Nordic Ideology

by Hanzi Freinacht

  As we saw in Chapter 3, this would change—dramatically—with the late modern consumer society of the 20th century. As Western societies democratized, the demands for civil society to cultivate evermore refined informal relations went up accordingly. The democratic developments of the Gesellschaft prompted corresponding dev­elopments within the Ge­meinschaft to avoid alienation, and to ensure the informal relations bet­ween people would match the increasingly com­plex formal relations. There are just so many subtle and minor things that cannot be put into a code of laws. We need to regulate ourselves in all the day-to-day affairs that constitute the minute parts in an increasingly com­plex society.

  So in order to ensure people would relate to one another as equal citi­zens and pursue their political interests in democratic ways as they enter­ed the political battlefields of the Gesellschaft , Western governments made great efforts to support their civil societies to cultivate democratic notions of Gemeinschaft . The welfare state’s growing expenditures on everything from public radio and television, over culture and sports, to afterschool activities for children and local community projects can all be seen as measures to generate positive emotions of fellowship between citi­zens and make them feel as equal participants in a democratic society.

  However, as the notions of the Gemeinschaft became more democratic and cosmopolitan, the Gesellschaft also had to develop to match the new level of Gemeinschaft . The two go hand in hand in a dialectical process where one cannot successfully develop without the other. Social inequal­ities and injustices get harder to tolerate when people start seeing them­selves and others as peers. Social measures within the domestic sphere (unemployment aid, health insurance, pensions etc.) had been implemen­t­ed in some countries since the 19th century, but mostly as a way to curb soc­ialism, not as a measure of Gemeinschaft Politics. This changed during the 20th century. To maintain public faith in the institutions of govern­ment and to ensure social stability in a democratically inclined late-modern society, new measures were needed to increase social mobility and limit the extent of social problems. Affecting behavior in the public domain wasn’t enough. Gemeinschaft Politics had to go domestic .

  The material welfare of underprivileged families became a societal con­cern so as to prevent poverty, poor health and lack of education, all of which hinder children from becoming productive members of society. Even such seem­ingly private matters as what people ought to eat and how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases became a concern for the ex­panding welfare state. But the state also began to interfere in more intim­ate affairs such as child neglect, substance abuse, domestic violence, divor­ce rights, abortion and so on, so as to avoid the marginalizing effects of dysfunctio­nal social relations at home. New legal measures were put in place to pro­tect the well­being of citizens in the domestic domain. Yet, alterations of the formal relations between citizens, and between citizens and the state, were not suff­icient to improve the informal relations in domestic life. Only through changed attitudes about gender relations and what is to be considered acceptable behaviors among family members, could domes­tic relations be improved. And this in turn required another change of atti­tude: that domestic affairs should become political issues.

  The attitude that it’s no one’s business if a man gets drunk and beats his wife and children every Tuesday, or the idea that women should shut up and obey their husbands, won’t change much just because the state says it’s wrong. It is mainly within civil society that any substantial chan­ges to such discourses can come about. So just like in the 19th century, the Gemeinschaft politics of the 20th were conducted with the help of civil soc­iety. The welfare state began to fund a multitude of non-governmental initiatives seeking to cultivate more democratic and benign relations in the domestic domain. Everything from private drug and alcohol rehabili­tation programs, over child protection agencies, domestic violence aware­ness groups and wo­men’s rights organizations, to local community efforts among youths to counter loneliness, bullying and idleness, can thus be seen as the expansion of Gemeinschaft Politics into the domestic domain. New civil societal initiatives pertaining to the further develop­ment of Gemeinschaft Politics within the public domain were also added, such as anti-racism campaigns, LGBT+ and ethnic minority rights organi­zations and so on. But the defining feature of the Gemeinschaft Politics of the wel­fare state was the expansion into ever more intimate aspects of the social relations within the domestic domain.

