monolith
I used to joke that if you walked into a philosophy department and started asking philosophers if they believed in God, they wouldn’t say yes or no right away, but would ask: “what do you mean by God?” I wrote a song called monolith in 2001 (original version here), a metal epic that clocked in at just over nine minutes. This was actually the short version—I started recording the Infinite Singularity album Ruins with a metronome and then struggled with getting the timing right, so I ended up ditching the metronome and letting the drums carry the timing. For the new release, Ruins Revisited: 20 Years Later, I recorded a version with exactly the same riffs in the same order, but consistently timed with a metronome throughout; it’s just over 11 and a half minutes long. Sorry, iTunes and other streaming-services folks—they won’t let you stream the new version because it’s over 10 minutes long.
So it’s a long, long song by today’s standards. It also doesn’t have much in the way of lyrics, and the lyrics are basically a criticism of organized religion. I wrote them when I was 16 years old and first recited them at a poetry event in front of hundreds of people (I was a poet before I was a songwriter). A metal song that’s critical of organized religion—how original! The track itself shows my early influences a lot I think: some heavy palm mutes a la Metallica and speedy riffs influenced by Slayer, along with lumbering, almost comically slow passages that were directly inspired by Type O Negative’s album World Coming Down. I was also thinking of the Arthur C. Clarke series 2001: A Space Odyssey, and (spoiler alert—skip to the next paragraph if you haven’t read them all) the monolith turns out to be a device that has judged human beings, found them unworthy, and must in the end be destroyed before it destroys our species. As I think I mentioned somewhere before that I now can’t find, combining metal with philosophy and science fiction and a liberal dash of dark and weird is kind of my wheelhouse.
But again, perhaps I digress. A bit. A lot. Oh yeah—the believing in God thing. So, when I wrote the poem that became the song, I was still a new apostate, an angsty teen taking a “moral holiday” (in the words of William James and Bertrand Russell) from organized religion. By the time I was recording the song, I had become…something else. Back to the philosophy bit: theism can be defined as belief not just in a god or higher power of sorts, but in a personal God to whom one prays and anticipates an answer, a sort of deity that has a plan for humans and perhaps the universe; and that intervenes in the world on behalf of one’s problems, friends, loved ones, sports team, nation, or species. By this definition, an a-theist is someone who does not believe in this particular sort of God. I am an atheist in this sense and have been since I was a kid, long before I officially left organized religion.
Of course, we puny humans can’t prove definitively one way or the other that the universe is or isn’t created and sustained by a deity that cares about us and has a plan and so on. You have to look for the indirect evidence and form a conclusion based on where it points. The universe is almost 14 billion years old; our planet is about four and a half billion years old, and orbits one star out of the hundreds of billions of stars in one galaxy out of hundreds of billions. We are late comers to the life game on Earth, descendants of earlier species who survived the multiple mass extinctions of the past (and who may be driving the planet toward a sixth extinction right now as I write). The universe and the physical laws that govern it seem to be largely indifferent if not hostile to human life, making our existence fragile and our extinction, sooner or later, all but guaranteed. If all this was created for the sake of humans by a benevolent deity, this would seem to be an odd and shockingly inefficient way of showing that to be the case.
Modern scientific knowledge is perhaps more compatible with an alternative: deism, or a belief that the universe was created by some kind of cosmic mind and then left to operate on its own physical laws. Maybe—but this isn’t going to get you to the kind of God that the denizens of the major religions of the world are inclined to worship. It was, according to many U.S. liberals, a popular belief system among the Founding Fathers of the U.S. and perhaps in the 18th century in general; and even staunch atheists like Victor Stenger and Alan Sokal at times point to parts of human knowledge that do not decisively undermine this sort of belief (while also arguing that this is hardly the sort of God one would be inclined to worship). I mean, there are problems with this argument beyond that: why do we need a single uncaused cause, a Prime Mover as Aristotle called it, at all? Isn’t it at least as plausible that the universe or something like it has always been? I really don’t know; I’m genuinely asking.
Monolith is a joke about how religion builds vaulting towers to celebrate humility, how moralistic people band together and usually bad things happen to other people who don’t live up to or share their morals; how organized religion tends to ally itself with the standpattism and reactionary elements of a society, preventing progress and enlightenment. The monolith, in this big, old, and indifferent universe, is also destined to die out like everything else does. On a long enough timescale, everything turns to dust and blows away, including religions that have survived for centuries or millennia. I talk a bit about some of my own ideas at the end of the song too, because when I was young and inspired, I didn’t just reject religion, but wanted to build up the skeletal structure of a religion of my own (now I’m not sure about either). The Eternal Storm became symbolic for me of the cycle of chaos, disturbance, death, and rebirth that many religions have in common, but which is curiously absent from the linear timeline of the Christian tradition. The only symbol that even sort of approximates this in Christianity is the devil, who is constantly tempting humans and causing trouble and upsetting the divine order. The Greeks had Prometheus, the forward-seeing, who was punished for stealing divine fire and giving it to humans. Many of the pre-Christian peoples had a god of mischief or a trickster, as Loki was in the Norse pantheon. Perhaps closest to the metaphor I was seeking, the Hindu goddess Kali who was both the great mother and the goddess of change and destruction.
If this sounds like a hopeless, despairing story, that’s only partly true. Remember I’m writing this stuff at the end of my teens when angst and rebellion are running at a lifetime high. And again, the really cool thing, in my view, is what happens on the other side of these recognitions—coming to terms with the despair and angst is the beginning, not the end. If the universe is not made for us, and no one is coming to save us from ourselves, as Carl Sagan famously referenced in his book Pale Blue Dot, then it becomes up to us as human beings to decide what kind of world it is we would like to live in. Perhaps a smarter one, and a kinder one, even if that belies the whole heavy-metal-critique-of-Christianity thing in the song. I sometimes wonder how many metalheads are really humanists of some sort, beneath the black leather and the white grease paint and the shocking rhetoric, but I want to be careful not to overgeneralize given that at least some are also literal fascists.
