“Enriched Environments” Should Be a Human Right

Though it's been a century and a half since the world started standardizing how we make spaces safe, we've agreed on the ideal height for ceilings, the width of doors, the slope of stairs, we've given a lot less thought to the emotional and psychological impact of buildings.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen: It costs just as much to build a bad building as it does to build a good building but you need to educate yourself about what a good building is.

Architecture critic and former Harvard professor Sarah Williams Goldhagen believes we need a paradigm shift in architecture, starting with its status as an art form.

Goldhagen: To call it an art, mistakenly casts it as a luxury good and it's not. It's more and more clear that the things that we experience in the built environment profoundly affect our mental health, our emotional health, our physical health, the way children learn, the way children develop and it's grotesquely neglected.

AJC: It sounds like you're talking about a civil right rather than an art form.

Goldhagen: I am, that's the reconceptualization of the built environment that needs to happen. I analogize it sometimes to the change in the way people thought about the environment from the 50s to the 70s or 80s. In the 50s nature was nature it was trees and forests and rivers and mountains and so on so forth and then people began to become concerned about pollution and various other things that turned into concerns about global warming.

When you look at global temperatures July was the hottest month on average since reliable record-keeping started and July was not a freak occurrence. The past ten years have seen many high temperature records broken.

Goldhagen: People realize that it wasn't all these disaggregated elements it was an ecosystem, it was one system that we all inhabited and instead of calling nature nature we tend to call it now the environment. And what we need to understand now is the kind of importance that we all accord now to the environment is the kind of importance that we need to accord to the built environment because the built environment is in fact what most of us inhabit most of the time and it's having an impact on us in all sorts of ways that people don't appreciate.

It may sound abstract but the subtle impacts of the built environment on humans are numerous, profound, and well documented. One study measured a spike in heart right and cortisol levels in people who walked through a featureless part of town, demonstrating the built environment's ability to add subconscious stress to our lives. Other studies saw patients in hospital rooms with a garden view recover from surgery faster and with less pain than their counterparts in rooms without a view. But Goldhagen says that for architects to leverage all this knowledge they'll need to radically and fundamentally change the way they approach their craft.

Goldhagen: One of the problems with the way that architecture is taught in schools and purchased by clients is really to put it simply from the outside. I mean you sort of look at these big renderings of these very very large scale forms well nobody experiences buildings that way so you need architectural education to flip the formulation where they start from the user. Small construction details, better materials versus worse materials, the sonic qualities of materials, the tactile qualities of materials. That's what the people who walk in that building or walk past that building they're gonna notice.

And Goldhagen herself has noticed many thoughtful designs abroad and at home. One example the Via Verde sustainable housing project in the Bronx that presents a strong model for responsible community conscious architecture. Further south in Philadelphia there's Dilworth Plaza where in 2014 three different firms were tasked with transforming the space around city hall from a menacing series of dark alleyways to a vibrant, uplifting center square. James Timberlake, whose firm's most recent accomplishments include the U.S. Embassy in London, was one of the architects who embraced the challenge of building joy into a previously dour public space.

James Timberlake: That's been one of the great shifts in our country in the last you know 18 to 20 years is that recognition that we can't gate everything we can't wall up everything but we need to open up some of these spaces to not only public expression but public use. I think Sarah Goldhagen's book somewhat refers to that and when she starts talking about the impact of our public realms on our psyches and our spirit and how we engage that and how use it and you can see it on a day to day basis in Dilworth Plaza.

Mean time, Goldhagen is in surprisingly good spirits about the future of architecture. Practically and aesthetically.

Goldhagen: I do think that some things that are initially difficult for people to comprehend and not beautiful can end up being appreciated as aesthetically powerful so beauty doesn't always have to be something that's just immediately pleasing.

AJC: Doesn't have to be pretty?

Goldhagen: Right, pretty is the word that I, it doesn't have to be pretty because one of the things we know we need from our environments is challenge. We want our expectations to be subverted, we want to go oh wait a minute, I didn't know I could stand on a bridge made of glass and look down. So is it beautiful? I don't know, it's a little unsettling but it's pretty cool too and it makes me think about my environment and my relationship to this city in a really different way.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen: Welcome to Your World.    By Jim Cotter.   Articulate,  January 2, 2019

Sarah Williams Goldhagen was the architecture critic for The New Republic for many years, a role she combined with teaching at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and elsewhere. She is an expert on the work of Louis Kahn, one of the 20th century’s greatest architects, known for the weighty, mystical Modernism of buildings like the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, and the Bangladeshi parliament in Dhaka.

Several years ago, Goldhagen became interested in new research on how our brains register the environments around us. Dipping into writing from several fields—psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and neuroscience—she learned that a new paradigm for how we live and think in the world was starting to emerge, called “embodied cognition.”

“This paradigm,” she writes in her magisterial new book, Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives, “holds that much of what and how people think is a function of our living in the kinds of bodies we do.” Not just conscious thoughts, but non-conscious impressions, feedback from our senses, physical movement, and even split-second mental simulations of that movement shape how we respond to a place, Goldhagen argues. And in turn, the place nudges us to think or behave in certain ways.

The research led Goldhagen to science-based answers for previously metaphysical questions, such as: why do some places charm us and others leave us cold? Do we think and act differently depending on the building or room we’re in? (Spoiler: yes, we do.)

Architects intuited some of these principles long ago. As Kahn once noted of the monumental Baths of Caracalla in Rome, a person can bathe under an eight-foot ceiling, “but there’s something about a 150-foot ceiling that makes a man a different kind of man.” As the peer-reviewed studies mount, however, this new science of architecture and the built environment is destined to have a profound effect on the teaching and practice of design over the next generation.

CityLab talked with Goldhagen about the book and why so much architecture and urban design falls short of human needs.

C :

Your book is about how we experience buildings and places through “embodied cognition.” How did you first learn about it?

SWG :

I fell in love with architecture the way most people fall in love with architecture, which is that I went to places that just astonished me and moved me. And so from very early on I sort of wondered: why does it do that? The arts have this effect on you, but architecture is so much more profound, I find, than any of the other arts.

At the time, there really was no intellectual paradigm for thinking about these questions. And then about 15 years ago, my husband handed me a book by someone who had written a previous book he had really liked. The title of the book was Metaphors We Live By. It’s co-authored by George Lakoff, who’s a cognitive linguist, and Mark Johnson, who’s a philosopher. The basic argument is that much of how our thought is structured emerges from the fact of our embodiment. And many of the ways those thoughts are structured are metaphorical.

There was an immediate light bulb: “Oh, people live in bodies, bodies live in spaces.” I started reading more and more about it and realized [that] what Lakoff and Johnson had figured out was in the process of being confirmed through new studies in cognition that had been enabled by new technologies. We’ve had in the last 20 years a kind of ocean of new information about how the brain actually works. Most of that was confirming the precepts of embodied cognition, and also going beyond it in certain ways, showing how multisensory our apprehension of the environment is.

I realized that our paradigm of understanding how people experience their environments had radically shifted, and no one had really figured out what this meant. One of the things I found was that, basically, [given] what we now know about human cognition and perception, the built environments we inhabit are drastically more important than we ever thought they were.

C:

One of your chapters is titled “The Sorry Places We Live,” and you refer throughout the book to the “beggary” of the built environment. What are the most flagrant sins that buildings and cities commit against human wellbeing?

SWG :

 Oh my gosh, the list is long! One thing I often say is there’s no such thing as a neutral environment. If the environment we inhabit— whether cityscapes or landscapes or buildings—is not supporting us, it’s probably harming us.

[Cities] undervalue the importance of the design of the built environment altogether. There is this sort of professional split between high architecture and building, which my research shows is just fallacious. It’s all architecture and it’s all important, because it’s all having an impact on people all the time.

More specifically, very often in cities, the overall form of buildings is given much more priority than materials, surfaces, textures, and details. What we know about the way we appropriate and experience places is that the overall form of a place is not what most dramatically affects our experience of it. It’s more what psychologists call the surface-based cues.

Architects tend, particularly with parametric design, to emphasize overall aggregate form, and all that other stuff gets filled in later. And then, very often, it’s value-engineered out. That’s what’s creating a lot of the impoverishment in the environment. To have “sticky” places—places that engage you, your sensory system, your motor system, [and] help you create a sense of identification with [them]—you have to have all those things, and most buildings don’t.

