Why Mortality Makes Us Free

People tend to avoid thinking about their mortality. Awareness that we shall all perish one day is instinctively suppressed, or glossed over with religious belief in the everlasting.

That’s something Martin Hägglund wants to change. In This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, the Swedish philosopher and author encourages us to see the bright side of our finitude.

For what seems to be a tough selling job, he argues that committing to this life means accepting it with all its limits. That means rejecting what he calls “religious faith” – a hankering for something beyond our earthly contingency. In contrast, “secular faith is to acknowledge that we are essentially dependent on – and answerable to – other persons who cannot be mastered or controlled, since we are all free, finite beings”.

Hägglund, a humanities professor based at Yale University in the US, says: “I’m not trying to divide the world into religious and secular people . . . We all practise secular faith by virtue of sustaining any commitment.”

However, “what I call the religious understanding – that the highest good, or the most desirable state of being, would be one where we weren’t susceptible to pain or loss or death – is, I think, holding us back both individually and collectively to full, practical devolution to our individual and collective life as it truly matters”.

The theme is developed further in his book as he explores what a society based on secular faith would look like. For a start, it would mean reorienting our values so that we cherished nothing greater than whatever time is available to us while we’re alive.

This would have a revolutionary effect, Hägglund argues, as it would suggest - among other things - that the economy should be directed towards, not income generation but rather, increasing the amount of “socially available free time”. He explains further as this week’s Unthinkable guest.

What exactly do you mean by secular faith and how does it differ from religious faith?

Martin Hägglund: “In the most general terms, what I am calling secular faith designates the practical activity of sustaining any commitment. We need the vocabulary of faith, because questions of fidelity and betrayal are at stake in all forms of commitment.

“I’m here using the term ‘secular’ in a very capacious sense and in accordance with its etymological root: the secular is the worldly, the temporal, the historical. In my sense, everything that depends on our historical practices is secular.

“What I am calling religious faith is the additional idea that there is a special object of faith, like God or eternity, something that ultimately doesn’t depend on the practice of faith, something that ultimately exists independently and eternally.

“If the highest object of religious faith is something eternal, then the highest object of secular faith is this fragile life we sustain together.”

Are you ignoring, though, the motivation religious faith in a broader sense can provide? You yourself cite the Christian campaigner Martin Luther King in the book as someone committed to a noble cause.

“I seek to show that King’s living faith – the faith that is implicit in his practical commitment to emancipation and often explicit in his political speeches, as distinct from his religious sermons – is better understood in secular terms.

“Indeed, one of thing I’m trying to show is that even in the political speeches when he’s using religious language, King is using terms like ‘God’ not to name an eternal saviour but as a name for the idea of social freedom for all, an idea that we have legislated to ourselves and to which we hold ourselves.

“So instead of taking the lesson of King to be that we need religious faith to sustain our political commitments, the lesson is the secular faith at the heart of emancipatory struggle.”

By celebrating mortality you elevate the value of our finite time on Earth. How does this influence your thinking in the second part of the book when you turn to the economy and the best way of measuring wealth?

“This question of the measure of wealth is for me directly linked to the question of freedom. To lead 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 resources that allow us to pursue and cultivate our freedom as an end in itself.

“The positive measure of value should therefore be how much time we have to pursue the projects and fulfil the obligations that we can recognise as inherently valuable. This is what I call ‘socially available free time’, which requires a form of society that in its principles is devoted to our lives as ends in themselves.”

Does it follow that progressive reformers should focus less on income inequality and more on inequality of free time?

“It’s not that those sorts of reforms [targeting income inequality] are unimportant. But the more fundamental question is not how much income you have but the ability you have to own, and take responsibility for, the question of what is worth doing with your time.”

To lead a “free life”, how much free time exactly do I need?

“It’s very important to say free time in my sense is not necessarily leisure time. It’s time that you spend on activities that you recognise as intrinsically valuable and expressing your commitment. So that could be working really hard but in a way where you can see the point, or purpose, of what you’re doing.

“It is important also to say we can’t blueprint how much free time is enough. But we can create the institutions and forms of education which allow individuals to own the question... Why do you do what you do? ‘Well, because I have to earn a salary. Because I have to make a living.’ Those are not very good reasons to do something. And the better reasons we have for doing what we do, the more free we are in my sense.”

How ditching religious faith can set you free. By Joe Humphreys. The Irish Times , September 26, 2019.

I went to Boston’s Harvard Book Store to hear Yale Professor Martin Hägglund speak about his new book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, because books such as this are exceedingly rare. It is rare to find someone exploring the basis of what Hägglund calls secular faith. Faith is a difficult word for nonbelievers such as myself, who identify as a humanist. Faith has a difficult to define meaning, but is commonly understood to be belief in that which is unprovable, such as God, souls and the afterlife. These are religious concepts, because faith is commonly understood in religious terms.

For Hägglund, secular faith is a “commitment to the flourishing of finite life – sustainable forms of life on Earth – as an end in itself.” It is not the promise of salvation and a never-ending life in heaven that motivates humanity, says Hägglund. It is the fact that lives end and existence, even the existence of the Earth itself, is not guaranteed. It is finitude that makes things precious and worthy of protection, value and love, not eternity.

“Even though it is painful and difficult to be finite, that is also the condition for anything mattering, anything to be at stake, anything being valuable and worth caring about,” said Hägglund to the crowd of over fifty people who came to hear him speak in Boston. The event was organized in conjunction with Mass Humanities and Hägglund was interviewed by Harvard Professor James Wood.

Hägglund doesn’t just talk about religion. Freedom from religion’s promise of immortality necessitates a discussion about what freedom means in the here and now.

“To live a free life, it is not enough that we have the right to freedom,” writes Hägglund. “We must have access to the material resources as well as the forms of education that allow us to pursue ou freedom and to “own” the question of what to do with our time. What belongs to each of us – what is irreducibly our own – is not property or goods but the time of our lives.”

We are not infinite beings. We are finite, and that finitude makes our brief time the most precious thing we have. It is the essence of our freedom.

“An emancipated life is not a life that is free from work, but a life in which we pursue work on the basis of our own commitments,” writes Hägglund. “Even our socially necessary labor can be an expression of our freedom if it is shared for the sake of the common good.”

People who decry secularism sometimes say that without religion, without a promise of God, miracles and an afterlife, the world becomes denuded of meaning – grayer, emptier, less full, what Hägglund characterized as an apparent “existential and normative deficit in secular life.”

