ARE SWEDES HUMAN
BEINGS? OR:
THE ILLUSION OF
STATE-INDIVIDUALISTIC ETHICS
Commented review of ethics in the book by Henrik
Berggren & Lars Trägårdh
Is the Swede a Human Being? (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2006)
by Kristo
Ivanov, prof.em., Umeå University, (October 2012, version 190715-1535)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Some roots of the Swedish socio-ethical model
Swedish Love, eroticism and God
Harnessing narcissism - egotism
Jesus Christ replaced by Zygmunt Bauman
Juggling with Liberalism vs. Leftism
Evangelization or Apocalypticism
In 2006 two Swedish historians, Henrik
Berggren and Lars Trägårdh, published a "monumental" book with
the provocative title of Är Svensken Människa? [Is the Swede a Human Being? Also
translated into German].
Its title is explicitly borrowed from an earlier book by Sanfrid
Neander-Nilsson that was a simple collection of essays based on erudite and
jocular anedoctal evidence, published in 1946. It is
not yet translated into English but it has been reviewed and in part summarized
in the international press such as the International Herald Tribune (November
13, 2006), Foreign Policy (February 14, 2007),
and Die Zeit (September 18, 2006). With
its extensive references and notes it is a statement and an explanation of
Swedish national identity and character as expressed in its politics, social
code and in the particularities of its legal system. They condition the
criteria by which researchers seek and get their funds, and consequently
conduct more or less "agnostically" their
research while, as claimed in a remarkable PhD dissertation in
computer science (popularized in #43 in Ellul Forum), such an apparent
agnosticism may be really be an unconscious modern expression of gnosticism.
The basic "Swedish model" is presented in terms of a rare combination
of individualism and collectivism. It is achieved through a democratic
delegation of authority and responsibility to state government and
administration, which are trusted because of historical reasons and of a
protestant alliance between the church and the state, recalling the messages of
Max
Weber and and Ernst Troeltsch
who saw "religion as one of the core forces in the society".
Individualism or independence is then understood as liberation from family,
church and personal ties, and it is seen as a precondition for sincere true
love as well as for responsible citizenship through the practice of democracy.
Some of the book's ideas have been subsequently used in political polemics in
other publications such as Absolut Sverige
(2012, page 32ff., see below, next paragraph), and indirectly in Do not let them
get away: Ten important questions to Swedish politicians (2012, in
Swedish, pdf-format on the net) by Patrik Engellau and Thomas Gr who were active at The New Welfare
Foundation.
The book is to a great extent research-based and
its analysis is often quite intricate but fascinating because of the revealed
complexity of the subject in all its ramification in hundred years of history,
literature, politics, economics and, for my own professional purposes, its
implicit technological infrastructure. In order to understand what I perceive
as the intellectual debacle that follows the books's
brilliant summary in its last chapter it is necessary to review here below a
sample of the book's text in its preceding chapters. The book, at the highest
level of ambition, completes earlier and later books, also in Swedish language,
of various degrees of quality and ambition, mainly expressions of the authors'
outrage for what they perceive as the Swedish ideology as implemented in its
state's democratic tyranny and implementation of political correctness. Most of
them start from worldviews different from mine but are historically important.
Examples of such books, that symptomatically are often considered in mass media
as controversial are Karl-Olov Arnstberg's three books Svenska Tabun [Swedish Taboos; sold out], Invandring och Mörkläggning [Immigration and Concealment],
and PK-Samhället [The Politically Correct
Society]. Furthermore: Absolut Sverige [Absolute Sweden] by Mikael Jalving, Demokrati: Socialistisk eller Frihetlig? [Democracy: Socialist or
Libertarian?] by Nils-Eric Hennix, and Med skräcken som verktyg [With terror as a tool]
by Marika Formgren.
And now about my motivation for this study. Because
of the ubiquitousness of information and
communications technology (ICT) it is justified that a recurrent theme in ICT
research should be the ethical aspects of its presuppositions, application, and
consequences. Is it "good", why and for whom, to contribute to its
further development, whatever that is, and to its diffusion, or to encourage
its use beyond what is perceived to be "mandatory" and unavoidable in
our personal life situation? In a review of an earlier book about certain trends in the philosophy of technology I
dwelled upon its ethical base. I was amazed by the depth of the authors'
insights but I was still more amazed by the experience of anticlimax
after reading the end of the text, its conclusions cast in the form of
recommended ethical action. It prompted me to dedicate a special paper to an
analysis of this experience of anticlimax, under the title of "Ethics in technology - and theology of the
flesh". My amazement grew still greater when I experienced the very
same feeling of anticlimax at the end of my enthusiastic reading of the book in
question here, on the Swedish cultural environment that also determines the
ethics or the lack of it that prevails in a technologically advanced society,
including its view of technology.
