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dcjones 's review for:
This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
by Martin Hägglund
This is a book about atheism, but it would be wrong to group it with books by Dawkins, Harris, or Hitchens. Where popular books on atheism largely focus on ridiculing the irrationality and lack of empirical evidence supporting religious belief, or casting it in the causal role of various atrocities, Hägglund has a more constructive project in mind. As he writes late in the book, echoing Marx: "If we merely criticized religious beliefs as illusions—without being committed to overcoming the forms of social injustice that motivate these illusions—the critique of region would be empty and patronizing. The task is rather to transform our social conditions in such a way that people no longer need to have recourse to the opium of religion and can affirmatively recognize the irreplaceable value of their own lives."
His argument follows in two parts. The first part seeks to invert a the common assertion by the religious that without some higher order or transcendence, there is no basis for a moral or meaningful life. Hägglund argues that the opposite is true: eternity renders our temporary mortal lives inconsequential in comparison. Only in realizing that our lives are impermanent, that wasted time can never be recovered, and that death is a permanent end, does what we do have real stakes. Committing oneself to undertakings and to people bounded by this risk and impermanence is what he defines as "secular faith".
The second part, argues that the implication of this outlook is that our goal should be the expansion of "spiritual freedom": the freedom to ask ourselves not just what we ought to to do with our time, but if we ought to do what we supposedly ought to do. From this perspective, the collective wealth of a society is the degree to which people have the time and ability to do so. This concept of wealth and value is incompatible with capitalism. (My brain being math-addled, I would say that capitalism optimizes the wrong objective function.) Contrary to Keynes' predictions, capitalism will never produce a 15-hour work week, and social-democratic redistributive policies will always be limited by arguments that they diminish the wealth they seek to redistribute. Only under some form of democratic socialism, where true social wealth is strived towards, Hägglund argues, will we get free.
Along the way, we get some deep readings of Kierkegaard, Knausgaard, Hegel, Marx, Martin Luther, and Martin Luther King Jr., among many others. The book doesn't assume a deep philosophical background, but neither is it a breezy polemic typical of atheist-lit. It demands something of the reader, but it is profound and very moving in parts.
His argument follows in two parts. The first part seeks to invert a the common assertion by the religious that without some higher order or transcendence, there is no basis for a moral or meaningful life. Hägglund argues that the opposite is true: eternity renders our temporary mortal lives inconsequential in comparison. Only in realizing that our lives are impermanent, that wasted time can never be recovered, and that death is a permanent end, does what we do have real stakes. Committing oneself to undertakings and to people bounded by this risk and impermanence is what he defines as "secular faith".
The second part, argues that the implication of this outlook is that our goal should be the expansion of "spiritual freedom": the freedom to ask ourselves not just what we ought to to do with our time, but if we ought to do what we supposedly ought to do. From this perspective, the collective wealth of a society is the degree to which people have the time and ability to do so. This concept of wealth and value is incompatible with capitalism. (My brain being math-addled, I would say that capitalism optimizes the wrong objective function.) Contrary to Keynes' predictions, capitalism will never produce a 15-hour work week, and social-democratic redistributive policies will always be limited by arguments that they diminish the wealth they seek to redistribute. Only under some form of democratic socialism, where true social wealth is strived towards, Hägglund argues, will we get free.
Along the way, we get some deep readings of Kierkegaard, Knausgaard, Hegel, Marx, Martin Luther, and Martin Luther King Jr., among many others. The book doesn't assume a deep philosophical background, but neither is it a breezy polemic typical of atheist-lit. It demands something of the reader, but it is profound and very moving in parts.