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SWEDISH VALUES IN THE MAKING

A vast amount of information about human beliefs and values in almost a hundred countries, collected by an international group of social scientists, is presented in the World Values Survey 2015*. Based on interviews with almost 400,000 respondents, the study suggests that Swedish values differ significantly from those of the rest of the world.

[* http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp]

In the Nordic countries in general — and in Sweden specifically — individual autonomy is emphasised very strongly, while residents show a great degree of confidence in both their fellow human beings and the authorities in a way that distinctively differs from the rest of the world. It’s actually possible to blame one single man for the extreme Swedish stand in the world of human values — that is the writer Carl Jonas Love Almqvist. It’s in his troubled soul some crucial Swedish values first appear.

Carl Jonas Love Almqvist was an imaginative writer and a sharp-pencilled journalist at work in the early years of the nineteenth century. He was unhappily married and longed for love and for sex. In addition, Almqvist longed for a life in the midst of nature, for God, and he yearned for worldly success. He also dreamed of a society governed by a different set of rules and of a love that was free to follow its own laws of desire, friendship, and loneliness, and of all his dreams and yearnings, maybe this dream went deeper and became the strong undercurrent influencing the rest.

In 1839, at the age of 46, he published a short novel, Det går an (translated into English as Sara Videbeck and the Chapel). It’s a story about Sara, the daughter of a glazier, and the non-commissioned officer Albert, both in their early twenties. They meet by chance on a steamboat trip and a relationship takes form. Reading it today, the novel seems almost without incident, but for the Swedish society at the time it was more than enough. The plot was considered outrageous. It is indicated that the couple have sex. Every step taken to deepen the relationship is taken by the woman. There are even signs of her experiencing an orgasm. The good Swedes were deeply shocked, and Almqvist was accused of spreading immoral ideas.

But putting the sexual aspects of the novel aside, an even more revolutionary narrative appears, one of greater future significance: Sara wants to be free. She wants a professional life, economic independence, and self-sufficiency. She has witnessed her mother helplessly go down, beaten by her husband and made penniless by his alcoholism. Sara has decided never to surrender to a similar fate and has decided to never ever marry. Almqvist lets his female protagonist plan her life with Albert without them becoming husband and wife. Instead, the couple should keep separate households and have separate finances. He can move in with her, but on condition that he rents a room. Then they’ll help each other, spend time together, and love each other out of free will, not because the marital institution so demands.

In the fierce public debate that followed, critics accused the novel’s female character of being everything short of a prostitute. As a result of the scandal, Almqvist eventually lost his job as headmaster of a reputable school in Stockholm.

But there are several layers to his short, seemingly simple book. It also deals with society’s general lack of love. Almqvist was not amoral. On the contrary, he was deeply convinced that intercourse without love was more immoral than intercourse without marriage. He took the same stance concerning matrimony. If it wasn’t based on love, it was just as immoral — or actually worse — than love without marriage. The church demanding chastity up until the wedding night prevented people from getting to know each other in all senses — leading to mismatches and unhappy marriages.

Even if his readers recognised the problems he described, the general morale did not allow such an opinion to be expressed in public debate. Almqvist was heavily criticised and ridiculed, and not only by the ‘public’ and the church. He also made women who aspired to gender equality furious. They considered Sara to be a male fantasy: an independent woman who did not make a claim of duty of any man but still was willing to share her bed with a man, who provided free access to love and sex but let him off the hook when it came to economic, legal, or moral obligations. An unmarried woman in the Sweden of 1839 who behaved like this would be completely unprotected, without support for herself or her children. Besides, she would be exposed to society’s contempt and alienation. What Almqvist dreamed about was not possible. At least, not yet.

What did Carl Jonas Love Almqvist actually wish to achieve with his challenging novel? An answer can be found in another book, Det Europeiska missnöjets grunder (Grounds for European Discontent), which he wrote a decade later. There he develops the idea of a new social order. Visions of love and happiness still constitute his driving forces, but are now placed in a political context where major entities in society must be transformed; the family, parish life, and, above all, marriage itself must be changed. The freedom of the individual was to be safeguarded. The woman must be economically independent, and the status of children must be secured through inheritance tax and a ‘child insurance authority’.

A strong ideal of individualism was his starting point, paired with a democratic stance, ensuring each and every person the same right to search for freedom and happiness, regardless of gender and social class — because true love can only happen between two individuals who are completely independent. In other words, Swedish values today.

Almqvist was no solitary thinker in a desolate Europe. He was influenced by writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller, who all raised questions concerning the idea of love and love’s practice in the 1800s. Although Almqvist’s books did not lead to any immediate political changes, he made the first crack in the tight patriarchal structure that would eventually crumble and be replaced by parliamentarism and liberal reforms.

His ideas concerning the protection of children were later developed by the Swedish author and women’s ideologist Ellen Key, and then further developed and put into political practice by the influential social democrat Alva Myrdal in the 1930s. In order to make it possible for women to work and become independent of their husbands, Myrdal suggested state day-care centres where children between the ages of two and seven could stay while their mothers worked. There they could play and be fostered and thus receive opportunities not all families would be able to give them.

Almqvist’s vision was a state that ensured individual citizens security and happiness on a liberal basis. A hundred years later, the Social Democratic party made it happen. Children and women would be entitled to separate state support, thereby guaranteeing that the children were given as decent an upbringing as possible, regardless of whether their father was out of work or an alcoholic.

And this is Sweden today. When an individual becomes ill, old, or weak, he or she doesn’t have to depend on the family for help, but instead turns to the state directly. If a child is maltreated or abused, authorities take responsibility. If you are broke, authorities support you. If you are unemployed or disabled, society takes responsibility. The state controls children’s education and hands out cheap loans so no one should be forced to refrain from university studies because of their parents’ financial situation.

Similar welfare structures are found in the other Nordic countries, but nowhere else has the direct link between individual and state evolved as far as in Sweden. When the movement for gender equality was first sparked in the 1960s, it was as if Almqvist’s words echoed in the public debate: ‘A prerequisite for gender equality is that women become fully economical and socially independent of men.’

In the 1970s, the vision became Swedish reality. The individual was ultimately freed from family dependence when the Swedish government introduced separate taxation for husband and wife. (In France, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Switzerland, Spain, the Baltic countries, and Germany for instance, married couples are jointly taxed.) As of 1977, parents were not obliged to support their children after their eighteenth birthday and children were no longer obliged to support their elderly parents if they lacked income in old age; the state would take responsibility.

But there is a dark side to Utopia. Freedom from family ties and obligations also creates alienation. Independence creates solitude. The result is a state-regulated system that lays the foundation for the famous Swedish melancholy.