Another thing is differentiated, non-repetitive surfaces. [The psychologist and author] Colin Ellard did a study of how people respond: He basically put sensors on people and had them walk by a boring, generic building. Then he had them walk past something much more variegated with more ways to [engage] visually and therefore motorically. He found that people’s stress levels, measured by cortisol, went up dramatically when they were walking past the boring building.

The reason I emphasize non-conscious [cognition] is because most people are very bad at knowing why we’re feeling or thinking the things we are. You could be walking past that boring building and you ascribe your stress to a bad conversation you had with someone the other day. But cognition is embodied, and you’re standing next to this soul-desiccating place, and that’s what’s going on.

C :

The book is peppered with the findings of scientific research on how the environment shapes us and our lives. The brains of London cab drivers actually change after they memorize the city’s geography. The design of a school can account for up to 25 percent of a child’s rate of learning. Why haven’t these findings upended architectural education?

SWG :

 I had architectural education very much in mind when I was writing the book. I taught in architecture schools for 15 years, good ones. The most obvious part of the answer is that architectural training is really, except for the technical and engineering part of it, based in the Beaux-Arts design tradition. Nobody’s really looking at the sciences.

Number two, the information which I draw in the book to construct this paradigm of how people experience the built environment comes from a lot of different disciplines. Cognitive neuroscience, environmental psychology, evolutionary psychology, neuroanthropology, ecological psychology. In most cases, the studies that I was looking at and ended up finding most useful were not necessarily about the built environment. It was up to me to look at a study on how people respond to water surfaces versus mirrors, and then figure out what that meant for the design of the built environment.

Another reason is that in the academy, the effect of poststructuralism and identity politics has been to hammer into people’s heads the notion of cultural relativism: “You can’t possibly say things about how people experience the world because it’s all culturally constructed, socially constructed; it differs by gender, by locale.” And so the other dimension was that talking about individual experience, even if it’s related to social experience, but from an embodied-cognition point of view, meant that you were apolitical. Because you were talking about something very subjective and individual. So it was kind of forbidden territory.

C:

The embodied-cognition approach is universalizing, although you make it clear that any design guidelines arising from it leave room for different social and cultural responses. Is it easier, or harder, to take this approach now than it would have been 10 or 15 years ago?

SWG :

I don’t think it’s coincidental that I’m not in the academy and I wrote this book. I don’t want to sound like I’m attacking architectural education because there are plenty of people out there doing great things. This book basically started with an essay on Alvar Aalto and embodied cognition and metaphors, in a book edited by Stanford Anderson. I presented this when I was still teaching at Harvard, and people went nuts. They just went crazy. “Wait a minute, you’re making all these universalist claims!”

  

My response to that was, and remains, “Sure, there are a lot of things that are socially constructed. All you have to do is read my earlier work; it’s not like I disagree with those ideas. The fact is that humans live in bodies, and brains work in certain ways.”

There’s this dichotomy between those who [think] about architecture in social and political terms, and those who [think] about subjective experience, and never the twain shall meet. One of the things the book does is basically dissolve that opposition. The critical wink is the work of this [psychologist] Roger Barker, who had researchers assigned to kids. [The researchers] followed them around and took notes. Breakfast, school, chess club, ballet. The conclusion was they could tell more about the kids by looking at where they were than by looking at who they were. Their individual psychology mattered a lot less in terms of their experience and behavior than the environments they were in.

So there isn’t this opposition between looking at it as a social construct versus experiential construct. It’s all the same thing. It’s a continuum.

C :

 One thing I kept thinking while reading the book was how little agency we really have. Have you gotten pushback on that? I can imagine some people saying, “No way is the environment shaping my thoughts to this degree.”

SWG :

 If people thought that, they didn’t say it to me. I think people are more ready to accept it than they were 10 or 15 years ago. The mind-body connection has become so apparent. We know now, for example, that how we hold our body affects our mood. If you’re depressed and your shoulders are hunched forward, you’ll actually help yourself if you straighten up.

The second thing is behavioral economics, which I think has been really key, and has been adopted into policy. People don’t make decisions logically. They make decisions based on association and fallacious heuristics. I think that has paved the way for people to recognize, “I don’t have as much agency as I thought I did.” The paradox is, with a book like this, I’m hoping to enhance people’s agency with their awareness of it.

C :

You argue that “enriched environments” should be a human right, included in the UN’s Human Development Index. What has to happen next for human-centered design to become not a luxury, but the norm?

SWG :

Well, a lot. One of the reasons the book is targeted to a general audience is that basically, we need a real paradigm shift in how we think about the built environment. It’s kind of analogous to the paradigm shift that happened in the 1960s and the way people thought about nature.

When I was really young kid, nature was nature. It was forests, trees, lakes, rivers. Then people begin to use the word “environment.” It was a political and social construct, and emphasized the interrelatedness of all these different components within nature. That was a response to pesticides, air pollution, and so on. Now, kids get education in the environment from the time they’re in first grade. They start learning about climate change, visit waste treatment plants. That’s the kind of paradigm shift that needs to happen about the built environment. Then it suddenly becomes of general public health importance.

What concretely needs to happen: One, architectural education. Two, real-estate development. Three, building codes, zoning codes, all these things need to be reviewed according to these kinds of standards. Four, architects need to not be so skittish in thinking about human experience and learn more about it. It’s a much larger problem than just, “Architects should do better.” It’s not a professional disciplinary problem, it’s a larger social problem. We also need more research.

I was at a book event where Richard Roberts [a former New York City housing commissioner] said, “I’m going to recommend to every public official I know that they read this book.” I’ve had a lot of architects tell me that they gave the book to clients.

 C :  That seems smart.

SWG :

 Yeah, no joke. We need general education about the built environment that starts very early on. So there are a lot of things that need to change. But they can.

 This Is Your Brain on Architecture. By  Amanda Kolson Hurley.  CityLab  , July 14, 2017.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen lives in a church. Well, a former teen-pregnancy center, in East Harlem, that was once a Pentecostal church. Either way, there is an ecclesiastical feeling inside.

The revered American architecture critic and former professor sits opposite me at the head of her dining room table. It’s the day after an early March blizzard hit the northeast, and as rays of morning sun filter through cathedral windows, their intensity is magnified by a carpet of snow on the ground outside. The natural light illuminates the entire double-height space, but Goldhagen anchors the room with her quiet poise—even as she picks at a gluten-free bundt cake. She’s bespectacled and dressed all in black, a look I’ve come to associate with austere Chelsea gallerists. Her warm smile, though, breaks through the seemingly hard-edged facade.

The reason for our meeting is to discuss her new book, Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives (Harper), the first major work of hers to be written for the lay reader—a departure from two academic tomes she penned in the early aughts, Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism (Yale University Press) and Anxious Modernisms (The MIT Press). Welcome to Your World, which was published last month, pulls from new research in psychology and neuroscience to explain exactly what its subtitle suggests.  

Goldhagen’s home, which she shares with her husband and children, is a perfect prototype for the design her book lobbies for: a tasteful mix of organic materials, natural light, and greenery. I pause my scanning of the room to take a sip of tea. Maybe it’s just because my feet are snug inside a pair of Goldhagen’s slippers, but I feel at ease. (At her home, guests are provided with sanctioned footwear.) She would contend, however, that my comfy toes aren’t the half of it.

In Welcome to Your World, Goldhagen manages to summarize a wealth of new research on the environment’s effects on the individual. What once seemed hopelessly nebulous—the importance of aesthetics, the impact of the arts, and so on—can now be scientifically proven. Patients convalescing in hospitals recover faster when they can see nature from the window. Test-taking in a room with a sky-blue ceiling leads to a higher score. Welcome to Your World gives designers the language to communicate the importance of their trade—a task they’ve been attempting for centuries, but with little success.

Having spent her whole life studying and analyzing architecture, Goldhagen is relieved to finally have proof of what she’s been saying all along. From her nine-year tenure as The New Republic’s architecture critic to the decade she spent teaching at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Goldhagen has never ceased to advocate for the necessity of good design. And now, sitting in her ethereal home, holding a forkful of bundt, she is certainly not going to stop.

CF : In this book, you’re pushing back against a culture that doesn’t value architecture. What do you think has contributed to this apathy?

SWG : Design isn’t highly valued in the United States, and there is a kind of self-perpetuating quality to that. Because it’s not highly valued, people think it’s not important. Another reason is that people tend to think of architecture as a fine art, which would mean it’s something very expensive and available only to the elite. That’s simply wrong. As a friend of mine said, “Thinking about architecture as an art is category mistake.” That doesn’t mean that an artistic sensibility isn’t important, but it’s not art—it’s a public good.

