The nation’s favourite carrot-top pop-sociologist…well, the nation’s only carrot-top pop-sociologist, David McWilliams, has scored quite a coup with the telegenic regurgitation of his smash book, The Pope’s Children. According to newspaper reports, about 500,000 people have tuned in to watch themselves be lampooned as Decklanders, HiCos (Hibernian Cosmopolitans, natch), and Breakfast Roll Men (I eat a breakfast roll, ergo I am Breakfast Roll Man).
All this might be entertaining for those who see patio heaters as an ominous symbol of deracination (sure, it was far from patio heaters you were reared…), but does this glib pigeonholing really add up to substantial analysis? Doubts about the shallowness of thinking on display were thrown into relief by an intriguing story this week in the International Herald Tribune, which reported on how a new book has triggered a bout of introspection in Sweden, a country not unfamiliar with searching self-examination.
According to historians Lars Tragardh and Henrik Berggren, the authors of the “provocatively titled” Is the Swede a Human Being? (Ar svensken manniska), Sweden, traditionally viewed as a land in which the collective good takes precedence over individual autonomy (those high taxes! those government-owned off licences!), actually allows its citizens more freedom than almost anywhere else, including the USA.
Lazily, I will quote part of the explanation rather than paraphrase:
Politically, this “moral logic,” as it is called in the book, has evolved into a bargain between the Swedish individual and the state, where the Swede leaves more in the hands of the state than an American, a German or an Italian would ever dream of. Swedish family policy, especially, is extreme in international terms, with state-subsidized infant care, strictly individual taxation after marriage, and no legal obligations toward parents when they grow old.
You could interpret this as saying that the Swedes have “out-sourced” familial responsibilities to the state, so relations between husbands and wives, parents and children, and links throughout the extended family are based purely on love, mutual respect, and, possibly, liking each other.
A cynic might argue that if relationships with your kindred are liberated from claims of dependency, then the family and clan are facing a bleak future. Indeed, the familiar phrase “you can’t choose your family” suggests a certain yearning. Regardless, the Swedish book seems to present a profoundly thought-out critique of a society.
And what is also interesting is that, in comparison, in Ireland, as in the US and the UK, it is particularly evident that the higher up you move the socio-economic ladder, the more you seem to want to disengage from the state. Public transport, public hospitals, public schools are all disdained by the people who pay the most for them (with the exception of those on the very highest rung, who pay zilch in tax).
The ultimate aspirational family model seems to the nuclear family in chain reaction mode: a stay-at-home mother supervising (with help from an East Asian support staff) a multitudinous brood, all reliant on a extremely rich paterfamilias. The Swedish model it is not.
But whether the changes experienced in Ireland over the past decade-and-a-half are so enormous that they can only be captured by an ambitious, overarching theory remains moot.* Sure, footage of Ireland from the mid-1980s makes the place look like Warsaw under marital law, but then again think what upheavals a citizen of Warsaw has experienced in the past 20 years! Nevermind trying to grasp,say, the culture shock experienced by a Chinese peasant, catapulted from feudalism into the 21st century by moving from the farm to Shanghai.
Things have changed, for sure, but, as Breakfast Roll Man might say, where’s our f***ing sense of f***ing perspective?
*How about: The collapse in the authority in the Catholic Church in the early 1990s led to a) a spiritual crisis of belated secularism that lead to frenetic displacement activity in the form of unleashed consumerism (a twist of Weber’s theory and a reversal of the orthodox argument that consumerism led to a spiritual malaise) and b) the end of the age of deference, culminating in today’s situation in which credit card companies are falling over themselves to woo shelf-stackers with 10k credit limits. Superficial thesis? Sure, but no more than McWilliams’s.