I guess you know that feeling when you are visiting a country for the first time and insist on taking a neutral stance about culture and habits, you know this ‘well I guess they just do things differently here’-approach. I must say that I really tried that when I traveled to Umeå (in the north of Sweden) mid-June, I really did. Discussions with people of my age and local legislation made me change my mind on that position. See, now I have got to blog about it.
I want to start off by recreating part of a discussion I had with a Swedish girl about the ban on dancing in Sweden (I am, especially considering the seriousness of all my blog posts, not making this up). Any bar, restaurant, etc. has to get a dancing license first, in order maintain the right that their customers can dance in their establishment.
“If somebody begins dancing at a place that doesn’t have a dancing licence, the landlord is obliged to immediately turn down the music and stop the dancing,” police spokesman Christer Ohlin told newspaper Södermalmsnytt.”
This is taken out of a 2007 article by The Local (Sweden’s news in English).
But back to the discussion:
Me: What’s wrong with people dancing? That doesn’t affect you, or does it?
– ‘The law is there to protect us. Drunken people might make a mess.’
Me: Getting drunk up here is quite expensive in the first place. Ok so even if they can afford it and make a mess, so what? That would be the business of the owner, not the state.
– ‘You know it may be different in your country, but here in Sweden people cannot take responsibility for themselves, that’s why we have these laws.’
I’m far from generalising in a way that I would claim that is something every Swede would say, but it astonished me to hear (especially the last sentence) so often. It’s almost like people never heard of self-reliance and freedom in their life.
When people think about Sweden they think of a free country. What they probably mean is tolerance, for example by a strong emancipation of women and a great acceptance for the LGBT community, which are clearly great things to have, but definitely do not represent the limits of how far the realm of freedom and taking your own responsibility reaches. Anything which is fun is either highly taxed and thereby hideously expensive, or completely banned. One might claim that they have an authoritarian government telling people how to live their lives, but that is only one side of the coin. On the other side we have a society which is not only advocating strong regulations – be that on social or economic subjects – but seems convinced that this is the vocation and the role of the government.
Let me introduce another example. People who know me, also know that I sometimes tend to tell offensive jokes and enjoy peoples reaction, that being my sense of humour (try it at your one risk, lost more than one Facebook friend over that one). I must say that I have never met so many people who consistently refused to find any amusement in jokes which were obviously intended to overstep the line of regular ‘making fun of blondes’-humour. Now the question of ‘Can we laugh about anything’ has often been asked, and at least from my analysis, been answered. We can laugh about anything, because we don’t hurt anyone by doing so. A joke is not advocating any sort of action, nor is it excusing it. Jokes as a part of satire often even mock certain points of view. The political correctness in Sweden emerges from the believe that offensive jokes contribute to offensive behaviour, which to me sounds like the slippery slope, and rather opens the door for discussions on freedom of expression. I will always love and repeat this quote by the representative Ron Paul about the first amendment in the US:
“We don’t have free speech so that we can talk about the weather, we have free speech so that we can say very controversial things.”
Taking part in the Umeå Youth Forum, I have experienced that for example the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (I know even the name is troubling, since rights belong to individuals, not genders, but never mind) suggested a guideline for how to deal with/oppress sexist jokes. Really? Jokes work in a way that you either find them funny or you don’t, and even having to explain that concept to people is quite silly. Again, joking is dealing with a subject in humorous way, it’s not minimising a problem or advocating an action.
The most formative experience I made in Umeå was that I told and offensive joke to a Swede who actually smirked, then proceeded to look around as to see if nobody caught him, then told me that he couldn’t find this funny. This made me think of the very accurate German expression “Schere im Kopf”, which doesn’t exist in English and basically expresses the action of self-censorship. It shows that oppressing techniques work and also exist in modern democracies: We limit what we say to what we think is acceptable for us to say. It’s like Orwell’s 1984, just that the government doesn’t play it’s role (yet).
Interestingly enough, before travelling to Sweden I posted this on Facebook
Reading it today reassures me of the dangers that this state of mind I described bears.
