Nordic Ideology

* Book: Nordic Ideology. Hanzi Freinacht.

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Description

From the publisher :

"In Nordic Ideology, the anticipated sequel to The Listening Society, the great philosopher Hanzi Freinacht strikes again from his refuge in the Alps—now with a yet bolder mission: to write social and political theory as a page-turner.

This book can be read independently of the first one and it outlines a path to a metamodern society, emerging from the Nordic countries—one that emerges from, but ultimately cancels and outcompetes modern society as we know it, while saving the world-system from collapse. How can this be achieved?

Here, things get real.

Not only do you get an overview of how society develops—what is higher freedom, deeper equality, a more intricate order of self-organization?—you get an actual plan-of-action for how to transform all of society and the people in it; indeed, even a strategy for how to organize and take charge of political development.

Loved and despised, Hanzi leaves few readers untouched. No issue is too controversial, no source of knowledge taboo; while committed to deep democracy and freedom, Hanzi does not shy away from learning from the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. And indeed, the power of his vision, and the six new forms of metamodern politics introduced in the book, compels readers to act—to actualize the vision, or to stop the metamodernists at any cost."

Discussion

Hanzi Freinacht:

"In my book, Nordic Ideology, I outline six new forms of politics that I feel must become institutionalized parts of societies across the world for the core challenges of late modern life to be properly managed. One of these I call Gemeinschaft Politics — “Gemeinschaft” being a German word that sociologists use to denote the aspects of society that are not formalized into rules, regulations, and bureaucracies. It’s the informal weave of relationships in society: friendships, family and courting practices, inter-citizen trust and solidarity, religious, cultural, and ethnic or racial relations. It’s the politics of “fellowship” — the active and deliberate work to heal, develop, and improve upon such informal but crucial aspects of society.

In the book, I go on to outline a few positions on gender/sexuality as well as ethnic/racial relations in society. In the latter case, I suggest the following positions that I hold can be observed in societies across the world:

• Nationalism — the (purported) defense of the majority culture, race, and ethnicity at the expense of minorities and foreigners. To the extent that nationalism has more cosmopolitan aspects, it’s in the defense of the right to nationalist assertion across countries and cultures.

• Non-Nationalism — the emphasis on market solutions and integration between ethnicities through a liberal order that empowers people to get a job and achieve social mobility and new contacts across different groups in society. In its left-wing version, this position holds that inequalities of culture, race, and ethnicity are surface phenomena and are fundamentally distractions to differences of class, and that class should be re-focused as the real basis of social relations. To the extent that people are treated differently because of e.g. skin color, this can be explained by socio-economic differentials at a group level.

• Multiculturalism — (or, as I rebrand it in the book, Inter-Culturalism) which is the standard “progressive” position that takes up anti-racism, inclusion, the defense of minority rights, and the higher valuation of multiple ethnic groups and their contribution in terms of unique ways of life and perspectives. As championed by Canadian sociologist and philosopher Charles Taylor, this position holds that people don’t only have individual “liberal” rights, but also collective or social rights that pertain to their needs to live in and express their culture, not only at the level of token attires or exotified “ethnic” festival color explosions, but as a real and felt part of everyday life. This position tends to hold that diversity is in and of itself a good: the more of it, the better.

• Transculturalism — the view we shall be exploring here, and which I hold can and should be a part of an effective Gemeinschaft Politics. The transculturalist position holds that it is both true that diversity is good, that racism, inequality, and discrimination are real issues with their own respective (often postcolonial) historical roots, and that there are real problems of integration and inter-cultural relations, as well as real limitations to and problems inherent in the cultures of different ethnic groups and cultures in society. As such, it takes a transformational view on ethnic groups (whether these happen to be constructed along the lines of race, nationality, ethnic denominations, or religious practices) and holds them responsible vis-à-vis one another as parts of “the whole” of society that results from their interactions. This sometimes involves making a value judgment of or comparison between the ethical desirability of cultures.

It should be noted that these four positions largely line up around four different “value-memes” prevalent in late modern societies (value-memes being the overall structures of people’s values and ways of making sense of the world): Traditionalists tend towards Nationalism, Moderns (“mainstream people”) towards Non-Nationalism, Postmodernists towards Multiculturalism, and Metamodernists towards Transculturalism."

(https://metamoderna.org/the-failure-of-multiculturalism-and-its-resolution-transculturalism/)