The Nordic Theory of Everything and "the Nordic theory of love".

 Notes on Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2016. 

Anu Partanen, a Finnish journalist married to an American, and now living in New York, writes about the differences between “socialist” Finnish society, with its “well-being” approach to society, and the American “dream” of individual effort and success, capitalist, competitive, and celebrating the supposed ability for everybody to pursue happiness and the good life. She kicks the tyres of America’s education, health, welfare, and tax system and finds them quite flat. 

The book’s main title is The Nordic Theory of Everything, but, in fact, it might as well been titled “The Nordic Theory of Love”. Perhaps the publishers felt that would be misleading, or misunderstood, but actually Partanen refers frequently to the Nordic theory of love. What is it? Briefly, it is the idea that “authentic love and friendship are possible only between individuals who are independent and equal” (50). So the role of the state–as the expression of a collective will of the people, as it were–is to ensure that everyone has equal opportunity to be self-sufficient and independent “in relation to other members of the community” (51). “If you’re a fan of American individualism and personal freedom, this might strike you as downright all-American thinking”, writes Partanen. 

The difference is that the Nordic theory of love holds that it is the collective responsibility of the national community through taxes and the “well-being” system, to ensure that all members of the community has access to important drivers to enabling people to attain that measure of self-sufficiency and independence. These drivers are such things as access to a good education, the ability to enjoy good health care, a good work-life balance, and assistance with building strong and stable family life. 

In the Nordic countries most of these objectives are met through the provision services paid for by taxes. In the United States, they are left to individuals, family units and even private companies to provide. To give but one example of the last: health insurance, a necessity in the States, is often provided through one’s employer. Partanen provides numerous examples of how Nordic countries support their citizens in being able to be parents to continue working while raising a family, and especially parents with young new-born or preschool age children. 

One is through the provision of paid parental leave: for fathers as well as mothers. Mothers can take a year or even two to be at home with young children, while a man might take “six months or so while the mother returns to work” (92). There is even “daddy-only” time available. In Finland it is nine weeks, and three may be taken concurrently with the mother. The leave is available to either parent, so a father can choose to take longer time and allow the mother to return to work (94). Surveys show American fathers, Partanen states, would like to take paternity leave, but are “often stymied in this by employers who don’t offer such leaves”.  All employers and employees fund parental leave through their taxes, and parental leave is widely accepted as the norm by employers. In the United States, parents must manage parental leave themselves, either by finding (sometimes costly) child-care or relying on grandparents or other family members. The burden most often falls on the mother, who may have to leave the work force in order to care for young children. In Finland, jobs are held open for a parent who stays at home for up to three years, though Partanen does not say how employers manage the interim. 

One of the things that worried Partanen when she moved to live in the United States, and discovered that she would no longer have access to the Finnish national health service, was how she would afford treatment if she needed it. “Medical bills”, she learned, “were the cause of most personal bankruptcies in the United States” (170). Another difficulty was in needing to find a personal doctor: in the States, it seems, it was important to choose a doctor one wanted or was comfortable with. Partanen relates how one friend researched and spoke with family and friends about finding the best doctor. This struck Partanen as stressful, and one she had not faced in Finland. She always went to her local “public clinic”, secure in the knowledge the one doctor in Finland was as good as the next. As for costs, these, compared with those in the US, were minimal to non-existent. 

So what about taxes? It turns out that taxes for a single individual without children are comparatively low. A comparison of OECD countries in 2014, showed that “Denmark had the third-highest average tax rate at 38.4 percent”, Finland was ninth at 30.7 percent, while Sweden “fell under the OECD average with a rate of 24.4 percent” (254). While overall taxes may be higher than in the States, what Finns get in return for their taxes in benefits, puts them on more-or-less an even playing field with Americans, when the after-tax expenses for Americans are taken into account (many of these covered for Finns by the high-quality and reliable tax-supported services they receive).

Partanen writes clearly, and cogently. She provides many examples of the differences between the Nordic approach to social and political agendas and those of the USA. She draws on personal experience, anecdotes relating to friends and family and folk she has interviewed. She has evidently read widely, and absorbed and synthesised a large amount of information very well, as her extensive notes and bibliography show. One interesting feature of the book is the stress she puts on the fact that the Nordic “theory of love” allows for individual choice, and opportunity, and independence from “unhealthy” dependency upon others (parents, spouses, others). And yet this all takes place within a communitarian framework: one in which the well-being of the individual depends upon the collective support of, and the sharing of the financial burden by, society. Perhaps her emphasis on independence is because she writes for a context where “socialism” (a communal, societal, governmental collective welfare system) is under suspicion. Nonetheless, there is occasionally an implicit tension, I sense, between a yearning for freedom from “unhealthy dependence” for the individual, and the necessity for a communal, societal and governmental framework to deliver this. 

