Be Careful of the Myths You Celebrate
Nightwish is the best band. Ever. Probably the best that
ever will be. In the history of rock and roll, no other band has ever written
and sung such powerful songs about such a wide variety of subjects. The Beatles
have had more popular hits, but they were just that: formulaic and catchy pop
with the depth of an advertising jingle. I will bet that no other writers in
the history of music--with the possible exceptions of Beethoven and
Wagner--have captured the power of music as Nightwish has. I can’t
believe I didn’t encounter them until I was in my 50s.
In the beginning of their career, Nightwish often sang about Christian
themes and references (e.g. "The Carpenter" and "Angels Fall
First" (1997), "Deep Silent Complete", "Bare Grace
Misery", and "Crownless" (2000), "Bless the Child",
"End of All Hope", and "Dead to the World" (2002)). Their
genius songwriter Tuomas Holopainen is the one who often included these rather
obviously Christian themes and references, which added powerful metaphoric
imagery to their songs.
With Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Holopainen has
changed the myth, at least as far as the lyrics are concerned. Unfortunately,
he picked a myth that is rather dull and powerless. As one otherwise very
sympathetic reviewer noted, being argumentative and negative ("Weak
Fantasy" and "Yours is an Empty Hope", respectively) is at best
out of place, and at worst bad art [1].
I'm a research engineer, so I love science and technology much
more than ordinary people do. My published articles indicate how much I
believe in technology's capability to solve many of the problems we face today [2]. With
a minor concentration on humanistic perspectives of technology, I also
understand the philosophy of science better; it is partially why I don't worship
science or technology. Also, I learned early in my adult life (while competing
in a wrestling tournament in Cuba) that false gods make false promises.
Darwin, Sagan, and Dawkins were all brilliant scientists, and
while science is totally cool, their myth is self-reflective and therefore as
inspiring as our reflection in a funhouse mirror. That said, if you
have a message and you want to make it look strong and beautiful, have Nightwish deliver
it.
The music in Endless Forms Most Beautiful is
great and powerful, but that is undoubtedly because it comes from myths buried
so deep in Holopainen’s subconscious that he couldn't remove the no matter how
hard he tried. He grew up in Finland, for goodness sake! The sources of his
music are the myths of Northern Europe--the same ones which inspired everyone
from Christians like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien to gnostic Richard Wagner
and atheist Fredrick Nietzsche. The Norse gods have power; they inspire heroes
with a bitter courage who stand fast to what right and good, even when there is
no hope at all. They inspired Nietzsche's Will to Power, and his Endless Return;
they inspired Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and Wagner's Flight of
the Valkyries. With a genius like Holopainen to give form to the hidden
myths of the Norse, it should be no surprise that next to Nightwish, all
other bands are either wimpy and insipid or just loud noise.
But what will happen to Nightwish if their lyrics
follow insipid myths? Their album announcement gushed over how one song borrows
from a poem by Roy Fuller, which states "even scientists shudder
before the beautiful". This is absolutely true. However, if evolution
is truly blind (as materialism assumes it must be), then all beauty
is fundamentally meaningless. "We were here" is the
oft-repeated phrase from both "Alpenglow" and "The Greatest Show
on Earth", and it captures one of the most serious self-deceptive
errors of the new myth. It is reminiscent of graffiti, a desperate grab
for attention in order to fill the emptiness inside, and a futile attempt at
immortality.
If we are to be consistent with the materialist myth, then it
doesn't matter that we were here. Why should the universe care? It
doesn't. Mother Earth is a psychotic bitch who tortures and slaughters 98% of
her children in the name of "survival of the fittest"--why should she
care about you? In fact, most devout environmentalists will tell you that
humanity is a cancer on the face of the Earth. But to follow the materialist myth
to its logical conclusion; “So what?”
Don't get me wrong; both songs are gorgeous. But their
lyrics reflect the bleak Gaian myth that all species must eventually die out.
Sez who? It is true that a species that fouls its nest and destabilizes its
ecosystem must correct its behavior or it will kill itself off. But even
if we changed our behavior to lock-step with our ecosystem, some football-field-sized
rock travelling 10 miles per second will show up in the next few million years
and do to us what its sister did to the dinosaurs. Those brainless reptiles
were too stupid to build a space program that was advanced enough to stop the
K/Pg asteroid, and so far, we're just as stupid. The problem is not that
difficult--from an engineering standpoint. And before the start of the
next century we'll have the technology to keep the Earth from being burned to a
crisp when our Sun turns into a red giant 500 million years from now (a problem
so simple that a high school student can calculate the math). It's our atheistic
Gaian myths that stand in the way. There is no other explanation to the abysmal
lack of imagination and dismal view in our culture regarding the future. To
make matters worse, Endless Forms
even has a song about Carl Sagan, who certainly had relatively imaginative
outlook that embraced the stars. On the other hand, Sagan only wanted to
look; he never had the foresight to view the extraterrestrial environment as a
place into which the ecosystem of Earth could expand for as long as the
universe exists.
Fortunately, most of us do have the imaginative myth created by
Gene Roddenberry. Of all the modern mythmakers, he is one of the few who saw
that humanity doesn't just have "a few decades under the sun",
but millennia under the stars. Why is that so difficult to see? The sad
thing is that many of us are living under a self-fulfilling
prophecy. But why do people want to be dead pessimists instead of living
optimists?
