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Of the mutilated Christmas celebrations this year, I especially missed going to church. Closing Christmas Eve with Midnight Mass is not only a reminder of the role of religion in life, it is the closest thing to a healing event one can come up with in a hurry. The atmosphere is devotional and somewhat relaxed; You hold hands with a strange neighbor at the bank and wish yourself a Merry Christmas, you hear a local singer struggle with the high notes on “O Holy Night” and you clear your throat shamelessly on Psalm 122, “The day has come “.
During the plague in London in 1665, other hymns were sung. Around a hundred thousand Londoners died from the painful bubonic plague. From the churches, says Daniel Defoe in the novel “The year of the plague” The psalmist sang Psalm 91: “You will not fear the horrors of the night, / nor the arrow that flies by day, /.”
Infectious diseases it affects not only the relationship of people with each other and with supposed higher powers. They also hold a mirror in front of our societies, revealing social, political, and cultural phenomena that we may not have seen before. Strengths and weaknesses show what we prioritize and what we don’t prioritize. Epidemics also do not hit randomly, but rather follow ecological and ideological niches that they can exploit. Every society has its own vulnerabilities that the virus will inevitably find.
In the United States, the crown pandemic has unmasked fact-resistant populism in all its misery and caused a president to lose an election he would have otherwise won. In Europe, the virus has revealed an authoritarian reflex and has shown that in practice democracy can be abolished. In Sweden, the virus has exposed how the anti-human elements of the hyperrational social model live. new public administration and an irrational organizational model in geriatric care.
However, one of the less-noted revelations of the pandemic in Sweden concerns something else. Namely, our relationship with culture, and especially with the performing arts.
One of the pandemics The less noted revelations in Sweden, however, refer to something else. Namely, our relationship with culture, and especially with the performing arts. It is well known that the theater has a unique capacity to provoke aggression; Through the millennia, the art form has been combated from church to market forces. It’s probably skepticism about imitation, artificiality, and masks, but each era has always found its own reasons to keep hatred of the theater alive.
I am not saying that it was hatred of theater that was behind the unreasonable treatment of the Swedish performing arts during last year’s pandemic. But it is impossible to get away from the fact that there was a repressive trend in how unreasonably hard the Swedish scenarios were hit compared to other industries and how few political spears were drawn to keep them open while it was still possible. Nothing touches the noon sale, while theaters sink.
Nothing touches the noon sale, while the cinemas die
I don’t say either that it is a deliberate attempt by the authorities to harm the Swedish performing arts. But the objective of pandemics is precisely that they continue and reveal the undercurrents in a society: the trends that we don’t see ourselves and that we don’t want to fake. And it is a fact that while in other European countries great emphasis was placed on living culture as a function of society, in Sweden it was punished with negative discrimination – as Johan Hilton of DN pointed out on several occasions that theaters and other scenes had to take a disproportionate share of the blast, while gyms, stores and malls continued to operate. It is possible, as I said, to blame the legislation. But legislation also reveals the true priorities of a society.
You can think that the welfare of theater life sucks in a situation where more than 8,000 Swedes are dead and the pandemic is pushing our society into a kind of extreme existential state. But in reality, these two things are connected. What kind of society do we return to? What do we want it to be? Who do we want to be ourselves?
Cultural life is absolutely crucial to the answers to these questions. Culture is, however lofty it may seem, a form of knowledge in its own right. Perhaps the only one through which humans can seriously see ourselves. Culture represents the difference between living and surviving. You can certainly survive a Christmas Eve without going to church. But do you live it?
A society where culture is fading opens up to an instrumentalization of our inner life, a kind of new spiritual public management. This technocracy of thought takes over at the worst possible moment, when cultural life is threatened from both a neoliberal and nationalist point of view, either because it costs tax money or because it disrupts a nationalist agenda or both.
A society where culture is fading opens up to an instrumentalization of our inner life, a kind of new spiritual public management
That’s why it’s exactly Swedish The carefree shutdown of living culture by society during the fight against this year’s pandemic is very concerning. The space for the cultural principle itself, play and imagination, diminishes when it is most needed. In fact, it is precisely a lack of imagination that has caused us to fail to plan what scientists have long warned would happen when humans cross ecological boundaries. It was the lack of imagination that made us not think that the unthinkable could also happen in Sweden, and it is the lack of imagination that prevents us from seeing that the pandemic crisis is just an exercise for a future on an increasingly dangerous planet. Our land is still free, as it is called in the Christmas carol that we do not hear in church, heaven is open.
But, and this is important to remember, if the virus shows a mirror that shows the worst sides of our society, we can also remember the best. What we see then is not a dark abstraction, but all the concrete details that make up the cultural life of a society: every laugh, every tone that sounds good, every well-written word in a text. Every thought that takes over the body and every body that is thought. All this is the meaning of life. The show must go on.
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