All cultures are full of paradox, a slippery vascillation between meta-narrative and reality, private and public, pride and shame. This article by Vanity Fair’s A. A. Gill is about as honest a reflection on Scandinavia’s cultural paradoxes as I have come across (only weakened by the occasional temptation towards rhetorical flourish), and a fairly astute observation as to why its stories manage to grip the attention of the outside world.Â
Scandinavia is Europe’s Canada, gentle giant of the North. A collection of countries we can’t tell apart, whose flags are color variations of the same pattern. They’ve got interchangeable Lego royal families, and all their names end in “-son.” Scandinavia has long been held up as the paragon of a decent, evolved society, like the blue-eyed teacher’s pet at school, the kid your mother always told you to be more like. In every survey of enviable smugness, Scandinavia comes first. Copenhagen is apparently the best city in the world to live in. Finland has a better education system, fewer fat people, and more beautiful women than the rest of us. Norway is, per capita, one of the richest countries. Scandinavians enjoy paying some of the globe’s heftiest taxes because they like their enormous, cozily knitted welfare state, which provides the best child care, hospitals, old folks’ homes, jails, and madhouses available this side of heaven. Mothers get generous maternity leave—16 months per couple in Sweden, and so they will not be disadvantaged on the ladder of success, and for the sake of their perfectly adjusted kids, fathers are required to take at least 2 of those months. No dodging dirty diapers by running to the office.
Scandinavians have managed to attain high standards of living while maintaining a low differential between rich and poor. And if that isn’t enough to make you want to throw up your smoked sheep’s head and give the blue-eyed blond kid a wedgie, then consider that they are the only humans in history who have been cool enough to divorce nudity from sex. Young and old of every gender and proclivity can nakedly sauna, roll in the snow, and skinny-dip with seals without the faintest leer or vain concern for subzero shriveling.
But at least we can console ourselves with the thought that a great many of them will commit suicide. Though the Scandinavians dispute this, saying they’re just more diligent at collating their mortality statistics, the North does have its dark side. The long winter nights, the months where the sun skims like a pale pebble across the horizon. Scandinavians may charitably love the Third World, but they loathe and despise one another. The nations share a pugnacious history of occupation, famine, murder. The watchword of all Nordic people, their mantra, is “conformity.” The worst social sin is to stand out, to appear even obliquely boastful or pleased with yourself. It is one thing to succeed, but you mustn’t ever be seen to be succeeding. You can’t tell how rich or powerful anyone is by looking at how they are dressed or the watch they are wearing or the handbag they are toting. Scandinavians drive sensible, unremarkable cars, pedal old, beat-up bikes. The streets of Copenhagen and Stockholm are a uniform monochrome of black parkas and wool hats. Not belittling others with your success is a serious and constant obligation.
You can split Europe between the herring people and the sardine people. Herring Europe, in the North, is Protestant, liberal, conformist, and honest. The sardine South is Catholic, corrupt, vain, and mendacious. But ask 100 Europeans—or anyone, for that matter—if they’d rather live in deranged, derailed Italy or decent and efficient Denmark and 99 of them will say, “Give me Tuscany.” Including the Danes.
Of course we’d rather live with the flattery, the flirtation, and the sybaritism, putting off till tomorrow what we should have done yesterday. But we also know, in our fear, that what we should do is live more like them. And when the economic weather is cold, it’s better to be a herring. The attraction of Scandinavia’s renaissance is in its having managed to survive a humane and collectively responsible recession. This is not a time for thoughtless laughter and lies, for long lunches and siestas. It’s a time for hunkering round the fire, caring for each other, diligent toil, and eating mushrooms. The appetite for murder and terse detectives always grows in popularity during depressions. The grim darkness of crime fiction reflects hard times. These tales aren’t an escape to a nice world—they are about facing up to a grimly Gothic life where stuff happens and you need to man up to make it right.
Out of Scandinavia comes the cold, cleansing gust of fiscal and social cohesion, of redemption, with a bit of heavy drinking and woolly, fit sex on the side. The Nordics have a trick, a useful mind game. They keep two sets of ethical accounts, like the New Testament and the Old. One set of books they show to the world; the other they keep to themselves. Publicly they are liberal and inclusive. They clear shelf space for pornography and they politely listen to nihilism. They prefer rehabilitation to punishment and they open the doors to refugees. They are never judgmental about social stumbles, abortion, or illegitimacy. They throw confetti over gay and inter-racial marriages. You could probably set up home with a willing reindeer. But privately, behind the shutters, they are moral sticklers, silently unyielding and stern about impropriety and licentiousness. They are formal and easily shocked. They are welcoming but not particularly friendly to strangers. They manage to live with this dichotomy, without suffering its contradictions, because it is practical. Society must work, and it works best if it’s fair and compassionate. Families work best when there are rules and stout boundaries.
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