Partanen does appreciate many things about the American system: its dynamism, its entrepreneurial verve and innovation (though she shows that Finland does not lack these either), its freedom and its optimism. She acknowledges that Finland, by comparison can be conformist and a bit dour. She is sometimes asked why Finland has such a high suicide rate, if it is such a great place to live. She acknowledges that negativity and pessimism is a feature of Finnish society. But Partanen evidently is somewhat conflicted over life in her adopted homeland (she is now a US citizen). She feels that the Nordic nations “have set an example from which America could profitably borrow” and were it to do so, that might make her “want to stay forever” (329). In her epilogue, she relates the day in 2013 that she received her US citizenship. At the end of the ceremony, she tells of how her husband offered to take a photo of a man and his newly naturalized wife. As the man left, he glanced back at Partanen clutching her certificate of citizenship. “Enjoy America,” he said grinning. “I hope you like it.” (333). That, I sense, is for Partanen still something of an open question. 

Where does New Zealand stand in relation to the comparison between the USA and Finland? In many ways, in the middle: we aspire to being a “well-being” state, and through our system of taxation and associated benefits make some attempt to achieve “well-being”. However, we are increasingly resembling the United States’ approach to social conditions and governmental strategies. Sometimes, I think, it is as simple as the fact that we want a “well-being” state, but we don’t want to pay for it.

Reading John Steinbeck's, The Grapes of Wrath

On our trip to the USA, Finland and the UK recently, I re-read The Grapes of Wrath (first published in 1939).[1] It is years since I first read it, so I had forgotten most of the story line.  However, the following passage has remained with me. Al Joad is driving an old, second-hand Hudson truck along Highway 66 (“the main migrant road”), as the family drive out west from Oklahoma to look for work in California.

Listen to the motor. Listen to the wheels. Listen with your ears and with your hands on the steering-wheel; listen with the palm of your hand on the gear-shift lever: listen with your feet on the floor-boards. Listen to the pounding of the old jalopy with all your senses; for a change of tone, a variation of rhythm may mean–a week here? That rattle–that’s tappets. Don’t hurt a bit. Tappets can rattle till Jesus comes again without no harm. But that thudding as the car moves along–can’t hear that–just kind of feel it. Maybe oil isn’t getting someplace. Maybe a bearing’s starting to go.[2]

Perhaps when I first read that evocative passage, it resonated because I was driving a second-hand Morris Minor. I could identify with listening “with your feet on the floor-boards”, or on the accelerator or clutch, as the case might be.

            Grapes of Wrath essentially is the story of an “Okie” family, the Joads, who are pushed off their little farm by a combination of poor crops affected by dust-storms, and the march of progress, or rather the banks foreclosing on the owners of the land, and the tenant farmers being put off their land. So the “Okies”, thousands of them, set out for California, where they imagine there’ll be jobs and opportunity galore, and they’ll be able to buy their own houses.

            The story charts their progress. It details their deprivations, their hunt for places to stay along the way, their time in Government supplied transit camps, or private camps. It describes the way they are exploited in the jobs that they land: how, because of the abundance of people looking for work, the employers are able to drive down the wages to barely subsistence level, if that.

            Steinbeck captures the dialect of the “Okies” beautifully. He conveys their simple faith, and religiosity. He writes of their everyday interactions on the road, and the way that folk, by and large, helped each other out, and made friends quickly and easily.

            Steinbeck generally conveys the injustices and the difficulties that the Okies experience through narrative description. Occasionally he writes a more discursive type of description, where the narrator’s voice engages in exposition. Here, some of his indignation shows through, though it is generally fairly muted. Here are excerpts from Chapter Twenty-One. He writes about how the “moving, questing people [who] were migrants now”, are changed by the movement, and the reaction of those amongst whom they hope to settle.

The movement changed them; the highways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and the hunger itself, changed them. The children without dinner changed them, the endless moving changed them. They were migrants. And the hostility changed them, welded them, united them–hostility that made the little town group and arm as though to repel an invader, squads with pick-handles, clerks and shopkeepers with shotguns, guarding the world against their own people.

In the West there was panic when the migrants multiplied on the highways. Men of property were terrified for their property. Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry. Men who had never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants. And the men of the towns and of the soft suburban country gathered to defend themselves; and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad, as a man must do before he fights. They said: These god-damned Okies are dirty and ignorant. They’re degenerate, sexual maniacs. These goddamned Okies are thieves. They’ll steal anything. They’ve got no sense of property rights.[3]

….

