Transcript excerpt from Tomas Björkman: "Metamodernism and The Future" | The Great Simplification #48
Nate: Your second book Tomas was called The Nordic Secret. Let's just start with just what is the Nordic secret?
Tomas: Okay, I should first of all mention that I had written the book together with Lene Rachel Andersen, my Danish friend and colleague. She is a philosopher and author and she really did the most heavy work on that book. Full credit to Lene on The Nordic Secret. What we do in that book is that we unpack a very important part of the history of the Nordic countries and the fact that just a little bit more than 100 years ago, all the Nordic countries at the end of the 1800s were amongst the poorest non-democratic authoritarian nations in Europe. We were so poor that at the end of the 1800s up to 30 % of the working population in Sweden emigrated to the US. Then just a few generations later, even before the second World War, we were all amongst the happiest, the richest, the most stable industrial democracies in the world. Many of those benefits are still amongst us. We are starting to lose a little bit of this, but the fact that we managed the transition from a pre-modern society into a modern society so well is worth investigating, because I think that we as a civilization are now at a similar transition from modernity into some sort of new society. What can we learn? The learning and the secret around this is that we had some very visionary intellectuals and politicians in all the Nordic countries 100 years ago, who knew the importance of inner development and inner growth, and specifically the connection between inner growth and cultural evolution and societal evolutions. They knew that in times of rapid societal change and uncertainty, it's just so easy for us humans to want to have an external authority to hold on to a dogmatic religion or a strong authoritarian, political leader. These intellectuals and politicians, they didn't want to be authoritarian leaders. They were firmly committed to build democracy and they knew that the only way to build democracy and keep democracy is if you build it from the bottom up. They wanted to find a way where they could facilitate the inner development of capacities in a large part of the population on a large scale and specifically help in this very important adult development step where we go from being dependent on an external authority being outer directed To become inner directed., To connect with our own inner compass and to be able to in a much more profound way, hold the complexity of rapid social change without freaking out. This was 100 years ago, 100 to 150 years ago. This was at the end of the 1800s. The way they went about to do this was extraordinary, because what they did was they created educational centers or even we might use the word retreat centers, because these were small centers out in nature, specifically dedicated to helping young adults in their 20s to take these important developmental steps. At the turn of the last century, year 1900, there were 100 centers like this just in Denmark, 75 in Norway and 150 in Sweden, where young adults later on with full state subsidy could spend up to six months in retreat with a specific aim of trying to develop their emotional and cognitive complexity and becoming conscious agents and co-creators of the new society.
Nate: Did those exist in France, Germany and the United States at that time?
Tomas: No. Or not as such. No, not in France. This originally came from a German idea about how we, as humans, have the lifelong capacity to continually develop our inner capacities, our emotional and cognitive capacities. That was from the German Bildung philosophers. Philosophers like Schiller, Goethe, Herder, Humboldt, Heigl. And this is where the market comes in again as if we quantify all the things that our ancestors valued by parsing it into a dollar, and the dollar doesn't reward some of the things that you just said.
Nate: It's almost as if Scandinavia already had a people, planets, profit hierarchy 100 years ago.
Tomas: It was just ... very much so because back then German was our first academic language. Our intellectuals back then, were actually reading these German philosophers in the original German language. As I was about to say, they all reacted against the enlightenment's materialistic view and the view of our mind as a rational machine. They were very much into nature. The relationship between humans and nature, the relationship between our inner capacity to develop our mind and consciousness, and how that inner development was always done in relationship to culture and cultural development. With that view, it is important to facilitate lifelong inner development, not just for the benefit of the individual, but for the benefit of societal development, then, of course, these ideas come very natural. But when we then later on lost that world view and definitely after the second World War, if not a bit earlier, reverted to the enlightenment materialistic worldview, then these centers as inner capacity building centers or consciousness development centers, didn't even make sense to us in our understanding. Today, we believe that these centers were mainly adult education, which they were to a certain extent absolutely. But the important reason for their establishment was really to empower people to take these important developmental steps to be able to not just have the knowledge but to have the inner capacity to act as co-creators of the new world.
Nate: Do those still exist today?
Tomas: They do. Many Of them do exist, but today we have the impression that they are around lifelong learning rather than developing these capacities. But I should answer your question there: if they exist in other parts of the world - and there is an interesting twist there. I'll show you a copy of the book. This is The Nordic Secret. Do you recognize the woman up in the corner there? No? It's a black American woman, and this is her mugshot. It's Rosa Parks who refused to give up her seat on the bus in Alabama. The reason, you could ask, is what Rosa Parks is doing on the cover of The Nordic Secret there, together with the German philosophers, Goethe and Schiller? Well, she has said in many interviews that what gave her the inner compass and the strength to actually remain seated on the bus, even if she knew that the law of the land said that she should give it up to that white guy was the fact that she had participated in one of these developmental centers. Not in Scandinavia, but in the US, because there was an American guy called Myles Horton, who in the 20s spent a year in Denmark learning this concept and then going back to the US and then starting four folk high schools, which this concept is called in the US, of which the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee is the most notable one, where Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and a lot of the people in the civil rights movement participated. These four schools in the US played such an important role that President Obama, at the end of his Presidency, when he had the four heads of states of the Nordic countries at a state visit, said something along the lines (and this is still available on YouTube): This speech that
You Scandinavian countries have given a lot of gifts to the world and I don't know if there was dynamite and Ikea or whatever, but a forgotten gift. And perhaps the most important is the concept of the folk high schools. Because if it hadn't been for that originally Danish concept that had come to the US, I would probably not be standing here in front of you as the first Black American President.
That's quite strong! This idea about inner development for societal transformation. That knowledge is still living in some sectors of American culture. How can this be scaled, both in the United States and beyond, or is it something particular to the temperament and culture of Scandinavian cultures? No, I think this is universal. At least the capacity for us to develop these inner skills and capacities.