Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two

by Hanzi Freinacht

Modern society required informal relations of a more delicate nature than in the past in order to make the wheels of industry and bureaucracy run smoothly. People had to engage in productive relations with strangers from more varied backgrounds and classes than what they had been used to, and they had to follow new intricate codes of conduct in their relations at work and towards authorities. Former peasants had to learn how to avoid bickering and misunderstandings when interacting with the many strangers in the densely populated urban environments, and they had to accustom themselves to the role as factory workers and the instrumental nature of the relationship between workers and factory owners. The state thus took measures to teach its citizens to read and write and speak the same language so that they could better understand one another. Literacy also made it possible to read the national papers.

The elite was also compelled to adapt to the new societal relations by revising their manners when interacting with the lower classes in public. Verbal and physical abuse could not be tolerated in a modern society. First of all because the poor had the same legal status as the rich, at least on paper;

The new ideal of the ruling classes, the “gentleman”, thus became widely promoted in newspapers and magazines and within the salons and clubs where the bourgeoisie gathered. In fact, everyone had to behave nicer and with greater consideration towards others as stress and tensions among thousands of strangers cramped into small spaces made people more susceptible to go off. Consequently, a culture of politeness and strict etiquettes of public behavior emerged within civil society, and people began to address strangers as “mister” and “madam”, poor as rich, and say “please”

largely develop without direct governmental interference. The state merely made sure that people understood they were equal citizens of the nation state

All of these changes remained, however, within the public domain. How you treated your wife wasn’t part of the state’s political project. Domestic and personal issues were left out.

Social inequalities and injustices get harder to tolerate when people start seeing themselves and others as peers.

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.

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.

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.

welfare state was the expansion into ever more intimate aspects of the social relations within the domestic domain.

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.

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

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.

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 of 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

Do we want a program for conflict resolution and mediation between neighbors to reduce the great costs of eviction cases in courts? Are the end results preferable? Is it a better idea to support kids at age four from bad family conditions than to support them at fourteen as their criminal careers begin? Are single-person targeting programs preferable to programs which work with whole populations, or vice versa? Which are the best strategies to get people to share living spaces more? How can the loneliness of old age be combated; does it work to pay teenagers pocket money to hang out with their elders?

general mode of thinking that Gemeinschaft Politics entails. In order of appearance, they are 1) measures to train emotional, social and collective intelligence, 2) organized community housing for families and the elderly, 3) support for local citizen discussion clubs led by professional facilitators, and 4) making room for civil society projects in public spaces. Measures to train emotional, social and collective intelligence: The modern school system somehow expects that we figure out the most important and difficult aspect of life all by ourselves: how to form productive and loving relations to others.

Measures to increase the emotional, social and collective intelligence of children could include training sessions in school to successfully read facial expressions and body language, guessing the hidden motivations of others, participating in games of perspective taking (in which you need to take others’ perspective of oneself in order to succeed),

Organized community housing for families and the elderly: Housing in late-modern society remains sociologically, economically and ecologically a deeply irrational endeavor.

Today’s “one-villa-one-family” housing system leads to unnecessarily large resource consumption, to loneliness and to social, economic and physical precarity in old age, to distance between the generations, to psychological pressure on the nuclear family, to distance between neighbors and diminished local community, to smaller support networks more generally—and of course to higher living costs, which in turn pressures people economically. It would make more sense to have housing systems which are hybrids between private homes and shared spaces. These would form medium-sized communities with a variety of different apartments. Elderly citizens could move to shared spaces that are safe for frail and weak bodies, letting families with children move into their houses rather than the seniors holding on to them, partaking in shared gardening projects, sharing some burdens of cooking, baby-sitting and so forth. There would be a facilitated framework for democratic decision-making and partly shared ownership—with relevant training offered to key people. Social isolation would drop, psychological health would improve, social skills and intelligence would go up, and people would live more sustainably. The economy would be stabilized. People would retain personal freedom but still have a communal context. The degree to which such housing projects are possible does not only depend upon the knowledge and perspectives of the people who create them, but also—and perhaps primarily—upon th...

Support for local citizen discussion clubs led by professional facilitators:

New arenas for public deliberation are needed and more people should be trained and equipped to become local leaders and facilitators of such meeting places.

If such initiatives for small-scale co-development and citizen engagement were present across society as a normal part of life, the gains could be immense: People would hear more perspectives, develop their own opinions and quite generally be more robust in their roles as citizens. It would also offer a platform for friendships and acquaintances to be formed on a civic basis, away from the pressures of family and professional life.

Making room for civil society projects in public spaces: It is somehow taken for granted that most of the public spaces of a modern consumer society should be reserved for commercial activities.

believe it is a sign of modernity’s lacking imagination when we struggle to come up with any better uses for the natural meeting points in our city centers. Couldn’t we use the spaces for something more useful than idle consumption?

People and organizations should be able to book public areas that are frequented by many fellow citizens and use them as meeting places and platforms for artistic, cultural or social ends. This would enrich society in a myriad of ways and work against the over-instrumentalization and commercialization of the public space.

But you can come up with more ideas. A corps of professional “listeners” in public service institutions and in healthcare? A concerted effort to improve the conflict management and mediation skills in work-life? Programs for intergenerational mentorships? The heart’s the limit.

Ethnic tensions are almost unavoidable in societies containing groups of people with different cultural, linguistic and religious identities. Reducing such tensions has become an ever more delicate task as societal complexity has increased, and the guiding principles to address the issue of ethnicity must be properly reexamined.

each of the four positions seem to correlate with effective value meme: postfaustianists, or traditional conservatives, usually favor nationalism; modernists, the mainstream in most Western societies, tend to gravitate towards the more civic stance of non-nationalism; postmodernists, the “politically correct” elite, are almost always devoted multiculturalists who unanimously defend the position of inter-culturalism. And if you agree with most of the section below on trans-culturalism, then it’s a good indication that you’re metamodern.

Nationalism is the position that defends what is perceived as one’s “own” nationality, state and ethnicity from the perceived threat of other cultural units. To the extent that immigrants are seen as acceptable, they should only be welcomed if they show allegiance to the majority culture and if they make real efforts to be assimilated.

Unfortunately, however, this process of national cohesion can also be reactivated in existing national populations when these feel threatened or shamed—contemporary examples of which we see not only in European right populism and American Trumpism, but also in countries like Russia, Turkey, Brazil and India. Conservatism tends to have a perpetual flirt with nationalism, saying stuff like “we have to learn to stand up for our values”. I say “unfortunately” because nationalism as a reactionary movement does not really offer any credible paths to creating a regulated and functional transnational order, and it tends to feed conflicts and misunderstandings.

Non-nationalism is what I call the reliance upon the modernist project—in its capitalist or communist forms—to simply supersede and eventually efface the ethnic differences between people.

Enlightened self-interest: You won’t go after people whose goods, services and capital you rely upon. And the free market can make that happen.

ethnicity is and remains an epiphenomenon, ultimately reducible to class. A fair society in which material gains are fairly distributed will have fewer ethnic conflicts. This idea of course fails to take ethnicity, identity and culture nearly as seriously as they should. It fails to see and take into account that culture matters, and that culture is a real, behavioral force with real explanatory value—which has shown itself time and again, historically speaking.