Such a system of thought must be inherently logical, like the tripartite division of powers—or else it can hardly be sustainable as a new equilibrium. What you need to do is to learn to see this attractor, how it is inherently logical, how and why it gets its competitive edge. This attractor is the lodestone of the navigator, allowing us to blaze new paths for society, because we can see—not quite where we are going—but which directions do exist: where is north and where is Mecca?
If we can see the directionality of how our societies evolve, and where we are on this map, the point isn’t necessarily that we should always go “forward”. The point is rather that we should navigate more proficiently, adjusting to every wind and current, because we know our position and our direction. This can include waiting for the right moment and taking some strategic retreats. But instead of “north” and “Mecca”, we are dealing with another dimension by which we can navigate: the stages of development; each stage being an attractor for society to stabilize around.
Understanding where you are in a sequence of attractors doesn’t necessarily mean you can go to the next stage, or indeed, that you should always try to do so. But it means you can tilt the likelihood of going in a direction that is more sustainable and is likely to have positive effects in the lives of people.
Imagine you have two governments in similar countries: one sees the attractor points ahead and the other doesn’t. As they each make a thousand policy and implementation decisions for their administrations over a period of time, the “attractor-aware” government will gain an advantage over the “attractor-blind” one. The difference might not be visible from the outside unless you study their many policies in great detail. In practical reality, however, one country is likely to thrive while the other is not. As the differences stack up over the years, one society will be happier, healthier, more resilient and gain a more central position in the global system—economically and culturally.
The people who recognize the attractors of course don’t have all the answers to the questions of life and society; they just have an extra hint on how to navigate in each unique situation that surfaces. So that’s how you use this text: You learn the attractors, and then you navigate to affect any number of situations in which you play a part. Because you can see through the goggles of political metamodernism, you can implant a little of the metamodern DNA here and there: in a political debate, in a media production, in your company’s values and culture, in the way you pose your research questions in social science—or just by hinting at something in an art project.
It’s like spreading a virus (if you will allow me a switch of metaphors), except this one improves society instead of making it sick. Hence the political method is—again—of a more non-linear kind than the political revolutions that grew from the Enlightenment. These revolutions required constitutional reform, and to achieve that, you had to scrap the old society, l’ancien régime , which was only possible by toppling the sovereign or at least ending the monarchic form of governance (or the colonial one, if you are the often-overlooked Haitian revolution).
The “virus strategy” proposed here works differently. We are not really targeting the constitution and designing “a system” you can “establish” by promulgating certain laws. We are talking about cultivating new processes that target culture itself and the developmental psychology of everyone; about creating a more existentially apt and emotionally sensitive civilization—a listening society. And we are exploring why contemporary society is driving us in this direction, and why the ones who fail to recognize this, and to act accordingly, will be severely punished and outcompeted in the many games of life.
Or actually, this virus can be harmful if it turns out we’re wrong about the attractors; if we make the wrong assumptions. There is nothing more beneficial than a good theory. Correspondingly, there is nothing more dangerous than a bad one. Getting it right is just as important as not getting it wrong. The wrong theory can and will land us in a sea of troubles.
Marxism comes to mind. Of course, Marxism has been an incredibly productive intellectual field for the last century and a half, but Marx’s attempt to identify the attractors of historical development was simply not satisfactory. Society did not follow the fundamental dynamics he proposed, nor did it develop through the stages he and his followers imagined. The mistakes of this theory killed about a hundred million people during the 20th century—however indirectly.
And of course, all things are both good and bad. If communism has left us with no substantial positive legacy in terms of socialist societies or historical developments, it still played a major and positive role in many people’s lives, and it has taught our global consciousness some hard-earned lessons about political and economic development.
Then again, it’s not like there is a default “no-theory” place from which we can develop society; we are always within the framework of a theory of some kind. So just “not being a Marxist” is hardly a mark of intelligence and critical thinking. We have to make assumptions, explicit or otherwise. (More on Marxism and communism in Appendix A.)
False assumptions mass murder people (like climate change denial) and correct ones save millions (like correct preemptive action against climate change). Montesquieu was successful in identifying the tripartite division of powers. If Marxism ended up killing people, how many lives has Montesquieu’s theory saved —if we understand the question in an indirect, non-linear sense? How about liberal democracy, human rights, market economy, free enterprise, the welfare state; how many lives have these saved, how many have they improved? What would have happened if these ideas had not taken hold? What about feminism and environmentalism? What about animal rights? You do the math.
