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Graffin's "Punk Manifesto"—his effort to define a movement that most of us associate with slam dancing and nose rings—is easily found on the Internet. It's also difficult to follow, perhaps because it's brilliant, perhaps because it's full of circular thinking and non sequiturs. Schoolboy skeptics and community college geniuses would probably opt for the former theory; I opt for the latter and offer this sentence as proof: "PUNK IS: the personal expression of uniqueness that comes from the experiences of growing up in touch with our human ability to reason and ask questions." Huh?
Still, it's refreshing when a punk singer does something other than curse his parents, dote on reproductive organs and beer, and scream the "f" word into microphones (though, admittedly, Graffin doesn't fear expletives.)
All of this is to say that Graffin has a brain. In his doctoral dissertation, "Monism, Atheism, and the Naturalist World-View: Perspectives from Evolutionary Biology," he concludes that there's "no conflict between evolutionary theory and religion on the one important condition that religion is essentially atheistic." One of his beliefs (and he is a man of deep faith), which must have helped him to arrive at his findings, is that naturalism is set to become a new and influential religion. Naturalism "is satisfying," Graffin told me, "because it is a teacher. Naturalism teaches one of the most important things in the world: there is only this life—so live wonderfully and meaningfully." And one of the keys to a wonderful and meaningful existence is living free of delusions, which all "bad religions"—traditional churches, political dogmas, conformist social codes—trade in.
Perhaps paradoxically, Graffin denies the existence of free will, though he acknowledges, citing Richard Dawkins, that the delusion of free will is so pervasive one might as well live with it. Or, as E. O. Wilson, whom Graffin recommended I read, puts it in Consilience (1998): "Because the individual mind cannot be fully known and predicted, the self can go on passionately believing in its own free will." (Graffin also suggested I read Julian Huxley. In turn, I recommended that he read Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, or see the BBC production of it, which is the closest thing to cinematic literature I know of. I also suggested the four Gospels, since, at the least, a rudimentary biblical literacy is—or should be—basic to education in a civilization shaped so considerably by the Christian and Jewish scriptures. Graffin agreed that this was a worthwhile point.)
So Graffin himself may not really be a moral free agent, but he nevertheless appears to be his own man. It's refreshing that he writes and records the kind of music he likes, regardless of fashion. He acknowledges that BR has a certain "sound" that fans expect to hear (while not yet out of his teens, he learned that wild experimentation can be treacherous); but he doesn't play to the hit charts and he doesn't want to be a "celebrity."
Graffin the semi-well known musician played all the instruments on his super-mellow solo album, American Lesion. Graffin the regular guy takes out his aggression in the hockey rink ("I sometimes get in fights during the game, but off the ice it's back to normal"). He has two kids. He now lives in upstate New York. So far as I can tell from personal experience, he's a pretty cool guy—partly ferocious, partly genteel in the manner of a thoughtful person committed to ideas. He and I agree that serious disagreement over serious matters is preferable to a politically correct blandness.
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