Following a series of both national and foreign
influential political and literary personalities, the book dwells upon one
nineteenth century's figure, Carl Jonas Love
Almqvist that Wikipedia introduces as a "romantic poet, early
feminist, realist, composer, social critic and traveler." I do not single
out him from the text of the book because of the depth of this thought or his
importance that I judge very inferior to that of another referenced
personality, Erik
Gustaf Geijer. I choose Almqvist because of his
representativeness for later dominant Swedish thought on the basis of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
whose ethical consequences for later European thought were comprehensively
summarized in Irving
Babbitt's Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), as commented
(in Swedish) by Jan Olof Bengtsson
and evidenced by the ongoing general confusion in the discussions of ethics,
including the introduction of terms such as "meta-ethics". The
reigning confusion is exemplified in Ann Heberlein's
overview (in Swedish) of late literature on "What characterizes a good
human being today?" (Dagens Nyheter 26 October 2012) where the lay reader
is conscientized about the mind-blowing effects of
modern discussions of ethics that programmatically explain away the Christian
heritage by means of reference to countless philosophical debates and
redefinitions of terminology represented by terms such as virtue,
character, freedom, etc. Those who want to pursue this question are
directed here to the valuable attempt to unravel these concepts made by the
Scottish philosopher Alasdair
MacIntyre.
In the context of Almqvist the book remarks (pp. 115ff.) that along with the
nascent bourgeoisie the natural division of labor between man and woman changed
with the consequent enhancement of male power and its domination of women and
children. The husband begins to be considered as the link to and a filter from
the outer world. The argument is illustrated with quotations including a
feminist novel that exemplifies brute domestic dictatorship, as if it
documented representative facts. What is interesting here is that the reference
to the nascent bourgeoisie and the figure of supposedly oppressive manhood with
consequent feminism is not related to the French revolution, nascent scientific
thought, technology and industrialization where both woman and man were forcibly subordinated to the hard
oppressive realities of a mechanistic worldview and initial capitalistic
exploitation. In this way all talk about man as a rescuing link to the family's
outer world, seen as a core of social criticism that I have surveyed in an
earlier review of "political
correctness", is explained away.
The book continues (p. 117) referring uncritically
to complaints about the husbands' consequent control of women's lives, and
bourgeoisie's complicated rituals for courtship, wooing and socializing,
followed by an increasingly hollow patriarchy and use of command-language in families.
In doing so it ignores the arguments advanced in the philosophy of technology mentioned above about
the brutalizing effects of the loss of tradition, related to the phenomena of
rape, not to mention the neglect of other uncriticized
"rituals" of Western modernization such as found in the disciplining
regulation of industrial work and in governmental bureaucracy or
administration.
A subsequent analysis (p. 121f.) of a novel by
Almqvist, Drottningens Juvelsmycke (The Queen's Tiara,
published in 1834) is famous in Sweden for introducing the androgynous figure
of Tintomara, evidencing the author's ambiguous if
not disturbed view of the relations between man and woman that were symptomatic
for the evolving Swedish view of the family institution. It is also symptomatic
that our book acknowledges that Almqvist there combined an erotic view of woman
with a "total plasticity" regarding woman's true nature, with blurred
sexual boundaries (that today are tellingly called gender boundaries.)
"People hide their feelings", and Tintomara
is an "unclear and erotically alluring being". One most important
observation for the purpose of understanding the limitations of our reviewed
book is to note that it nowhere displays a psychological or a
sociopsychological insight into the meaning of Tintomara.
As I have suggested in my paper on political correctness mentioned above, we
have here the option of an interpretation in terms of both psychoanalysis (Oedipus complex) and
analytical psychology (anima-animus
archetypes) that I also presented in an essay on The Illusion
of Communicative Information. Almqvist can be identified as,
say, "anima-obsessed". This is not the place for trying to develop
the whole question along the internationally classical pattern of "Ayesha" as, for
instance, Sue Austin does in Desire, Fascination and the Other, but rather to hint at important
shortcomings in the book's analysis as restricted to narrow Swedish cultural
themes, which explain its eventual ethical anticlimax.
It is therefore symptomatic that despite of
Almqvist himself ambiguosly forfeiting individual
dependence only upon God, along with interpersonal independence among all
humans, he is still described (p. 124f.) to have avoided "religious
moralizing" and to have found an effective leverage for the rescue of true
love: "full economic independence between man and woman" or a
"federation of two equal and socially androgynous beings." My own
reflection is that in doing so he would apparently have solved but in fact
explained away the problems raised by three different kinds of friendship
according to the Aristotelian ethics of friendship (Nicomachean
Ethics, book VIII). As Aristotle expresses it: "The kinds of
friendship may perhaps be cleared up if we first come to know the object of
love. For not everything seems to be loved but only the lovable, and this is
good, pleasant, or useful." Without "religious moralizing",
Aristotle still refers to both god and gods, and is able to differentiate
perfect or true friendship with the good from the one with the pleasant, while
the two are unconsciously equated at the historical basis of Swedish love, a
friendship that obviously only distrusts the useful and opens the way for the narcissism of the
pleasurable.
A bit further into the text (p. 127ff.) the book
considers other related works by Almqvist such as Det Gr An (It is Acceptable, 1839),
which in the form of fiction portray the nascent ideal model of Swedish love.
True love is rescued at the cost of abandoning
the social contract of reciprocal responsibility between husband and wife.
