This Life

This is a highly recommended read if you are a nonbeliever who nevertheless has ever felt some amount of disappointment at the supernatural stories of the church of your youth not being true, or are somewhat baffled and disturbed by the idea of your permanent death (or that of your loved ones), having only known your own consciousness, even if it's comprehensible that you didn't exist before you were born, and eternal life doesn't really make sense. The only of the mid 2000s public atheists I really enjoyed was Christopher Hitchens, and even he I think fell well short of the “well, now what?” question. This book isn't really in dialogue with him as much as the entire history of philosophy, which can occasionally read as sort of pompous (e.g., “I unlock a new understanding of Marx's theory of value,” etc.), but goes along with his thesis. Marx already wrote his books. It is our privilege as those living afterwards to not have to reinvent the wheel. Our task as the people who are alive now is to take the ideas, the causes forward.

Some questions he takes a rather detailed look at. When we evince a desire to not die, what might “eternal life” or “infinity” actually look like? (I love the Who's song “Heaven and Hell” which describes the cartoon version in an unironic way: “On top of the sky is a place where you go if you've done nothing wrong, And down in the ground is a place where you go if you've been a bad boy.” ... of course this book goes well past that idea.) Is there any way that it could ever make sense to us? He says no; in his term it is “unintelligible” and undesirable. Not for nothing does the Twilight Zone present hell as a place where you always win at cards. Moreover the logic even makes the idea of being a God an undesirable thing (“An infinite being cannot value anything and cannot lead a spiritual life, since nothing is urgent and nothing is at stake”), which fit with some portrayals in the Bible (messing around with Job because he's bored?) or in Homer (the rather silly scenes in the Iliad of some of the gods attempting to fight on the battlefield have much less dignity than the battles between the mortals, and their immortality is what makes it so silly) and much other literary portrayal of gods. The finite life we have is not just the hand we've been dealt, so take it and don't complain, but rather necessary for meaning.

Once you get past that, how should we live, either as individuals (not really possible in a pure sense, he argues–even a person who chooses to live alone in the woods has a social understanding of their isolation ... but you do have to make choices about what to care about and commit yourself to. Ed Tom in “No Country for Old Men” describes this as “A man would have to put his soul at hazard.”) or as a society? And through a very careful logical structure, Hagglund arrives at democratic socialism, not as a better political program than another in the way that blueberries are better than blackberries, but as a true prerequisite for every person to be able to live their own life in freedom.

I have long considered myself a socialist, but I hadn't gone so far as to ever read the likes of Marx or Hegel, both of which struck me if only by reputation as too recondite to be useful primary texts for a broader political understanding for non specialists or any sort of practical organizing of and with one's fellow citizens. (I did read Marx's thing about religion as “the opium of the people” and skimmed my way through the Communist Manifesto in college, but that's it, I believe.) Hagglund does a nice job of explicating Marx and Hegel and many others and in using their ideas to build from. I don't know if this means I will ever run out and read the Phenomenology of Spirit, but it's more likely than it was last month. I would like some more practical ideas about how to bring about democratic socialism, but part of Hagglund's point is that it has to be democratic. Neither he or anyone else can swoop in with the best plan and force it upon anyone else.

Combining this with “The Jakarta Method,” another recent read, part of the landscape of fascists and capitalists we see in 2021 is a legacy of the mass murder and repression of would-be socialists and communists in the 20th century. Simply put, what did the western states encourage to grow and multiply and what did they work to weed out? (possibly with more success than we can really even understand, because we can only have a very dim and unfalsifiable sense of all the things that didn't happen as a result.) Hagglund perceptively notes, writing of Martin Luther King, “the murder of King belongs to a number of murders of socialist organizers in the 1960s.” It makes sense that if democracy is socialist, that the response of the capitalists and fascists is increasingly going to be to attack democracy itself. https://popula.com/2020/12/09/yes-democracy-is-socialism/ It makes comprehensible the growth of the reactionary right to be more openly white supremacist and to seek to wield power through minority rule and violence. Will the response to a regrowth of socialists in the 21st century be more 1960s-scale mass murder, or worse? I suppose we'll see. We live in interesting times!