Steinbeck writes of how “the great owners and companies invented a new method” for making profits, by buying a canneries, and making profits off the end products while cutting the cost of the raw materials. “And the little farmers who owned no canneries lost their farms, and they were taken by the great owners, the banks, and the companies who also owned the canneries”. The little farmers also take to the road, so that “the roads were crowded with men ravenous for work, murderous for work.”

And the companies, the banks worked at their own doom and they did not know it. The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads. The granaries were full and the children of the poor grew up rachitic, and the pustules of pellagra swelled on their sides. The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line. And money that might have gone to wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and spies, for blacklists, for drilling. On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment.[4]

In fact, the anger, such as it is, does not translate into violence, so much as protest, or strikes, actions which lead to violence against the protestors and strikers. Such violence that Okies mete out is localised, individualised and in the heat of the moment when a friend is attacked (see the incident with Tom Joad).[5]  Mostly, they accept their situation docilely, and compete with each other for work, and drive the cost of wages down:

When there was work for a man, ten men fought for it–fought with a low wage. If that fella’ll work for thirty cents, I’ll work for twenty-five.

If he’ll take twenty-five, I’ll do it for twenty.

No, me, I’m hungry. I’ll work for fifteen. I’ll work for food. The kids. You ought to see them. Little boils, like, comin’ out, an’ they can’t run aroun’. Give ‘em some windfall fruit, an’ they bloated up. Me, I’ll work for a little piece of meat.

And this was good, for wages went down and prices stayed up. The great owners were glad and they sent out more handbills to bring more people in. And wages went down and prices stayed up. And pretty soon now we’ll have serfs again.[6]

That final sentence, an authorial comment, says it all. Have we moved on much from the circumstances and values of The Grapes of Wrath?

---

[1] First published by William Heinemann. The edition I read was in the Penguin Modern Classics series, published by Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1951.

[2] John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 109.

[3] Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, 259.

[4] Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, 260–61.

[5] Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, 354–55.

[6] Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, 260.

Two books on Arab/Jew and Israel/Palestine relations.

The current conflict in Gaza has caused me to read a couple of books on the long-standing issue of the relations between Jews and Arabs, or Israel and the Palestinian territories. One is by David K. Shipler, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land (Revised and updated edition; New York/London: Penguin Books, 2002; first edition Random House, 1986; Penguin 1987). The other is by Anna Baltzer, Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories (Revised and updated; Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2007).

In his book David Shipler, who states at the outset that he is “neither Arab nor Jew” (xxi), puts his finger on where any hopes of peace and co-existence between Arabs and Jews, and between Israelis and Palestinians, must start. They must look into each other’s eyes: and see a fellow human being. He writes:

   Whatever happens in war of diplomacy, whatever territory is won of lost, whatever accommodations or compromises are finally made, the future guarantees  that Arabs and Jews will remain close neighbors in this weary land, entangled in each other’s fears. They will not escape from one another. They will not find peace in treaties, or in victories. They will find it, if at all, by looking into each other’s eyes. (xxxviii)

The notion of looking into each others eyes surfaces several times in the final chapters of the book.

            The book is divided into three sections. The first one, Part One, is called “Aversion.” It outlines four factors that have led to the way in which Israelis (or Israeli Jews) and Palestinians (and in many ways, Israeli Arabs, as well) have comes to exist in the way that they have: in a state of hatred and fear, with sometimes tentative and febrile accommodation and even friendship and love. These factors are: war, nationalisms, terrorism, and religious absolutism. Shipler takes a largely anecdotal approach to these topics, but references various events e.g. the massacre at Deir Yassin, or that annual “Day of Remembrance” when Israeli Jews remember those who have died in wars.

            The second part, “Images”, outlines the various stereotypes that each group has of the other: the Jews who see Arabs as craven, violent, primitive, “dirty”, exotic, sexually dangerous and lustful. Arabs who also see Jews as craven, violent, alien, superior or arrogant, and aggressive. There are stories interspersed with depictions of the way in which these stereotypes are portrayed, or believed, of Jews and Arabs who do have good relations with each other. But, as Shipler points out, these are isolated and individual cases, and, of themselves cannot do much to break down the suspicion, and alienation that exists within the wider societies. It should be said that neither the Jewish nor the Arab societies are monoliths. Within each there is a wide variety of types: for the Jew, there are the disparaties between Askenazi and Sephardi. The Sephardi, coming as they do from societies where many of the customs and social mores are similar to many Arabs. On the Arab side, there are differences in religion, as there are Christian as well as Muslim Arabs; and also one must distinguish between Israeli Arabs and Palestinians.