Set the Lodestone Right
I hold that our current society is based on a number of false assumptions; a number of sacred cows must be brought to the slaughter house and shown little mercy (said by a vegan, mind you). I hold that these false assumptions can and will kill or otherwise harm millions—in indirect, non-linear ways—because they do not match the new dynamics of a global, digitized, postindustrial society. The chief such false assumption is that we can and should continue the current social-liberal “business as usual” politics within the framework of left-right party politics.
The failure to spread more accurate ideas about society can cause, or fail to prevent, unimaginable quantities of suffering. So we must put forward the best ideas and try to spread them—to the right people, at the right moments, from the right angles.
But how can we make sure this is Montesquieu and not another Marx? A common reflex, championed perhaps most clearly by the “father of libertarianism” Friedrich von Hayek, is to denounce all greater plans and plots for society. In this regard libertarianism and conservatism tend to agree: Top-down social engineering and utopian ideas enforced upon society according to the blueprints conceived of by our limited minds can hardly do justice to the complexity of society. Edmund Burke, “the father of modern conservatism”, underscored in his dismissal of the French Revolution that customs and mores are based upon a long-tried and arduously evolved sum of human experience, whereas intellectual ideas can hardly take into account all the subtle contexts of these collective wisdoms. Radicalism tends to build fortresses in the skies that collapse and backfire when imposed upon the complexities of real life.
This is also largely the line of argument in Hayek’s 1943 book The Road to Serfdom , in which he basically tells us that the road to hell is paved with good intentions of social and political reformers and revolutionaries. The tendency of humans to think we can understand the complexity of our own societies and “plan them” has led to huge mistakes, the communist experiments being only the clearest example. Instead
, society should self-organize through the interactions of many independent players who engage on a free, unobstructed marketplace (as well as in other arenas).
In some ways, this is an appealing idea. It lets us off the hook, intellectually speaking, when it comes to imagining future society, and lets each of us focus on whatever we can do ourselves, as agents on the market and in the civil sphere. It is a humbler stance, its adherents argue, because it’s difficult to know what is good even for oneself—let alone all other people, or society as a whole!
But it is, ultimately, a lazy stance and it quickly leads to dead ends. It begs the question about the libertarian stance itself: If humans cannot understand the complexity of society, or if you are too “intellectually humble” to try, how come you can still diagnose which thoughts about society lead to oppression and which ones lead to freedom? Such humility quickly reveals itself as hollow. How come you are allowed to argue that the market is the most free and rational form of self-organization? How come you are allowed to determine that individuals are more real and important than collectives, that a minimal “night watchman” state is best, or that corporate structures are less oppressive than political ones? Or that “freedom” should be defined in this particular manner?
This “libertarian reflex” also avoids answering another question: What about all the social engineering and utopianism that did work? What about Montesquieu’s tripartite division of powers; would we have been better off without it if it had never guided the formulations of the constitutions of countries? And how come some of the most successful countries in the world, by most measures the Nordic ones, have also been subject to extensive social engineering and the perhaps most thorough penetration of the state into the everyday lives of the citizens?
Scandinavian libertarians and conservatives like to point out that Sweden was in fact a very liberal economy up until the 1970s, and that its main spur of economic growth occurred in the period preceding the social democratic expansion. [13] While this point is correct, it does not take into account that Sweden’s population became the most progressive in the world during the Social Democratic period and that other measures of human development did very well. It appears as though good societies can be built by a dynamic balance between free markets and democratically governed bureaucracies.
The libertarian reflexes warn us of important risks, but as a general dismissal of social engineering they don’t compute. They offer no defense against the Nordic ideology, which seeks to create a deeper and more psychological form of welfare. Lene Andersen and Tomas Björkman show in their book, The Nordic Secret , how Scandinavian reformers explicitly sought to support widespread psychological development in the population.
There is only one proper reply to all of this: studying major societal attractors is a good thing when your analysis is correct, and it’s a bad thing when you’re wrong. Once in a blue moon, a good analysis can grow from a bad one and vice versa , but there it is.
So the question is not: “Is it okay to try to see how society overall develops and to try to act accordingly?” Yes, it’s okay. We just need to make damn sure we set our lodestone right before we sail the seas of history, lest we be left paddling in the cold.
Navigators of History
Back in the days, until the 18th century, European ships had to navigate the seas with latitude but no longitude. You wouldn’t know how far east or west you were. There simply were no clocks available that could keep the time on board a ship as it kept waving back and forth. That Britannia so easily ruled the waves in the 19th century had a lot to do with the British inventing a “marine chronometer” before anyone else. In 1714, the British parliament offered a huge prize sum to whoever could solve the problem of longitude. This led to any number of experiments, including the stabbing of rabbits, in the faint hope that onboard rabbits would suffer some measurable consequences of their siblings on land being tormented at a set point in time. But no luck. Decades went by.