  The mission of the welfare state was not only to curb poverty and dis­ease, but to create a just social order people could identify with and view as their home. The fact that the Swedish welfare state was referred to as folkhemmet , “the people’s home”, is thus no coin­cidence. The massive welfare programs of the post-war era, that literally entered people’s homes, can thereby be seen as the next stage of Gemeinschaft Pol­itics that was needed to match the developments of increasing demo­cra­tization in late-modern consumer society.

  So, what would be the next step?

  A developmental sequence towards increasingly intimate aspects of the scope of Gemeinschaft Politics has already become visible: from the pub­lic, to the domestic, to the… my suggestion is: the personal .

  Then, what could Gemeinschaft Politics look like in the global, hyper­complex, multicultural, information society of the 21st century? As the world grows ever more complex, citizens will find it harder to avoid con­fusion and alienation and society will find it increasingly challenging to maintain high levels of belonging and togetherness—to maintain pro­social behavior and trust in others. At the same time, the demand for even better relations between citizens goes up. That all the king’s subjects didn’t share the same cultural understanding was hardly a problem in medieval times, but in the industrial age it would break the kingdom apart. In the times of Charles Dickens, govern­ments could safely ignore that common people were too poor to give their children a safe and happy upbringing, but in the massive social housing projects of today’s metro­polises, a group of disgruntled and alienated Oliver Twists can turn a city into a war zone.

  Providing a sense of Gemeinschaft to a factory worker in an industrial city is more demanding than it is to do the same for a peasant in a med­ieval village—and providing Gemeinschaft to a modern consumer in a ser­vice economy is more demanding than for a 19th century factory worker. It thus hardly needs to be said that Gemeinschaft Politics gets even trickier when we are dealing with a new generation of digitally connec­ted millen­nials who have to come to grips with one another in a globalized infor­mation economy. And if our children are to survive, they will need to experi­ence higher levels of Gemeinschaft than any generation before. Their rela­tions with one another will need to be of a much higher quality than what is typical today. Our future civilization depends on fellowship, higher levels of love and friendship. If Oliver Twist could rav­age a city center today, he could blow up the world tomorrow.

  Gemeinschaft Politics needs to get personal.

  Enter Creepy Politics

  Again—Democratization Politics, the poli­ticization of the development of our formal relations in the public sph­ere, must naturally be matched by a corresponding dev­elop­ment of the informal and personal relations bet­ween all citizens across all spheres of life.

  After all, does not each and every vote cast depend prec­isely upon the rel­ations people experience in their everyday life? Does not every debate, dialogue or deliberation depend upon the level of trust and the social skills of the parties involved? Does not the very will to want the best for not only ourselves, but for the public and for all citizens, depend upon our exper­ience of these same people we meet? Deeper democratiza­tion is only poss­ible if there is a solid foundation of Gemeinschaft . Ulti­mately, the political always rests upon a personal foundation, and this foundation is always rela­tional.

  We need Gemeinschaft Politics. As I have argued, for a society to acti­vely and deliber­ately cultivate and promote the quality o
f all human relati­ons, the personal must become a political issue. This drives us towards the frightening con­clusion that even the love affairs of teenagers are of politi­cal concern, that how many friends an average old drunk has is a political issue. It is a matter of public interest, because it affects all of us. In order for society to self-organ­ize at a new and higher level, the realm of the poli­tical must expand; the political must dive into the human soul, crawl in under our very skins.

  This can and will of course get creepy as hell—unless a corresponding deepening of democracy has occurred, so that it is not an expert commit­tee who subtly nudges and shapes the rest of us, but rather a free, trans­parent and fair debate is had about how citizens want to shape the gene­rative preconditions for rich and functional relations to thrive. And there are oth­er restraints that keep creepy at bay, as you will see in the coming chapt­ers. Just as deeper democracy requires deeper Gemeinschaft , so does Gemein­schaft Politics require a successful expansion of Democrat­ization Politics if it is to be in the service of higher order, freedom and equality.