            In the third part, “Interaction”, Shipler examines some of the ways in which the two groups interact with one another. These are both positive and negative. There is, for instance, on the negative side, the way in which Arabs are harassed and treated by the secret police, or the surveillance and suspicion that Israeli Arabs are subject to, especially when they wish to travel abroad. A negative, but interesting example of co-operation between Jews and Arabs occurs in the criminal world, where Arabs will engage in burglary, while Jews then act as “fences” to on sell the stolen goods. Another is the finding that “40 percent of all pimps in Israel were Arabs managing Jewish prostitutes” (342).

            On the positive side, there is the instance of the relationship built up between an American Jewish academic, Dr. Clinton Bailey, who had become “one of the Western world’s foremost experts on the Bedouin tribesmen who live in the Negev and Sinai deserts” (358), and worked to protect their interests. Another chapter details some instances of intermarriage between an Arab and a Jew, in many cases it seems that the woman is the Jew. One chapter, entitled, “The Violent, Craven Jew”, includes a heartwarming interaction between a young Lebanese Arab woman and an Israeli army colonel, which ends with the young woman, who began defiantly, saying “I’m happy to meet you”, and the colonel saying, “You have touched my heart.” (200). In the penultimate chapter, titled “The Dream”, Shipler spends quite a bit of time describing the interaction between Jewish and Arab young people, eleventh and twelfth graders, who take part in a four-day “workshop” run at “the hilltop community of Neve Shalom” (457). They will play games together, and have “trust building” exercises before discussing their lives and their attitudes to each other, and to the circumstances of living in Israel. This chapter also relates some of the efforts taken within the school system to expose and break down stereotypes.

            Overall, there is much in this book to make one despair of the situation of mistrust, of hatred and of conflict ever being overcome. And one wonders how many generations the current military action in Gaza (since October 7, 2023) will set back any hopes for a peaceful, and just solution to the divisions in the region. Nonetheless, there are sufficiently hopeful signs within the book that suggest that progress is possible. However, it will require a change in the political, social, and institutional arrangements of the region. To begin with, Arabs (and especially the politically-driven groups, such as Hamas) will have to recognise the right of Israel to exist in security and permanently. On the other side, Israel will have to take its foot off the throat of the Palestinians, and genuinely support and work towards their political self-determination. A two-state solution is probably the best way forward: and this will mean that Israel and Palestine will both have to give up any idea that the whole of the territory belongs solely to Jews or Arabs.

            Anna Baltzer, a young American Jewish woman, provides in her book a personal account of some of her experiences during several visits to the West Bank, as a volunteer with the International Women’s Peace Service. This is “a grassroots peace organization dedicated to documenting and non-violently intervening in human rights abuses in the West Bank, and to supporting Palestinian and Israeli nonviolent resistance to the Occupation.” (11) Her book is largely a kind of journal (a series of dated entries) on her experiences, interactions with Palestinians, participation in protest actions, experiences of Israeli Defence Force brutality in 2003, 2004, 2005 and lastly 2007. She includes testimony from various Palestinians along the way, together with some analysis, and occasional background information or commentary drawn from other sources.

            This is the book to read to get a sense of what it means to have the Israeli foot on the throat of Palestinians. It is full of horrifying and, at times, unbelievable accounts. She details the everyday harassment of Palestinians by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and often by Jewish settlers living in illegal settlements, along with the frustrations of having to pass through checkpoints. Beyond that there are stories of the detention of (mostly young) Palestinian men, the demolition of homes, unbelievably, in some cases while the residents are still inside. There is no doubt that there have been many instances of “extrajudicial” killing, with the perpetrators able to act with impunity and the connivance of the IDF; members of the IDF, as well as settlers, have been the perpetrators.

            It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the IDF, with the support of the government, has been tacitly conducting a policy to try and empty the West Bank of Palestinians by making their lives unbearable and infeasible. The word “genocide” has been bandied about in the light of the current conflict: this, I think, is too strong a word, and cannot be proven. It is not likely that the Israelis intend to completely wipe out the Palestinians. However, Baltzer several times refers to a policy of “ethnic cleansing”, and this may be true to the extent that much Israeli policy and IDF practice is designed to deprive Palestinians of their land, and livelihoods, and to provide Jewish settlers with security of tenure in illegal settlements.

            Can Israelis and Palestinians live together in peace? Can Arabs and Jews co-exist (not forgetting that some Arabs are Israelis, that is, citizens, though second-class citizens and subject to some of the same harassment as their non-Israeli counterparts)? Both these books suggest that the answer can be “Yes”, and there are those, both Arab and Jew, Israeli and Palestinian who are prepared to do so. But in order for that to happen there need to be changes at the societal, institutional, governmental level: and, perhaps hardest of all, an ideology will need to change, on both sides.