BrianGarst.com

Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem.

Sweden Archive

Saturday

21

April 2012

0

COMMENTS

Freedom and Social Engineering Don’t Mix

Written by , Posted in Big Government, Liberty & Limited Government

Slate reports on Sweden’s radical move toward gender-neutrality:

Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral. The idea is that the government and society should tolerate no distinctions at all between the sexes. This means on the narrow level that society should show sensitivity to people who don’t identify themselves as either male or female, including allowing any type of couple to marry. But that’s the least radical part of the project. What many gender-neutral activists are after is a society that entirely erases traditional gender roles and stereotypes at even the most mundane levels.

…Earlier this month, the movement for gender neutrality reached a milestone: Just days after International Women’s Day a new pronoun, hen (pronounced like the bird in English), was added to the online version of the country’s National Encyclopedia. The entry defines hen as a “proposed gender-neutral personal pronoun instead of he [han in Swedish] and she [hon].”The National Encyclopedia announcement came amid a heated debate about gender neutrality that has been raging in Swedish newspaper columns and TV studios and on parenting blogs and feminist websites…

Hen was first mentioned by Swedish linguists in the mid-1960s, and then in 1994 the late linguist Hans Karlgren suggested adding hen as a new personal pronoun, mostly for practical reasons. Karlgren was trying to avoid the awkward he/she that gums up writing, and invent a single word “that enables us to speak of a person without specifying their gender. He argued that it could improve the Swedish language and make it more nuanced.

Today’s hen champions, however, have a distinctly political agenda…

The Swedish school system has wholeheartedly, and probably too quickly and eagerly, embraced this new agenda. Last fall, 200 teachers attended a major government-sponsored conference discussing how to avoid “traditional gender patterns” in schools. At Egalia, one model Stockholm preschool, everything from the decoration to the books and toys are carefully selected to promote a gender-equal perspective and to avoid traditional presentations of gender and parenting roles…

Ironically, in the effort to free Swedish children from so-called normative behavior, gender-neutral proponents are also subjecting them to a whole set of new rules and new norms as certain forms of play become taboo, language becomes regulated, and children’s interactions and attitudes are closely observed by teachers. One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys “gender-coded” them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys. Another preschool removed “free playtime” from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely “stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying.” And so every detail of children’s interactions gets micromanaged by concerned adults, who end up problematizing minute aspects of children’s lives, from how they form friendships to what games they play and what songs they sing.

As a philosophical conservative I place value on tradition, or the social roles and institutions that have developed over time. I am not resistant to change per se, but think it should be largely endogenous and happen gradually. I also see political systems, which necessarily operate on the principle of force, as existing outside civil society, which is governed by voluntary interaction. Therefore, I naturally resist the exogenous nature of social change as directed by government.

But I have more than just philosophical objections to this sort of meddling. There are also very practical concerns. Namely, it necessarily means a loss of freedom.

In order to force change on society, government must discourage the old behavior while also encouraging the new. The more entrenched the behavior, and I can’t really think of anything with a deeper foundation in human society than gender roles, the more discouragement tends to become suppression and encouragement force. The last paragraph above provides examples.

Social engineering necessarily diminishes freedom. The greater the change desired, the greater the loss of freedom required. For that reason alone, Sweden’s experiment is one I would consider dangerous and unwelcome.

Friday

31

August 2007

0

COMMENTS

Cartoon Rage Redux

Written by , Posted in Foreign Affairs & Policy

Like the Danes before them, the Swedes are coming to understand just how opposed to freedom fanatical Islamists are.

Swedish artist Lars Vilks was invited by an art school to participate in an exhibit with the theme, of all things, of dogs. Vilks, something of a provocateur (his website has a cartoon of a Jew’s head on a pig’s body), submitted cartoons including one with Mohammed’s head on a dog’s body (it’s connected to the contemporary Swedish craze for “roundabout dogs,” but that’s another story). Before the exhibit opened, his drawings were removed by the organizers, citing possible security threats. Another gallery followed suit, claiming similar worries.

This provoked much discussion in the Swedish media. Although several other newspapers had already published the cartoons, it was only when Nerikes Allehanda, a regional paper in Orebro, published one of them on August 18 that the fur began to fly. Like the Jyllands-Posten cartoons of Mohammed published in September 2005, the cartoon was used to accompany and illustrate an article discussing self-censorship, threats, and freedom of religion.

It looks like things have already reached the point where thuggish violence is rewarded by preempted censorship. Unfortunately, the perpetual outrage mongers seem to have vastly increased their efficiency:

Sweden’s own Muslims have merely demonstrated peacefully outside the paper?s office, but, like the Jyllands-Posten affair, foreign intervention has now raised the stakes. With the Danish cartoons it took four months before several Muslim governments, at the behest of an Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) meeting in Mecca, launched protests, boycotts, and threats, resulting in dozens of murders, especially of Christians. This time they took only nine days.

The Swedish response? Dhimmitude, of course:

A Swedish foreign ministry spokeswoman said the government had “expressed regret that the publication of the cartoons had hurt the feelings of Muslims”.

“We can’t apologise for the cartoons because we did not publish them,” spokeswoman Sofia Karlberg told the BBC News website.

The only reason they can’t apologize is because they aren’t the perpetrators, not because they believe in principles of freedom. It’s no wonder Islamists believe the West is weak, we can’t even defend our own principles.