  For now, bear with me. This is going to get creepy. But remember that this perceived creepiness is a symptom of not working with all the six dimensions of new politics together, of failing to get the new “Monte­squieu balance” up and running.

  If society is going to work at all in the future, we have to go deeper in our coordination of human agency and cognition, and we thus need deeper politics. All else is toothless crap. To believe that you can rearrange things without going deeper is what I call­ the position of “the liberal inno­cent”, a figure we sol­emnly sentenced to death in Book One. The liberal innocent is a false defender of freedom.

  Let us then go beyond the liberal innocent. Let us dive into deeper pol­itics, one that seeps into so many more relations, one that dares to go where the truth leads us: towards the intimate. Because it’s the only way ahead; if we don’t reshape human psychology, we don’t stand a chance. And in order to do so we must travel down a sensitive and risky path.

  We’re taking these risks. That’s why political metamodernism is a rev­olutionary and dangerous movement. We must live and breathe dange­rous dreams.

  An Orwellian “Ministry of Love”?

  Just how dangerous can these dreams get? Ask your nightmares.

  As you may know from George Orwell’s nightmarish political sci-fi dyst­opia 1984 , the Ministry of Love was the ministry of interior affairs, enforc­ing loyalty to Big Brother—the personification of the ruling party—thr­ough trem­en­dously extensive surveillance, manipulation, networks of in­formants, brainwashing and good old torture. The notorious Thought Pol­ice are part of the Ministry of Love.

  The protagonist Winston Smith is brought to “Room 101” to encoun­ter his deepest fear, his phobia of rats, in order to make him give up his love of a woman who has inspired rebellious and independent thoughts in him. His tormentors are successful; his emotions are extinguished as he betrays her to be spared from his greatest horror. Here is a government and a political realm that respects no personal boun­daries, no privacy and no integrity—and which subdues the domain of private emotions and rela­tionships to its own logic of political self-preservation.

  In the last instance every trace of human meaning and spontaneity are effaced under the blind logic of power. The bad-guy in the book, O’Brien, who works at the Ministry of Love, says in earnest that there is nothing left of life, but at least he and others can have the consolation of torment­ing the weak. When Winston desperately inquires for a last shred of resis­tance and hope, O’Brien says to his prisoner:

  “But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxi­ca­tion of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Al­ways, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”

  Dang. So this, there is good reason to believe, is basically what is at stake if we go ahead to create an expansion of the political realm into the private and personal. An eternity of a boot up our faces. The very opposite of Emmanuel Levinas’ idea of a surrender to the helpless visage of the other, or Buber’s relatedness to the sacred Thou.

  I fully agree that this is a real risk. And yet—as I have labored to show in this book and the last—it is only by dealing with these inner and rela­tional issues of all citizens that we can have any hope of resolving the prob­lems of modernity and reach a new island of “relative utopia” before it is too late. We must evolve, before civilization itself crashes under the weight of dev­elop­mental imbalances as the world-system is shocked by the emer­gence of new super-tech­nologies for which we are socially, psy­cholo­gically and poli­tically unprep­ared. I know I am repeating myself here, but I believe it is with good reason.

  And on a more mundane level, again, most of today’s problems in soci­ety are not of an economic nature, but of a social, emotional and relatio­nal one. Most of us—in the rich parts of the world, at least—are limi­ted, thwar­ted and har­med so much more by relationships gone awry, in so many ways, than by actual poverty. Even those who do suffer actual pov­erty very often do so, in practice, because too many social and emo­tional prob­lems have amassed in their lives. And even when economic inequality does hurt us, it is often by negatively distorting our social rela­tion­ships, making us feel unwelcome and inferior. In short, society is a rela­tional affair through-and-through. To think that you can meaning­fully manage and sustain soc­iety (let alone transform it in a positive direction) without man­aging the rich multi­plicity of intimate human relation­ships is non­sensical.

