The Almost Nearly Perfect People Page 13
Christensen isn’t the first to accuse the Danes of smugness, by the way: writing in her travelogue of the Nordic region, the eighteenth-century women’s rights pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft had this to say on the subject of the Danes’ – to her mind over-inflated – self-image:
If happiness only consists in opinion, they are the happiest people in the world; for I never saw any so well satisfied with their own situation . . . The men of business are domestic tyrants, coldly immersed in their own affairs, and so ignorant of the state of other countries that they dogmatically assert that Denmark is the happiest country in the world.
It is a thin line indeed between relaxed and smug. The Danes do have a remarkably relaxed approach to life which, I admit, I have sometimes interpreted as immense self-satisfaction, but they do have a great deal to teach us about not taking life too seriously. They are a remarkably chillaxed people. The Danish language is rich with phrases designed to encourage the reduction of stress: Slap af (‘Relax’), they will say, Rolig nu (‘Easy now’), Det er lige meget (‘It doesn’t really matter’), Glem det (‘Forget about it’), Hold nu op (‘Give over’), Pyt med det (essentially a combination of all of the above). It’s not a bad way to approach life, I think.
Of course, there is another possible explanation: it may well be that these happiness surveys are so riddled with flaws and paradoxes that we ought not to take them seriously in the first place. As we have heard, renowned epidemiologist Professor Richard Wilkinson scoffs at the notion of gauging and comparing different countries’ happiness levels, and believes that health statistics paint a far more accurate picture of societal well-being. But where does that leave the Danes? Danish happiness hardly seems to accord with any ‘Well, at least we have our health’ approach to life, because they so patently haven’t. Their consumption of cigarettes, alcohol and sugar has made them among the unhealthiest people in Europe.
Yet another theory: when we spoke, Christian Bjørnskov mentioned to me that no Danish political leader has been assassinated for centuries. He believed that political stability is an important cornerstone of happy societies. This may well be the case, but he neglects to take into account the traumatic upheavals Denmark underwent during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the British bombardment and the loss of those precious territories (Norway, Schleswig-Holstein, Iceland, and so on); the occupation by the Germans during the Second World War; as well as the threat of Soviet invasion or even nuclear annihilation for much of the rest of the twentieth century. And, actually, Denmark has experienced a number of quite major domestic political upheavals – the resignation of governments; the rise of the right wing; the Mohammed cartoon crisis, and so on. Though it is true that they have not lost a prime minister and foreign minister to random assassins, as Sweden has in recent years, Denmark has had a far from frictionless ride for the last two centuries. The crucial point, though, is that the Danes still feel as if their history has been relatively placid. They are exceptionally adept at covering their ears to history and chanting ‘la la la’ until the nasty noises go away.
There is no doubt that democracy, a strong welfare state, equality of wealth and opportunity (particularly in terms of education), are all crucial to the success of any society and its people, and I do think that their excellent housing stock and well-designed furniture contributes a great deal to the Danes’ quality of life – and I don’t mean that flippantly, they do live extraordinarily well – but they are far from unique in these aspects.
Where they are unique, or at least supreme, is in their trust and social cohesion. Personally, I remain fond of my hypothesis that this tight-knittedness is founded in a survivalist reaction to nineteenth-century territorial defenestration – that they pulled together in the face of calamity and learned to appreciate, and make the most of, what they had left, including each other. The ‘What was lost without will be found within’ theory has a great deal to recommend it, and seems to explain so many of the Danes’ idiosyncracies, from their disproportionate satisfaction in small pleasures (a game of handball, a can of crappy beer, an industrially produced sugary pastry), to their dislike of conflict and ostentatious display.