“My point… is not to say that everything is great about secularization, but rather that what we’re missing is not religious faith or the supernatural,” said Hägglund to his audience. “What we’re missing are social institutional forms that enable us to lead flourishing lives.”

Before getting to the video, let me quote Hägglund’s book one final time:

“…IF WE ARE ENGAGED IN A PROJECT OF CREATING GREATER SOCIAL JUSTICE, WE SHARE AN EXISTENTIAL COMMITMENT TO A SET OF PRINCIPLES AND A FORM OF PRACTICE THAT THE PRINCIPLES DEMAND. WE BELIEVE IN CERTAIN VALUES AND IN THE IMPORTANCE OF UPHOLDING THEM THROUGH CONTESTATION AND STRUGGLE. THIS EXISTENTIAL COMMITMENT IS SUBJECT TO THE NECESSARY UNCERTAINTY OF SECULAR FAITH. WE CANNOT BE CERTAIN THAT OUR COLLECTIVE PROJECT WILL HOLD TOGETHER AND THE CONSEQUENCES OF OUR ACTIONS ARE NOT GIVEN IN ADVANCE. THIS NECESSARY UNCERTAINTY PUTS THE PROJECT AT RISK – IT MAY NOT SUCCEED AND IT MAY FALL APART THROUGH INTERNAL DISSENT OR EXTERNAL CONFLICT. YET THE RISK IS ALSO THE MOTIVATIONAL FORCE THAT SUSTAINS OUR COMMITMENT TO THE PROJECT. WE DEVOTE OURSELVES TO SOCIAL JUSTICE BECAUSE IT IS NOT GIVEN AS FACT BUT REQUIRES OUR EFFORTS FOR ITS CONTINUED EXISTENCE. THIS DYNAMIC OF FAITH DOES NOT COME O AN END WHEN WE HAVE ACHIEVED THE SOCIAL JUSTICE FOR WHICH WE STRIVE, SINCE SOCIAL JUSTICE IS A FORM OF LIFE THAT ALWAYS HAS TO BE SUSTAINED. TO BE COMMITTED TO SOCIAL JUSTICE IS TO BE COMMITTED TO A PROJECT THAT LASTS FOR AS LONG AS THEIR ARE SOCIAL RELATIONS.”

Martin Hägglund talks about freedom, faith, and the emptiness of infinity. By Steve Ahlquist.  Uprise RI   , April 12, 2019. 

Yale Professor Martin Hägglund Discusses Freedom, Faith, and the Emptiness of Infinity.  The event at the Harvard Book Store was organized in conjunction with Mass Humanities and Hägglund was interviewed by Harvard Professor James Wood. April 2019.  YouTube.

At a recent conference on belief and unbelief hosted by the journal Salmagundi, the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson confessed to knowing some good people who are atheists, but lamented that she has yet to hear “the good Atheist position articulated.” She explained, “I cannot engage with an atheism that does not express itself.”

She who hath ears to hear, let her hear. One of the most beautifully succinct expressions of secular faith in our bounded life on earth was provided not long after Christ supposedly conquered death, by Pliny the Elder, who called down “a plague on this mad idea that life is renewed by death!” Pliny argued that belief in an afterlife removes “Nature’s particular boon,” the great blessing of death, and merely makes dying more anguished by adding anxiety about the future to the familiar grief of departure. How much easier, he continues, “for each person to trust in himself,” and for us to assume that death will offer exactly the same “freedom from care” that we experienced before we were born: oblivion.

No doubt much will depend on our definitions of “atheist” and “good.” But, if Pliny is too antique for Robinson, listen to Montaigne: the Montaigne who professed a nominal Christianity but proceeded as if his formal belief were essentially irrelevant to his daily existence, and perhaps even at odds with it; the Montaigne whose wanton pagan invocation of “fortune” in his essays provoked Vatican censors. Or attend to the work and life of Chekhov, the good nonbelieving doctor who asserted that his “holy of holies” was the human body, the writer whose adulterous characters in “The Lady with the Little Dog” stop to look at the sea near Yalta and are reminded that their small drama is nothing alongside the water’s timeless indifference:

 “And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings—the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky—Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.”

Or James Baldwin, that great recovering Christian, who once wrote, “I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being.” Or Primo Levi, who, when faced with death in Auschwitz, was briefly tempted to pray for rescue, and then did not pray, lest he blaspheme his own secularity. Or Camus, especially in “The Myth of Sisyphus” (a philosophical articulation of the atheistic world view), and in his rapturous unfinished novel, “The First Man” (a novelistic embodiment of the secular world view), in which his alter ego is possessed, from childhood, of “a love of bodies” that exalted him when he was able “just to enter into their radiance, to lean his shoulder against his friend’s with a great sensation of confidence and letting go, and almost to faint when a woman’s hand lingered a moment on his in the crowd of the trolley—the longing, yes, to live, to live still more, to immerse himself in the greatest warmth this earth could give him.”

Or Louise Glück’s extraordinary poem “Field Flowers,” narrated from the perspective of a flower, which chides its human visitors for thinking about eternal life instead of looking more closely at the flowers. In that poem, humans become spectral, and the natural world has the real, everlasting solidity:

  . . . Your poor

idea of heaven: absence

of change. Better than earth? How

would you know, who are neither

here nor there, standing in our midst?

Finally, Robinson could look at her own first novel, “Housekeeping,” which is essentially about people in rural Idaho constructing a usable creed out of the near at hand: scraps of the Bible, bits and pieces of culture and folklore, fantasies of resurrection, and a great deal of the natural world, thrillingly described. In that book, Robinson’s lovely phrase “the resurrection of the ordinary” means springtime, which unfailingly occurs every year, not the resurrection of human beings, which seems much more doubtful.

These are visions of the secular. A systematic articulation of the atheistic world view, the one Marilynne Robinson may have been waiting for, is provided by an important new book, Martin Hägglund’s “This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom” (Pantheon). Hägglund doesn’t mention any of the writers I quoted, because he is working philosophically, from general principles. But his book can be seen as a long footnote to Pliny, and shares the Roman historian’s humane emphasis: we need death, as a blessing; eternity is at best incoherent or meaningless, and at worst terrifying; and we should trust in ourselves rather than put our faith in some kind of transcendent rescue from the joy and pain of life. Hägglund’s book involves deep and demanding readings of St. Augustine, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (with some Theodor Adorno, Charles Taylor, Thomas Piketty, and Naomi Klein thrown in), but it is always lucid, and is at its heart remarkably simple. You could extract its essence and offer it to thirsty young atheists.