CF : Being an editor at a design magazine makes me biased, but I’d have to say I agree.

SWG : My sister once said to me that hiring an architect is just a way to waste money. Can you believe that? My sister!

 CF : My brother is studying engineering and thinks very little of my art history degree.

SWG : In part, it’s a failure of education. In most countries in Europe and Asia, people get a general education in the built environment. For example, in the Netherlands a lot more people are trained in the basics of the built environment than in the United States and more of them end up being architects. Here, you’re lucky if you get it in college.

CF : What about architecture schools? Are they effectively teaching students what they need to know?

SWG : One of the principal targets of my book was architectural education. Having come out of teaching history and theory in architecture schools, I found a lot of people making assertions about what architecture should be that were pretty unsupportable. There’s a lot of stuff we can point to that designers need to know that they’re not being taught, and I don’t understand why. Well, I do understand why. Because until I wrote the book, no one had presented it as a body of knowledge.

CF : What would you say to people who claim that it’s a monetary problem? That if everyone could afford it, we’d all invest in design?

SWG : I was once asked a question at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas. It’s a little politically conservative out there. Someone said, “Well, you know they’re building a post office in Bentonville. It’s a public building, so it has to be functional and inexpensive. What would you say about that?” And I said, “It costs just as much money to design a bad building as it does to design a good one.” I think that at any level of investment, you can make better decisions or worse decisions, and if you’re not making good decisions, you’re making bad ones.

CF : One of the worries that I had when I was reading your book is that you rely heavily on data and hard evidence to prove your point. If there’s anything I’ve learned this past year, it’s that the truth isn’t always enough to convince people.

SWG : First of all, just because Donald Trump was elected doesn’t mean that data goes out the window. What I’ve realized is that people are susceptible to big paradigm shifts. For example, we used to think that the brain developed into your mid-twenties and it was kind of set. Now, we know none of that is true. That is an easily comprehensible idea that someone can get: “Oh, the brain is changing all the time.” Yes, there’s an ocean of studies that I’ve read and researched, but the central idea is really very simple and communicable, which is that we can know things about how people experience environments.

 CF : Was it different to write about scientific studies, rather than observations and interviews?

SWG :

This is by far the most difficult project that I have ever done. That’s in part because I was crossing a lot of different disciplines, from cognitive neuroscience to environmental psychology to all these branches of psychology that I didn’t even know of before. I had a long correspondence with a cognitive neuroanthropologist from Florida. He’s actually very interesting. Who knew?

CF : How has the cognitive neuroanthropologist and everyone else reacted to the book?

SWG : The scientists love it. Terry Sejnowski, who blurbed the book—he’s the Francis Crick Professor at The Salk Institute—came up to me and said, “You’re right on target. This is exactly right.” He actually wanted to publish it in the Journal of Computational Neurology, which he edits. I said it didn’t sound like the right fit.

 CF : Do you think this is the future of the humanities? To integrate with the sciences?

SWG : It’s happening in other fields. It’s a big thing in the study of literature. Some people think this is a bad direction in the humanities because it drains away the humanism of the arts. But I’m a big believer in information—I think more information is better.

 CF ; Are there any architects you believe are doing a good job now?

SWG : I do. One more general point is I think that technologies have been developed in the last fifteen years that allow for large-scale interpretations of mass customization. It makes it much easier for architects to inflect moments in their buildings in an experiential way.

 CF : That’s interesting, because many critics of architects such as Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry have credited those technological developments for their creations.

SWG : I think Zaha Hadid was a terrible architect. I haven’t been in every one of her buildings, but in the ones I have, the craftsmanship is awful. The moment-to-moment experience of these buildings is just nonexistent, because they’re these large-scale conceptualizations that end up getting built that way. But the technology’s not to blame—it’s how you use it.

  CF : If not the technology, what do you think has enabled the system that supports architects in that vein?

 SWG : Constant self-promotion and the awards commissions coming to the same short list—this phenomenon happened within twenty to twenty-five years. I don’t see it changing that much because the market forces keeping the “starchitecture” system in place are so powerful that it’s going to be hard to contravene them.

CF : What would have to change to alter that system?

SWG : I do think clients need to be better educated—they need to hold whoever they hire to a much higher standard. Part of the problem in the commissioning of architecture is that [the end product] is very difficult for people to visualize as clients so they don’t know what they’re buying a lot of the time. Architects need to be better at communicating what they’re thinking.

 CF : Funny. Architects will tell you the clients do too much talking as it is.

SWG : This is part of what I’m trying to break down. I ended up not putting this in the book, but there are studies that show how differently architects look at buildings than non-architects do.

 CF : Makes you think about how many bad buildings are under construction right now.

SWG : Exactly, and the amount of building that’s going to take place in the next fifty years is just staggering.

CF : You see time lapses of cities being built in China and the pace is unbelievable.

SWG :  Actually one of the things I’m pleased about is that the preeminent business publisher in China bought my book, and they’re expecting to sell a bazillion copies. Yes, China needs my book.

   

CF : Hopefully they listen. If there’s one thing I gleaned from Welcome to Your World, it’s that architects have more power than they know.

SWG : You’re right, [my book] gives architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and everyone else involved in the built environment an awareness of their immense power. They can either make human experience or really fuck it up.

Feeling Sad? Blame the Building. Interview by Chloe Foussianes. Surface , April 12, 2017

Harper Collins

We can do better.

This is the fundamental message of Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives (Harper, 2017) by architecture critic Sarah Williams Goldhagen. Published this week, the book delivers a forceful indictment about the impoverished state of our constructed world, based on the author’s deep experiences as an itinerant architecture critic for the New Republic and as an instructor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Most importantly, Goldhagen’s argument is not merely a matter of opinion; rather, it is based on enlightening studies in neuroscience and cognitive psychology that reinforce the consequential relationship between our buildings and ourselves.

The impetus to write Welcome to Your World can be traced to Goldhagen’s 2001 American Prospect article, "Boring Buildings." “It is a truism to state that architecture composes the immediate physical environment of our lives,” she argued. “But in this country, we too often forget that high-quality architecture is also a social good, one that more than repays the investment.” In her new book, Goldhagen expands on her critique of culturally, aesthetically, and environmentally impoverished buildings with examples that she calls “four sorry places.”

Such settings include the slum dwellings, where one-third of the world’s urban residents live; the soul-sucking suburbs in which many middle-class Americans reside; schools for wealthy families that ignore best design practices for learning environments; and starchitect-designed landmark projects that fail to recognize basic aspects of human behavior. Refreshingly, the expansive sweep of Goldhagen’s condemnation eschews favoritism towards particular groups—such as renowned architects or vernacular builders. Rather, she focuses on what science tells us about good and bad design, regardless of socioeconomic level or geographic location. The most compelling moments in the book are those in which the author employs convincing studies to dispel commonly held beliefs, as demonstrated in the following examples.

In typical practice, architects privilege form over material. Long before they select particular assemblies or systems for a building, architects will have designed—and redesigned—a project’s siting, massing, and geometry. This emphasis is reflected in academia, where students study the formal aspects of a design over its material constitution. Goldhagen believes our experience of the built environment is the opposite. The brain processes contextual cues based on the nature of surfaces—not overall forms—and evaluates their physical qualities based on the summation of past material experiences. “Our responses to surfaces, consequently, are more likely to powerfully contribute to our holistic experience of place than our responses to forms,” she writes. “In short: form has wrongly been crowned king, because form-based cues elicit less of a whole-body, intersensory, and emotional response than surface-based cues do.” Based on a study by Canadian cognitive scientists Jonathan Cant and Melvyn Goodale, this realization suggests that architects should place more emphasis on material considerations in the design process, and at an earlier stage.

An acronym associated with architectural practice—among other industries—is KISS, short for “keep it simple, stupid.” This sentiment pervades much of contemporary design culture, which aims to minimize complexity and visual noise—often to extremes. Consider the ultra-refined simplicity of products designed by Apple, or the company’s new ring-shaped building designed by U.K. firm Foster + Partners. This kind of clear intelligibility is a positive effort at the object-level, but can be a detriment at larger scales.