Of course, if we want to talk gods that are actually present (and didn’t just push the first button and then take an eternal nap, so to speak), theism is only one kind of belief in one kind of god, and maybe how I defined it above isn’t the way you think of God if you believe. One could be a pantheist, too, believing in a god that is basically a metaphor for the cosmos and the laws that govern it, a god that is everywhere (closest to the beliefs of the philosopher Spinoza and Albert Einstein, whose words are often taken out of context in bad faith to make it appear that they believed in a theistic god). They told me “God is everywhere” in Sunday school in Catholic Church when I was about seven, which led immediately to the question: then why do we have to come here every Sunday to worship him? Followed by: why is God a him? If God is everywhere then why would God have, or need, a gender?
I am much more comfortable with the pantheistic vision of a deity and perhaps always have been. A metaphysical relative—panentheism—offers a place for a deity that lives outside the universe but also suggests that the universe and God are symbiotically linked to one another, growing, changing, and progressing over time. The idea of a deity as changing and dynamic and growing and inseparable from the universe seems more alive and vital than an unchanging omni-lotsofthings personal deity that stands apart from and in judgement of us. Then there’s animism, believing that everything, including animals, plants, rocks, the sky, the earth itself, has a soul and an essence. A great way to see past our human conceits.
But to be clear, these are appealing ideas, alternatives that I seriously consider and feel warmer toward than theism (though pantheism is particularly compelling to me). I actually don’t like the whole idea of believing in stuff for reasons I detailed here so it would be a mistake to say I “believe in” a god in the sense that many religious people may say this. Instead, I would say that I experience some kind of oneness or connection, that I am “religiously musical” and, being unsatisfied with thoroughgoing atheism, try to find metaphors to understand that experience and give that music form, and that out of the alternatives, something like Einstein’s or Spinoza’s God, a pantheistic God, is most appealing to me. Whatever else you call me (and I’ll probably get called a lot of things for publishing this post), please don’t call me “spiritual.”
Of course, a person who is religious could easily point out the flaws in my 16-year-old reasoning processes that gave rise to the song lyrics to Monolith. Religion can drive social change, even radical change, and itself changes over time, so the idea that religion is always bottling up human beings and keeping them from progressing is simplistic and misleading if not patently false. In fact, I wrote a whole book about how religion has constructively shaped environmental concern in the United States, so I would agree with this hypothetical religious person and disagree with angsty 16-year-old Lukas on these points. What can I say? Admitting when I am wrong and changing my mind based on new information is important to me. Maybe that could be a religion—the holy book would read like a research methods textbook, except even drier (I actually have really enjoyed reading some research methods texts and, having taught research methods for many years now, am considering writing one of my own).
I could also see how a religious person might appeal to their own will and experience, and those experiences of others, as indirect evidence that there is a personal god who cares about their wellbeing in ways that are more profound and less snarky than what I was saying above. Religious people benefit from being religious in terms of things like health and wellbeing, but I would dig deeper than that and talk about what psychologist and philosopher William James called “The Will to Believe”—choosing faith over agnosticism changes the person who makes the choice in ways that reflect the importance of this choice. Zooming out, even a sufficiently humble nonreligious person might admit that what we believe about ourselves and the world around us comes to shape who we become as well as the world we live in, in all kinds of fascinating ways (this is literally what sociologists study, and being that that’s what my doctorate is in, yeah, there’s definitely something to that, though I might not fit the “sufficiently humble” bill especially well).
So yeah, it’s a metal song that criticizes religion and ultimately, looking back, gets a lot of it wrong. But I’m still proud of the riffs and the overall atmosphere. The deadpan sarcasm of the lyrical delivery is cathartic too despite the content and how I’ve changed since writing those words. Honestly, I listen to a lot of extreme metal songs with lyrics I don’t agree with, and some with lyrics that seem cringey or even downright ridiculous, but that doesn’t (much) take away from enjoying the music. And I have, indeed, enjoyed the music so far, and plan to continue to do so. Even the new version of Monolith I just recorded, original lyrics intact, coming Halloween 2022 to CD and to whatever streaming services will support a song that’s 11 and a half minutes long.
Sources:
Defilippo, Joseph G. 1994. “Aristotle’s Identification of the Prime Mover as God.” The Classical Quarterly, 44(2):393-409.
Einstein, Albert. 1931. "The World As I See It," In Living Philosophies, New York: Simon Schuster, pp. 3-7.
James, William. 1911. "The Absolute and the Strenuous Life", Chapter 11 in The Meaning of Truth. New York: Longman Green and Co., pp. 226-29.
Moynihan, Colin. 2019. “Heavy Metal Confronts Its Nazi Problem.” The New Yorker, Feb. 19 https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/heavy-metal-confronts-its-nazi-problem
Russell, Bertrand. 1957. “On Catholic and Protestant Skeptics.” In Why I am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects. New York: Touchstone Books, pp. 117-27.
Sagan, Carl. 1994. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. New York: Random House.
Sokal, Alan. 2008. Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy, and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Spinoza, Baruch. 2020. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/
Stenger, Victor. 2012. God and the Folly of Faith. New York: Prometheus Books.
Image Credit: Painting by Georges Yatridès of one slab monolith, like the one that appears in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Free Use Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_monolith#/media/File:Yatrides'_Slab.JPG
