A state education
Today we believe that we all spontaneously understand the import of the term “public service.” The concept gives off clear signals. Translated into Swedish it has the essence of “something that the community/public is expected to provide.”
We think then for example of TV, radio, study circles and arenas for public debate. Personally, I associate spontaneously with the signature tune to the TV programme Anslagstavlan (“The Noticeboard”) which I heard almost every day in the 1970s when I was a child. You know, that innocent era when there were just two TV channels and everyone watched everything.
Since then the selection of media offerings has grown enormously. Public service has both broadened as a concept and become more problematic. The phenomenon has been praised but also questioned, even ridiculed. Today it is not difficult to find alternative arenas to discussion and alternative authorities competing with each other to guide us subjects. Nota bene, this occurs within the framework of a general acceptance of the fundamental prerequisite: we are all agreed that it is a good idea to have a “serving” authority with whom we can conduct a dialogue—an authority who (which is not as easy to admit) helps us to think.
But public service is an English concept. The idea itself is as un-Swedish as it is possible to be. The term belongs in the post-modern Swenglish society outside the comfortable time-honoured framework of the Swedish welfare state. There is nothing Per-Albinesque, nothing Astrid Lindgrenesque, about the concept of public service. Can one even imagine public service in the 1950s and 1960s? Or is the phenomenon reserved for what is now “the present day,” that is the epoch after the post-war period?
This depends of course on the values we place on the term. What do we mean by the concept? If you think of the authorities and the institutions with the function of providing information which can be reached via the media, institutions and the internet, then the term is closely tied to our own time. Public service is subordinated to the technological expansion of the modern welfare state. But if we rather imagine a public discourse, a general consciousness of an authority providing general education, then the question is more open. How long have we had a collective identity which has meant that it has been obvious for us to seek the answer to these questions from Big Brother? How long have we been aware of the existence of different forums for the dissemination of knowledge and the exchange of ideas? How long have we had authorities with the ambition of providing general education? The answer is that the authorities have always had an interest in disseminating the right information—that is to say, the information that the authorities consider is right—to the rest of us. Knowledge is power. If the Mesopotamian god-kings, the demagogues of classical Athens and the emperors of ancient Rome had only been able to, they would certainly have exerted themselves just as much as our present-day moulders of public opinion in their ambition to influence the people in a certain direction. What is really interesting is what people have thought about this ambition. Has the subject in general accepted the monopoly on the truth held by authority? Have we tried out alternative information-bearing authorities?
To whom did our forefathers turn when they felt that they really needed the education that we today have learned to associate with public service? The easiest way of finding an answer to questions of this kind is to concentrate on great tragic events, situations when people really did have a need of guidance, were in such great need that the demand for public service has left traces in surviving documents. Where did people turn when catastrophe was a fact and they needed help? Where did they go for support? Who did they believe? In the most ancient history, the history conveyed in religious documents written down in cuneiform and hieroglyphs, public service rests in the hands of the divinity. In the Epic of Gilgamesh the concept corresponds to that of the god Ea, who through a reed house—the prehistoric Mesopotamian equivalent to a broadcasting medium—speaks to the well-favoured individual Utnapishtim, inducing him to build a stable craft to save himself from the great flood. In the Old Testament there is a similar story. God speaks to Noah and saves him with his family from the Flood. Whereupon God—authority—enters into a pact with the few survivors, a contract which indirectly portends all of those laws contained in the Pentateuch. The moral is over-explicit: those who have power also have knowledge. Seek the power. Obey the power. Then you survive.
Did the people of ancient times accept this? Or did people choose other routes than those the kings, priests and warlords tried to imprint on their brains when they were subjected to such major catastrophes that they were forced to ask the authorities for advice? As we are often referred to documents that have been manufactured by this very authority, the question is, in the majority of cases, impossible to answer. But in really major catastrophes the voice of the people becomes so strong that we nevertheless can hear it.
During the years of the Black Death, between 1347 and 1352, Europe was seized by panic. Everyone asked questions—heavy, existential questions which were not possible to answer correctly because science had not yet advanced far enough. Above all, people wanted to know why so many people were dying. In certain villages around 60 to 70 per cent of the population died. In other villages no one died at all. How could this be? Why the differences? Who was responsible? Could the epidemic be avoided, combated, adjured?
Those kings who had access to the university, for example the King of France, naturally turned to it. That was of course where the best education of the time was to be found. Other panic-stricken Europeans approached the men of the Church—parish priests, people in cloisters, mystics, etc. In those cities that had the means to retain doctors, these were told to provide medical advice to the people and, if they could, take care of the sick. If you neither had access to a university, church nor doctor, you asked those people in your immediate neighbourhood in whom you had confidence. Great esteem gave great influence.
