by Per Johansson
Human beings are really incorrigible, at least in the relatively long run. This thought struck me one day as I was pondering, as I often do, the contrasts and differences between what is conventionally labeled traditional and modern. Take a look at this picture from downtown Brussels:
Here modernity squarely, literally, towers over ornate and older traditional style buildings. The different intuitive emotional impact is immediately perceptible. The romantics among us, including all tourists in Brussels (I was not among them, I was there on business), flock around, in and among the beautiful older parts of the city. I also went for a stroll there once business was out of the way. So I am a romantic too, apparently. And for most of us, ”business” (busy-ness) is in fact conducted in buildings like this:
That is in Budapest. After business, if you walk for fifteen minutes north the view is very different:
Guess where the tourists are, and everyone else in their ”free” time it seems. Making observations like this border on the trivial. But if you stick with that kind of supposed triviality with a sufficiently probing tenacity, coupled with a healthy dose of introspection, you may begin to uncover some perhaps not altogether comfortable things. I have discovered, for example, that despite my sometime very strong romantic inclinations I have a real soft spot for the modern streamlining of everything. I actually, sometimes, like efficiency, rational clarity, no nonsense meeting rooms and offices, the desert feeling you get in city areas totally devoid of tourist appeal, which is most of them. There is a deadness there, comparable to stark rocks without vegetation by the sea (like in Bohuslän in Sweden), or to a real desert, seemingly devoid of all life. Such places are places of potential. They can, it feels like to me, be filled with literally anything. They are blank slates. As a consequence, underneath, invisibly, they teem with potential hidden life. Just see what happens if they’re not well ”kept”:
Something similar seems to be happening to our human minds, or I should rather say psyches, when, for generations now, we have been living in the deserts of modernity. Strange growths and creatures begin to sprout. Fantasies and fantastic ideas pop up out of nowhere. And the most crowded book shop in Stockholm seems to be SF-bokhandeln, a science fiction and fantasy store in Gamla stan, The Old Town. I always go there when I’m in town and find myself surrounded by, for the most part, much younger people. I like such windows to other worlds as well, magical windows that seem to crop up more and more in the cultural sphere, right in the middle of hypermodernity (”post-modernity”, to me, is an oxymoron). The strange fascination with vampires and zombies seem to fill the same inner space needs, as do black and death metal, all genres speaking to the dark sides of the same spirit that compels tourists to avoid the aesthetics of efficiency, when, for a few days, they can indulge in the brighter side of the same kind of longing romanticism. Death and beauty are akin.
In a word, I have come to realise that I am indeed very much part of the mind and psyche of the times. I feel very unoriginal. What may be somewhat original, however, in the etymological sense of coming from the origo, from the indescribable Origin of all things, is that I experience a deep part of myself as literally timeless. This aspect of my existence, which has come nearer to the surface in recent years, has no age. It is neither modern nor traditional, it is not even “contemporary”, whatever that might really mean (I think it means some kind of sickness).
My body was born in the magical year of 1956 (you know, Björn Borg, Ingemar Stenmark). Late middle age they call it. But I have always felt this timelessness in me. When I was twelve it meant that I thought most of my mates in school were childish. These days it means, I find, that I think most people sharing my bodily age have stiffened, or are really square as they used to say in the sixties. Consequently, I find myself mostly working with and having closer relationships with persons a generation (or almost a generation) younger than myself, persons who are still passionate in ways many people my age are not, at least not in the future oriented way that I have realised is so important to me. The other day one of my sons told me that he was unable to think of me as even a day older than forty-five, which is also my subjective feeling. I do not mention this out of some kind of self-indulgence, far from it. I mention it as a fact which, if “de-personalised” (that is, taken as not just applying to me), has much more interesting implications. Being timeless means that you are open to potential. Being stuck in your “age” means that you are not.