For example, urban proposals for homogeneous tower blocks and street grids—such as Le Corbusier’s 1924 Ville Radieuse and Ludwig Hilberseimer’s 1944 modern city project—have long received scathing criticism as dehumanizing dystopias. Yet the architect’s goal should not be complexity, as this quality thwarts comprehensibility and accessibility in the built environment. Rather, Goldhagen argues that designers must aspire to achieve "patterned complexity," which approximates how we encounter the natural world—simultaneously intricate and legible. According to the author, architects may achieve this objective via various strategies including “chunking” spatial volumes based on program, introducing visually compelling material languages, and creating surprise by shifting one’s expectations of a particular construction typology.

Big cities are often celebrated as ideal settlement models from an environmental perspective, based on their per capita reduced land area and ecological footprint compared with smaller, more sparsely populated municipalities.  The fact that the natural landscape, while appreciated, is often minimized in large metropolises is accepted as an inherent outcome of the intensified demand for space. Generously sized landscapes such as New York’s Central Park or Tokyo’s Imperial Palace grounds are considered luxuries in cities that are otherwise dominated by impervious surfaces. Yet such green spaces are not extravagances but essential provisions, Goldhagen argues. She offers a multitude of scientific evidence for the powerful benefits of nature: medical patients offered views of trees are able to leave the hospital a day earlier than those facing blank walls; children exposed to adequate green spaces demonstrate superior cognitive functioning and reduced stress.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, green spaces comprise less than 10 percent of many of the world's largest cities—such as Shanghai (2.6 percent) and Los Angeles (6.7 percent). Political will emerges as a critical force here, as evidenced by the fact that cities such as London, Stockholm, and Sydney exhibit 35 percent or more green space due to their local governments’ prioritization of public welfare. Architects can similarly advocate for living landscapes as a fundamental requirement—not in the form of the typical suburban lawn, which Goldhagen denounces as an monocultural afterthought, but in well-designed environments crafted by talented landscape architects.

The boldest argument in Welcome to Your World is the eradication of the differentiation between architecture and building. This long-held dividing line—which defines architecture as an elevated, higher-level craft in contrast to building as the construction of ordinary shelter—reinforces the elitist, exceptional associations of the former while permitting the latter a “free pass” to meet a minimum set of aspirations. “The distinction between building and architecture, between designing for aesthetic pleasure and designing (or building) for ‘function,’ is misleading, wrongheaded, and defunct,” Goldhagen writes. “Everyone needs better—indeed, good—landscapes, cityscapes, and buildings of all kinds, everywhere.”

Such a lofty goal may seem overly ambitious; however, the fundamental contribution is the shift in perspective. By expecting more from all aspects of the built environment, as opposed to the comparatively rare moments when architects have the opportunity to design landmark commissions, Goldhagen is issuing a challenge to a much broader audience than just the AEC industry. Given the direct correlation between the constructed world and human development, we all have a reason to advocate for better design.

Assessing Architecture Through Neuroscience and Psychology. By  Blaine Brownell.  Architect ,  April 13, 2017. 

Why Mortality Makes Us Free

Of all the world religions, Buddhism enjoys the greatest respect and popularity among those who seek a model for “spiritual life” beyond traditional religion. Even the prominent atheist Sam Harris turns to the meditational exercises of Buddhism in his best-selling book “Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.” This is understandable, since Buddhist meditation practices can be employed to great effect for secular ends. In particular, there has been success in adapting various forms of meditation techniques for cognitive therapy as well as for practical forms of compassion training. If you learn Buddhist meditation techniques for such therapeutic purposes — or simply for the sake of having more strength and energy — then you are adapting the techniques for a secular project. You engage in meditational practices as a means for the end of deepening your ability to care for others and improving the quality of your life.

The aim of salvation in Buddhism, however, is to be released from finite life itself. Such an idea of salvation recurs across the world religions, but in many strands of Buddhism there is a remarkable honesty regarding the implications of salvation. Rather than promising that your life will continue, or that you will see your loved ones again, the salvation of nirvana entails your extinction. The aim is not to lead a free life, with the pain and suffering that such a life entails, but to reach the “insight” that personal agency is an illusion and dissolve in the timelessness of nirvana. What ultimately matters is to attain a state of consciousness where everything ceases to matter, so that one can rest in peace.

The Buddhist conclusion may seem extreme when stated in this way, but in fact it makes explicit what is implicit in all ideas of eternal salvation. Far from making our lives meaningful, eternity would make them meaningless, since our actions would have no purpose. This problem can be traced even within religious traditions that espouse faith in eternal life. An article in U.S. Catholic asks: “Heaven: Will it be Boring?” The article answers no, for in heaven souls are called “not to eternal rest but to eternal activity — eternal social concern.” Yet this answer only underlines the problem, since there is nothing to be concerned about in heaven.

Concern presupposes that something can go wrong or can be lost; otherwise we would not care. An eternal activity — just as much as an eternal rest — is of concern to no one, since it cannot be stopped and does not have to be maintained by anyone. The problem is not that an eternal activity would be “boring” but that it would not be intelligible as my activity. Any activity of mine (including a boring activity) requires that I sustain it. In an eternal activity, there cannot be a person who is bored — or involved in any other way — since an eternal activity does not depend on being sustained by anyone.

An eternal salvation is therefore not only unattainable but also undesirable, since it would eliminate the care and passion that animates our lives. What we do and what we love can matter to us only because we understand ourselves as mortal. That self-understanding is implicit in all our practical commitments and priorities. The question of what we ought to do with our time — a question that is at issue in everything we do — presupposes that we understand our time to be finite.

Hence, mortality is the condition of agency and freedom. To be free is not to be sovereign or liberated from all constraints. Rather, we are free because we are able to ask ourselves what we ought to do with our time. All forms of freedom — the freedom to act, to speak, to love — are intelligible as freedom only insofar as we are free to engage the question of what we should do with our time. If it were given what we should do, what we should say, and whom we should love — in short: if it were given what we should do with our time — we would not be free.

The ability to ask the question of what we ought to do with our time is the basic condition for what I call spiritual freedom. To lead a free, spiritual life (rather than a life determined merely by natural instincts), I must be responsible for what I do. This is not to say that I am free from natural and social constraints. I did not choose to be born with the limitations and abilities I happen to have. Moreover, I had no control over who took care of me; what they did to me and for me. My family — and the larger historical context into which I was born — shaped me before I could do anything about it.

Likewise, social norms continue to inform who I can take myself to be and what I can do with my life. Without social norms, which I did not invent and that shape the world in which I find myself, I can have no understanding of who to be or what to do. Nevertheless, I am responsible for upholding, challenging or transforming these norms. I am not merely causally determined by nature or norms but act in light of norms that I can challenge and transform. Even at the price of my biological survival, my material well-being or my social standing, I can give my life for a principle to which I hold myself or for a cause in which I believe. This is what it means to lead a spiritual life. I must always live in relation to my irrevocable death — otherwise there would be nothing at stake in dedicating my life to anything.

Any form of spiritual life must therefore be animated by the anxiety of being mortal, even in the most profound fulfillment of our aspirations. Our anxiety before death is not reducible to a psychological condition that can or should be overcome. Rather, anxiety is a condition of intelligibility for leading a free life and being passionately committed. As long as our lives matter to us, we must be animated by the anxiety that our time is finite, since otherwise there would be no urgency in doing anything and being anyone.

Even if your project is to lead your life without psychological anxiety before death — for example by devoting yourself to Buddhist meditation — that project is intelligible only because you are anxious not to waste your life on being anxious before death. Only in light of the apprehension that we will die — that our lifetime is indefinite but finite — can we ask ourselves what we ought to do with our lives and put ourselves at stake in our activities. This is why all religious visions of eternity ultimately are visions of unfreedom. In the consummation of eternity, there would be no question of what we should do with our lives. We would be absorbed in bliss forever and thereby deprived of any possible agency. Rather than having a free relation to what we do and what we love, we would be compelled by necessity to enjoy it.

In contrast, we should recognize that we must be vulnerable — we must be marked by the suffering of pain, the mourning of loss, the anxiety before death — in order to lead our lives and care about one another. We can thereby acknowledge that our life together is our ultimate purpose. What we are missing is not eternal bliss but social and institutional forms that would enable us to lead flourishing lives. This is why the critique of religion must be accompanied by a critique of the existing forms of our life together. If we merely criticized religious notions of salvation — without seeking to overcome the forms of social injustice to which religions respond — the critique would be empty and patronizing. The task is to transform our social conditions in such a way that we can let go of the promise of salvation and recognize that everything depends on what we do with our finite time together. The heart of spiritual life is not the empty tranquillity of eternal peace but the mutual recognition of our fragility and our freedom.