In 1773—more than fifty years later—the carpenter and self-taught clockmaker John Harris finally collected the prize, after a lifetime of incremental improvements to his invention: an advanced mechanical clock which included a contraption that countered the rocking of the boat. The prize was £20,000, about 3.5 million US dollars in today’s currency (which was, by the way, more than a thousand times the average yearly income at the time. Ka-ching.)
The marine clock was expensive, so they couldn’t make too many. Still, the British fleet could now navigate the world in a manner unparalleled by all other powers. And it saved quite a few sailors from scurvy and other maritime miseries as well. The British government saw an attractor point—the measurement of longitude—and with its help the British navy could eventually navigate the world with much greater ease. The competitive advantages were immense. The same holds, I believe, for the map I wish to present you with: the Nordic ideology.
It would be foolish to claim that the Nordic ideology as proposed in these pages is free of error or makes up a complete blueprint for how to renew society. You, the reader, need to help out by critically evaluating this theory as we go along—it might need tweaks, serious revision, or downright rejection. [14]
In this book, you need to evaluate which parts of my theory should be kept or scrapped. But, again, to do that you need to successfully understand the theory first. You can only be a navigator of history to the extent that historical circumstances place you in a position to think and act. You are always part of a greater, self-organizing system of society. The study of self-organizing systems has been called many things—and it stretches across many sciences. One of its early names, the one used at the influential Macy Conferences back in the 1950s, was cybernetics ; the word’s root comes from Greek for “navigator”. You navigate history, just as history navigates you. This makes you a part of the self-organization of global society. This book helps you to become a part of the self-organization of the “metamodern” layer of societal development.
On a last note on historical attractors, I’d like to underscore that these exist in the logical structure of things, much like mathematical theorems. They are “out there”, available to be discovered and made visible—perhaps not as “natural laws”, but certainly as discernable dynamics under certain given circumstances. Attractors aren’t “inscribed into a pregiven universe”, but they can still guide us, just as any other discovery.
Once discovered, mathematical truths can be put to use as we navigate the world. For instance, the Indian mathematician prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan who went to Cambridge in the 1910s, left behind a notebook with some ideas he never published. These proofs were jotted down in his idiosyncratic and intuitive manner, self-taught as he was. The notes were rediscovered in the 1960s, and they were still original at that time. These ideas have since been used in research about black holes. The logical structure was there to be uncovered all along.
But even if the attractors follow from what is logically coherent, they do not represent a “manifest destiny”. After all, even if it is logical for a system to evolve in a certain direction, any number of things can happen to disrupt it. You can get hit by a comet (outside shock to a system), or you can run into an ecological limit that was not accounted for (inside breakdown of a system)—or there may be other, stronger attractors that you failed to spot, pulling you in another direction altogether.
So even if there are some arrows that point history in certain general directions, this is not the same as saying this and that will happen. There are no guarantees here. But that only serves to make our own conscious participation in the self-organization of society all the more necessary. This is the paradoxical relationship at hand: Potentials become realities in part because we recognize them and act upon them.
But please
note that history doesn’t allow for an “individual” to see it “from the outside”; we can only ever see history from a vantage point within it. History can only be seen from the inside, and that is in itself a part of its evolution and path. Again, history navigates us and we it. This is the cybernetic view, the perspectival view.
In other words, we can be diligent students of the attractors of history and faithful navigators of its winds and currents—while still remaining agnostic as to what actually will happen. The point is that the ones who are best at recognizing what can happen, also have the greatest chances of affecting what will .
Do you now believe attractors exist and that they can be studied, and to some extent can be known in advance?
What we are trying to do in this book is to take the vague currents currently forming in the Nordic countries and flesh out a more coherent and clear Nordic ideology, to be manifested in a few progressive societies and eventually spread to other parts of the world. There are paths society can take, and some of these are more logical, coherent, viable and conducive to human flourishing than others. We should find these paths and travel them together. Dreamers must learn to steer by the stars.
Easier said than done. But let’s say it first, then do it.
Chapter 1:
RELATIVE UTOPIA
“Here’s the deal. The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed—to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through.”
—Parker Palmer
In a way, we’re living in our ancestors’ utopia. If they could have witnessed our lives today, they probably wouldn’t have believed their eyes: all the food you can eat, a minimum of hard manual labor, the expectation to see all your children reach adult age, and no drunken lords to abuse you—truly a paradise compared to what most of them had to put up with.
Nordic Ideology Page 4