His argument is that religious traditions subordinate the finite (the knowledge that life will end) to the eternal (the “sure and certain hope,” to borrow a phrase from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, that we will be released from pain and suffering and mortality into the peace of everlasting life). A characteristic formulation, from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians, goes as follows: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” You die into Christ and thus into eternity, and life is just the antechamber to an everlasting realm that is far more wondrous than anything on earth. Hägglund, by contrast, wants us to fix our ideals and attention on this life, and more of it—Camus’s “longing, yes, to live, to live still more.” Hägglund calls this “living on,” as opposed to living forever.

His notion of religion seems to be northern-European Christian first and foremost; he is quiet about Judaism, whose practices are sensibly grounded in the here and now, and which lacks the intense emphasis on the afterlife characteristic of Islam and Christianity. (And he has very little to say about, for example, Hinduism.) Yet he wields a definition of religious faith wide enough for his purposes: “any form of belief in an eternal being or an eternity beyond being, either in the form of a timeless repose (such as nirvana), a transcendent God, or an immanent, divine Nature.” That should cover most contenders. Elsewhere, Hägglund defines “the religious aspiration to eternity” as part of any ideal that promises us that we will be “absolved from the pain of loss.” Defining the religious ideal in this way enables him to characterize, however unfairly, Stoicism, Buddhism’s Nirvana (a detachment from everything that is finite), and even Spinoza’s “pure contemplation as the highest good” as essentially religious.

The problem with eternity is not that it doesn’t exist (Hägglund is uninterested in the pin dancing of proof and disproof) but that it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value. This is a difficult truth to learn, because we are naturally fearful of loss, and therefore attached to the idea of eternal restoration. Hägglund, who was born and reared in Sweden and now teaches comparative literature at Yale, begins his book by telling us that he returns every summer to the northern-Swedish landscape he knows from his childhood. His love of the place is premised on the knowledge that he will not always be able to return; that he, or it, will not be there forever:

  

‘’When I return to the same landscape every summer, part of what makes it so poignant is that I may never see it again. Moreover, I care for the preservation of the landscape because I am aware that even the duration of the natural environment is not guaranteed. Likewise, my devotion to the ones I love is inseparable from the sense that they cannot be taken for granted. . . . Our time together is illuminated by the sense that it will not last forever and we need to take care of one another because our lives are fragile.’’

Once we seriously consider the consequences of existence without end, the prospect is not only horrifying but meaningless (as the philosopher Bernard Williams argued years ago). An eternity based on what Louise Glück calls “absence of change” would be not a rescue from anything but an end of everything meaningful. Hägglund puts forth his eloquent case: “Rather than making our dreams come true, it would obliterate who we are. To be invulnerable to grief is not to be consummated; it is to be deprived of the capacity to care. And to rest in peace is not to be fulfilled: It is to be dead.”

A liberal rabbi or pastor might object that Hägglund is unhelpfully hung up on eternity. Eternity is not at the heart of what such people care about; they hardly ever spend time envisaging it. But Hägglund’s central claim is that a good deal of what passes for religious aspiration is secular aspiration that doesn’t know itself as such. He wants to out religionists as closet secularists. When we ardently hope that the lives of people we love will go on and on, we don’t really want them to be eternal. We simply want those lives to last “for a longer time.” So his reply would probably be: Just admit that your real concerns and values are secular ones, grounded in the frailty, the finitude, and the rescue of this life. He makes a similar point in relation to Buddhism. He is happy to welcome, as essentially secular, those popular forms of meditation and mindfulness which insist on our being “present in the moment”; but he chides as religious and deluded those doctrinal aspects of Buddhism which insist on detachment, release from anxiety, and an overcoming of worldly desire.

Hägglund is a deconstructionist; his second book, “Radical Atheism” (2008), was about the work of Jacques Derrida. Put simply, deconstruction proceeds on the assumption that literary texts, like people, have an unconscious that often betrays them: they may say one thing, but they act as if they believe another thing entirely. Their own figures of speech are the slightly bent keys to their unlocking. “This Life” is a work of profound deconstruction. If the religious believer often behaves like an unconscious secularist, then one can assume that some of the great canonical religious texts will do something similar, revealing their actual procedures to a skeptic who is willing to read them against the grain.

Hägglund examines writing by C. S. Lewis, Augustine, and Kierkegaard with a generous captiousness, fair but firmly forensic. He begins with Lewis’s memoir of mourning, “A Grief Observed,” which the Christian writer and apologist wrote after the death of his wife of four years, Joy Davidman. It was a late and unexpected love affair; the book is notable for Lewis’s frank admission of his inconsolable grief, in the course of which he seems to grant that God’s eternal consolation could not be adequate to the loss of this particular worldly loved one. Lewis concedes, remarkably, that a religious mother who has lost her son might receive comfort at the level of “the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her,” but not in her earthly and all-consuming role as a mother. “The specifically maternal happiness must be written off,” Lewis allows. “Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.”

Hägglund admires this honesty, and is therefore baffled by Lewis’s account of Davidman’s deathbed words. “She said not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God,’ ” Lewis writes. “She smiled, but not at me. Poi si tornò all’eterna fontana.” The last line is from Dante’s Paradiso: “Then she turned toward the eternal fountain.” It is the moment at which Beatrice turns away from Dante, whom she loves, toward the everlasting light of God. Eternal beatitude has supplanted human connection. There is no Dante in Beatrice’s beatitude, Hägglund writes, and no Beatrice in Dante’s beatitude. “By analogy,” he observes, “there is no C. S. Lewis for Joy Davidman in heaven and no Joy Davidman for C. S. Lewis.” Lewis loved Davidman as an end in herself, Hägglund thinks, only to exchange that love at the last moment for a love of the eternal, making Davidman a means to an end.

It is the same when Augustine, in the “Confessions,” mourns the loss of a close friend—of a friendship that was “sweet to me beyond all the sweetness of life that I had experienced”—only to remind his readers that, as a good Christian, he should not have loved someone who could be so easily lost, rather than loving God, who can never be lost. It is the same when Martin Luther, grieving the death of his daughter in 1542, reminds his congregation after the funeral that “we Christians ought not to mourn.” And the same when Kierkegaard, in “Fear and Trembling,” praises Abraham for being ready to sacrifice his son Isaac at God’s command, sure in the knowledge that God will redeem his loss. In all these cases, Hägglund identifies the true dynamic, the true anguish, as secular desire—a natural anxiety about loss, a natural mourning of the lost one—horribly distorted by its corrective religious gloss. The supposed attraction of eternity, Hägglund writes, is that you cannot lose anything there. “But if you can lose nothing in eternity,” he goes on, “it is because there is literally nothing left to lose.”