State government assumes the economic responsibility for the children who will
"belong" to the woman. Family law will be matrilineal, and
fatherhood, if necessarily know at all, will amount to the fathers'
"counseling" their children. The dissolution of the link between
procreation and marital relations (cornerstone of e.g. the Catholic doctrine of
marriage) led to accusations that the author was advocating polygamy. I note
that (as reported by the tabloid Aftonbladet, 8 September
2005) polygamy has indeed been proposed in modern times by Swedish feminist
politicians, while polyamory
movements have raised increasing interest as portrayed in a long series of
articles in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter in September 2012. Symptomatically it included an
article referring to a legal counsel who expresses the need, desirability
and feasibility of a reform of Swedish family law in order to accomodate polyamory. This is the background against which
a critical recent editorial about "Children are not a human right"
("Barn
är ingen rättighet", Dagens Nyheter 17 September 2012) had to be
written in order to emphasize that human choices of late, single, or lesbian
parenthood should not be entitled to support and coverage of costs for
insemination or in
vitro fertilization by tax financed public health insurance. This is also
background for other phenomena noted in the press (Dagens Nyheter, 7
September 2012), not to mention those not
noted in the press, like citizens who request that social welfare pay them
or somebody else for accompanying their own old mother to theater or for taking
their son to football's training.
As it could have been foreseen this kind of
portrayed sociopsychological development led to a change in the perception of
what manliness is supposed to be in view of the tendencies towards a new
matriarchal order associated with the liberation of woman from patriarchy. In a
few following pages (p. 128-133) the book describes how the liberation of woman
was associated to a sort of liberation of man from the responsibilities that
ensured adulthood and dignity. Contrasted to the mature, independent woman (or,
rather, dependent upon the support of the state) man is depicted as a wandering
Casanova or, I
would say, rather a Rubirosa if seen from the intellectual point of view.
He is not especially independent in terms of intellect or livelihood, relying
upon his relatives and social network. Rather, he is a male "belle of the
boat", pleasant and easygoing, a person who willingly establishes himself
as a drone on the margin of woman's pre-planned life. The male figure of Albert
in Det Går An can be
seen as introducing a possible future for manliness that foreshadows the most
recent realities like Hanna Rosin's The end of men
(2012), a book that repeats the today "feminist" theme of the
early Society
without the Father by Alexander Mitscherlich
(1969) that I considered in another
essay, and the later Life
Without Father (1996) by David Popenoe to which I will return below.
Man is emancipated from his social obligations. His economic parental and
educational responsiblity has been assumed by woman
and ultimately by the state and its nurseries. Fatherhood is no more a fact but
only one among his various possible allowed pastimes on the mood. Emancipated
man has been allowed to become "a selfish, comfortable individual
satisfying his own needs, without civic responsibility, displaying a tension
between aesthetics and politics, and between romantic utopia and powerful
realism." This recalls the phenomenon of how aesthetics came to replace
religion, and postmodernly even politics, as witnessed in today's
"inter-net-worked" Western academic rush for "design" and
"emotional
interaction-engagement-involvement-embodyment".
It is a trend that is hinted at in the book by means of references to Ellen Key (besides Geijer, Almqvist and others.) Key, classified as "difference feminist",
appears as the intellectually most ambitious representative of the well-meaning
ethical-religious disorientation of the epoch as depicted in Claudia
Lindén's doctoral
dissertation (in Swedish, with summary in English, pp. 305-312) On Love:
Literature, Sexuality and Politics in Ellen Key (2002.) Key's legacy as expressed
in Wikipedia includes "that motherhood is so crucial to society, that
government, rather than their husbands, should support mothers and their
children." In the bargain it was forgotten that it is marriage, foundation
of society, which originally gave protection to woman and children. This
includes physical protection of their bodies, which becomes obvious in times of
war and crisis. It is such protection and "care" that nowadays is
supposed to be practically assured by the state police, which then would be the
contingent substitute for solidarity in the civil society and man's muscle
strength and protective support of the family, while technology (cf. weapons
and power steering)
amplifies the muscle strength of women.
It is interesting to note how this blueprint for
the coming techno-industrial society follows the same outline as analyzed in one earlier review of mine of Howard
Schwartz's book on the rationale behind "organizational
self-destruction", before the literary visions referred above became fully
political, and eventually even "politically correct". The question is
more subtle than simple egoism, and it stands at the core of our book here. A
key thought in our context is that humans are at best capable of altruism or
selfless solidarity. Nevertheless they are quite
reluctant to voluntarily submit to binding communities over time where other
people have the power to determine what the collective obligations should be
(p. 363.) The theological import of this standpoint for our analysis here is
contingent to the idea of "other people" having the power to
determine and enforce obligations, while one forgets that traditionally the
main obligations were coded in terms of religion, as divine will. As the
Swedish political scientist Tage Lindbom did explain in
his books, of which The Myth of Democracy and The Tares and the Good Grain were
translated into English, the suspicion for investing power in other humans,
increased during the process of secularization of society, is what eventually
impelled the strive towards equality aiming at limiting others'
power, albeit at the initially unperceived risk of everybody becoming "democratically"
powerless alike in relation to the state, as feared by Alexis
de Tocqueville, more specifically in his "What sort of
despotism democratic nations have to fear" (1835.) This unperceived
process was reinforced in Protestant countries because of the more pronounced
alliance between the state and the Church, while in Catholic countries today
there has been more of a division of power between the two. The startling
reliance upon the almighty state in Sweden is what apparently justifies a
statement, expressed in the book, that "There exists a qualitative
difference between working and not working. In one case one is dependent, in
the other one is not dependent" (p. 313), meaning the "in a conflict
with her husband a woman can still assert her independence [from the man, but
dependence upon the state] and show the man at the door." And this is
taken as one main argument for women to leave home in order to work on the
labor market (as long as there is no unemployment).
