When nights draw in

Another tome under the belt. It must be something to do with the onset of Autumn. This time I have devoured (if not fully digested) Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, published last year and obtained from a stack of remainders in Ken Spelman’s York bookshop before lockdown (how I miss going there). Hägglund, a Yale University professor, who was born in Sweden brings a questioning knowledge to his subject which is more than impressive. Marx features heavily in this account of how we could better understand and live our lives. Along the way there is analysis of other philosophers as long as your arm. The two central themes are religion and capitalism, and their fateful influence on our idea of ourselves, as well as their interconnectedness. Hägglund’s exploration of the myths which sustain religions is devastating, so much more so than one finds in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (which I nevertheless deeply enjoyed reading and recommend to anybody interested in learning about the self-delusions of religion). As the title suggests, Hägglund’s book is about life, which is to say the only form of existence we can ever know. He exhaustively demolishes the concept of such ideas as an afterlife of eternal bliss, and even Buddhist concepts of basically self-annihilation do not escape his analytical gaze. The interesting thing is, he nevertheless throughout the book talks of a spiritual life, which is something that makes us distinct from amoeba. He finds that this spiritual life is rooted in secular faith and goes so far as to suggest that much religious faith is simply a form of dressed-up secular faith, inspired by needs which are purely human and are not divine.

An excellent read, and a challenge to the left too, given his Marxist dissection of much leftist talk of the redistribution of the proceeds of capitalism. In short, there can be no successful ‘redistribution’ of wealth under a capitalist system, and as such ‘social democracy’ as opposed to democratic socialism is doomed to failure as it always seeks to accommodate the root cause of inequality. Could this be why when, as in 2008, the banks were the first to be bailed out in a ‘social democratic’ system? Hägglund finds luminaries like Theodor Adorno and Thomas Piketty falling short, since they do not seem to recognise that the values of capitalism are inimical to the revaluation of life’s potential and always will be. Hägglund does not mention the concept of ‘late’ capitalism, currently a wishful thinking trend on the left. It cannot have escaped our notice, surely, that capitalism is in the process of destroying the environment and thus everything that sustains us. There is no meaningful dream of a redemptive ‘late’ capitalism, only end capitalism. ‘Late’ capitalism does not I’m afraid provide the scent of any alternative which could be considered viable in the diminishing window of opportunity now before us.