The great merit of Hägglund’s book is that he releases atheism from its ancient curse: its sticky intimacy with theism. Hägglund has no need for a parasitical relationship to the host (which, for instance, contaminates the so-called New Atheism), because he’s not interested in disproving the host’s existence. So, instead of being forced into, say, rationalist triumphalism (there is no God, and science is His prophet), he can expand the definition of the secular life so that it incorporates many of the elements traditionally thought of as religious. Hägglund’s argument here is aided by Hegel’s thinking about religion. For Hegel, as Hägglund reads him, a religious institution is really just a community that has come together to ennoble “a governing set of norms—a shared understanding of what counts as good and just.” The object of devotion is thus really the community itself. “God” is just the name we give “the self-legislated communal norms (the principles to which the congregation holds itself),” and “Christ” the name we give the beloved agent who animates these norms.

It’s strange that Hägglund, in a book that moves so easily between Hegel and Marx, doesn’t mention the German philosopher who bridges those two thinkers, and who wrote more lucidly than either about religion: Ludwig Feuerbach. In “The Essence of Christianity” (1841), Feuerbach proposed that when human beings worship God they are simply worshipping what they themselves value, and are projecting those values onto the figment of objectivity they choose to call God. Feuerbach is particularly interesting on the question of immortality. He says that Heaven is the real God of man: it is Heaven we are really after. When Christians say, “If there is no immortality, then there is no God,” they are actually saying, “If I am not immortal, then there is no God.” They make God dependent on them. “As man conceives his heaven, so he conceives his God,” Feuerbach writes.

Feuerbach wanted to liberate human beings from their harmful self-deceptions, but Hägglund sees no imperative to disdain this venerable meaning-making projection, no need to close down all the temples and churches and wash them away with a strong dose of Dawkins. Instead, religious practice could be seen as valuable and even cherishable, once it is understood to be a natural human quest for meaning. Everything flows from the double assumption that only finitude makes for ultimate meaning and that most religious values are unconsciously secular. We are meaning-haunted creatures.

That is the theory, at least. I’m not sure Hägglund can quite summon this ideal generosity toward all forms of religious practice. In “Field Flowers,” Glück’s flower scoffs that “absence of change” is humanity’s “poor idea of heaven.” But the religious believer might object that Hägglund’s idea of eternity is equally poor. In fact, his book is in danger of becoming a victim of its own argumentative victories. For if most religionists perform in ways that are unconsciously secular, as he observes, don’t many secularists behave in ways that are unconsciously religious? Doesn’t Chekhov, in the passage I quoted, sound quite religious (“our eternal salvation . . . the higher aims of our existence”)? I suspect that Hägglund would claim this as precisely his point—and as a win for the secular side. He is insistent about the secular importance of enjoying things in themselves and for themselves; treating them as a means to a different end becomes, for him, almost a secondary definition of what is wrong with the religious impulse. But don’t most of us, nonbelievers and believers alike, often substitute one thing for another—which is to say, read the world allegorically? Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar.

None of these objections disarm Hägglund’s essential argument, which I find—having been raised in a Christian tradition relentlessly committed to preferring the eternal to the worldly—beautifully liberating. But “This Life” is aimed at what he sees as the very foundations of religious appeal; the buildings—the structures housing the exemptions, compromises, and fudges that religious people enact daily—interest him much less. He talks a good Hegelian game about the dignity of religious community, but actually he soars above it.

Yet you could not accuse “This Life” of being merely a work of theory. Hägglund wants to broadcast his good news evangelically—to slide from page to world, from map to journey. The second half of the book, by way of a long and dense reading of Marx, argues that the revaluation of everything we have formerly valued implies not just urgent spiritual redefinition but also political and economic transformation. A hundred pages or more on “Capital,” “Grundrisse,” and the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” might at first seem like an extended session of literary-theoretical self-pleasuring. But Marx is at the living center of “This Life,” not just as the slayer of religious and capitalist illusion but, more important, as the utopian who saw beyond merely negative critique. For it’s not enough to claim that religious values can be subsumed by secular ones. One has to lay out new, better secular values. Otherwise, why would religionists ever want to become secularists?

Savagely compressed, Hägglund’s argument goes something like this: If what makes our lives meaningful is that time ends, then what defines us is what Marx called “an economy of time.” Marx is, in this sense, probably the most secular thinker who ever lived, the one most deeply engaged with the question of what we do with our time. He divided life into what he called the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. Hägglund adopts these categories: the realm of necessity involves socially necessary labor and the realm of freedom involves socially available free time. Rationally, Hägglund says, we should strive to reduce the realm of necessity and increase the realm of freedom. But capitalism is systemically committed to exploiting most of us, and to steadily increasing the amount of labor at the expense of our freedom. Capitalism treats the means of economic life, labor, as though it were the purpose of life. But, if we are to cherish this life, we have to treat what we do as an end in itself. “The real measure of value,” Hägglund says, “is not how much work we have done or have to do (quantity of labor time) but how much disposable time we have to pursue and explore what matters to us (quality of free time).”

Rather than simply replace the realm of necessity with the realm of freedom—which would be impossible anyway, because there is always tedious and burdensome work to be done—we should be able to better “negotiate” the relationship between those realms. Hägglund gives an example of how this might be done when he talks about the way his own work on the book we are reading unites the two realms: writing “This Life” was labor, of course, but it was pursued as an end in itself, as a matter of intellectual inquiry. In a Hägglundian utopia, labor would be part of our freedom. Even drudgery—his example is “participating in the garbage removal in our neighborhood on a weekly basis”—could be an element of our freedom if we see it as part of a collective understanding that we are acting in order to reduce, in the aggregate, socially necessary labor time and to increase socially available free time. This revolution, he says, will require the “revaluation of value” (in Nietzsche’s phrase); and he criticizes a number of thinkers on the left, such as Thomas Piketty and Naomi Klein, for wanting to alter capitalism (via redistribution) rather than effectively abolish it (via a deep redefinition of value). Such people, he says, are stating that capitalism is the problem while also stating that capitalism is the solution.