Conclusions? After an initial masterly depiction of
the "state of the art" in Swedish society, the last chapter of the
book, entitled "Swedish Love - timely or untimely?" (p. 365) starts
its inconclusive conclusions that in part build upon some of the faulty ethical
fundaments hinted at in my text above. One of these conclusions is the
reference to luminars such as Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault, as
heirs of, among others, the enlightened Marquis de Sade and the
philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche. Such reference would explain the nature of love or "erotic
revolt" as the only means left for the individual human being to exist for
at least a few futile moments vis-a-vis an apparently benevolent almighty state
(p. 370.) I find it obvious that such a futile erotic revolt is consistent with
the sexualization and "feminization"
of modern societies that are controlled by a strong and controlling
"benevolent" state, typically under the label of a Swedish
version of state feminism.
It is also obvious that such a state government will have no objection to the
sexual liberalization of customs along LGBT-guidelines, while politicians
can relax as people and its mass media prefer to discuss percentages of
biological gender (in)equality in occupational branches of the society instead
of discussing embarassingly hard ethical foundations
and political questions of real international power balance, finance,
criminality, and general "moral disarmament" that is "feministically" described in the Bible's Isaiah 3:12: "Youths
oppress my people, women rule over them. My people, your guides lead you
astray; they turn you from the path."
The book, however, does not stay at this state of
affairs as a solution to the conflict between individualism and collectivism,
attempting as it does to define its own bias for what it calls "state
individualism". In doing so it willingly mentions (p. 376) Tocqueville's
and his closest Swedish counterpart Erik Gustaf Geijer's anxiety for
individualism's narcissistic dangers, or man's continuously increasing focus on
his own ego, a concept that is conveniently left undefined but possibly
standing for (the ego's) sheer pleasures. While ignoring relevant philosophical
analyses of Geijer's thought such as (in Swedish, but
with references to Harald
Höffding, related to Carlyle and Kierkegaard) by
Jan Olof Bengtsson, it is symptomatic for the book's own bias that it does
so without recalling their most important appeal to the early guarantee against
narcissistic dangers that was offered by Christian teachings. Remarkably, they
are forgotten and occasionally referred to as "moralisms"
(p. 243, 245) but they were mentioned
earlier in the book (e.g. p. 221). Almqvist is occasionally quoted referring to
them (e.g. pp. 132, 143) despite of forgetting them in the main of his work. In
his famous classic Democracy in America (1835-1840)
edited
with introduction by Isaac Kramnick and translated by
Gerald Bevan, Tocqueville himself adduces the political importance of
Christian teachings while acknowledging the problematic conflict between
individualism an collectivism in words that are still more clear (e.g. pp.
799-809) than in our book reviewed here. He has numerous such references to
Christian teachings (pp. 344, 336f., 497, 501ff., 613f., 634, 792, 801,
858.) They are conspicuously absent in
our reviewed book. Some of Tocqueville's references deserve to be quoted here
below, with my own occasional emphasis in italics (p. 344, 510f.):
"Tyranny may be able to do without faith but freedom cannot". "There is almost no human action, however individual one supposes it to be, which does not originate in a very general idea men have about God, his connections with the human race, the nature of their souls, and their duties toward their fellows.[...] Fixed ideas about God and human nature are vital to the daily practice of their lives but the practice of their lives prevents their acquiring such ideas. [...] General ideas relating to God and human nature are thus among all ideas most fitted to be withdrawn from the usual practices of individual reason and which have the most to gain and the least to lose by recognizing an authority. [...] We have to recognize that if religion does not save men in the other world, it is at least very useful for their happiness and importance in this. That is above all true of men who live in free countries. When a nation's religion is destroyed, doubt takes grip upon the highest areas of intelligence, partially paralyzing all the others. Each man gets used to having only confused and vacillating ideas on matters which have the greatest interest for himself and his fellows. He puts up a poor defense of his opinions or abandons them and, as he despairs of ever resolving by himself the greatest problems presented by human destiny, he beats a cowardly retreat into not thinking at all. Such a state cannot fail to weaken the soul, strains the forces of the will, and shapes citizens for slavery. Not only do the latter allow their freedom to be taken from them, they often give it up."
But still more than so, Tocqueville also offers the
basis for the forgotten or ignored solution of the conflict between individualism
and collectivism in his discussion (p. 613f.) of the doctrine of self-interest,
which properly understood can be reconciled with religious beliefs": that
is, to do good to our fellow men for the love of God. His thoughts would later
reverberate in the work of Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch
that I mentioned above.