 Why Mortality Makes Us Free.  By Martin Hägglund  New York Times  ,  March 11, 2019.

We're all going to die. How we should spend our time before we hit our expiration date has been a main concern of philosophers from Ancient Greece to the present day, when most people are familiar with moral philosophy thanks to The Good Place. The question is how we can find meaning and purpose in an existence that can seem meaningless. The answer that Martin Hägglund, a professor of contemporary literature at Yale, comes up with in This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, is democratic socialism—which can only be achieved, he notes in his introduction, "through a fundamental practical revaluation of the way we lead our lives together."

"Under capitalism," he continues, "we cannot actually negotiate the fundamental questions of what we collectively value, since the purpose of our economy is beyond the power of democratic deliberation."

For Hägglund, democratic socialism and freedom go hand in hand—to have the former, we need to rid ourselves of the constraints of capitalism. His aim, essentially, is to have enough resources publicly owned that each of us can do what we want and consequently advance humanity, instead of being shackled to system that probably doesn't operate well any longer. (Or perhaps never did.)

The book is an exploration of how we should be spending our (limited) time that ultimately asserts, as the New Republic stated in a review, a "spiritual case for socialism." It's an argument that connects a rejection of all forms of religious belief to the abuses and constraints of capitalism. At the crux of the thesis is what Hägglund labels as secular faith. "To have secular faith," Hägglund writes, "is to be devoted to a life that will end, to be dedicated to projects that can fail or break down."

He's most concerned with how we structure our days and what we value, and though his book is explicitly anti-religion, it lacks the bombast of the so-called New Atheists. It's at once a broadly accessible and academic volume (it's set to be the topic of conferences at Harvard, Yale, and NYU), and tackles timely issues—climate change, the rule of the billionaire class, the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal, our increasing focus on work—without seeming ripped from the headlines.

VICE talked with Hägglund about the rise of socialism in the United States, Americans' relation to work, critiques of religion, and how we might all improve society going forward.

VICE: This Life seems embedded in the times we live in without bludgeoning the reader over the head. There isn't anything, for instance, relating to Donald Trump. Was that intentional—writing a book that calls for a new way of living, at a moment in our history when it seems as if our institutions, our governments, our religions are on the brink of collapse? Or did it simply become more "relevant"—meaning Americans were talking more and more about socialism—after the 2016 presidential election?

 Martin Hägglund: When I started working on the book six years ago, I did not know how timely it would end up being (I was even advised against speaking of "democratic socialism" at the time, since people thought it would be off-putting to most readers). From the beginning, though, I knew I wanted to respond to our historical epoch, in which social inequality, climate change, and global injustice are intertwined with the resurgence of religious forms of authority that deny the ultimate importance of these matters. My way of responding was to write a book that addresses fundamental philosophical questions of life and death, but also offers a new political vision.

 V : One effect of our historical moment is that the idea of socialism is now said to be "hip" among the younger generation. How do you feel about that?

MH :

The interesting thing with our current moment is that the fundamental questions of how we should organize our society—of how we should live and work together—are felt with a new urgency. I think it is an important moment, but for it to gain substance we need much deeper analyses of what we mean by capitalism and socialism. There is a widespread sense that capitalism is inimical to our lives, but also a lack of orienting visions of what an alternative form of life could be. What we are missing are not indictments of capitalism, but a profound definition and analysis of capitalism, as well as the principles for an economic form of life beyond capitalism (the principles of democratic socialism). This is what I seek to provide in the book.

V : Much of this work focuses almost exclusively on the conception of time—which is a nice way of saying we’re all going to die one day. Did you have a moment in your life when you accepted that? Will a majority of people ever be able to accept finitude? I’m asking, partly, because I’m curious if you believe people could actually embrace what you're suggesting, or if, in the end, they're too afraid of death?

MH : Well, first of all, I don’t think we can or should overcome our fear of death—or more precisely, we cannot and should not overcome our  anxiety before death. As long as our lives matter to us, we must be animated by the anxiety that our time is finite, since otherwise there would be no urgency in trying to do anything and trying to be anyone. What I do think we should let go of are religious ideals of being liberated from finitude—whether in Christian eternal life or Buddhist nirvana or some other variant. Rather than try to become invulnerable, we should recognize that vulnerability is part of the good that we seek. In my book, this is a therapeutic argument as much as it is a philosophical one. The therapy will not exempt you from the risks of being committed to a finite life. You cannot bear life on your own and those on whom you depend can end up shattering your life. These are real dangers. But they are not reasons to try to transcend finitude altogether. They are reasons to take our mutual dependence seriously and develop better ways of living together.

V : Would you suggest ridding all religion from the world? What's wrong with it?

MH : It is very important to my approach that the critique of religion is careful and emancipatory, rather than dismissive. The practice of religious faith has often served—and still serves for many—as a helpful communal expression of solidarity. Likewise, religious organizations often provide services for those who are poor and in need. Most importantly, religious discourses have often been mobilized in concrete struggles against injustice. In principle, however, none of these social commitments require religious faith or a religious form of organization. A central example in my book is Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. By attending closely to King's political speeches and the concrete historical practices in which he participates, I show that the faith which animates his political activism is better understood in terms of secular faith than in terms of the religious faith he officially espouses.

If we are committed to abolishing poverty rather than promising salvation for the poor, the faith we embody in practice is secular rather than religious, since we acknowledge our life together as our ultimate purpose. This is why the critique of religion must be accompanied by a critique of the existing forms of our life together. If we merely criticized religious notions of salvation—without seeking to overcome the forms of social injustice to which religions respond—the critique would be empty and patronizing. The task is to transform our social conditions in such a way that we can let go of the promise of salvation and recognize that everything depends on what we do with our finite time together. What we are missing is not eternal bliss but social and institutional forms that would enable us to lead flourishing lives.

V : You mention that Karl Marx had "no nostalgia for the premodern world"—do you believe we're alive right now with little sense that we can form our own history, and don’t have to be subject to it?

MH : The reason Marx had no nostalgia for the premodern world is that he was committed to making the modern idea of  freedom a living reality—to fulfill the promise that each one of us ought to be able to lead a free life. In recent decades, the appeal to freedom has been appropriated for agendas on the political right, where the idea of freedom serves to defend "the free market" and is largely reduced to a formal conception of individual liberty. In response, many thinkers on the political left have retreated from or even explicitly rejected the idea of freedom. This is a fatal mistake. Any emancipatory politics—as well as any critique of capitalism—requires a conception of freedom. We need to rehabilitate a sense that we are forming our own history and that we can form it in a different way. To live a free life, it is not enough that we have the liberal  rights to freedom. We must have access to the material as well as the pedagogical and institutional resources that allow us to pursue our freedom as an end in itself. To this end, I outline a new vision of democratic socialism that is committed to providing the conditions for each one of us to lead a free life, in mutual recognition of our dependence on one another.

This Philosopher Says We Should Replace Religion with Socialism.  By Alex Norcia . Vice , March 22, 2019.

What gets a wolf or a pigeon up in the morning? No offense to wolves or to pigeons, but it's probably not the desire to make the world a better place. As far as we know, humans are unique in the freedom to decide what's worth doing with our finite time on Earth.

But as my guest today argues, we often steal that freedom from one another or sell it off without even realizing it—our finite lifetime, the one thing we have of real value, is devalued by capitalism and for those who have it, by religious faith in eternal life, or eternal everythingness, or eternal nothingness. . . .

What happens to freedom when time is money – with Martin Hägglund.  Jason Gots talks with philosopher Martin Hägglund about his book  This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. Martin Hägglund is a professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale and a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient.

Big Think , March 9, 2019. 

Any human identity is made up in part of beliefs about how to live—what is admirable, worthwhile, shameful, precious. These are not abstract opinions, but are better understood as parts of who we are, distinctions that guide us through the world as surely as a sense of up and down or near and far. And they are full of consequences. We decide every hour which chances are worth taking, which attachments worth making, which tedious tasks are worth the reward. The questions add up: What shall I do with this hour, this morning, and with what they amount to, my one life? What shall we do together?


