The Almost Nearly Perfect People

by Michael Booth

  I have often wondered about the pre-Sandemose roots of Jante Law. After all, Sandemose claimed merely to be observing existing Danish traits, so those tendencies must already have been present. Professor Richard Wilkinson had told me that people from more egalitarian societies have less need to show off, so perhaps that is where Jante’s roots lie: the Danes are especially scornful of people who boast because they prize equality so highly. ‘Hunter-gatherer societies – which are similar to prehistoric societies – are highly egalitarian,’ Wilkinson had said. ‘And if someone starts to take on a more domineering position they get ridiculed or teased or ostracised. These are what’s called counter-dominance strategies, and they maintain the greater equality.’

  Or could it be that their Lutheran heritage means the people of the North still baulk at success in frivolous, individualistic or elitist pursuits, and frown upon conspicuous displays of wealth? Though the Danes limit their church attendance to the big-ticket events only – Christmas, weddings, christenings – and churches are closing across the country on an almost weekly basis, Christianity still plays a central role in notions of Danishness and how Danes should behave. Unlike Sweden, there is no separation between Church and State in Denmark and, after some years off the curriculum, religion is once again a compulsory subject in schools.

  Perhaps this is why working hard to get rich and then exhibiting your success is still very much disapproved of. Danish tycoons and captains of industry are rarely role models here. The late shipping and oil magnate – and probably the wealthiest non-royal Dane of all time – Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller was respected but neither loved nor a role model. Møller wisely chose not to display his wealth too gratuitously. According to the Mærsk Corporate Communications department, he also abided by a strict work ethic, attending meetings well into his nineties, bringing a packed lunch with him to work, and climbing several flights of stairs to his office every day. Together with many generous donations to public works – he paid for Copenhagen’s opera house, among other projects – this seemed to help him avoid much of a Jante Law backlash.

  What is the foreigner to make of Jante Law? How does one negotiate its boobytraps and trip-wires? There are two approaches to take: one is to play the stupid foreigner card, proceed as you would at home and feign obliviousness to the frowns as you sail through Danish society boasting of your successes and acquisitions. Or you can keep your head down, your socks up and your nose clean. Becoming a teacher would help.

  Whichever route you choose, to live at ease in Denmark and assimilate with the Danes it pays to be alert to Jante Law. But I am afraid there are two other key social phenomena you are going to have to get to grips with if a life in Denmark beckons.

  Chapter 12

  Dixieland

  ALONGSIDE JANTE LAW, there are two other prime drivers of Danish conformism – hygge and folkelig. They are tricky to translate: the former is a deceptively relaxed and informal, uniquely Danish form of cosiness or conviviality, which is actually highly codified, with strict social rituals that exercise a relentless, tyrannical pressure to conform; the latter is a kind of broad-based cultural populism that pervades a good deal of Danish mainstream culture and, in a kind of reverse-Midas effect, turns everything it touches to cack.

  Let us start with hygge, for the Danes prize it more than ambergris and stardust. While it is true that you can often simply substitute the word ‘cosy’ for hygge 1 – ‘Didn’t we have a hyggelig time at the pub quiz yesterday?’ ‘Aren’t those candles hyggelig?’, and so on – the closest available English translation still fails to encompass the full import of the word. Then there is the word uhyggelig, which doesn’t, as you would expect, mean un-hyggelig (for that you would say ikke hyggelig, or not hyggelig), but instead means anything from ‘spooky’ or ‘scary’ to ‘unnecessarily confrontational’, ‘suspicious’, or ‘uncanny’. Unemployment figures might be said to be uhyggelig, for instance; I don’t think I have ever heard statistics defined by whether or not they were cosy.

  In theory you can have a hyggelig experience with anyone, anywhere and at any time; and you can have it with an almost limitless number of people at once; you can even hygge yourself, although that always seems somehow deviant to me. Hygge need not cost a penny. It is entirely democratic and egalitarian, open to all (assuming, of course, you understand the rules, for which it is necessary to either be Danish or have had extensive tutoring from a benevolent Dane). And then there is råhygge, literally ‘raw hygge’, the especially intense form – überhygge, if you like. You’d better know what you are doing if you dabble with råhygge, I can tell you.

