[D66] "If God Is Dead, Your Time Is Everything"

[A.OUT]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/if-god-is-dead-your-time-is-everything

If God Is Dead, Your Time Is Everything

    By James Wood, www.newyorker.com
    View Original
    May 20th, 2019

The idea of eternity, Martin Hägglund argues, destroys meaning and value.
Photo by: Illustration Deanna Halsall

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. ♦