What did the people consulted reply? The academics at the University of Paris speculated as to whether the positions of the heavenly bodies had resulted in cosmic disturbances leading to poisonous vapours being created on Earth and then driven northwards from Africa towards the cities in Europe. The priests, like Muslim imams in the Near East, sometimes claimed that the Black Death was a blessing from God and encouraged their congregations to learn from this and to mend their ways. Other men of the church linked the epidemic to one or several specific sins. Saint Birgitta was particularly keen to stress the pernicious influence on morals of women’s repulsive mode of dress. Doctors prescribed a number of prophylactic diets and recommended bloodletting in the case of an operation. Normal people came up with all kinds of proposals: party and have a good time as if tomorrow is to be your last day on Earth, pretend that nothing is happening, isolate yourself from the world around you, flee to the countryside, pursue scapegoats, and so on.
But what did the authorities do? The answer is easily found. Kings, popes, bishops, mayors and councillors exerted themselves to the utmost to demonstrate an ability to act and let the people know that they were taking responsibility. The Swedish King Magnus Eriksson’s reaction is typical. In a letter to the nation’s bishops—only the letter to the Bishop of Linköping has survived in the form of a copy—the king decrees that all Swedes shall go barefoot to their parish church every Friday. They shall in all humility listen to mass and hand over money according to means to the priest. The money will then be distributed among the poor. What is more the King decrees that everyone on Friday should live on bread and water. Swedes should also go to confession and do penance for their sins. Finally everyone should give a Swedish penny in honour of God and the Virgin Mary. The money should be taken to the cathedrals. The King and the council will thereupon consult as to what should be done with the money in order to do honour to the Lord and Mary.
Magnus Eriksson’s actions are worth noting. He automatically associates royal action with the churches. The religious sphere merges with that of the state. What is more, he incorporates both a moral and a financial element in his communication with his subjects. You have to bow down before God and repent your sins. You have to give money to the commonweal. On the one hand a plague collection to the benefit of the poor, and on the other a kind of supplementary tax the king is honest enough to admit that he does not even know how he is going to use.
The Swedish king showed an ability to take action, both moral and financial. But he needed help from the church. As the church was independent in relation to royal power, Magnus never succeeded in creating the great secure authority necessary for his public service project—or whatever we should call it—to work. It was not very long before prominent clerics, with Saint Birgitta at their head, turned their back on the King and began to plot an insurrection. The royal project failed. The public service scenario of the Black Death is only unique in so far as people’s needs for public service were unusually pressing in the mid-14th century, and that the documentation is surprisingly rich. Otherwise the similarity with—continuity with—later forms of state popular education and mastery of the people are obvious. If we turn to the power of the Swedish state in early modern times, we again find the churches and the priesthood in the role as mediators between King and people. It was through the pulpit and the altar that Swedes learned how important it was to pay their taxes, to show authority appropriate deference and to allow themselves to be enrolled as soldiers in the Thirty Years War.
This was where the world was explained to you. This was where you learned to be a good, God-fearing Swede. But there was a difference between the 17th century and the 14th century. During the late Middle Ages and the 16th century the Swedish state not only expanded externally but also internally. Royal power incorporated the Church into the state, established a monopoly of violence vis-à-vis the magnates, and created public forums for debates, primarily the parish meeting and the Riksdag.
In inns and on the square one could, as early as the 15th century, hear proto-nationalist rhyming chronicles depicting the enemies of the king, for example the King of Denmark, as the deplorable human counterparts of the scorpions of the animal kingdom. After the Reformation the priests became the political and moral megaphones of royal power. The king and his agents took upon themselves the right to educate and tame the people—to teach them to read, write and think.
For several hundred years no institution in our latitudes could compete with the church in its role as a public service body. Priests shaped and delivered the national self-image, a religiously coloured vision adapted to Lutheranism and the framework of royal authority. All education worthy of the name was delivered within the framework of the Church. Against this background it should come as no surprise that Christian culture entirely characterised the view in earlier times of what knowledge benefited the general public. The official actors of Christianity, from priests to heads of families, carried out a function of state control. The Swedish people were to be kept in order and in fear of the Lord. At the same time, the actors regarded it is as their God-given responsibility to actually protect their fellow human beings from the Devil and from evil by affording them a general Christian education. Bishops, priests and heads of household believed in what they were doing. For this very reason it was not difficult for everyone else to put their trust in them. Nevertheless, there were obstacles to what the public service of the state church was capable of achieving. Its power was very much weaker in reality than it was in theory.