The reviewed book's message recalls the phenomenon
of giving up privacy and - as it is better called in Sweden - personal
integrity vis-a-vis citizen's control by the nanny-state, and political
correctness as a mirror of the above quoted "retreat into not thinking at
all" that I also considered in my
review of a book by Howard Schwartz about the psychology of
"organizational self-destruction". But my focus of interest in this
review is to grasp the process by which this religious dimension is lost or
ignored in the reviewed book with all its depth and historical insights. This
can be seen by following the course of its text with the relevant highlights
(pp. 98, 145, 162, 167, 173f., 221, 297, 376, and 339). From the early
historical insights that "freedom is what is left when God and the king
have got their part" to the later position that despite of disregard for
Christian idealism there should be a difference between higher and lower forms
of individualism. Furthermore: the gradual shift of authority from God to
"the law" as ground for individual independence led to a further
shift from law to the supposed authority of an introspectively perceived
"love" that merges with a vague Nietzschean conception of individual
self-realization and approximation to superman ideal. The next step
was to guarantee a sort of private sphere, a privacy restricted to pure
personal life of feelings. When obliged to realize the need of an overarching
function corresponding to God's, the gradually secularized culture had to
assign it to the supposedly democratic almighty state, leading to nationalism.
That also meant that law itself was to be subordinate to politics in the spirit
of positive law. At
this point (p. 221) the book finds and confesses an insight that later on
appears as remarkably inconsequential for its argumentation: "without the
Christian faith in God that defined the limits for the nineteenth century's
individualism there was not natural defense left against the state's turning against
the weaker groups of the population." The idealism of the hegemony of
undefined "love" had opened the door for ideas of voluntary racial hygiene and new
supermen in government agencies who could strain and eventually infringe human
rights. A general thirst for security was satisfied by the mirage of
independence, if not from the state of a majoritarian democracy, at least from
each other human, to begin with inside the family: " in a culture that
equates the human dignity with the individual's autonomy, it is difficult to
fundamentally oppose that women and as far as possible even children should be
beneficiary of the independence from other people who had been accorded to
ordinary male citizens " (p. 297.)
It is at this point in the text that we arrive to
the passus initially surveyed above (p. 376) about the "anxiety for
individualism's narcissistic dangers, or man's continuously increasing focus on
his own ego, a concept that is conveniently left undefined but possibly
standing for sheer pleasures. Now becomes clear how one arrived at that,
roughly by dismantling Christian teachings with its church-expression in civil
society, and equating God with the state and its annexation of labor unions (p. 339)
that characterizes social democratic ideology. Probably this is a part of a
broader cultural development in the West as accelerated or mirrored in the
history of its philosophy. As I have already remarked elsewhere in an article
on Ethics
in Technology Carl Jung, writing on the nature of the psyche, notes
that (in Collected Works CW 8, 359f., p. 170f.):
"Wherever the spirit of God is extruded from our human calculations
an unconscious substitute takes its place. In Schopenhauer we find the
unconscious Will as the new definition of God, in Carus
the unconscious, and in Hegel identification and inflation, the practical
equation of philosophical reason with Spirit, thus making possible that
intellectual juggling with the object which achieved such a horrid brilliance
in his philosophy of the State. Hegel offered a solution of the problem raised
by epistemological criticism in that he gave ideas a chance to prove their
unknown power of autonomy. They induced that hubris of reason which led to
Nietzsche's superman and hence to the catastrophe that bears the name of
Germany. Not only artists, but philosophers too, are sometimes prophets. [...]
A philosophy like Hegel's is a self-revelation of the psychic background and,
philosophically, a presumption. Psychologically, it amounts to an invasion by
the unconscious."
So, the question is why, how it comes that a deepgoing book like the one reviewed here programmatically
ignores the religious question despite of mentioning the need for a "moral
rearmament", and relabels ethical questions as "moralisms",
and satisfies itself with explaining away religion and theology by
programmatically and tersely declaring (p. 365) that "We do not believe in
God." In a personal communication (21 August 2012) one of the book's
authors explains that they had considered the inclusion of
religion/secularization in the analysis but desisted from that without any
deeper discussion. He still believes that it was a wise decision because
otherwise they would not have made it to get out the book, but if they had
written it today they probably would have made a different decision, since
religion appears to be an increasingly important topic today. On November 1st,
2015, however, a friend called my attention upon the need to update the present
text of mine on the basis of an editorial on culture in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter with
the title of "Svensken
lider av ett sekulärt självbedrägeri" [The Swede is suffering
from a secular self-deception]. It notes that in the preface to a new edition
(2015) of the book reviewed here (2006) the authors recognize "with shame
redness on the cheeks" that when they wrote the book were guilty of a
grave omission in their narrative about the Swedish government individualism:
they simply forgot away religion! The authors themselves see their oversight as
being an example of "one of the most common errors majority culture in
this country: to believe that the Swedish political culture is unaffected by
beliefs". Nevertheless it is symptomatic that
this oversight, both in the editorial and the book itself, is later to some
extent explained away by reducing again religion to its political role.