We all know that I could go on about patronising attitudes in Sweden, their absurdly low speed limits, their high taxes on foodstuffs, alcohol and tobacco as well as high age limits for the latter, talks about gender quotas and of course the enormous welfare state, taking away people’s responsibility over their finances. It bugs me when people don’t question the current way in which their state works, and it’s something I see in Luxembourg as well. It seems as if it has become easier for politicians today to adopt a patronising attitude than to tell people to rely on their own responsibility, and in a way that is quite comparable to Keynesian economics, since it is easier to have deficit spending then to tell people to take a step back. This phenomenon has been going on for years know, and it’s not a chain of isolated incidences, it’s the leitmotif of today’s society.
One last thing I will definitely remember about Umeå is that I did not get dark at night, probably the only thing that the government cannot regulate. I wish it could.
Naaah just kidding.
Pictures are Creative Commons.
Thanks for liking and sharing!
Bill Wirtz 
The Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality is modelled after the Committee of the European Parliament (http://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/femm/home.html) that is concerned with this field of policy.
You have a very particular (libertarian?) preconception of state and society and see them in the tradition of US and UK thinkers as systems seperated or almost opposed to each other. The approach of most European countries – and especially the smaller, more homogeneous, nothern European countries differs from this: They believe in the reciprocity of these entities and that a more perfect society can also be designed through the means of the state. When they enact rules they do not ask: Is this necessary? Instead they ask: How do we want to live together as a society? And how can we be truely free by and through(!) the means of state? (Is freedom really a pre-societal and pre-governmental notion?)
In case the state gets too invasive with the spheres of society and the individual, especially Supreme or Constitutional Courts may step in – based on a countries constitution. Their often counter-majoritarian judgments can and at times should correct the over-indulgence of the law maker.
And yet again: If the majority of the people (or rather: their representatives elected in a democratic way) want it a certain way – who are we to tell them that they got it wrong? Would that not be undemocratic?
Hey John, thank you for your feedback!
Criticism of the name of the Committee is independent from it’s origin, so that I naturally find it to be incoherent in both cases.
Your remarks tend to defend legal positivism, which i’m obviously not a fan of. Freedom is pre-governmental, it is and always will be. I think I made it quite clear that I don’t see a necessity in regulating things that didn’t have a negative affect an anyone’s rights in the first place. I find it to be arrogant of any sort of group to claim that they know what is best for you. I may, for example, hold the position that pineapple doesn’t belong on a pizza, but I don’t ask that my opinion is made into the law.
The state is already too invasive, and I think we can both agree that this process is accelerating.
I pretty much liked your comment when I started reading it, but I was quite disappointed with your conlusion. Are you defending the tyrany of the majority? Do you think that if a majority decides what you can and cannot wear, you automatically have to accept it? Sure it’s a democratic decision, but I don’t have to be anyone special to tell them that they got it wrong. To suggest that that is undemocratic to me is quite silly (excuse the term). I think democracy is a good system, but just the fact that a large group participates in it doesn’t make it immune from criticism. Some of the most idiotic decisions have been made in very democratic way, and I don’t think I have to give you examples on that one.
My last sentences where obviously aimed to provoke a response on your side.
The aim was to point out that the result of a proper democratic process is always a strong one in its stability and legitimacy. You will always have a hard time overcoming this result for the sake of counter-majoritarian jurisdiction and minority protection. However, I am not claiming that it cannot or should not be done. But I would ask everyone to exercise caution and have good reasons if they attempt.
When a right is negatively affected heavily depends on your view point (or rather the view point of the applicable law or residing judge). Example: All legal orders recognise insults as an interference with the rights of the insulted – most even have criminalised such behaviour. To claim someone’s rights are never affected by a sexist joke or an act of speech is therefore a bold statement, to say the least. And while the test here cannot solely be based on subjectivity or the presumably thin-skin of some people, the moment when most people feel severely hurt may be used as one of the first clues to find a proper objective test to answer if someones rights are affected.