Hägglund makes himself terribly vulnerable here—to critique, but perhaps also to teasing. The professor of comparative literature is wading into the alien depths of political economy. Worse, his version of democratic socialism proffers a three-point plan, one of whose stipulations is that “the means of production are collectively owned and cannot be used for the sake of profit.” He says that his plan would permit private property, as long as the property could not be “bought and sold for profit.” You could own a house, but only on the basis of “its concrete specificity as valuable to you.” Of course, what is valuable to me might also seem valuable to someone else who wanted my house. Surely the abolition of the market, of the human tendency to buy and barter, would demand a kind of aggressive, systematic state control that would be at odds with at least some of the freedom (“valuable to you”) so dear to Hägglund. An ideal democratic socialism that harmonizes Hägglund’s idea of freedom with the state’s necessarily different idea of freedom will come to America, I guess, not just when the mountain comes to Muhammad but when the tenured academic willingly gives up his Yale chair for a job at New Haven’s Gateway Community College. Like many readers, I get anxious when literary academics use the verb “negotiate” at tricky moments; it forecloses argument, and seldom means actual negotiation. Indeed, Hägglund is unusually weasel-wordy when he concedes that such negotiation will demand “an ongoing democratic conversation.” That’s putting it optimistically.

One could say that, in moving from theory to praxis, Hägglund’s secularity gets a touch religious, burning with correction. And what gets sacrificed, at least on the page, is freedom: in these sections, the reader feels less able to move about within his argumentation and test his propositions, and is instead hemmed in by an atmosphere of political certainty and utopian fervor. One can’t dispel the suspicion that the ideal life Hägglund is envisaging is something like his own—ethically and intellectually satisfying work, pursued as a worthy end in itself, with plenty of freedom and vacation time (though institutionally dependent on a busy, fertile capitalism). To be fair, one could say the same of Camus, when he asserts, in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” that “the absurd man” should try out, in the name of freedom, a variety of roles: the conqueror, the seducer, the actor, and the writer. Camus knew quite a lot about the last three of those roles.

And yet Hägglund’s very vulnerability increases my regard for his project. I admire his boldness, perhaps even his recklessness. And his fundamental secular cry seems right: since time is all we have, we must measure its preciousness in units of freedom. Nothing else will do. Once this glorious idea has taken hold, it is very hard to dislodge. Hägglund offers a fulfillment of what Marx meant by “irreligious criticism,” a criticism aimed at both religion and capitalism, because both forms of life obscure what is really going on: that, as Hägglund puts it, “our own lives—our only lives—are taken away from us when our time is taken from us.” We are familiar with the secular charge that religion is “life-denying.” Hägglund wants to arraign capitalism for a similar asceticism. Religion, you might say, enforces asceticism in the name of the spiritual; capitalism enforces asceticism in the name of the material.

I finished “This Life” in a state of enlightened despair, with clearer vision and cloudier purpose—I was convinced, step by step, of the moral rectitude of Hägglund’s argument even as I struggled to imagine the political system that might institute his desired revaluation of value. As if aware of such faintheartedness, he ends the book with a beautiful examination of Martin Luther King, Jr.—in particular the celebrated last speech he gave, in Memphis. Hägglund reminds us that King had studied Marx with care while a student, and that he told the Montgomery Advertiser, in 1956, that his favorite philosopher was Hegel. Toward the end of his life, King had begun to insist that society has to “question the capitalistic economy.” He called for what he described as “a revolution of values.” At a tape-recorded staff meeting for the Poor People’s Campaign in January, 1968, King appears to have asked for the recording to be stopped, so that he could talk candidly about the fact that, in the words of a witness, “he didn’t believe capitalism as it was constructed could meet the needs of poor people, and that what we might need to look at was a kind of socialism, but a democratic form of socialism.” King told the group that if anyone made that information public he would deny it.

Hägglund does his usual deconstructive reversal, and argues that King’s religiosity was really a committed secularism. At this point in the book, this looks less like a hermeneutic move than like an expected reality. We read the famous words of King’s last speech with new eyes, alert both to his secularism and to a burgeoning critique of capitalism that had to stay clandestine:

It’s all right to talk about “streets flowing with milk and honey,” but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can’t eat three square meals a day. It’s all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God’s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.

After the theory and the academic reversals and the grand proposals, Hägglund’s book ends, stirringly, with a grounded account of a man who died trying to use his precious time to change the precious time of oppressed people, aware that the full realization of his vision would likely involve a revaluation of value that could not yet be spoken in America. We still haven’t seen that system, and it’s hard to imagine it, but someone went up the mountain and looked out, and saw the promised land. And that land is in this life, not in another one.

If God Is Dead, Your Time Is Everything. By James Wood.  The New Yorker , May 13, 2019

If there’s one thing to be said for our otherwise desolate historical juncture, it’s that the question of how we should organise society appears to be back in play. A climate catastrophe of unknowable dimensions is taking shape on the horizon. Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to obliterate vast sections of the employment economy. The internet, for all its benefits, has led to an epistemological crisis of unprecedented scale, facilitating the international rise of demagogues and reactionary populists. For a generation of Europeans and Americans, the constitutive elements of a decent life – stable employment, affordable rent, the prospect of one day owning a home – are receding as rapidly as the ice caps. Capitalism’s failures and iniquities, in other words, have rarely been so palpable, and it seems more reasonable than ever to ask how this social arrangement might be overcome, and with what it might be replaced.

Two new books that explore those questions in very different ways are Clear Bright Future, by the NS contributing writer and former Channel 4 News economics editor Paul Mason, and This Life by Martin Hägglund, a professor of comparative literature and humanities at Yale. Both books proceed from an understanding of capitalism as an unjust system that limits rather than maximises human freedom, and both propose versions of democratic socialism – as distinct from social democracy – that arise from deep, critical and lively engagements with the writing of Karl Marx. In terms of style, pacing and basic intellectual approach, the similarities end more or less there.

Clear Bright Future begins as it means to continue – which is to say at speed, and with revolutionary intent. We join Mason in medias res, in Washington, DC about a minute into the presidency of Donald J Trump. He’s in the thick of a riot, a GoPro taped to his crash helmet, taking in the vista of smashed windows and flaming SUVs. The reader gets the impression of an author deep in his comfort zone. (Mason published a book in 2012 entitled Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere.) It’s an awkwardly self-dramatising note on which to begin, but it makes a kind of strategic sense. A riot, after all, is both a violent reaction to an oppressive political reality and an expression of volatile democratic energy. It’s this volatile energy that Mason wants to channel into the construction of a more humane world.