  Upon initial acquaintance, hygge would appear to fall into the ‘what’s not to love?’ column of Scandinavian social mores, conjuring as it does visions of free-flowing wine, open fires, candlelight and good times. Hygge requires equality of participation (it is decidedly uhygglig for one person to hog the limelight), and is predicated on the participants living in the moment (‘Isn’t this barbecue hyggelig [the barbecue that is happening right here, right now]?’). As ethnographer Stephen Borish wrote in his analysis of the phenomenon, ‘It depends on the complete and positive participation of all present in the encounter . . . an evenness of flow, a sustained back-and-forth dance of involvement that encourages, and even demands, this level of participation . . . the achievement of these goals is made possible by a range of positive social skills, including teasing (a national pastime), quick repartee, the telling of stories and jokes, patience, sensitivity, and the ability to be an enthusiastic audience as well as a performer.’

  But I am afraid to say that over the years I have come to detest hygge somewhat. It wasn’t the cheap, fizzy beer (how did they ever have the nerve to claim it was ‘probably the best’? It’s like claiming Sunblest is the best bread), the curried herring or the communal singing in which the Danes inevitably indulge when more than two of them gather together and which can drag out a formal Danish dinner to interminable lengths,2 that ultimately turned me against hygge; it was more hygge’s tyrannical, relentless drive towards middle-ground consensus; its insistence on the avoidance of any potentially controversial topics of conversation; its need to keep things light and breezy – the whole comfortable, self-congratulatory, petit bourgeois smugness of it all.

  As Danish anthropologist Jeppe Trolle Linnet once wrote, ‘When people hygge, they engage in a mutual sheltering of each other from the pressures of competition and social evaluation.’ In this way hygge can seem like self-administered social gagging, characterised more by a self-satisfied sense of its own exclusivity than notions of shared conviviality. Linnet also wrote that hygge ‘acts as a vehicle for social control, establishes its own hierarchy of attitudes, and implies a negative stereotyping of social groups who are perceived as unable to create hygge.’ The inference here is that only Danes really know how to have a properly hyggelig time; pity those poor foreigners with their la-di-da cocktail parties, their gladiatorial dinner-party discussions, and sophisticated soirées. Similarly, British anthropologist Richard Jenkins has described hygge as ‘normative to the point of coercive’.

  That was my experience when I first arrived in Denmark. I soon discovered that playing devil’s advocate to stimulate discussion is unwelcome, for instance, as is spirited debate on political and social issues. Such things make the Danes shift their buttocks awkwardly. I am exaggerating a bit, I’ll admit, but it is true that the Danes do not generally appreciate the ding-dong of heated discussion when they gather socially. They much prefer to occupy themselves with the nitty-gritty of where the wine was bought, how little it cost, and whether the bottle they are currently drinking is better than the last one.

  I am not alone in this view. ‘We in Sweden ridicule the Danes for their insularity and their so-called hygge – just have a cosy time with your family and friends,’ one Swedish academic told me. ‘There are some sociologists who have looked at Danish xenophobia and racism and they refer to hygge and how the Danes like to put up fences between
themselves and the rest of the world and draw back and be comfortable and cosy.’

  This overarching desire to foster an unchallenging, informal, hyggelig atmosphere chimes with my post-colonial ‘drawbridge theory’ – the ‘What was lost without . . .’ way of valuing what little cultural and economic capital Denmark had left after the loss of its empire, and the way in which the country turned its gaze inward. The need to cling together, to identify shared values and stick resolutely to them regardless of prevailing winds or fashion, could well have its roots in the history of Danish territorial loss. They clung together on their flat little life raft, and soon learned not to rock the boat. Hygge is a highly effective way to skirt controversial topics, or sweep unhappy memories under the carpet – ‘Okay, all right, so we had Norway and Schleswig-Holstein and lost it all, but do we really need to talk about it? How about another bottle of Amarone? Aunty Inge: a song!’