The Danes are a notably forgiving bunch, something which I think ties in with their underlying fear of conflict. Lord knows the Danes have been involved in – and lost – more than their fair share of military conflicts over the years. Has this left them with a strong and instinctive aversion to disputes or ruckus, I wonder? Certainly hygge acts as a useful prophylactic against social friction (as we’ve heard, it tends to put a block on controversial topics of discussion). But the Danes are also extremely forgiving of public figures who transgress social or legal rules. Long before Lance Armstrong’s mea culpa, the Danish 1996 Tour de France winner, Bjarne Riis, admitted to having taken banned substances over many years, yet he remains prominent in the sport. Christian Stadil, the high-profile new-age boss of Danish clothing company Hummel, wrote a corporate self-help book based on his theory of ‘Company Karma’ and garnered a great deal of publicity from his support for Tibet’s women’s football team, yet he withdrew that support in order to sell more T-shirts in China, and his shipping company was revealed to be (legally) transporting arms – an activity of which one imagines, the cosmos would strongly disapprove. Little fuss was made and Stadil continues to spout his new-age corporate philosophy in the Danish media. Another example is the former prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who led the Danes into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and led the country’s lenders to ruin with his introduction of interest-only mortgages. While Tony Blair and George W. Bush have become hate figures to large swathes of their respective populations, Rasmussen has sailed on merrily as a Danish elder statesman and remains head of NATO. His cowardly role in the Mohammed cartoon crisis is almost never referred to, or questioned, by the Danish media. The sense is that the Danes, conscious that they have an extremely limited talent pool when it comes to international statesmen, are very reluctant to attack their prime candidate.
And then we have the fat tax. Introduced in 2011 by the then ruling Venstre party, this levy on products such as bacon and butter was a quite spectacular and costly political cock-up. Though it was cloaked as a health initiative, the tax was a purely money-raising exercise and the Danes were having none of it. They are the fiercest bargain hunters on the face of the earth (spending less on their groceries per week than any other nationality in Europe, for instance, something I find especially dispiriting considering their groceries also cost more than anyone else’s) and, as we have heard, simply drove across the borders to Sweden or Germany to buy these products. The country’s crucial butter and bacon industries suffered significantly as a result and the tax was eventually scrapped, yet, when I questioned the Venstre party’s health spokesperson about the fiasco she told me breezily, ‘Oh no, we don’t support that any more.’ No heads rolled. There were no recriminations, no resignations, just a collective shrug. Now, you can view this as a healthy, even civilised, approach to mistakes, or as a negligent attitude towards accountability, either way, it certainly helps keep the ripples on the surface of Danish society to a minimum.
This might well be another of the keys to the Danes’ happiness – and I suspect this applies to any kind of long-term happiness. Proper, deep, enduring joy usually requires a remarkable facility for denial, something which the Danes have in spades. I do not, of course, mean self-denial here. As we can conclude from their alcohol, tobacco, hash and sugar intake, the Danes deny themselves few pleasures. I am talking, for instance, about their denial of what it costs to be Danish – the literal cost, via their taxes and the cost of goods in their shops but also the spiritual costs in terms of their relative lack of ambition and dynamism, the denial of those sometimes necessary conflicts, and the loss of freedom of expression and individualism denied them by Jante Law and hygge.
The Danes are in denial about their poor health, too. In surveys they claim that they have above-average health, though the reality is quite the oppo
site. They are in denial about their creaking public services; in denial about the increasingly rampant gang criminality which has resulted in numerous shootings in Copenhagen suburbs; in denial about the realities of integration and of being part of a globalised world; in denial about the growing economic and geographical divide within their country and its consequences; and in denial about their various economic woes – the low productivity, their head-in-the-sand approach to debt, the massive public sector over-spend, and so on. I have read numerous articles in Danish newspapers of which the gist has been ‘Well, things are going well for the other Scandinavian countries so they will probably go well for us, too,’ in which no mention is ever made of Norway’s colossal oil wealth or Sweden’s manufacturing supremacy and major public-sector reforms. Denmark’s economy is far, far weaker than its neighbours’, and the country is facing far more serious problems, but the Danes are oddly reluctant to address their private debt levels or their gigantic welfare state.