The book’s subtitle, “A Radical Defence of the Human Being”, gives a fair indication of where he’s coming from. Mason is concerned, among other things, with the ways in which contemporary capitalism dehumanises people, viewing them as “rational actors” in a market, or sources of data to be mined and surveilled, or labour to be exploited for profit. In a short but illuminating chapter on the creation of the “neoliberal self”, Mason outlines how the state over the past 40 years or so has become subordinate to the market, and how its purpose has devolved to one of sweeping away all aspects of life that remain non-commercial, from the supply of tap water to who we date. “If you invent a form of capitalism,” he writes, “where power surges suddenly towards an unaccountable and technologically armed elite, with a penchant for class confrontation, it becomes easy to destroy the liberal, democratic and universalist ethos most people in the West thought was permanent.”

As destructive as neoliberalism has been in its own right, one of its more threatening aspects, for Mason, is the extent to which its mechanistic logic – its insistence on total submission to the higher wisdom of “the market” – prepares the ground for a future in which we cede control of our affairs entirely to machines. Over the last three decades or so, he argues, free market capitalism has “produced a mass conversion to fatalism: the market knows best, all politicians have to be its servants, attempts to improve human society by design lead to gulags and concentration camps”. Submission to this logic, he insists, becomes a “gateway for submission to the logic of the machine”.

Mason goes deep on some pretty alarming ideas about the dangers of future AI. He takes at face value claims from the AI safety experts Steve Omohundro and Elezier Yudkowsky about the need to program “socialising and humanising objectives” into these technologies, lest we risk being enslaved by a superhuman intelligence that would “come to resemble a sociopath”. He seems  here to be susceptible to a kind of magical thinking about AI that is common among Silicon Valley types, a quasi-religious conviction that this technology will either redeem or destroy us. If we program these algorithms with the right objectives and “human values”, he argues, AI could be “the tool that liberates humanity” by abolishing class divisions. Mason doesn’t go into much detail as to how this might come about, but it’s worth bearing in mind that the people who work closest with artificial intelligence tend to be wary of such grand claims about the technology’s transformative possibilities.

Despite the strain of techno-utopianism, one of the book’s central contentions is that there has been a wholesale relinquishing of humanist thinking on the left, making it difficult to defend against the encroachment of machine logic. For this he blames, predictably, academic postmodernist philosophy. “Postmodernism,” he writes, “turned relativism into a secular religion, whose first commandment is: nothing is true.”

It’s a frustrating line of argument, in which Mason makes huge claims for the perniciousness of postmodernism without engaging in any real depth with the complex critique of modernity in the work of thinkers such as Foucault and Baudrillard. He views postmodernism as an essentially prescriptive project, as opposed to a descriptive one that aimed to analyse the conditions of life under capitalism. (This is a bit like accusing Nietzsche of deicide for declaring the death of God: a straightforward case of shooting the messenger. Indeed, Nietzsche gets similarly short shrift here: Mason presents him as a kind of in-house aphorist of the alt-right, which seems at best drastically reductive.)

Mason spends a lot of time picking fights that don’t obviously further the book’s cause. There’s an entire chapter devoted to criticising progressives’ adoption of Hannah Arendt, in the wake of Trump’s election, as the great analyst of the dynamics of totalitarianism. (Arendt, he argues, was unable to see fascism as “the elite’s response to the possibility of working class power”, and was convinced that the United States’s origins in Enlightenment ideas guaranteed its immunity to totalitarian impulses.) There’s also a chapter breaking down the world-view of Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping.

Clear Bright Future covers a lot of territory in 300 pages, but its impressive range is often at the expense of real depth. A detour via, say, the neuroscience of decision making – outlining experiments showing how the brain initiates action hundreds of milliseconds before registering a conscious decision to do so – is interesting in itself, and goes some way toward illuminating a mood of fatalism in our culture, but leaves the reader wondering what it ultimately adds up to. Given the book’s frenetic pace and eclectic range, it’s also odd how little thought is devoted to what is surely the most pressing question in any consideration of the future: climate change. The subject is not entirely ignored; but to give you some idea of scale, Mason spends not much more time discussing it than he does Mark Ravenhill’s hit 1996 play Shopping and Fucking.

As the book progresses, the omission starts to seem increasingly odd, as though the prospect of ecological catastrophe was simply too dark and unknowable to be incorporated into its vision of a clear bright future. (Alternatively, it could be that Mason is quietly pinning his hopes on the problem being solved by the same AI algorithm that abolishes class divisions.)

Mason is at his best – his most passionate and persuasive – on the topic of Marx, whom he successfully portrays as a philosopher of human freedom, whose thought was distorted and weaponised by the totalitarian communist regimes of the 20th century. The populist right are still terrified of Marx’s thought, he writes, because “stripped of its authoritarian impulses, it can still be the most important source of a radical strategy of resistance”.

Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom similarly portrays Marx’s philosophy as a project of liberation, but takes a different approach. Though it’s lucidly written, and at times beautifully so, it is unmistakably a work of philosophy; where Mason proceeds at a brisk polemical clip, Hägglund moves through his argument with scholarly pace and purpose. Though his style is more careful and deliberate, Hägglund’s book is also more deeply radical in its aims. He wants to effect a revolutionary change in our understanding of value, in our economies and in our lives.

The first half of the book, entitled “Secular Faith”, is given over to a case against religion. This might at first seem counterintuitive, given the political nature of Hägglund’s project, but because he wants to argue for democratic socialism as the system that most honours our lives and our freedom, he intends to establish that it’s the finite nature of those lives that give them value in the first place. He’s not interested in the sort of rationalist “disproof” of religion that makes the New Atheists seem so intellectually unserious. His quarrel with the gods is, rather, an existential one.

At the risk of oversimplifying, the form it takes is something like this: if you believe in the eternal life of the soul, then you necessarily believe that death is not an absolute loss. Religious faith, he argues, devalues this life as an end in itself, by viewing it as a means to salvation, or as a staging post en route to the eternal. We only truly realise what we have – in our own lives, in those of our loved ones, in the fragile natural world in which we spend our limited time together – when we accept its loss as final.

If we care for our lives and those of others as ends in themselves, Hägglund argues, then regardless of how deep you consider your faith to be, you are acting on the basis of what he calls “secular faith”. The obvious argument against this is that religious people – constantly, everywhere – act in ways that show deep concern for the value of this life as an end in itself, and do so because of their religious faith. But no, counters Hägglund: if they’re acting in such a way, their actions have little to do with that faith. I’m not religious, but this seems to me a little too neat to do justice to the complexity and richness of the relationship between faith and morality.

