Eagles of Death Metal, Peace, Love, Death Metal (2004)

I don’t believe in an afterlife. The body functions as a series of chemical reactions, and when that stops, it stops. Consciousness, our being, our soul, is not separate from that. We decay and our matter supports future life in an ongoing universal cycle. It is a process beautiful enough that a religious idea of heaven seems redundant.

Some might tell you that without god — really any god will do, but there are certainly individual teams out there touting their own over the others — anything becomes morally permissible. I’d counter that the events in Paris last night and many in the past demonstrate clearly that anything is morally permissible anyway, and that over the course of our history as a species, this chaos is not an aberration, but an ever-present norm. And that, since belief in the afterlife reward for “being good” while we’re alive hasn’t worked, maybe it’s time to try something else.

That’s not an especially persuasive position, but if you think you’re going to try to reason someone away from their deity, you’re wasting your breath anyhow, and it’s in times like this that it gives me comfort to know that even in the best of cases, life is short, and then over. It means that all we have while we exist is each other. Rather than ultimate spiritual anarchy, it means we need each other even more, to hold onto in this expanding void that only makes us smaller as it goes. It’s all the more reason to be as good, willfully kind, passionate and loving as we can possibly be, because the only ones who can help us through is us. We are all we have.

Amid the anger, the ongoing brutalities of war, the unquestioning of violence, it is imperative that we remember how much the same we are. How among us there is no “other,” and that any loss of life in a situation like that in Paris last night, whether the innocent person attending the Eagles of Death Metal show at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, or someone out to dinner at a cafe, or at a football match, or a refugee falling out of a raft and drowning, or someone killed in a drone strike, or someone whose family has been murdered by a state, or someone driven to the point of suicide bombing or indiscriminately firing automatic weapons into an assembled crowd, is a tragedy. It’s not “us” and “them.” It’s just us.

The day when we can act on that belief as one people, all one voice, will probably never come. We have existed in conflict since before apes set up hierarchical social structures and I expect we will until there are none of us left. More reason to huddle together as much as possible and love those near you with everything you are.

When the history of these attacks is written — and it will be written about endlessly, and soft voices will wonder where the perpetrators got their funding and AK-47s and explosive devices, while loud voices actively do not — music will likely be a footnote. Eagles of Death Metal the same. A happenstance setting of a drawn, contained crowd rather than a causal factor. Nonetheless, these attacks now define the lives of everyone there, the band included, and those who survived will carry that with them for as long as they continue to live. For many, that feeling of shock and horror and that image of their compatriots being murdered will have a permanent fix on their being.

This makes it harder to ask someone to throw away their tradition and comfort in the notion of an eternal life for a blank-stare meaninglessness that requires us to create our own warmth in each other when over and over we show ourselves to be so mercilessly cold. But that is all we’ve ever had in the first place.

Love and strength to all of those affected by last night’s events. Vive la France, and please, peace.

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