Making our choices count is, however, far from straightforward, and this is the subject of Martin Hägglund’s book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. Hägglund, who teaches literature at Yale, aims to give fresh philosophical and political vitality to a longstanding question. He argues that to live well requires two things: We need to face our choices with clarity, and we need the power to make choices that matter. He makes a forceful case that religion keeps believers from confronting their responsibility for the meaning of their own lives, by displacing ultimate questions to a higher plane. Meanwhile, capitalism denies us the power to make important choices, since we are each to varying degrees compelled to spend our time on things that we do not choose and that don’t carry meaning for us.


Ranging from discussions of the nature of eternity to arguments about who should control the means of production, Hägglund puts forward a single, sustained picture of the situation we all face. To free ourselves spiritually, he proposes that we adopt what he calls “secular faith”: a commitment to our finite lives and fragile loves as the sole site of what matters, the setting for all the stakes of existence. Achieving material freedom is a more logistically complex project. The only social order compatible with spiritual freedom, Hägglund believes, is democratic socialism. Only when return on investment ceases to be the measure of value can the polity decide for itself what counts as valuable, what kind of activity should be rewarded and cultivated.


For a work that aims to outdo everyone from preachers and self-helpers to political pundits and economists, This Life spends little time orienting itself to 2019. There are no assertions about internet tribalism, resurgent populism, or the spiritual void of modernity; there isn’t even a Trump cameo. Yet much in the book will resonate with a democratic left that has gained strength in the seven-plus years since Occupy—in Black Lives Matter and the Sanders campaign, in the vision of the Green New Deal, in the Fight for $15 and in North Carolina’s Moral Mondays. This Life attempts to deepen the philosophical dimension of this left and to anchor its commitments in a larger inquiry: What kind of political and economic order can do justice to our mortality, to the fact that our lives are all we have?


 This Life is anti-religious from stem to stern. Its strategy, however, is not to show that theism is unscientific, as the “new atheists” have tended to do. Nor does it remind readers of all the atrocities committed under the banner of religion, as Christopher Hitchens did in God Is Not Great. Instead, Hägglund follows a humanistic tradition that sees ideas of God or gods as displaced expressions of thwarted human wishes. The notion of a kingdom of God, of divine grace, of seeing each other face to face instead of through a glass darkly—all are ways of trying to express what people could be to one another. Hägglund doesn’t discard the religious impulse so much as try to separate the desire for meaning and community from doctrine and metaphysics.


In making his target “religion,” Hägglund takes aim at any system of thought that finds the answer to human suffering outside this world, whether in the philosophical indifference of Buddhist nirvana or in the eternal life of Christian heaven. As different as these are, they each represent attempts to locate the real stakes of existence elsewhere, safe from a reality where we love people who will sicken and die, devote ourselves to work that will fail or be ignored, and identify with institutions and countries that grow corrupt and do terrible harm.


Hägglund sets out to show that this is a kind of bad faith, a failure to reckon clearly and honestly with our predicament. Our experience of caring for people we will lose and projects that will fail or fade is what makes us human. If we got to heaven or nirvana, we would no longer be persons in any sense that we could recognize, no matter whether we imagine those ideal places through folk images of an eternal family reunion or through high-theological concepts of timeless unity with God. Although the dream of becoming bodhisattvas or angels expresses a very human wish to cease our suffering and loss, if we understood it more clearly we would see that it is also a wish to dissolve our humanity.


Hägglund wants to turn readers back to a brief lifetime of perilous caring. “Whether I hold something to be of small, great, or inestimable value, I must be committed to caring for it in some form.” This, he judges,



is a question of devoting my own lifetime to what I value. To value something, I have to be prepared to give it at least a fraction of my time.… Finite lifetime is the originary measure of value. The more I value something, the more of my lifetime I am willing to spend on it.



Hägglund gives a few examples of what this means for him. The most vital of these is his choice to spend time writing a book—a commitment of several years for an author who believes time is the most precious thing, and whose political project might well be crushed by resistance or snuffed out by indifference.


In identifying time with value, This Life can at times sound strangely like an economics textbook. For a neoclassical economist, any choice to spend—money, effort, attention—comes with “opportunity costs,” the paths not taken. Thus a person’s choices comprise a pattern of trade-offs: time spent earning wages versus time with family, the prospects of law school versus the sense of purpose in nursing work, keeping a dangerous job rather than risk unemployment. Modern economics assumes that prices reflect these priorities, pinpointing in dollars and cents how much of X someone will give up in order to have Y. Superficially at least, economic reasoning, the elite common sense of our time, is as much concerned with the stakes of our choices as This Life is.


Hägglund doesn’t entirely discard this reasoning. Instead he deepens it. To take free choice seriously, he argues, we need a conception of freedom that is not tied to selling our time and talents at the market rate just to go on living. We are in “the realm of freedom,” writes Hägglund, when we can act in keeping with our values. By contrast, we are in the “realm of necessity” when we adopt an alien set of priorities just to get by. A great many of the choices most people face under capitalism fall within the realm of necessity. How do you make a living in an economy that rewards predatory lending over teaching and nursing? Or how do you present yourself in a workplace that rewards competition and often embarrassing self-promotion?


Economic thought treats these choices as if they were just as “free” as Bill Gates’s next decision to channel his philanthropic spending to this group or that. Hägglund sees it differently: Our economy keeps its participants locked in the realm of necessity for much of their lives, draining away their time in unfree activity. In the realm of necessity there is very little opportunity to spend our lives on the things we care for, to devote ourselves to what we think most worthwhile. Economic life may be a tapestry of choices, but as long as it directs its participants toward goals they do not believe truly worthwhile, a life of such choice is a grotesque of freedom.


Hägglund formulates his criticisms of this system by taking liberal values more seriously than many liberals do. He shares the liberal conviction that people have to determine the meaning of their lives by individual reckoning. But he contends that a liberal who fully understood the meaning of this commitment would become a socialist. This is because the market economy dictates answers to the most important question—what is our time worth? To be free is to be able to give your own answer to this question; but in our lives, the answer comes to us in the form of wages and such potent monstrosities as the rate of return on investment in our human capital. These dollar-and-cent measures make decisions for a boss or owner as for a worker: Mind the bottom line, or “market discipline” will replace you with someone who will.


The market presses some people closer to the bone than others, but it drives everyone, because it is a system for determining the price of things, among them time itself, and substituting that price for any competing valuation. You cannot exempt yourself, except in the rare case where you have “won” enough or inherited enough—and even then you are the exception, an odd rich person with economic power over others’ time, not one in a society of free equals.


Instead of occasional exceptions, we need collective self-emancipation into a different regime of value. Hägglund defines his ideal—democratic socialism—as a system of public ownership of productive resources in an economy that aims at maximizing “socially available free time,” that is, making the realm of freedom as large and inclusive as possible. His democratic socialist society would create institutions that let us learn without incurring insurmountable debt, and work without fearing poverty or untreated illness. It would not make its members trade their time for mere survival. He invokes Marx’s “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”


Hägglund can give the impression of gliding over the problems this society might face. There is always some work that not all that many people really want to do, unwelcome but socially necessary labor. There is no way around emptying bedpans, caring for the severely demented, sorting recycled goods, providing day care for other people’s children, picking lettuce, cleaning up after concerts, and so forth. Hägglund writes that under democratic socialism “we will be intrinsically motivated to participate in social labor when we can recognize that the social production is for the sake of the common good and our own freedom to lead a life,” making such labor “inherently free.” Yet it is hard to imagine the voluntary caretaking of others’ needs that sometimes happens in families and religious communities scaling up to the national or global level solely “through education and democratic deliberation.”


Readers who have these doubts, Hägglund writes, “should consider their lack of faith in our spiritual freedom.” It is an important response, if not a decisive one. The certified best minds of their times have believed democracy a recipe for anarchy, women’s equality a monstrosity, and so forth. Every age invents respectable formulas to convert local limits of imagination and experience into universal limits on reality. A book that presses against these limits does more service than one that dresses them up with libertarian bromides and a little evolutionary psychology, as too many of our “big thinkers” do. Hägglund’s question is not which marginal tax rate would be compatible with incentivizing effort in 2019. It is how to think about the basic ordering of the world. To the extent that readers find his argument persuasive, it is up to them to make it useful.


Can a religious person who believes the ultimate stakes of existence are cosmically elsewhere also invest this life with the moral urgency that it merits? Hägglund argues vigorously that they cannot. But in practice the world is full of activists who are religious and who seem to square the circle in their own lives. Many of them say that their sense of the goodness and moral weight of this life, and their motive to uphold and transform it, arise from experiencing the world as infused with divine love, as a creation. For my part, I would not have taken this observation so seriously before I spent nearly 15 years living in the South among activist friends and movement leaders whose work is entirely stitched into religious community, language, and feeling.