It’s in the book’s second half (“Spiritual Freedom”) that Hägglund turns his attention to more directly political matters, arguing – via a detailed and at times demanding reading of Marx – for democratic socialism as the means of honouring that secular faith and pursuing the ideal of human freedom. If we accept that our time is finite, and that its finitude is what gives it value, then we need to take seriously the question of what to do with it, and how to maximise the amount of it we spend in free pursuit of our own ends.

Rather than the theorist of historical inevitability he is often seen as, Hägglund’s Marx is, like Mason’s, a thinker whose fundamental interest was freedom, and whose basic principles the totalitarian communist regimes of the last century failed to grasp.

Hägglund wants to use Marx to reclaim for the left the fundamental ideal of freedom. This task is all the more important, he writes,

because the appeal to freedom in recent decades 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. Only in light of a commitment to freedom can we render anything intelligible as oppression, exploitation, or alienation.

Following Marx’s lead, Hägglund divides life into two competing realms: the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. The former is all the stuff we have to do to continue living – work, in one way or another – and the latter is what we do with the free time left over. Capitalism, for all its rhetorical association with individualism and freedom, operates by maximising the realm of necessity at the expense of the realm of freedom – which is to say by extracting as much labour as possible for as low a wage as possible.

The priority under capitalism is always profit, and so we must in one way or another prioritise doing what is profitable, even if it’s at the expense of other necessities, such as living a meaningful or spiritually fulfilling life. But if we take seriously the idea of life’s finitude, we have to redefine value from the ground up, locating it not in labour time, but in what we do within the realm of our freedom. “The first principle of democratic socialism,” as he puts it, “is that we measure our wealth – both individual and collective – in terms of socially available free time.”

As with Mason’s book – and as with the vast majority of critiques of capitalism – This Life is more lucid in its handling of what is wrong with the present system than in its delineation of what might replace it. But the book’s central contention is powerful, and remarkably simple: that what matters is our time, and our freedom to choose what to do with it, and that only by overcoming capitalism can we build a world with the true value of human life at its centre. “To make our emancipation actual,” as Hägglund says in the book’s stirring final lines, “will require both our political mobilisations and our rational reflections, our labour and our love, our anxiety and our passion. We only have a chance to achieve democratic socialism if we grasp that everything is at stake in what we do with our finite time together.”

Life after capitalism. By Mark O'Connell.  New Statesman , July 3, 2019

Swedish-born multi-lingual academic Martin Hägglund lives in New York and teaches philosophy and comparative literature at Yale. His new book, This Life, is a substantial examination of secular faith in contrast to religious faith.

He defines secular faith as devotion to life as it is lived, with all its uncertainties, joys and loss. His argument is the opposite of strident. Rather, it is a heartfelt and radical take on the notion of faith. Hägglund presupposes that to think of life as finite is itself a faith; death is the background against which life appears.

Hägglund accepts life as finite and proposes that our own lives are what we make of it. This point of view emphasises our individual responsibility and our freedom to exercise that responsibility. Life is for life’s sake. If we tend towards eternity, nothing we do matters except as an impossible progression towards an immutable state. We cannot depend on ideas of the eternal – of extrinsic rules from some divine otherworldly imposition – because that means the value of life and its loss is meaningless.

Hägglund makes his point in different ways. There is a frisson of shock as he quotes the words of comfort offered by Barack Obama, a publicly committed Christian, at the memorial service of Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, when he quoted Jesus “Let the little children come to me”. Hägglund suggests that the logical end of these sentiments suggests the killings were not ultimately a tragedy but “a transitional stage on the way toward God”. God, Obama was saying, called them home.

He draws on many writers and philosophers, segueing from a meticulous examination of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s seven volume autobiographical My Struggle to Proust’s six volume In Search of Lost Time, while folding in the writing of economist Thomas Piketty, social commentator Naomi Klein and St Augustine. In a few hundred pages of philosophy, politics and economics he takes in Kierkegaard on the story for Abraham and Isaac, refers to Hitler and Mein Kampf, Adorno, Martin Luther, John Stuart Mill, and scores of the most significant writers, theorists, philosophers and economists of the past and present. It is an erudite reading list.

Heroes feature. The core of the book is a reading of Karl Marx which differs from conventional interpretations, cogently noting that the authoritarian state was the least desirable panacea for society. Extrapolating from Marx, Hägglund argues not for what he calls a social democracy but for democratic socialism. He outlines this in some detail, alongside a quietly devastating take down of capitalism as well as the notion that reforming capitalism is possible.

The other radical hero is Martin Luther King, whose political speeches were absolutely about life as it was to be lived, and what actions were to be taken to reach those goals. He forbade the reporting and recording of speeches where he actually used the word socialism and his activism is carefully examined – as is the basis of potential reform being economic.

If King and Marx are in different ways his ideal political philosophers, the philosopher he admires most is Hegel, whose ideas thread through the book.

Partly, his argument captures the ways in which our attitudes transform how we live. Hägglund is concerned with religious faith and the ways in which it may blind us towards what we should do with the finite life we have, but also with what he calls political theology. He concludes that the only way forward is acknowledging that we own the responsibility of our life together and that ultimately it is destructive to “assume that we must defer to higher authority than we the people in order to hold together as a community”. It is not the New Jerusalem we must look to – but New York, or New Memphis: “if we help one another to own our only life.”

He offers “a secular vision of why everything depends of what we do with our time together”. The decline of religious faith is not to be lamented. Rather, it provides an opportunity to make explicit and strengthen our secular faith in this life as an end in itself.” The italics are the author’s, and indeed his use of italics throughout, is a curious and touching echo of the way students underline important points in lecture notes for emphasis.

Hägglund’s This Life is a highly readable, accessible – yet profound – examination of what kind of society might enable life at its most fulfilling. Whilst realising our interdependence, we have to be responsible for our own fragile lives. The theses may be heavy, but the discussions and analyses, however complex, are written with a light touch and beguiling clarity which is both wholly absorbing and deeply relevant. The reader is complicit, a partner. It is a book to read slowly, and this reviewer is about to start reading it all over again.

Martin Hägglund: This Life - Why Mortality Makes Us Free review - profound book to be read slowly. By Martina Vaizey.  The Arts Desk, August 4, 2019.