My point was obviously not to exhort the authors to believe in God but rather
to point out that their analysis can be invalidated if they to
not consider the consequences of people's religious convictions, or the lack of
them. All this is consistent with, explains and emphasizes the main remarkable blunder in the book. Among its 450 pages with
as many bibliographic references plus 600 notes it ignores and does not even mention the Swedish political scientist,
Tage
Lindbom who most directly deals with its subject,
unraveling roots of the problem in several books, e.g. in Västerlandets Framväxt och Kris [The
Emergence and Crisis of the West, 1999.] But that is not all. This remarkable
blunder of ignoring Tage Lindbom
is a pale reminder of all what the book ignores, invalidating its research and
its message: the historical meeting of liberalism as socialism in the light of
religion and theology. This whole question is treated in Alain Besançon's work La
falsification du Bien: Soloviev et Orwell
[The falsification of the Good: Solovyov
and Orwell], which in
its complexity recalls Lindbom and reveals the basic
ethical failure of the book reviewed here. Be as it may, the case seems to
recall in my mind what Tocqueville claims in my quotation above, about when
"Each man gets used to having only confused and vacillating ideas on
matters which have the greatest interest for himself and his fellows. He puts
up a poor defense of his opinions or abandons them." The rest of this
article will dwell upon symptoms or consequences of this standpoint in the
analysis in the rest of the book and its conclusions.
In a section on alienation and anomie beyond the earlier
mentioned anxiety for individualism's narcissistic dangers, or man's
continuously increasing focus on his own ego (p. 376ff.) the book considers
several secular approaches to the phenomenon that seem to limit themselves
mainly to describe the phenomenon, sometimes relating it effects of technology.
Such approaches are as in David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, Christopher
Lasch's The culture of
narcissism or The True and Only
Heaven about progress and its critics, Jrgen
Habermas' Between
Facts and Norms on the so called colonization of the "life
world" (whatever that is, that I did question in another
context), Zygmunt Bauman's The
Individualized Society, or Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone with
reference to, for instance, the rise of "autistic TV-watching" that today could have been an analysis
of the advanced autism of computer
gaming or even of presumedly "social" facebooking
and twittering. What appears to
me to be common to many such approaches is precisely their reliance on secular
theorizing such as, for instance, critical theory that I have considered in
other reviews of ethical aspects in social
psychology and technology.
Without touching (except later, p. 383) the delicate term "political correctness",
which I have dwelled upon in another
review, the book nevertheless complains (p. 379) that we are living in a
"therapeutic society where individualism has degenerated into a whiny
narcissism that is good at monitoring rights but uninterested in living up to
obligations and duties except for those that are severely enforced by almighty
state government in its own interests and in the name of "the people".
Instead of striving for responsibility we compete about who is most
victim."
A surprising anticlimax
arises, however, when the book suddenly claims (still on p. 379), and
thereafter suddenly abandons with a remarkable but, that the astute Zygmunt Bauman is
undeniably correct to call 'love thy neighbor as thyself' a cornerstone of a
civilized life (sic.) In stating this, replacing Jesus Christ's Love
your neighbor as yourself with the astute Bauman's as source of the
exhortation, the book reaches the abyss of the consequences of secular thought.
In the bargain it does not notice that the Christian teaching has been the one
which to a great extent and long before Bauman has mobilized humans merging
emotionally and cognitively the individual with the collective. God means more
than Bauman and a Kant with his categorical
imperative. Towards the end of this article I adduce a quotation from the
Confucian I Ching that clarifies
these aspects of the question.
After this the book keeps wandering around the
concepts of individualism
and self-realization, its rightful and legitimate expression in the market and
the state, contrasted (p. 385) to the collectivism of the political Left. The
distressing results of the European Values Study and World Values Survey
regarding Swedish secularism and weak "family ideology" are explained
away (p. 383) on the account of other presumed Swedish virtues such as greater
tolerance for other cultures and a positive attitude to immigration. In the
absence of God or Jesus Christ the synthesis between individualism and leftism
will be achieved by the Swedish model of state
individualism. And here we encounter the second and final anticlimax of the
book which in my mind recalls a quote of mine from T.S.
Eliot's (Choruses from "The Rock", VI, 1934)
"They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good."
In short, the book puts the question of a
"deeper insight" into the meaning of individualism. For this purpose
(p. 385f.) it puts on the one side of the balance: (a) a striving for [or need
of? - never clarified] a market-liberal independence and self-realization. On
the other side of the balance (b) a political left striving for [or need of? -
never clarified] security and solidarity. Despite of giving the impression that
there will be a neutral weighing of merging of the two dimensions, the authors
of the book surreptitiously claim that (a), i.e. the striving for freedom,
autonomy and independence will not lead
to normlessness (anomie) as little as conservative
or socialistic ethics of moral duty will lead to happiness and solidarity. In
this way the authors by means of "nots" and "as little"
confuse it all as if in double negations. They put on the same hip both
conservatives and their traditional opponent leftists, and tip the balance in
favor of market liberalism. They top the blended argument by just assuring the
reader that "Swedish individualism", that is, state individualism
does not "automatically" lead away from solidarity, but rather can
deepen it on the basis of acknowledging a "reciprocal autonomy",
whatever that weird concept is. Presumedly, the
process will be successfully driven by the "cumulative choices" at
the free individual level .
