There have always been people who despise sound knowledge. I remember a meeting about dental hygiene sometime during the first years of the 1950s. The dental inspector from Kristianstad talked about the importance of toothbrushing and the danger of sweets.
An elderly man from a village up on the ridge protested. He had never brushed his teeth and never shyed away from a caramel. Still as healthy as a nut!
The mood was a bit depressed. The inspector had his crushing statistics, and most believed in him, many reluctantly. But the old man from the ridge stood up.
How idyllic that time looks today, 70 years later. I do not know anything about the Sweden Democrat Martin Kinnunen’s view of dental hygiene. But I know that he is just like the old man from the ridge when it comes to Sweden’s contribution to climate change. An overwhelming expertise speaks against him. But he’s talking! And he is not alone in his opinion but shares it with a large party. The party has a key role in Swedish national politics. If a leading Sweden Democrat talks about the climate, Ebba Busch and Ulf Kristersson and Johan Pehrson listen carefully. They want to form a government with Jimmie Åkesson’s party.
Many politicians today relate freely to well-established knowledge today. It is a noticeable change in just a few decades.
One of the first articles I wrote for the National Encyclopedia was about anti-intellectualism. I remember at first feeling a little hesitant about the word that did not belong to the usual vocabulary. Also, it was as far as a bus. But after thinking for a while, I realized that it was, after all, an important word that deserved a text.
Anti-intellectualism expresses a deep distrust of the human mind and thus of everything from sensible everyday reasoning to strictly scientific methods. But it could also be an aversion to those whose main task was to deal with such issues, “the intellectuals.”
When I wrote the article, anti-intellectualism appeared above all to be a overcome position. The culmination, of course, was Nazism. The Soviets with their party truths were about to disappear. The present brightened. But, I wrote, there were important examples of anti-intellectualism also towards the end of the 20th century.
It was a glorious time for what was called the new age. Astrology, this ancient doctrine of the influence of stars on man, was constantly gaining new followers. Tarot cards were popular, as were various fortune tellers and fortune tellers. Yes, in short, ancient superstition flourished.
When I read this today I feel a certain nostalgia. To today’s eyes, the years around 1990 appear almost like an idyll. Astrology! A doctrine that in serious contexts has become obsolete centuries earlier. There were people who thought they were entering the age of Aquarius; but most dismissed things as bullshit.
Above all, it was a belief without practical consequences. It was alleged that Margaret Thatcher consulted an astrologer before making important decisions. But the decisions always remained equally rational and heartless.
So different now! Today, the tone of politics is set above all by the new right, that is, the nationalist right of Putin, Trump and Åkesson.
In Sweden, it has come a long way. Climate change is not something we should worry young people about, says Kinnunen and his friends. Sweden’s problems are due to the refugees.
The new right is critical of the elites. The elites are the ones who claim to have the best available knowledge and the most secure information. It is the researchers and journalists, perhaps also the writers and artists. The new right distrusts the elites and feels free to defend the truths that feel right for it.
On the other hand, the economically powerful are not counted among the elites. On the contrary, they are considered allies. The new right has made their interests theirs. Its representatives have found it in order that private financial interests seize an increasing share of the tax money in the form of profits from health and care and education.
It’s an unequal marriage. But at least for now, it lasts. The cold economic calculations of the moderates have been combined with nationalist waffle. Greed gets its share, prejudices get theirs. The Christian Democrats are the small Swedish equivalent of the American Christian right, where Mammon is a more important potentate than the Christian god.
And the Liberals! A soot flag that danced down among the right-wing parties after the old Social Liberal People’s Party burned down.
Let Annie Lööf out in the woods and soon she has left all biologists behind: Annie knows best.
In this political landscape flourishes anti-intellectualism. They praise what benefits the temporary political economy. Do enough people think that it is more important to fly to Gran Canaria than to avoid Putin’s fossil energy – so go for it! Here, bourgeois, suckers and left-wing parties can take each other by the hand and dance long dances.
If the notion of a stable and original Swedish culture has a good market, then one can sacrifice all well-founded knowledge of how changeable and easily influenced our customs and beliefs are.
Is there a strong group that, against ever better knowledge, claims that it is only diligence and not background and school environment that determines what life opportunities young people and young people have – so be it.
It has become free for leading politicians to claim what they find best for the moment. Opinion figures are more important than factual politics.
How could it be this way? Of course, there are many factors that have driven such a radical change. Some of them deserve special mention.
Social media, of course. There, everyone can publish almost without restriction. The old man without a toothbrush would today easily find friends of opinion in the near and far. He and his new friends would build each other up with good tales. Maybe they should join SD.
Equally basic is an increasingly careless approach to knowledge. Politicians set a bad example. They have their favorite areas where they seem to know better than the experts. Let Annie Lööf out in the woods and soon she has left all biologists behind: Annie knows best. Or let Ulf Kristersson talk about nuclear power and the way to the great nuclear peace is open.
When it comes to fossil emissions, all are equally good cabbage drinkers, except the Green Party. The environmentalists are therefore hated by the others.
All this is a sign of a deeper crisis. It has become more important with money than with knowledge. Economic values beat all other values. It is more important that something gives money than that it is based on sound knowledge.
It also means that the time perspective has become increasingly shorter. Today I want to go to Thailand in the cheapest possible way. Today I am going to sell my wood.
This is the next election I will win; a more distant future I do not have to worry about.
The great utopias are dead, they say. This is not strange; utopias paint pictures of a relatively distant future.
Maybe we should nurture utopias better or rather develop new ones. Above all, we should think of a completely natural thought that we are now trying to displace: What kind of world do we want our grandchildren and great-grandchildren to live in?
Read more:
Björn Wiman: That is why hatred and threats against the Green Party are growing
Sven-Eric Liedman: The political battle over the individual’s responsibility for the climate is peculiar