The album's title track, "Endless Forms Most
Beautiful" references a quote from Charles Darwin. “There is grandeur
in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed
into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on
according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms
most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
Darwin was a bold and brilliant scientist, but sometimes even brilliant
people say dumb, self-contradictory things. In this case, what is the evolutionarily
objective value of beauty? Does it contribute to the survival of the
fittest? How is objective beauty even possible in a universe driven by
dumb luck?
Nightwish's hit single "Élan" comes from the French word meaning spirit, zeal, momentum. And it's an absolutely wonderful song (though it is rather strange to hear my elementary school-age children humming it over breakfast). Holopainen is undoubtedly referring to "élan vital" which was a term coined by philosopher Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution to explain what he believed was the driving force behind evolution. Bergson believed that living things are inhabited and propelled by a vital impulse (élan) that enables them to create their future by reacting creatively before all the obstacles they run into [3]. Strictly scientifically speaking, this is nonsense. Evolution has no driving force other than survival of the fittest. For the fittest to win a genetic lottery, the non-survivors must be tested to death. Because life forms don't know in advance which direction to flexibly change, the primary value is not flexibility per se, but struggle. Perhaps the Norse gods, who saluted a valiant struggle against insurmountable odds, are getting some thoughts in sideways?
Regarding "Élan", Holopainen said: "I live to be
the ruler of life, Not a slave. To meet life as a powerful conqueror, and
nothing exterior to me will ever take command of me.' This beautiful quote from
my hero Uncle Walt [Walt Whitman] was the starting point for writing
'Élan'...The underlying theme of the song is nothing less than the meaning of
life, which can be something different for all of us...It's important to
surrender yourself to the occasional 'free fall' and not to fear the path less
travelled by." (http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/nightwish-tenth-endless-forms-most-beautiful-making-of-trailer-available/)
Older Americans will immediately recognize the allusion to
Robert Frost's poem, "Road less Traveled." And younger people of
every age will rejoice at the opportunity of surrendering to the momentary free
fall of a trampoline, a sled jump, or (for the less sane among us) a parachute
jump. As Viktor Frankl pointed out in his "Man's Search for Meaning",
figuring out the meaning of your life is much more important than fame, money,
or pleasure. However, Holopainen’s
desire to be the ruler of life... well, yes, that would be nice. But
according to all realistic and
ancient myths (Norse, Greek, Christian, Native American, African, Chinese,
etc.), this is a fallen world in which everyone suffers, and eventually (even if
nanotechnology enables us to overcome the seven mechanisms of aging) everyone
dies. Our power over life, even with technologies such as CRISPR and DNA
Origami, is rather limited.
One of the brilliant, and until now and almost unheard-of things
that Nightwish did with "Élan" was to invite
other musicians to cover it in a music contest. Bands and individuals from
all over the world competed, and many of them were quite good.
A submission from Anahata, a Hungarian duo living in
Romania, stood out for a number of reasons (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QycMGlCig1I).
First, they rewrote the lyrics in Hungarian. This sounds easy, but
as Tuomas himself has admitted, he would rather write lyrics in
English than in Finnish. This is probably because Finnish only has 301,000
words, while English has more than a million words (possibly because as a
nation of immigrants, Americans introduced words from every other nation). Even
though Hungarian is also a Finno-Ungric language, it only has
120,000 words. This means that generally, it is more difficult to be
precise in one's communication. However, this ambiguity is *perfect* for poetry and songs--you can
easily insert many levels of meaning--a more difficult task in English.
Second, everyone knows that an original song is almost always
better than its cover. And when the original is Nightwish... well,
everyone else might as well pack it up and go home. So when I saw two
young teens/twenty-somethings cover "Élan" in an old apple
orchard, at first I did not expect much. True, Andrea Kovács has a beautiful,
clear voice, but it was the lyrics that absolutely blew me away. How could
Andrea and Necro Mango surpass the genius of Tuomas Holopainen?
I'm still in shock. It helps that I can speak Hungarian (at least at a 3rd
grade level), but the power of their lyrics even resonates in the
English translation.
How exactly did they do it? The difference is between the
myths referenced in the respective lyrics. Tuomas emphasized the luck and
chance of evolution ("Finally your number came up... Writing noughts
till the end of time"), while Andrea and Necro challenged
listeners to forcefully embrace the struggle ("Destiny is yours, and
is the world... Your will is steel... let some scars appear on you"). This
difference is rampant everywhere you look; for example, in the
cultural touchstones of Forrest Gump and Terminator 2. The essence
of Forrest Gump's life is artistically rendered in the opening scene -- a
feather being helplessly tossed around in the wind. In contrast, the
Terminator-destroying Sarah Connor carves the words "No
Fate" in the picnic table, indicating that she has no fate but the one she
makes. As a result of the myths they believe, Sarah has an internal locus
of control, while Forrest has external one. And that makes all the difference
in the world.
-------------------------------
[1] http://www.ign.com/blogs/conkersbadfurday/2015/04/12/nightwish-endless-forms-most-beautiful-review
[2] E.g. "Non-evolvable indirectly replicating nanorobots
with self-assembling parts",
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=true&arnumber=1508500, "The Ethical and
Political Implications of the Hall Weather Machine" http://www.nanotech-now.com/columns/?article=486,
and "A few lesser implications of nanofactories: Global Warming is
the least of our problems"