When I started to muse in the above fashion I realised something that was at first very counter-intuitive. I started to conclude that modernity and, even more, hypermodernity, equals freedom of the soul, because it is, in a very deep way, devoid of historical feeling; tradition-wise it is sterile. It is a freedom, however, that has to be discovered where you least expect to find it, and the precondition of its discovery is rather stark and psychically, perhaps also intellectually, demanding. At least it was for me.
The realisation, almost an epiphany actually, came to me one day in Malmö, in the district called Västra hamnen, a truly hypermodern part of the city. Until 2007 I had worked for many years in Lund, the old university town, whose central parts still have a quaint medieval feel about them, something that, again, attracts tourists, in a way that Västra hamnen does not (although it is rather cool in some ways). Since I left Lund university I have, when not working from home, spent quite a lot of time in Malmö, and often in the Västra hamnen district. Then, one fine autumn day with a chilly wind from the sea, it suddenly came to me. I really liked Malmö a lot more than Lund.
At first I could not really take that thought in. I had lived in Malmö for a while in the late seventies. Then it was, as we say these days, an old fashioned industry town with a very provincial mentality. I really did not like it then, although it sometimes provided me with that desert feeling I mentioned above, which was paradoxically positive. However, I was unable, i those days, to reflect on it consciously. But now, in that chilly wind, looking towards Orkanen, a rather singular building, part of Malmö university, I found myself almost loving Malmö because it was so different from Lund, because it was not mentally stuck in tradition. Malmö has many residents born in other countries; most countries of the world are represented. It has a predominantly young population. And it has had to remake itself completely, like many other old industry towns. And all of this, I realised, epiphany-like, was the very core of hypermodernity, of the external lives of most of us these days.
Note: “external lives”. My personal epiphany as such had to do with the internal aspect of this external condition. The changes and crises brought about by hypermodernity are so deep and all-encompassing, that to think that you can escape, at all, is the very pinnacle of illusion. We are heading, at warp speed so to speak, towards no one knows what. No one. And that, I now knew, is true freedom, if it ever can exist in this world. It is the same kind of inner freedom that comes from really taking to heart the old maxim memento mori, really believing and feeling that death is inevitable to all and everything.
I find myself increasingly wary of all movements towards “returning to” or “re-inventing” dying traditions, whether they are religious ones or not. Such endeavours will subjectively satisfy some people, giving their lives meaning and direction, for a while at least, but they are powerless against the crushing impact of hypermodernity. The Singularity is near, says Ray Kurzweil, Google’s engineering director. I think in a way it has already happened. We have lost the possibility of understanding how our increasingly digitalised and hyperconnected societies work. Forecasting has become impossible, if it ever was (read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Antifragile if you think otherwise, and be cured of that illusion).
No, I say, f**k tradition as such. Working to resuscitate or trying to save actual traditions is, today, very often a kind of destructive violence, either psychologically or literally. Study history by all means, study real traditions— I do that a lot! — but make sure that you do it with the attitude Dougald Hine formulates so elegantly in this paragraph, in another essay in Mooria:
Not only is there much that we would not willingly give up about the age in which we find ourselves — even if we wanted to do so, it is not an option. The only time machine we have travels in one direction at a steady speed of just over 365 days per year and we have yet to find the gear stick. A politics that looks to the past with longing is no politics at all. Yet there may be other ways of looking to the past. In renouncing such romanticism, we have not necessarily exhausted the political potential of the backward gaze.
That is it: a seriously non-romantic but open and intensely curious stance towards the past, especially towards those things and thoughts that modernity systematically ignores, because it does not fit within its self-image, which really is square. It is one thing to understand, as I claim to have done, the potential in the modern desert; it is quite another to believe in modernity. And remember — there are always weeds, like the ones by the railway in Brussels above, like the ones occupying and stimulating young minds at the fantasy and science fiction bookshop in Stockholm’s old town. The true potential of hypermodernity, that which is unforeseeable and which therefore will make all the real differences, is a wild thing, freely lurking just below the surface.
That is true incorrigibility for you. It might become violent. It need not