I consider that this kind of argumentation will not
do. A serious discussion of this matter would probably require, for instance,
an in-depth understanding of what is meant by the term "communitarian statism" as related to state individualism in the
account of J. G.
Fichte's philosophy of law, and which are the problems of its combination
with liberal individualism.
The argument is completed by assuring (p. 386f.)
that the Swedish family is not in such a state of disintegration as it is
sometimes affirmed and remarking that, by the way, the crisis of the family is
an international problem. The authors satisfy themselves with noting that 80%
of households consist of two adults (never mind whether they are not the both
parents of the children) and that the number of first birthing single women is
relatively low (never mind whether the children lack one parent.) They ignore
the roles of finance and technology that I have considered in the context of
the earlier mentioned political
correctness, and the economic opulence of immediate post-war Sweden
that allowed for a comparatively lavish welfare. The family politics of state individualism
is then claimed to have rescued parenthood at the cost of marriage (sic.) The
possibility for women to work on the labor market has protected family's most
basic functions: to reproduce itself and educate the children (sic.) The book
achieves a sort of apotheosis when finally noting that the state creates
possibilities for a functioning social community despite of increased
individual autonomy - "not the least for women, children, and elders"
(forget the fathers) by supporting the citizens both within the
"family" and on the market. Statistics of divorce are acknowledged to
indicate that Scandinavians do not succeed in creating lifelong "couple
relationships", but seen from children's perspective (sic) Sweden with its
"parental insurance" is still a more family-friendly,
"softer" society than the highly competitive USA society. Former
critic of Sweden David Popenoe, author of, among others, Life
Without Father (1996) has apparently been led astray when he is
triumphantly quoted at the end of the book claiming that even if Sweden cannot
live up to the ideal of lifelong "biological parenthood" it is ahead
of the USA with regard to "structured and lasting relation between parents
and children in a family-friendly environment."
At this point it is justified to only recall the
Christian heritage about the meaning of family (e.g. as summarized by Stephen
B. Clark in Man
and Woman in Christ, 1980) but also to present the following
self-explanatory quotation from the Chinese "bible", the Confucian I Ching or Book of Changes (the
Richard Wilhelm translation rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 3rd ed. 1968, pp. 144,
227f. and 570). The particular influence of modern democracy and social order
for the understanding of this quotation is furnished by Tocqueville as
referenced earlier.
"The family is society in embryo; it is the
native soil on which performance of moral duty is made easy through natural
affection, so that within a small circle a basis of moral practice is created,
and this is later widened to include human relationships in general. [...]
Religious forces are needed to overcome the egotism that divides men. The
common celebration of the great sacrificial feasts and sacred rites, which gave
expression simultaneously to the interrelation and social articulation of
family and state, was the means employed by the great rulers to unite men. The
sacred music and the splendor of the ceremonies aroused a strong tide of
emotion that was shared by all hearts in unison and that awakened a consciousness
of the common origin of all creatures. [...] Only a man who is himself free of
all selfish ulterior considerations, and who perseveres in justice and
steadfastness, is capable of so dissolving the hardness of egotism. [...]
Therefore the hearts of men must be seized by a devout emotion. They must be
shaken by a religious awe in face of eternity [...] When the father is in truth
a father and the son a son, when the elder brother is an elder brother and the
younger brother a younger brother, the husband a husband, the wife a wife, then
the house is on the right way. When the house is set in order, the world is
established in a firm course."
I am finally tempted to return to the book's
reference to Geijer's observation (p. 122)
that it is one thing to love people as a matter of principle, another one to
live together with them. That is by definition the family, instead of paying
lip service to solidarity,
toleration, and cultural diversity.
But my temptation is mainly to revert to Tage Lindbom's work that as I observed above was unforgivably
ignored in our reviewed book. The negligent omission of Tage
Lindbom is a minor symptom of neglecting main
currents of thought at the confluence of politics and religion,
socialism-communism and Christianity such as exemplified in Nikolai
Berdyaev's Dostoievsky: An interpretation. In that text
Berdyaev, who had lived through the Russian revolution, explains the dynamics
of what today appears as political correctness, and the loss of ethical freedom
at the meeting between socialist and Christian thought, a problem that had
earlier been hinted at by Alexis de Tocqueville
in his Democracy in
America (availalble in a Penguin
Classic edition) when referring to the "Tyranny of the Majority"
(pp. 287ff. and 305ff.) and "What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations
Have to Fear" (pp. 803ff.) It would take us too far here if I were to try
to develop in my own, new words, some main lines of Berdyaev's complex
argument. It will be enough to offer a hint directing the reader to an essay
that is available on the net, The
Metaphysical Problem of Freedom (1921), which apparently is an
outgrowth from a chapter of Berdyaev's mentioned book. Unfortunately it seems
to be a heavy, faulty translation and it is better to revert to the book itself,
mainly its chapter III on "Freedom" and chapter VIII on "The Grand Inquisitor:
Christ and Antichrist". The main idea is to explain why Christianity is a
religion of fundamental freedom in the sense that allows for the two poles of
freedom: freedom from coercion and therefore allowing for the possibility of a
choice of evil, and thereby the freedom to freely choose the good of God, not
because of admiration of or dependence upon power, but just for spontaneous
love. Rejection of Christianity means negation of the possibility of sin and
implicit coercion to do the "right" thing, or to choose the good that
is then defined politically. In the philosophical domain such questions appear,
for instance, in texts about the related central problem of "free
will", as in the following by The Information
Philosopher who writes:
---
Hegel's idealist colleagues Fichte and Schelling were very enthusiastic
about freedom for the individual, the "I," which was Kant's
"transcendental subject." They wanted the I to be
"unconditioned," an undetermined thing in itself (unbedingtes
Ding an sich). For Friedrich
Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, this freedom was freedom from both Nature and God.
