Made in Finland

“I pöbelns tid” (The age of the mob) is a book by Ulf Modin. The language is Swedish, not Finnish. Modin himself claims to be from Stockholm, but the Finland-centric perspective of the book suggests that he is really a Finnish Swede. His language sounds peculiar to somebody used to standard Swedish, suggesting, of course, that it's a dialect of Swedish spoken in Finland. And yes, Modin is obsessed with “the language question”, so I think I might be excused for pointing this out!

Modin calls himself a Marxist, but after reading his short tome, I'm not really sure why. His attacks on liberalism, the bourgeoisie and the political establishment come from the right, rather than from the left. I think Modin would be more honest if he simply declared himself to be a conservative. The author despises manual laborers, claims that the working class is degenerate and disappearing, that it never was a revolutionary class to begin with, and that the real force for change are the intellectuals and the middle class people found in highly skilled technical or scientific professions. Most of his book consists of rather grumpy attacks on political correctness, bad manners, gays, feminists, Social Democrats, public schools, Olof Palme or Finns who refuse to learn Swedish. Utopias are said to be impossible, and it's not clear what kind of future society the author really prefers, since he mentions both central planning, cooperatively owned businesses and a free market as possible ways to organize an economy. Weirdly, he eulogizes the Swedish organization Young Left (Ung Vänster) and the youth radicalism on European campuses. Something tells me Young Left wouldn't feel too comfortable with this guy at a convention fringe meeting!

Two more serious themes stand out. One is Modin's attacks on degeneration, something he believes starts at the top in a dying society (i.e. with the bourgeoisie) and then moves downward, with “the people” being transformed into “the mob” (hence the title of the book). By “mob”, Modin doesn't necessarily mean a violent crowd, but rather something closer to the English term “plebs”, as in uncultivated or unsophisticated. Hedonism, homosexuality, effeminacy, an obsession with the here-and-now, bad manners, people in high places positively bragging about being mediocre and unlettered – these are some characteristics of decadent ruling classes throughout history, with the Roman “nobility” and the French “aristocracy” as two typical examples. (Yes, Modin mentions the Rococo.)

In our society, dominated as it is by sixties liberalism, an additional and more peculiar trait has evolved, what we would call political correctness. Modin calls it “cozy language”. Everyone is supposed to be unnaturally nice, to the point of familiarity, to co-workers or even complete strangers, offensive words are replaced by cozier ones (Modin's favorite example is “dark-skinned person” instead of “Negro”), everyone has “55 friends”, and so on. Yet, societal relations go in exactly the opposite direction: people actually have less real friends today than ever before, the dark-skinned persons (or the cleaners, the unemployed and the disabled) aren't treated with more respect than before, and the over-nice relations with all and sundry become a hypocritical preening and strutting in front of the powers-that-be.

I don't deny that there is some truth in this diagnosis, although a return to a different kind of hypocrisy (the one before 1968) doesn't strike me as much of a solution to it…

The second theme that stands out is Modin's peculiar infatuation with science, technology and the supposedly dynamic strata upholding them. I find it almost fascinating that an author who sounds conservative in the “old fashioned” sense is nevertheless a great believer in the Western Idea of Progress. May we guess that Modin was once a pro-Soviet Marxist in love with Sputnik and the Lunokhod? Modin believes that work will one day be more or less completely automated, and that humanity – after a couple of new dialectical crises – will move into outer space. Despite the obvious contradiction between the technical-scientific experts and profligate intellectual types á la Modin himself, he nevertheless believes that the latter category will occupy an important niche in the future (socialist?) cosmos. Here we have it again, the typical overestimation of modern intellectuals of their own role in society and history. (As any Joe Higgins would tell you, this kind of intellectual belongs to a “dying class”.) Peak oil, climate change and overpopulation aren't even mentioned in “I pöbelns tid”. Perhaps knowledge of these things haven't reached the highly cultured circles in Det Egentliga Finland?

In the end, Modin calls for broad unity around the slogans “Bread, work, dignity”. He envisages a broad popular front of Marxists, women's groups, progressive Greens, pre-sixties liberals, serious conservatives and good Christians. Conspicuously absent from the alliance are the labor unions, tenants unions (which are strong in Sweden) and/or any political factions with real clout, suggesting that Modin's political project would simply become another “metapolitical” talking shop. (Perhaps recruiting Putin to the alliance might help?)

While “I pöbelns tid” does raise some interesting or disturbing points, Modin is too much of the stereotypical Finlandese free-thinker for my Germanic-rationalist tastes. For that reason, I will only give his little book two stars. Or perhaps two-and-a-half.