  I have worked hard to make this point before: We are now reaching a point in world history in which sustaining society means transforming it. Rebirth or bust. Metamodern Renaissance.

  And this, again, compels us to delve into the all-too-human great web of relations. It’s the right thing to do, no matter how revolting the idea may seem to the conventional modern mind. Again, you need all six new forms of politics for this to make any sense.

  The modern mind—and its conventional compass—is wrong. It was built for another time, for another social and political landscape.

  Doing Gemeinschaft Politics

  How, then, could Gemeinschaft Politics be any different from a degen­era­ted form of Orwellian governmental super-surveillance, manipulation, over-reach and smo­th­er­ing? What, concretely, would the Ministry of Gemein­schaft be doing?

  First of all, the Ministry of Gemeinschaft would lead the ongoing pro­duction of high qual­ity, det­ailed censuses of people’s lives over months, years and entire lifes­pans: how much loneliness, how much issues of trust among our friends, how often we feel the need to lie to one another and in what spheres of life (per­sonally, professionally), what deeper insecurities drive us, how fun­ctional and satisfying our relationships are, how much we identify with ethnic or political groupings—and so forth.

  Today’s gov­ernments do monitor public health and some social indic­a­tors. But what we are considering here would be a much larger project—more systematic, more detailed and frequent and publi­cized as relevant self-reflection for the pub­lic.

  This major thrust into soc­iological issues would produce a vast bank of open data upon which people can ref­lect, credible arguments can be made in political debates, and which social move­ments or civil society may react upon—or even priv­ate enterprise for that matter. Supp­orted by big data, such a data­bank would not only be fertile soil for the applied social scien­ces, for inva­luable empirical research into society’s workings, but it would enable the public debate to process and handle issues that are today far beyond the scope of the political realm.

  Such issues concern all of the many aspects and dimensions of social life and relations throughout society—personal, professional, sex­ual, eth­nic, civic, class-related, and so forth. The general collective
know­ledge base, our collective ability to talk about, understand and tackle such issu­es, in­crea­ses over time as relevant statistics and information is continuo­usly made public: Has loneliness seen a sharp increase in older rural men lately? Or in young urban women, especially in this or that city? Do peop­le in the educa­tion sector feel they have a harder time relating to stu­dents? How strong is the trend? Have quantities and qual­ities of friend­ships been im­proving or deteriorating? What is the distribution of positive attention and support? Which groups are getting too little affection from others? Do people feel sexually harass­ed, which groups and under what circum­stan­ces? How many people feel they have access to arenas in which they can honestly and safely express their views? Is online bullying on the rise? Online gaming or gambling addic­tion?

  All of this can be engaging news material and lay the grounds for entirely new ways for society at large to seeing itself, for new public dis­cussions and for political leaders and others to offer suggestions about how the issues may be addressed.

  A second area of concern for the Ministry of Gemeinschaft would be to devise, implement and evaluate social innovations, practices and insti­tutions with the aim to advance the generative conditions for Gemein­sch­aft throughout society . In the last instance it would of course be up to political leaders and “the people” (read: the processes of demo­cra­tic self-organization) to suggest and vali­date such pract­ices. But as is always the case when new forms of politics emerge, a corres­ponding organ­iza­tional structure with professional exper­t­ise needs to be created. This would of course require the proliferation of university edu­ca­tions gear­ed towards this end as well as a rich plethora of private com­pan­ies, public-private partnerships, public support of civil society and volunteer­ing and a host of social entrepreneurs and other so-called “fourth sector” [81] actors. Any suc­cessful Gemeinschaft Politics must be sup­ported by a rich eco­system of partner­ships, as it obviously depends upon the close and intimate partici­pation of warm hands and localized perspec­tives. It cannot be purely top-down, as no person can be ordered or paid to feel fellowship and soli­darity or to not be lonely. These qualities must be cultivated; they must emerge.