  The Danes pride themselves on their informality: the men rarely wear ties, teachers are on first-name terms with their pupils, Danish politicians cycled to parliament long before it was a fashionable cause. Yet, like every other race on earth, they still have their social rules and formal procedures. Even when the Danes appear to be at their most informal, often it will be a highly ritualised informality. In fact, this is when the foreigner should be most on his guard, because this is when the traps are set: the beer may be poured, but wait for the host to lift their glass and say skål before you taste it; there may be rye bread and salmon on the same buffet, but the salmon always goes on white bread; and, please, don’t ask what Great Uncle Oluf did during the war.

  Christmas is the most ritualised event of the Danish calendar. You could write a whole book about Danish Christmas traditions (and, my Danish publisher told me with a weary sigh, many have); from circling the tree singing carols, via the ‘almond game’ (in which an almond is concealed deep inside a gigantic rice pudding, all of which must be eaten before the winner reveals they have the nut in their mouth), to joining hands to form a chain, then running through every room in the house singing ‘Nu er det jul igen’ (‘Now it is Christmas again’), and so on. The Danes have put in serious training to perfect the Christmas experience and, to be fair, even a toxic old humbug like me can’t help but enjoy it.

  There are many other special days in the Danish calendar: Sankt Hans we have already encountered; there is also Fastelavn (Shrovetide) when they beat a cat with a stick (or, at least, they used to; now they whack a barrel filled with sweets); Store Bededag (Great Prayer Day), a random religious holiday that falls on the fourth Friday after Easter; and something called Mortensaften (I never have been able to figure out what this is, but it is in November and they eat a duck). Then there are all the various anniversaries and birthday parties which, with their sit-down meals, speeches, songs and toasts, tend to adhere to a strict template (for a good idea of what this involves, I direct you to the film Festen, although not all Danish parties feature impromptu revelations of incest and suicide), as do weddings, christenings and confirmations – the latter a fast-growing industry of their own.

  Thinking about it, you could argue that the Danes have developed complex rituals and social signifiers that are every bit as impenetrable to outsiders as those of, say, the Jains in India, or Hasidic Jews: from the order in which you tackle the kolde bord (the Danish equivalent of a smorgasbord, or lunch buffet), to the way you introduce yourself to fellow guests at a party, or how you discuss your children’s performance at school.

  As for folkelig, I have an even less ambiguous relationship to that: I loathe it. I loathe its whole Dixieland-jazz-in-a-beer-garden forced bonhomie; its lowest-common-denominator, often xenophobic humour; the assumption that all people require from their entertainment is to be anaesthetised by the lazy pastiche of the ever-popular summer review shows (‘Look, a man dressed as the queen!’); and all they want from the caterers is industrial beer and processed pork products. But that’s just me. Lots of people like it, and I acknowledge that I am a hateful snob.

  Folkelig pervades a great deal of Danish popular culture and life. One must remain vigilant at all times if one is to have any hope of avoiding it. I failed to do this when I agreed to attend the residential choir week in Jutland I mentioned earlier. This was the single most intense period of exposure to folkelig I have ever experienced in my time in Denmark, involving six days singing popular hits of the seventies and eighties together with four hundred retired public-sector workers. By midway through the second day I was experiencing a profound identity crisis; by the third day I was making plans to leave Denmark for ever; but by the fourth day I had become strangely becalmed by the easy-listening arrangements and collectivist atmosphere.

  As Friday’s concert grew nearer, nerves began to fray slightly, but voices were never raised and our endlessly patient choirmasters coaxed and cajoled us across the finish line with just a few notes missed and the odd line dropped. There were no rows or diva-like tantrums.3 In the evenings of the choir week, after rehearsing all day, we would reassemble in the wake of a meal usually featuring some meat, boiled potatoes and thick brown sauce of indeterminate origin and eaten at long tables in the school cafeteria with a plastic beaker of warm Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon, to sing Danish folk songs and hymns, the lyrics of which spoke of the Danish seasons and countryside, community and fellowship, death, and loss, in tones that were fond and ironic, modest yet proud.

