Swedish paradoxes: Loving and hating the modern world

Part 5 in a mini-series about weird/normal Sweden

This is the 5th and last in a series about Swedish culture, seen through the perspective of five paradoxes. This is the introduction and collection of all the other episodes.

Let me know if you have requests for future themes. I have some newsletters prepared about politics, games, teaching and stories.

‘I’m already nostalgic for the latest thing’. Tradition versus rationality (and foreign imports)

This paradox is about how Sweden is a country that loves newness, but also needs predictability and routine and hence tradition.

I defined it in the introductory letter as “Swedes love everything that is modern, new and offers more efficiency – apart from when they don’t and when they cling on to watching exactly the same 1930s Disney cartoons every year at exactly the same time.”

The cartoons I’m talking about are the ‘Donald Duck and friends’ showing that happens every Christmas Eve. For a country of individualists and people in love with rational modernity there’s still an enormous ritual that takes place at this time on the eve of Yule. An argument I’ve been making all through this series about Swedish culture is that the five paradoxes all link into each other and reinforce each other. For example, this Disney ritual is in a way collective, but it is also carried out by people who are separate, in front of their private television sets. It survives precisely because it fits so well into this individual/collective paradox. And it also works as an example of the aloof/emotional paradox. I think the whole reason rituals survive in Sweden is because of a need for people to be able to handle change and modernity by making it familiar so it doesn’t cause stressful emotions or a kind of spontaneous intimacy. Imagine having to decide what to do on Christmas with relatives every year? Awful! No, instead we get to all sit down together and watch the predictable show, and make the predictable jokes and comments.

The reason this phenomenon deserves its own paradox is because – why are Swedish people all sitting down to an American cartoon? Why has a modern import been chosen as the centre of this calming tradition? And that brings up the Swedish need to feel that everything is as rational, effective and modern as possible – but also a need for comforting familiarity.

There are other examples of foreign culture being taken onboard as a local ritual. In Germany they do "the same procedure as every year" and watch a short English film called Dinner for One at New Year. But this is a film that is almost unknown in the country it came from, and so it’s possible to see that this isolated snippet of foreign culture has been easily Germanised. In Sweden people are hugging tightly the cultural transatlantic colossus of Disney. In a way, the closest parallel to this is how the East Mediterranean religion of Christianity was embraced in northern European countries and made a part of their own traditions. Sweden has that too, with its Santa Lucia processions that supposedly commemorate a young woman who died in southern Italy over a thousand years ago, but are really a classic Nordic festival of lights and foods, at a time when real light is dying.

In the same way I’d say the Disney culture has been taken on as a Swedish tradition and adapted to local needs. To extend the point further we can say that the entire Swedish Church has been almost emptied out of its Middle Eastern heritage and made into something that fits the modern Swedish mind. While the majority of Swedes are still members of the Church, they mostly only attend to get married, get their babies baptised and to get their relatives buried. In other words, the basic bare tent-pole rituals of the human animal’s lifecycle, that hold up the social fabric. The church itself preaches a post-war understanding of human rights more than it preaches the ancient words of the prophets and if you attend a service you’re quite as likely to hear modern music – including Abba – as you are to hear an old hymn.

But my point isn’t that the Swedish culture has taken in and adapted other influences – every single culture does that. What I’m saying is that there is a need and a drive to import and adapt new influences, because of the special nature of Swedish culture, and that this creates a tension between the constant shock of the new, and the need to maintain a recognisable tradition.

In a way the ‘import’ of Christianity can be seen as an early example of state innovation. The Swedish kings gained a legitimating narrative for their rule, and they also gained access to the legal, administrative and educational resources offered by a priesthood. The path to a rational Reformed Lutheran church under the state-builder Gustav Vasa (1523) is a simple one. The priests were used as local record keepers to mobilise the sparse manpower of this thinly-populated country for war. If we skip ahead to the 1920s we can see the idea of concrete building being imported in a similar way. Not because the Swedish elites believed in some brutalist ideal, but because concrete plus plentiful timber resulted in a building boom. The poverty and low population of Sweden has always meant a constant scraping for resources and an eagerness to adapt what has been developed elsewhere to gain local advantage.

For a long time this openness to foreign ideas meant Sweden was very close to the German states and their ideas about bureaucracy and industry. This all ended in 1944 for reasons that should be obvious! The USA and New York had already been seen as elements of the future, but when it was clear that the United Nations were going to win, the Swedish love affair with America really took off, supported by a perfect storm of economic, political, diplomatic and cultural reasons.

It is in this context that ‘Kalle Anka och hans vänner önskar God Jul’ (‘From All of Us to All of You’) became a Swedish classic beginning in 1960. There was also a super-storm of reasons for this, too. Sweden was rich, and an unusually high number of people had television sets, but there was no free commercial television market, rather a single public broadcaster (SVT), which could decide what everyone watched. Hence the yearly adoration of the pinnacle of American popular culture. Swedes are in doing so worshipping modernity and affirming their place in the English-dominated modern post-war order and marking themselves as a modern society. One of the winners.

However, if you’ve read my past articles about Swedish culture you’ll know that Swedes are not Americans. Swedish society has very different ideas about the individual, society and how people should act towards each other. This means the foreign traditions need to be held at more of a distance in order to be appreciated. I’d argue that since the Disney cartoons are as old as 1932 and are now a yearly tradition that makes them more powerful as a cultural trope with every year, since they have been Swedified and function as forms of separate-togetherness as I’ve described in my other articles.

There are many other examples of Swedish paradoxical borrowing to talk about. For example, how the classic rural culture of Sweden owes so much to the idealised American South of the ‘Dukes of Hazard’, featuring muscle cars, Elvis and the occasional Confederate flag hung from a tractor. Or how Swedes have latterly embraced East Asian culture, producing their own manga comics, and e-sport champions to rival the Koreans. The point is that this all happens in the context of a paradox where the intrinsic different and weird Swedish culture relates to the need to keep borrowing, while still retaining its elements that are necessary with regards to the other cultural paradoxes.

I’ll end this letter, and the whole series here, though. I’ll return to writing about specific issues in Swedish culture and also my thoughts about storytelling in future episodes. If you like this issue, please share it on social media.

Supposedly straight-forwardly yours

Loukas Christodoulou