Hagglund develops the idea that religious life is a mode of alienation, but this rather mundane idea has interesting consequences…
If we live life as if our real life was somewhere else after we are dead, we suffer from “a devaluation of our finite lives as a lower form of being.” We tend to assume that “finite life is not enough, that there has to be something beyond it.” Even the potential destruction of everything is trivial compared to eternal life. As St Paul says:
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.
With this attitude, there is no way of relating to the world, to people, or to animals and plants as they really are. Hagglund claims that:
To be invulnerable to grief is not to be consummated; it is to be deprived of the capacity to care.
This is the way the Christian Religion (not alone) has tended to argue – our concentration should be on the eternal not the passing. This focus is magnified because the stakes are so high – either death and/or eternal pain, or eternal life free of misery. A case could be made that this is a Christian innovation, ‘Old Testament’ Judaism is not the same – there seems to be no inherent transcendent immortality project).
This spiritual tradition is probably why it has been so easy for the west to dismiss animals as if they were empty (soulless) machines, and the world as if it was dirt, while simultaneously trying to prevent change and freeze the ideal, when change is the way of natural processes. The world we live in is not a being (or beings) in its own right, with its own necessary imperatives, but something to be abandoned, or bent into the unchanging image of the eternal. Hence, to the religious, action to preserve the world in its fluxing imperfections can seem ridiculous – God will end the world sometime anyway, so what’s the point of trying to preserving the non-eternal.
We can have people assuring us, that the world cannot pass away without God requiring it to be so, when the question is whether a livable world can pass away, and what do we do to prevent this.
He says:
I’m trying to show that it’s not just that eternal life is unattainable. It’s actually undesirable, because if you remove the possibility of death you also remove life, if you remove the possibility of grief you also remove joy. These things go together.
Nietzsche, if I remember correctly, argued that in a religion of omnipotency there can be no tragedy, because everything has to end up as God wills, and that must be good, no matter how much suffering there is – we ultimately loose our ability to relate to others because suffering fits into that demanded good. If people die horribly then God has either taken them to heaven, or damned them to hell. In either case feeling upset, in itself, is an expression of disloyalty to God’s omnipotence and peace. And this is a point made repeatedly by theologians from Augustine to Luther and Lewis.
Hagglund suggests that, in practice, many religious people do care about daily life, and are distressed by the loss of those they love (even if they are supposedly eternal) and, to that extent, they are either non-religious or their religion is undermined by necessity of living and their humanity. Similarly ‘secular’ people undermine their secularity by attempting to deny or avoid finitude and death as is argued by Ernest Becker’s denial of death thesis.
Religious people often suggest that atheism is a religion; here Hagglund is returning the favour and arguing that religious people are really secular to the extent that they are human and not what we might call ‘spiritual cybermen’ – all human imperfections removed.
However, if our finite lives are all we have, then time is the basis of all experiential value – “and the best form of society is the one that maximises our freedom to use that time as we wish…,” “everything depends on what we do with our time together.” There is a sense in which ‘time is life’ as there is no known life without time, and without that life occurring through events. The search for a society which allows maximum free time availability and usage, is part of our way of relating to the world.
Whatever its strengths, Hagglund, argues that capitalism can never be a system which maximises free time and hence freedom, since the system will always tend to enforce the use of whatever time ‘surplus’ you can generate in its service. That is, in service of further growth, more consumption, and further job-work. We can add that your survival, both moral and practical, depends on working at the commands of a boss, or an organisation. Capitalism is a system which is anti-democratic at its heart, although you can be taught to believe freedom involves flitting from one boss to another, and buying products you don’t need.
When we sell our labour, or thoughts, or commitment, for a wage so as to survive in the only way allowed to those who are not independently wealthy, we are selling away our lives. “Capitalism, even if it rewards you with great wealth, will always want more of your life.”
