggest. Graffin himself is an atheist, but has said that the band uses “religion” not literally, but more as a metaphor for conformity of all kinds; for any kind of “shared way of thinking” that is prescribed by others.

The ceremony started off with an introduction by the able Dan Robinson of the undergrad Harvard Secular Society, followed by an introduction to both humanism and Graffin by Greg Epstein, Harvard’s star humanist chaplain. And then the honoree himself took the stage.

* * *

His talk began with a bit of history, starting with the scholastic tradition in the first medieval universities. Broadly speaking, scholasticism sought to use reason to make the Bible consistent with the ancient Greeks, holding the truth of both as fixed points. This was the birth of systematic theology in the West.

In contrast, the intellectual movement that came to be known as humanism emphasized the arts, especially the language arts. According to Graffin, they too paid homage to the ancient Greeks and Romans, not for the “sole purpose of making them consistent with theology,” but also to improve upon them — Copernicus improving on Ptolemy, Andreas Vesalius improving on Galen. And more interesting for Graffin, they emphasized the “creation of an active, politically responsible citizen,” arguing that the humanities were better suited than scholastic philosophy for the development of civic and social virtues.

This, he said, is a goal modern-day humanists should share: presenting creative and written works to the public with the hope of helping people lead better lives. That’s been a goal of his own work with Bad Religion, he said: not just entertaining people, but also making them think. And conversely, in his academic lectures he seeks to entertain.

The quote that began this article came at the end of his talk, as he was drawing these and other threads together. I took him to be saying that the best products of culture come from people shaped by a diverse range of experiences. A fitting way to conclude an acceptance speech for this award, which seeks to bring the often science-driven humanist movement more in touch with the humane and artistic as well.

(Intriguingly, given the context, he described this claim as a “naive belief in an untested hypothesis” — i.e. faith. Perhaps he was joking, or perhaps he was showing us his nonconformist side…)

“If you’re satisfied with that, I’d like to play some music,” he added, to enthusiastic applause.

* * *

It was the first time he had ever done both in one evening. “I’ve never actually played guitar in… a suit,” he said, and didn’t unbutton his top button until the second song.

Because I’m new to Bad Religion’s music, and punk in general beyond The Cramps, I’ll simply post videos of the four songs he played without much comment. The first one was “Suffer” from the 1988 album of the same name, and the rest are under the cut.

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(h/t Rebecca at Skepchick)

Next was “Cease” from The Gray Race (1996):

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Following that was “Live Again” from the recent (2004) album The Empire Strikes First:

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And finally (actually, this is the only ordering I’m 100 percent sure about) was “Sorrow” from The Process of Belief (2002). Apparently it’s been added to the latest version of Guitar Hero, which he was amused to report.

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