Additionally: Half of the argument boils down to the question of freedom as pre-governmental or freedom through government. The former view (freedom is pre-governmental) was clearly held by the drafters of the US constitution and is still prevalent in American and British philosophy and jurisprudence (social/constitutional contract theory, etc.). But the longer I know humans and observe them, the more individuals strike me as firstly social beings. It is their togetherness with their peers that make them truely human. And therefore the first question should not be: How can we preserve some impossible state of pre-governmental wild? But rather: How do we want to live together as a society?
When did I write that every spoken statement cannot infringe on anyone’s rights? Running around telling lies about someone is obviously calumny and should be an offence. I don’t see that point with jokes though, since it has a completely different intention.
You keep asking this question ‘How do we want to live together as a society?’, and I quite frankly don’t really see what it is you want to say, since it’s rather the question I am answering: You are free but you cannot infringe on anyones right. We are not following this today because we have extended the idea to how some people want society to be, and that I think is arrogant. Take a shop owner for example: He has to deal with strong regulations concerning his opening hours. If he opens his shop on a Sunday, how does that affect anyone negatively? It doesn’t, but it is still prohibited because some people have the opinion that not everyone should be able to work on Sunday.
Now if I want to change that I have two options, the first one being using force, something I am willing to do (unlike the government), and the second one being trying to persuade people.
We all sometimes make jokes that seem inappropriate to others (and sometimes rightly so) – and it still isn’t banned, even in that evil, evil welfare state Sweden. In your blog post you actually confuse something being considered as inappropriate and offensive and being frowned upon with it actually being banned. The cops didn’t arrest you, right? You didn’t have to pay a fine, you weren’t expelled from the country? So it’s not a BAN. As much as you have the right to make whatever jokes you like (it would actually be quite interesting to know what kind of jokes those were. So if you’d like to share them with us, just go ahead. I promise not to call the thought police), people also have the right to be offended, to tell you so and even to not talk to you anymore. If you say something, you have to live with the consequences; even if it (hypothetically) means people could dislike you for it. And if you’re not willing to deal with said consequences, don’t say it. As much as the state doesn’t ban your offensive jokes, it also doesn’t intervene with whether people will like you for them or not. Or is that what you want?
Oh hey, the guy who deleted me on Facebook – because I wrote that Hugo Chavez was an evil dictator and that it is a good thing that he died – commenting on freedom of expression, how intellectually rewarding.
You are obviously confusing several things. Never have I written that I thought they would be banned, I was rather explaining a state of mind which I find to be worrying (and which in some cases is actually working towards this, like in the US where media campaigns advocate banning words). This is also kind of a rebuttal on the Conference itself, where we dealt with questions about freedom of speech, the influence of hate speech aso.
I generally delete people who make nazi comparisons and thereby actually (even if not willingly) diminish the horrors of German fascism, yeah. But on your personal profile, feel free to make whatever comparisons and complain about evil dictators as much as you like (even ignoring the fact that most of the mass media in Venezuela is actually anti-chavist and is still spreading its propaganda without being banned, despite their involvement in the 2002 coup d’etat). I never banned you from doing anything. I just didn’t want to provide a forum for such despicable comments (which, by the way, is your right, too. Feel free to delete for whatever reason). Deleting comments or unfriending someone on Facebook is not the same as attacking free speech.
But why is it worrying that someone doesn’t laugh about – as you yourself admit – offensive jokes? If you think they’re funny, ok, who cares, but if people think they’re not, that might suck for you and you’re absolutely allowed to tell them that they have no sense of humor or whatever. But you kind of suggest that the fact that people don’t like your jokes (or only laugh about them behind closed doors) would be some kind of worrying social development. Which, in my eyes, it isn’t, even though I might even agree with you that we shouldn’t start banning everything that’s offensive in some way. But being offended isn’t the antecedent of a ban.
Sveinn,
I don’t remember making a nazi comparison, but never mind. You tend to diminish crimes if the people comitting them suit your political ideal, and that I find to be more disturbing. Well, let it be that then…
I find all the advanced form of political correctness to be worrying, yes. Some are imposed, others aren’t, but either form wants you to adapt or hold your language. And again, I’m not only commenting on legislation, but also on a state of mind which I find to be disconcerting. I suggest you read the article again, might help.