We can notice that despite attempts in the socialist 20th century to reduce working hours and ensure that workers earned enough to feed and house their families and spend time each week off work, that since the triumph of neoliberalism from the 1980s onwards, work hours have increased, many people need to work in more than one job to survive, and in the US people may work and need food stamps to survive. All the “labour-saving devices” we own tend to just free us for more job-work – and this is despite consistent promises during the last 100 years that constructive leisure for ordinary people would increase through free markets and mechanisation.
Given the demands of capitalism, people in our everyday world tend never have any time and feel overwhelmed and empty, even while they are working away their lives in the hope of eventually having free time – which, for most of us, will never eventuate, or eventuate only briefly in our old age, when we probably cannot use it any more, or are saving for our increasingly time starved children.
To lead a free life, it’s not enough that we have formal rights to freedom. We must also have access to the material resources and the forms of education that allow us to own and engage the question of what we ought to do with our time together. What really is our own is not property or goods, it’s the time of our lives.
Capitalism, as an ideal and as a practice, may also be based a need to engage in ecological destruction of the ‘dirt world’ to make cheap goods, and these destructions will eventually end the possibility of free time. It has probably inherited this contempt for ‘material nature’ through our spiritual traditions.
My love remarked the other day that with the COVID quarantine, that as well as us having lower pollution and poisoning, it seemed that people were walking and engaging with their local world and even their children. With some control over their work, or lack of work, they were in some moments, relating to the real world again. She wondered if this might lead to a change of attitude, that could translate into a reluctance to meekly go along with eco-destruction.
I, being a pessimist, think it more likely that once they get submerged in the endless demands of job-work, that they will stop feeling the world, and feel harassed again. Indeed one function of a job, is to fill up your time, stop you from thinking and feeling, and help to allow the system to keep on grinding to destruction, and others to make a profit.
Perhaps people become so miserable in their jobs, that it helps global destruction. People come to want it all to end, as destruction is the only freedom they can see as ever arriving, and hence they ignore the signs, or welcome them….
Freedom in capitalism can also be constrained, because of the apparent ultimate need to make a monetary profit. We cannot engage in the discussion of what we value apart from this need for (powerful people to) profit. So we are inherently limited in our response and our values and driven by the need to cut what may be important away to decrease cost and increase profit.
We have to hold open our understanding of the deeper problems with how we measure value in our society in general… we ultimately need a revaluation of value rather than a mere redistribution of wealth
This is similar to Ruskin’s criticism of capitalism’s destruction of ethics, relationship and beauty. Capitalism cannot be the answer to a question it cannot ask.
Haaglund apparently concludes that democratic socialism is the answer, but this assumes that capitalism has only one “opposite” when there have been many different systems of governance and organisation, although not many geared to maximising free time since we retreated from hunting, gathering and casual cultivating.
The harm is not just in capitalism, it is, for example, clearly possible to have a military society in which your time is totally consumed by training and by war, and you never have time for life.
In any case, the building of possible new ways of life do not “exist independently of the way we are sustaining and devoting ourselves to them.” Which to me is another way of saying the means must be in harmony with the ends – wherever possible.
The ends are also finite ends – there is no theocratic paradise here or elsewhere. The fragility of what we aim for is intrinsic and valuable. Indeed value can depend on the fragility. If we aim at the eternal, there may be no value as it cannot be lost and reality is elsewhere. Perhaps only by knowing we could destroy the world can we come to not take it for granted.
Even if we achieve an emancipated society, we’re always going to have to sustain the forms of justice to which we are committed at the risk of failing to do that, and that’s part of what makes it a living project.
Whatever you think of all this, it seems to me me the question of how we work towards a society which enables us the maximum time to devote to lives that give us meaning, without deflecting the meaning to the transcendental and away from the earth, is perhaps one of the most important questions there is.
Quotations:
From this review:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/02/this-life-martin-hagglund-outgrowing-god-richard-dawkins-review
and this interview:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/05/this-life-martin-hagglund-review-interview
Tags: activism, free markets, philosophy
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 
Leave a comment