[And quoting Schelling:]
"The
defenders of Freedom usually only think of showing the independence of man from
nature, which is indeed easy. But they leave alone man's inner independence
from God, his Freedom even with respect to God, because this is the most
difficult problem."
"Thus since man occupies a middle place between the non-being of nature
and the absolute Being, God, he is free from both. He is free from God through
having an independent root in nature; free from nature through the fact that
the divine is awakened in him, that which in the midst of nature is above
nature."
---
There are people who instead of trusting religion
and Christianity appeal to either "musts" or to art, such as Claes G. Ryn in his penetrating
criticism (in Swedish) of "cultural
radicalism" that could be seen as an approach parallel to the book
reviewed here. Symptomatically a desperate appeal to art is also Alain de Botton's in his Religion
for Atheists. Others appeal to the "religion" of
phenomenology: in my article on Trends in
Philosophy of Technology I did characterize it as a desperate
attempt to create a "theology without God". Nevertheless, amid vague
references to phenomenlogy, an insightful approach is
offered by Steven Shapin in his "A Social History of Truth"
with dimensions that are significantly ignored in the book reviewed here:
"Freedom is the source of the need of trust...promises offered under
duress were void...Free action had to be freely disciplined". And quoting Niklas Luhmann: "Trust is
then the generalized expectation that the other will handle his freedom"
(p. 39, but cf. also pp. 375, 394, 413.) The unacknowledged problem of the
state individualism proposed in our reviewed book is that the state will not handle
its freedom, except formally on election day, and as exemplified in the
Wikileaks-Assange or the Snowden affairs that I considered in my article on WikiLeaks, Information and Systems.
On the contrary, through propaganda and criminalizations
it will enforce political correctness and the people's trust in its
correctness, undermining (the need of) reciprocal trust among citizens, within
civic or church communities, and in particular within the educational source of
trust: the nuclear family. This terminological and philosophical chaos is what
eventually leads astray even a quite sophisticated Swedish historian of ideas
as Ronny Ambjörnsson, in an article on friendship as
being more enthralling than love (Dagens Nyheter, 1 June 2014, "Därför
är vänskapens väsen mer spännande än kärlekens".) On the basis
of an apparently apolitical secularized analysis he endorses the hypothesis
that people's supposedly increasing interest in friendship is the counterpart
of distrust of modernity.
Disregarding that modernity includes secularization he states that this mirrors
our late disbelief in the states's capability to
solve the problems of the individual or we do not want any longer that some
"patriarchal authority" plans for us and subsumes us in one of its
compartments. Even homosexuality is then seen as evidencing the supremacy of
friendship over love. Ambjörnsson's approach in the
middle of chaotic thoughts where eros is
left undefined may then paradoxically be read as an acclaim of the victory over
patriarchate and heterosexuality that we earlier saw as closely related to the
disintegration of the family and the rise of the modernity's state.
My conclusion is that state individualism is the result of the rejection of
religion in general and Christianity in particular in a society that still
stands on rests of basic Christian values. It will work only so long as a
wealthy Western country like Sweden has the financial capability, built upon
capitalistic high-tech industry, to "buy" replacements for familial
love at the cost of long run disintegration of society. Some consequences are
suggested in the film documentary about The
Swedish Theory of Love, which also has been illustrated by
comments of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in a noted video with the same
title, both echoed by elaborations about the evanescent meaning of modern worklife, such as by Roland Paulsen and, earlier,
by Christer Sanne. My own overviews of dominant academic
conceptions of ethics in
technology as deduced from ongoing technological research and industrial
development, as well as the decay of the community
between old and new generations, only confirm these findings. My final conclusion, as already expressed elsewhere, and also
explaining why Tage Lindbom
has been sometimes shallowly criticized for his traditionalist
"preaching" style is, beyond gnosticism: Evangelization or Apocalypticism. In the
way of Catholic evangelization an exemplary document that was written for other
times (1910) is the apostolic letter of Pope Pius X Our Apostolic
Mandate. Together with its later complement by Pope John Paul
II, Laborem Exercens (1981)
it can be finally recommended as one valid basis for further brainstorming and
research in the main areas of this paper, illustrating the neglected necessary
interdependence among politics, ethics and theology in a modernistic
techno-industrial society such as Sweden.