The Danes have a number of other blind spots. Take their much-vaunted environmentalism. They are very proud of their ongoing efforts to make the world a cleaner place, with their sustainable this, renewable that, organic blah and recylable whatever. They have their windmills, their biofuels, their bicycles, their organic turnips, their punitive treatment of anyone who so much as looks at a set of car keys, and so on, and oh, don’t they go on about it! Yes, but still, according to the Worldwide Fund for Nature’s 2012 Living Planet Report, Denmark has the fourth largest per capita environmental footprint in the world, beaten only by three Gulf states and ahead of the US. It is also the EU’s largest exporter of oil (Britain extracts more, but consumes most of it itself; Norway, of course, is not an EU member); the majority of its energy still comes from filthy coal-powered stations; and in Mærsk, Denmark’s single most important company, they have the largest shipping company in the world. According to a 2008 UN report, shipping is responsible for twice the CO2 emissions of aviation.1 I am not necessarily saying that the Danes should wake up and smell the pollution, but they might want to clean up their own back yard before they try to rally the world’s leaders to the cause of global warming at high-profile international summits.
And the Danes are in denial about actual, tangible things, too, like, say, the existence of Germany. Considering that Denmark has a substantial land border with Germany, and considering the relative sizes of the two countries and how important Germany is for Danish exports, it is remarkable how little attention German politics and culture receive in Denmark. It is as if the Germans weren’t there, or the Danes would rather they weren’t. During his fieldwork in Jutland, Richard Jenkins, noted that he never once heard a Dane make a joke about a German: ‘Perhaps one has to recognise some affinity with the “other” for ethnic jokes to work. Or perhaps Denmark’s shared history with Germany is simply not a laughing matter.’
Denial is always interesting because often the object of denial acts as a giant red, neon arrow accompanied by a klaxon alerting one to underlying issues. America is in denial about global warming because they are disproportionately responsible for the emission of greenhouse gasses. The British are in denial about their loss of empire because their pride cannot bear their irrelevance. The Chinese are in denial about human rights, because their economic success is founded on disregarding them. As for the French, well it would probably be easier to list the things they aren’t in denial about.
After we had talked for a while about the benefits of economic equality, I asked Professor Richard Wilkinson if he thought there might perhaps be any downsides to the low Gini countries. Didn’t the most equal societies also tend to be, you know, a bit samey, a little boring? All those lists of the best cities to live in are always made up of places with clean streets, cycle paths, and touring productions of Phantom of the Opera, like Bern or Toronto; it is never the really scintillating, stimulating places like New York or Barcelona. (Full disclosure: I have a great deal to answer for myself here. Every year I help compile Monocle magazine’s Urban Quality of Life Survey, including the one that most recently claimed Copenhagen was the best city in the world in which to live.) As soon as I asked the question I realised that, compared with the social ills examined in The Spirit Level – crime, teenage pregnancy, obesity, cancer, suicide, and so on – a lack of decent street food and interesting graffiti were hardly serious complains.
‘People do say that,’ the professor replied. ‘But the costs of inequality are very high indeed: the stress, the depression, the drug and drink problems, the tendency for narcissism.’
A surprising number of Danes agree with me, though: they also think their homeland is stultifyingly dull. Newspaper columnist Anne Sophia Hermansen, of the broadsheet Berlingske, caused a small kerfuffle recently when she expressed her feelings about what she saw as Denmark’s suffocating monoculture. ‘It is so boring in Denmark. We wear the same clothes, shop in the same places, see the same TV and struggle to know who to vote for because the parties are so alike. We are so alike it makes me weep . . . Here Invasion of the Body Snatchers is not just a 1970s horror film, but reality.’