Whether or not Hägglund needs to save devotion from religion, This Life presents a vital alternative to certain kinds of nihilism that today’s politics can produce—when the news brings weekly updates of dire climate forecasts and America seethes under Trumpism. It is now almost ordinary to remark in casual conversation that things are pretty much over, that we are just waiting for the catastrophes and the resource wars to begin in earnest. In a decade or three, when we watch the floods at the coasts, the inland droughts, and the waves of refugees breaking on the border walls of Europe and the United States—or even shattering the walls—we will at least have seen it coming. There is a weird satisfaction in being among the ones who saw that capitalism is at once too venal and too powerful, or humanity at large too shortsighted and tribal to survive.


Nihilism has minor chords as well as major ones. It might be that, with so much disaster so thoroughly forecast, you will judge that the only thing to do is to draw up the bridges and look out for your own: spend college angling for a hedge-fund job, or stockpile rifles and ammunition, and hope that, whether with a MacBook Pro or a six-shooter, your grandchildren will be among the lucky few who can defend a secure spot in New Zealand or Montana. If you aren’t heroically inclined, you may simply look out for your own without hatching much of a plan for their future.


If you feel the pull of this kind of thinking, Hägglund wants to persuade you that this is bad faith. We are creatures who care, whose nature is to grow infinitely attached to finite things. What we truly believe is worth our time, the natural things and the cultural forms in which we find the richness of this life, gives us an imperative to take responsibility for them.


This book might be, in other words, not so much about why to be an atheist as how—how to embrace emotionally hazardous forms of existential commitment as weighty as religious devotion, and without the nominal assurances of religion. It is also perhaps less about why to be on the left than about how. I am not sure that anyone who has signed on contentedly for growing inequality mitigated by a little redistribution will be moved to democratic socialism by Hägglund’s conception of freedom. But for those who start with some version of his politics, the idea that we should be fighting for control over our time might prove powerful. What does “free college” or “Medicare for all” come down to, other than saying that our lives should be our own to use well, not parceled out in years of debt service and cramped by fear of future medical bills? What is the Green New Deal but an explicit engagement with the value of life, an effort to secure a humane future in a world where we do not live by exploiting one another?


The old labor slogan—eight hours for work, eight for rest, and eight for what we will—sticks around because control over our time really is the beginning of all other forms of autonomy. To understand our lives this way can illuminate rather abstract considerations, tying them to the most immediate, felt concerns of a finite life. What are we fighting for? For more of the only thing we will ever have, the time of our lives. Why do we fight for it? Because it goes so fast, and, for a human being who faces the tragedy of our situation, there can, and should, never be enough of this life. 

What gets a wolf or a pigeon up in the morning? No offense to wolves or to pigeons, but it's probably not the desire to make the world a better place. As far as we know, humans are unique in the freedom to decide what's worth doing with our finite time on Earth.

The Spiritual Case for Socialism. By Jedediah Britton-Purdy. The New Republic , February  19, 2019. 

In a new book, philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that only atheists are truly committed to improving our world. But people of faith and socialists have more in common than he thinks

Religious zealots are no longer the only ones to prophesy the apocalypse. Secular scientists and experts regularly warn us that the skies will fall, that plagues will overwhelm us, and that the seas will cover our cities—all of it well-deserved punishment for our sins. We live in an era in which traditionally sacred questions about the nature and end of our world have become political. The old firewall between faith and politics, so lovingly crafted in the eighteenth century to solve problems that are no longer ours, will likely come down whether we like it or not.

Martin Hägglund, a philosopher and literary critic at Yale, has published a book for this moment. This Life is an audacious, ambitious, and often maddening tour de force that argues that major existential questions—about the world and our place in it—must once again inflame our politics. What’s more, he presumes to answer those questions, providing an ambitious defense of secularism and a provocative attempt to link a secular worldview with a robust politics. To fully abandon God, Hägglund proposes, is to become a democratic socialist.

Few have tried harder than Hägglund to consider secularism’s political and ethical consequences. In a world in which Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand seem to have a stranglehold on the theme, this is a crucially important case to make, and to a crucially important audience. In the United States, and globally too, the number of religiously unaffiliated people grows by the year. This Life asks secular readers to take their own secularism seriously, reminding them that their worldview can and ought to influence their politics as fully as it might for religious believers. He is not, to be clear, making an empirical claim that secularists are, in fact, the light of the world, but rather a normative argument that, if they understand themselves correctly, they should be. This aspect of Hägglund’s book is convincing, even if his kindred attempt to convince the religious among us to actually become secularists is less successful. Regardless, his project is to be applauded. Its iconoclasm and sweep provide an example of what intellectual activity can and should look like in an era of emergency.

This Life opens with an attack on religion, but of a novel sort. Hägglund is not much interested in whether or not God exists. He prefers to root out the more persistent belief that it would be a good thing if God existed. In his view, even many secular people are nostalgic for faith, and mourn the absence of a deity to command us and save us. This has kept the secular amongst us from deeply thinking through what it means to be secular—what it means, in other words, to accept that the lives we have here are the only ones we will ever have.

In Hägglund’s view, the essence of religion is a flight from finitude. He sees all religions as being basically the same in this regard, in that they all counsel us that the empirical world is essentially unreal. Our salvation, after all, resides in heaven or some kind of afterlife. Given that, the religious believer has no incentive to grant any independent significance to a particular human being, or even to the natural world. In his reading of Augustine, C. S. Lewis, Søren Kierkegaard, and other religious writers, he argues that they are intellectually committed to a devaluation of our shared, finite life. At the same time, he delights in offering evidence that these religious thinkers—despite themselves, in his view—granted meaning and significance to the finite world and its denizens.

His purpose is not merely to root out perceived hypocrisy, but to buttress the claim that devotion to the finite, or what he calls “secular faith,” is intrinsic to what we are as human beings. This anthropology is taken up in the second half of the book, which is devoted to what he calls “spiritual freedom.” In these chapters, Hägglund asks some basic questions: What would be the political and social consequences of true atheism? If we truly are alone in the world, what would it mean for us? These only seem banal because so few writers have the audacity to pose them so baldly.

The answers certainly are not banal: starting from first principles, Hägglund seeks to reconstruct what a worthwhile human life might look like, and what institutional arrangement might make it possible. The most interesting feature of his analysis is the great attention he gives to temporality. It is not just that human beings are “rational animals,” as Aristotle put it, but that our rationality expresses itself first and foremost through our decisions about how to use our time (hence the importance of finitude as a category). This is less an ethical principle than a meta-ethical one. We can debate endlessly over whether we should devote ourselves to art, or love, or political organizing. Hägglund simply wants us to see that these debates hinge on how to spend our time.

Time, not carbon or land, is the raw material of our humanity. With this insight in hand, Hägglund turns his attention to the state of our shared world now—one that is organized around literally inhuman premises. If our freedom is defined by the rational use of our time, capitalism is defined by its irrational waste. In an era of what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” and increasing awareness of the crushing requirements of modern labor, there is something plausible about this as a sociological observation. Hägglund presents it as a theoretical insight, too. In all of the excitement over the revival of socialism, it can be easy to lose sight of what capitalism actually consists in—or at least, how Marx understood it. Hägglund reminds us that Marx understood capitalism primarily through temporal categories. The historical significance of wage labor, after all, was precisely its linkage between monetary remuneration and the iron progress of the clock.

This linkage between value and labor-time, codified into the wage, distinguishes capitalism from alternative economic forms. It explains why the explosive technological innovations of the modern era, celebrated by Marx and Hägglund alike, have not shortened our labor time appreciably. And it explains why unemployment is immediately classified as a problem, instead of celebrated as evidence that we can feed and clothe ourselves with less labor than before.

In short, Hägglund believes that we are defined by the way that we spend our time, but that we are enmeshed in a system that devours our time without our rational input. The only solution, therefore, would be to remake our economic system in a way that honors our finite time precisely by disaggregating the equation of time and economic value that is the hallmark of capitalism.

