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?



THIS LIFE: SECULAR FAITH AND SPIRITUAL FREEDOM by Martin Hägglund Pantheon, 464 pp., $29.95

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.