Years ago, the magazine US Catholic ran a headline that had the air of being written by a devout believer who had just had an appalling realisation: “Heaven: Will It Be Boring?” If he believed in heaven, the Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund would answer with an unequivocal yes. And not merely boring: utterly devoid of meaning. “If I believed that my life would last forever,” he writes, “I could never take my life to be at stake.” The question of how to use our precious time wouldn’t arise, because time wouldn’t be precious. Faced with any decision about whether to do something potentially meaningful with any given hour or day – to nurture a relationship, create a work of art, savour a natural scene – the answer would always be: who cares? After all, there’s always tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.

I sometimes feel oppressed by my seemingly infinite to-do list; but the truth is that having infinite time in which to tackle it would be inconceivably worse. The question at issue here isn’t whether heaven exists. In This Life – a sweepingly ambitious synthesis of philosophy, spirituality and politics, which starts with the case for confronting mortality, and ends with the case for democratic socialism – Hägglund takes it for granted that it doesn’t. Instead, his point is that we shouldn’t want it to. Religious people, even if they don’t believe in a literal place called heaven (“white bean bags, 24-hour room service, fat babies with wings”, to quote Alan Partridge), nonetheless believe that what truly matters most in life belongs to the realm of the eternal and divine. The result is “a devaluation of our finite lives as a lower form of being”. Hägglund’s alternative, “secular faith”, insists that our finite lives are all we have – and that this finitude, far from being a cause for regret, is precisely what gives them meaning.

His annual family holiday, in his childhood home on Sweden’s wind-battered Baltic coast, is valuable because he won’t be around to experience such things for ever, he argues, and because his family relationships are therefore equally fragile and transient. Even the landscape in which the house stands is shifting, as glaciers melt. And it’s only from the standpoint of secular faith, Hägglund insists, that you can really care about the climate crisis at all. If our finite lives are only a means to eternal salvation, the destruction of life can’t matter in a truly ultimate sense.

There’s a glaring problem with all this as a critique of religion, which is that religious believers manifestly do find meaning in daily life, are devoted to their relationships, and care about the fate of the planet. (Hägglund acknowledges as much, but suggests they are acting from secular faith when they do so, risking the weird conclusion that religion isn’t all that religious.) A more interesting question is how far even the secular among us remain locked in the “eternalist” mindset, thereby inadvertently sapping our lives of meaning. Like any good rationalist, I know I’m going to die, but I’m not sure I really believe it; if I did, I probably wouldn’t spend so much time on Twitter. In other words, I can’t say that I live every moment of my life with an awareness that “everything depends on what we do with our time together”. This Life makes a forceful case – via readings of Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Ove Knausgaard, St Augustine and CS Lewis, among many others – for keeping that truth in mind.

 Yet these lofty thoughts comprise only half its argument. The other half is political. If our finite lives are all we have, it follows that time is the basis of all value – and the best form of society is the one that maximises our freedom to use that time as we wish. Through a detailed re-examination of the writings of Karl Marx, Hägglund concludes that capitalism can never be that system, since it’s committed to using whatever time surplus it generates in the service of further growth. When you sell your labour for a wage, you’re selling your life – and capitalism, even if it rewards you with great wealth, will always want more of your life. For Hägglund, democratic socialism – of a kind far more radical than anything proposed by Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn – is the only way to maximise what he calls “spiritual freedom”: the power to devote as much of your time as possible to what matters most to you.

This certainly sounds preferable to the politics associated with the philosopher most famously obsessed by human finitude, Martin Heidegger, who opted for nazism instead. Still, the usual objections arise: how would you prevent the bureaucratic structures necessary for implementing this freedom from making life much less free? What do you do about seemingly intrinsic human urges, like acquisitiveness, competition, or the desire to provide for one’s descendants? Would tasks like “participating in the garbage removal in our neighbourhood on a weekly basis” really become suffused, under democratic socialism, with camaraderie and meaning? But it’s best not to treat the book as an election manifesto. The fundamental point is that our fleeting time together is all that counts; you can’t take it with you, and our politics fails us to the extent that it has us chasing any goal other than using it for what counts.

Maybe it goes without saying that reflections on building a meaningful secular life are absent from Outgrowing God, Richard Dawkins’s latest fulmination against religion, this time aimed at a young adult audience. Like other luminaries of what we should probably now be calling the nearly new atheism, Dawkins’s goals are demolitionary. And so a familiar liturgy, recited in a familiar tone of exasperation, fills the book’s first half. Since you already don’t believe in “Jupiter or Poseidon or Thor or Venus or Cupid or Snotra or Mars or Odin or Apollo”, why randomly believe in one other god, the bearded old man of the Bible? Don’t you realise there’s no evidence for Jesus’s miracles, and not much evidence for the rest of the story? Besides, what kind of mean-spirited deity would drown almost every living thing he’d created, sparing only “Mr and Mrs Giraffe, Mr and Mrs Elephant, Mr and Mrs Penguin and all the other couples” admitted to Noah’s Ark? It’s possible, I suppose, that younger readers will find this less condescending than I did. It’s also possible that they won’t.

Unlike Hägglund, Dawkins never explicitly addresses what it is that makes life meaningful, if the answer isn’t religious faith. So it’s ironic that the book’s (vastly better) second half, on the evolutionary origins of life, vividly demonstrates the spirit of scientific discovery that has made life meaningful for Dawkins himself. His contagious enthusiasm renders the basics of natural selection newly astonishing; triumphs of evolution such as the way humans gestate other humans, or how starlings manage to co‑ordinate themselves in thousand-strong flocks, strike the reader as mind-blowing, as do other truths of biology and physics: that every glass of water you drink probably contains a molecule that passed through the bladder of Julius Caesar; or that two bullets, one fired horizontally from a rifle and the other dropped to the ground, will (assuming a vacuum) land at the very same time.

Who can doubt that the discoverers of this sort of knowledge took their limited time seriously, and used it well? As for Dawkins himself, his career in evolutionary biology might stand as an exemplar of the kind of life Hägglund urges us to live – a finite existence, devoted to the fragile and collaborative human endeavour of expanding scientific understanding. But atheism alone can’t explain why it should matter to spend your time that way. For that you need secular faith, a belief in the value of our finite projects as ends in themselves. And Dawkins, however intensely this might irritate him, gives every sign of being a true believer.

This Life and Outgrowing God review – heaven, atheism and what gives life meaning. By Oliver Burkeman. The Guardian , October 2, 2019.

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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