The book concludes with a robust vision of democratic socialism in which time, and not just capital, serves as a resource to be cherished and distributed. Hägglund is not opposed to the welfarist measures that constitute the horizon of democratic politics today. He does, though, think that they are inadequate given the magnitude of our crisis; they do not arise from a fully articulated philosophy of what man is, and what sort of world would be fit for her flourishing. More pointedly, he thinks that we are focusing too much on the mechanisms of redistribution, and not enough on the capitalist, temporal logic that governs the creation of value.

His form of democratic socialism essentially gives us back our time. The endless hours that are sucked into the maw of production can be ours, once again, if we have the courage to claim them. Partially, this involves the simple exploitation of technology to increase the amount of time we are away from work. It also, though, presumes the revaluation of work and the economy itself. He imagines a world in which our work is unalienated because we have freely chosen it, and because we understand how it contributes to a just world that we want to be our own. This is a world, too, in which we are not riveted to a profession forever, but can exercise our talents in diverse ways across our lives because we are not submitting our bodies to the dictates of the market.

This is a utopian vision, to be sure. Hägglund does not do the work to show how it might plausibly be on the horizon, or ask how it might be possible in a globalized economy where the most unsavory and dangerous sorts of labor are often outsourced. That, though, is the great virtue of the book: it provides a regulative ideal, and a reminder of what kind of world we are actually fighting for. However secular he might be, Hägglund’s is ultimately a project of restoring faith. And if the history of religion teaches anything, it is that faith is not created with concrete proposals. We have faith in a story, and in a promise, and this is what Hägglund seeks to restore to his secular audience.

If I have tried to depict This Life as an example of what we might call “good” utopianism, there is an element of misguided utopianism in the book, too. This becomes apparent in his treatment of religion. However bracing and convincing his linkage between secularism and socialism might be, he fails to make the case, either normatively or empirically, that only secularism can save us.

For all of its laudable concern for democracy, there is something imperious in Hägglund’s dismissal of religious believers: specifically, his contention that, insofar as they are properly religious, they do not and cannot have any concern for the finite world. It is enormously provocative and counterintuitive to assert that religious traditions (all of them!) counsel believers to ignore finite beings in pursuit of eternal happiness. And yet this is his consistent claim. “If you truly believed in the existence of eternity,” he argues, “there would be no reason to mourn the loss of a finite life.”

The most obvious objection to Hägglund’s thesis is simply that religious people care about the world, and other people, all of the time. Indeed, the history of humanity is little else than the history of that care. His response is that when they do so, they are not in fact acting religiously but are, despite their own self-perception, honoring the secular faith that is at the heart of the human condition. This sweeping argument is made largely through an analysis of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, designed to show that his theological vision does not in fact make room for a devotion to finite beings. A textual analysis of a famously complex thinker simply cannot bear this much weight. Even if we assume that Kierkegaard can stand in for the entire Christian tradition, which is a stretch, he simply cannot stand in for “religion” as a whole (represented in this book, it must be said, almost entirely by European and Christian men).

So even if Hägglund is right about Kierkegaard, there is no reason to conclude that it would be relevant to, say, the millions of Muslim mothers who care deeply about their children. Religious believers claim, in all manner of ways, that their care for the finite world is enlivened and awakened by their sense that the world is not dead matter, but rather emanates from the divine. Hägglund considers this to be impossible, but he does not directly explain why. Even secular people can imagine some form of it. Imagine that a dear friend died and left their beloved dog in your care, and that for years you loved and cared for this dog. It is likely that you would love this dog both in its own right, and also because of its provenance: through caring for the dog, you are honoring both the dog and the friend who gave it to you, even though that friend no longer exists. It would be both uncharitable and mistaken for someone to tell you that you did not really love the dog, but were only honoring your friend. It would be especially so if that person did not know you but only knew the broad outlines of your story. And yet this is precisely Hägglund’s position. He believes that you can 

either love the world in its finitude, or you can love the eternal creator, but you cannot possibly do both, and one could not possibly enrich the other.

“This Life,” to which Hägglund is so admirably committed, is teeming with cases in which love for God and love for the finite world enhance one another. For many, this world matters precisely because of its linkage to the eternal.

Consider care for the environment, which Hägglund rightly emphasizes as a crucial issue for our times. His view is that religious believers, insofar as they are consistent, should be indifferent to the fate of the world because they care only about the afterlife. One objection is that this argument, which uses clearly Christian categories, fails to address the Native American traditions that have been employed against oil companies in recent years, most famously at Standing Rock. Another would be that, even from within the Christian tradition, there are deep resources for ecological consciousness that cannot be dismissed out of hand. The theologian Brett Grainger, for instance, introduces us to some in Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America. While we sometimes attribute an enlightened ecology to the New England Puritans, he shows how the many millions of evangelicals of the same period had a similar sensibility. The book shows what an approach to religion that strays from the titanic intellectuals and texts can do. In lieu of a rereading of Thoreau, Grainger offers us a fine-grained account of the hymns, sermons, and poetry that constituted the commonsense worldview of a people.

It is no secret that evangelicals sought to study scripture and nature—or what they called God’s two books—in tandem. What Grainger shows is how deeply this permeated their daily lives. These were people who worshipped outdoors, and who viewed the contemplation of nature as a central component of spiritual practice. This reached bizarre heights in the evangelical attitude to health. They were, Grainger reveals, quite committed to hydrotherapy, believing that water, the stuff of baptism, had unique healing properties, and that mineral springs in particular were sacred sites. His point is that the evangelical tradition has enormous resources for a veneration of nature and that, moreover, the history of U.S. environmentalism relies on a hidden Protestant heritage.

Hägglund does not, and cannot, convincingly show that none of these traditions can nourish a genuine commitment to the finite world. The problem is that, for a book so concerned with theology, Hägglund does not really have a theory of religion. He does not, in other words, have a theory to explain why so many people, today and historically, have devoted themselves to (what he sees as) transparently false understandings of the universe. Ironically, Marx himself is more instructive on this point, and less committed to a reductive reading of religious activity. His fullest analysis of the topic (“On the Jewish Question”) was in fact written to refute a philosopher named Bruno Bauer who had made a claim similar to Hägglund’s. Marx did not believe that religion was an error in judgment, but rather an unsurprising response to a world in which our political and ethical ideals are so hideously absent from our economic realities. The mystifications of religion, in other words, are a reflection of the mystifications and contradictions of capitalism, and faith a coherent response to a world where salvation seems impossible.

Marx had no particular sympathy for religion, but he did not seek to explain it away as a failure of courage or as an error in judgment. Insofar as he does so, Hägglund denies himself the ability to empathize with the billions for whom faith might be the only recourse in a world of savagery—“the heart,” as Marx put it, “of a heartless world.” That insight did not commit Marx to providing a place for religion in the communist utopia to come, but it did allow him to better understand its role in the fallen world we call home.

The world cannot be saved by one book, even one as ambitious as This Life. That would be the most religious claim of all, and one that Hägglund would certainly not endorse. We need many books, like this, speaking to many audiences, if we are to face the crisis of our moment. Hägglund’s is a book for a secular audience, but it is not one that can summon a secular public.

Democratic socialism will run into the ground if it lashes itself as tightly as this to a rigorous secularism. About 80 percent of the world’s population formally subscribes to some form of religious belief, meaning that the concepts and categories that they have at hand to understand political, economic, and climactic affairs are at least inflected by religious categories and institutions. If the transition away from rapacious capitalism must begin with an educational process to reduce that number to zero, we will still be holding seminars on Kierkegaard until the seas overwhelm us.

The task for the present cannot be to convince the world’s population to abandon religion, and then to convince them that secularism entails democratic socialism. The task, now, is to meet people where they are, and to understand the stories and institutions that structure their lives in order to see how the moral arc of their particular universe might be bent toward justice.

To do that, though, we need a vision of justice that is plausible and compelling enough to organize our efforts. Hägglund’s book provides one. After a half century of anti-utopian suspicion, This Life calls us back to a nearly forgotten style of thinking and imagining. In our time of genetic experimentation and climate apocalypse, we are forced to confront anew, and in public, the questions that long seemed safely sequestered in our private lives, and our private hearts: What is it to be human? What do we owe one another? What is to be done? As the waters rise, these questions could not be more urgent. It is impossible to believe that we will all arrive at the same answers. But unless we all start asking them, and with a real commitment to continued life on earth, we are doomed. Hägglund is right that time is our most precious resource. Unlike carbon, though, there is not much left.

Democracy Without God.   By James G. Chappel.       Boston Review ,   March 4, 2019

Pantheon Books