Another prominent newspaper commentator, Jyllands-Posten’s Niels Lillelund, pinpointed a more serious side effect of the Danes’ Jante Law mentality: ‘In Denmark we do not raise the inventive, the hardworking, the ones with initiative, the successful or the outstanding, we create hopelessness, helplessness and the sacred, ordinary mediocrity.’ He seems here to be echoing something else Mary Wollstonecraft observed. She wrote that the Danes’ love of money ‘does not render the people enterprising, as in America, but thrifty and cautious. I never, therefore, was in a capital where there was so little appearance of active industry,’ later adding that, ‘the Danes, in general, seem extremely averse to innovation.’ As The Economist put it in their Nordic special edition, Scandinavia is a great place in which to be born . . . but only if you are average. If you are averagely talented, have average ambitions, average dreams, then you’ll do just fine, but if you are extraordinary, if you have big dreams, great visions, or are just a bit different, you will be crushed, if you do not emigrate first.
Even the usually ebullient Ove Kaj Pedersen of the Copenhagen Business School was open to this line of criticism: ‘I like Denmark, but I like to work abroad. I pay my taxes with great honour because I know for a fact that whenever I need something it will be there . . . every day I conclude the best place to live is Denmark, but for me this kind of social cohesion, these middle-class-oriented societies do not present the kind of challenges I am looking for. I want to be in the best places and you don’t find the best places in Denmark when it comes to elite research and education. And why the hell can’t you go down to the bookstore in the morning and buy the New York Times for five dollars? Or get a good cup of coffee for a cheap price?’
Most of us would probably conclude that expensive coffee and having to put up with another touring production of Mamma Mia are reasonable prices to pay for a fair, functioning society. Denmark – and the rest of Scandinavia for that matter – might not get your pulse racing like the Lower East Side or Copacabana, but in the long run a solid pension fund and reliable broadband will always win the day – as long as those plates keep spinning, and as long as the Danish miracle is sustained.
I had a standard question that I asked most of my interviewees: ‘What are your fears for the future of Denmark?’ One word cropped up more than any other in their responses: complacency. Many of my interviewees were worried that the Danes had had it too good for too long, that they were now content to sit back in their Arne Jacobsen Swan armchairs and watch the plates wobble and fall. Worryingly for the Danes, the latest OECD Better Life Index of life satisfaction saw them plummet to seventh place, behind Norway and Sweden, among others.
‘There were a few years in the 2000s where there was this feeling that Denmark was the best country in the world type thing, and that complacency is a bad thing,’ said Martin Ågerup.
‘There’s a downside to trust,
’ warned Professor Christian Bjørnskov. ‘You tend to be too optimistic. We have this massive problem with the welfare state, but people seem to wish it will just go away, that somehow everything will be fine.’
‘My fear is that we continue lying to ourselves,’ said Anne Knudsen. ‘Trying to make-believe that we are smarter and richer and more content and better educated than the next country . . . to the point where we end up, you know, Greek. I don’t believe that is a realistic scenario, but it is a possibility.’
‘We have a confusion in Denmark in terms of where should we go, what is the long-term sustainable version of the welfare state, version 2.0?’ said Torben Tranæs. ‘All the graphs about trends in Danish society and the economy have either gone up and then plateaued, or gone down and plateaued – the only exception is our weight.’
Danish society appears to have reached maturity, some would argue to a state of perfection, others to a perilous halt. The fear is that the next stage will be stagnation and decline. What happens when you develop a genuinely almost nearly perfect society in which there is nothing left to achieve, nothing to kick against, or work for?
‘When you get up to this level, there are such small differences it gives this kind of confusion in terms of where are we heading,’ said Tranæs. ‘Is there another mountain we should try to conquer or . . .’ He trailed off, as if unsure of what actually would happen next.
But I had one other question I always asked, which, in its way, was even more revealing. Whenever I asked my Danish interviewees whether they could think of a better country to live in, the answer was invariably a thoughtful silence. It was true, when the wind is howling and the taxman is knocking, they might sometimes hanker for Tuscany or Provence, but in the ultimate analysis, none could name a better place to live than Denmark. And, for all my moaning, as a parent I have to agree it is at least a fantastic place to raise kids.