  Many of them had been written by Benny Andersen, the great Danish folk poet, now eighty-three years old. Andersen even turned up in person for an evening in his honour, during which we sang his wry, bittersweet songs about Denmark (‘This little, neurotic land of smiling crazy people,’ is one of his best-known lines) and listened to reminiscences from his career. Andersen is an important cultural icon to these people, and at the end of his appearance the ladies of a certain age were false-starting each other to be the first to give him a standing ovation.

  I feel a bit of a heel being critical about the kind, good-natured, gentle folk who attended the choir week in Tønder. It is easy to mock their Gary Larson aesthetic (sandals with socks, cut-down denim shorts with their shirts tucked in, and so on), and their Ned Flanders sensibilities. In truth, a more contented, kind, honest, community-minded group of people you could never hope to meet. The problem was that, for a cynical misanthrope such as myself, folkelig has much the same effect as Kryptonite on Superman, or water on the Wicked Witch of the West. I become weak and confused, and begin to question who I am. Prolonged exposure to folkelig undoes me, smothers me, suffocates me. It’s because I am bad.

  One particularly visible manifestation of folkelig which can be especially discordant for visitors is that central ornament of the folkelig, or hyggelig occasion: the Danish flag, the Dannebrog. The Danes genuinely believe that they have the most beautiful flag in the world, and will hoist it given the slightest opportunity – birthdays, funerals, anniversaries, any old social event. Flags are used to decorate gift-wrapping paper, to grace birthday cards and are stuck in cakes and buffets. Richard Jenkins cleverly deduced that a Dannebrog flying on a Tuesday often signifies a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, because ‘allowing for leap years, the twenty-fifth anniversary of any original matrimonial Saturday will fall on a Tuesday’. He claimed that the Danes spend up to DKK60 million (£6 million) a year on flags. Various rituals and rules attend to the use of the Dannebrog – it must never be allowed to touch the ground, must be lowered before it gets dark, and so on. It stirs the Danes’ collective hearts and can genuinely bring tears to their eyes to see the Dannebrog fluttering in the breeze, or painted on a child’s face – as I said. I remember my mother’s horrified look when my wife wheeled in the cake for my son’s first birthday and it was crowned with a ring of Danish flags, and the bewilderment I felt when my in-laws telephoned to tell me they had raised their flag in their front garden on the occasion of my own birthday (virtually every Danish home, summer home and even children’s Wendy house has a flagpole outside).
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br />   From a British perspective, the Danes’ enthusiasm for their flag can be quite unsettling – like finding out a much-loved friend votes for UKIP. When you spot the Dannebrog on the packaging of innumerable products in Danish supermarkets (everything from potatoes to washing-up liquid), or flying from buses on the occasion of some or other minor royal’s birthday, it can sometimes seem like the entire country has been set-designed by Leni Riefenstahl. But the truth about the Danes’ love of their flag is not as sinister as first impressions might have you believe. Though the Dannebrog has been slightly tainted in recent years by the Danish People’s Party’s xenophobic nationalism (a while back they attempted to pass a law to put the Danish flag on car number plates, but failed), the Danes do not see their flag-waving as a nationalistic gesture. It’s just, well, hyggelig.

  ‘Other countries love their flags,’ a Danish dinner guest protested to me recently. ‘Look at the Olympics!’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s true. But the French don’t hoist the Tricolor on the cat’s birthday.’

  Richard Jenkins has written about the Danes’ curious attachment to their flag in his book Being Danish: Paradoxes of Identity in Everyday Life. He doesn’t see it as wholly negative.

  ‘Not all nationalism is bad, for a start,’ he told me over the phone from his home in Sheffield. ‘The point is, the Danes use their flag in lots of different ways. It is the most complicated flag in terms of its use. Over the last 150 years it has become identified with happiness and good times, celebration.’

  Jenkins’s interest in the Dannebrog was initially piqued when he arrived at a Danish airport for the first time and saw, as is often the case, crowds of Danes waving the Danish flag to welcome home their friends and families.