One of the most important reasons was that communications technology was undeveloped. The communication of knowledge took time and was difficult to control, and no chain of knowledge was stronger than its weakest link. The fact that neither the state nor its ecclesiastical arm was able to control people’s thinking completely is shown not least by the public violence that occasionally broke out locally, with or without the approval of the authorities. Many of the notorious pogroms against the Jews in Europe in the Middle Ages were the results of the spreading of popular rumours and mass psychosis which openly (but in vain) was counteracted by the authorities. Irrespective of what the Pope or the count said, the people went their own way, creating their own causal connections, their own cultures. When officialdom tried to communicate official truths, many chose—unpunished—not to listen.
An infamous example from the 17th century is the persecution of witches. In Sweden witch hunts were a local phenomenon, primarily concentrated in a number of places in Dalarna and Norrland, but without the presence of the early modern state these persecutions would never have been possible. The state supplied the arenas for conflict management and discussion—the Church and the Thing (or law meeting)—but it was the Swedish people who to a great extent decided how these arenas were to be used. The authorities and the people carried on a dialogue that was as constructive as it was deadly dangerous. It was the peasant society’s own laymen and priests who laid charges and gave testimony about witchcraft, but had it not been for the authorities the charges would never have resulted in legal actions with death sentences. As no individual or group of individuals had total control over a witch trial, each individual case proved to be unpredictable, and sometimes degenerated into capricious brutality. Finally the madness went too far and the hysteria of the trials imploded under its own weight. What characterises public service in earlier times is the multiplicity of arenas and the weakness of power. When a conflict arose, a social dilemma which placed a demand on knowledge, it was not obvious which source of knowledge one should draw from, which authority one should ask. Not even during the second half of the 17th century, when Swedish society was developing towards a theocratic military dictatorship, was the state able to supply a natural template for human actions at times of crisis. The power society and the communications society were underdeveloped.
The roots of the present public service can be found in the 19th century, the century when the early modern state matured and became really modern. The authorities became more powerful. Government officials learned to communicate effectively. At the same time technology lent the decision-makers and moulders of public opinion entirely new possibilities. While the ideas of the Enlightenment in the 18th century had primarily been disseminated among small elites, through salons and books, the thinkers and politicians of the 19th century came to address the masses—first the educated middle class, later also peasant farmers and workers. For centuries Swedish kings had tried to remould local patriotic inhabitants of parishes, districts and provinces into Swedes with a national frame of reference in which to take pride. Now they succeeded.
An excellent example of how a national consciousness was shaped among the Swedish middle-class of the 19th century is the use of statistics. The historian Henrik Höjer has depicted the process in his thesis Svenska siffror (“Swedish Figures”, 2001). The statisticians of the 19th century, men such as Carl af Forsell, published long lists about Swedish conditions, often by province, so that people throughout the country could compare themselves with each other. Just consider the hunting of large game. In 1829 in total 134 foxes were killed in Malmöhus County. No bear, no wolf, no lynx. The trigger-happy folk in Umeå had a much better time of it. In Västerbotten 53 bears were killed, 43 wolves, 10 lynx and 732 foxes. As regards foxes, no one could however outperform the hunters of Jönköping County: 851 were killed in the 1829 hunting season. Smålanders certainly knew how to hunt foxes! Forsell’s object in providing such comparisons was to awaken a civic sense by providing real data about the country and the people. The comparisons would teach the inhabitants of Skåne, Västerbotten or Småland that they were Swedes. Concealed behind the dead foxes and bears there is a process of state construction, with statistics as a weapon. From these figures the literate public received a manageable image of Sweden and became a part of the nation.
Underlying this is the fact that official Sweden was suffering from a trauma as a result of the harsh peace treaty of 1809, when Finland was lost to Russia. Statistics were one of many strategies in the struggle to regain self-esteem. By re-shaping the Fatherland in figures an attempt was made to render it measurable, debatable, criticisable and the object of boasting. People had to identify themselves with Sweden and be proud of being a Swede. The religiously coloured world picture of earlier centuries was replaced by a nationalistic vision. Both the opposition and the establishment exploited the figures. In the eyes of the Liberals statistics became a means of advocating the eradication of social evils. For the Swedish chauvinists statistics became a means through the power of figures—comparisons of the number of illegitimate children, suicides, crimes, etc—of showing how much worse the neighbours were than the Swedes.
Popular
SD behövs för bråk
Sverigedemokraternas relevans har börjat ifrågasätts i och med att andra partier ska ha anammat en striktare invandringspolitik. Men SD:s roll i politiken är knappast förbi – snarare har den anledning att intensifieras.
The examples can be multiplied. 19th-century Swedes not only acquired figures, they also acquired a golden age in which to take pride. The Greeks and Romans had Antiquity; the Scandinavians got the Viking Age. In the age of the poets Tegnér and Geijer the Viking came to stand out as an ur-Scandinavian who plundered, traded, discovered America, founded Russia, worshipped Thor and the White Christ and created the Nordic kingdoms. Some decades later people began to dismantle and collect together Swedish houses, cottages, manor houses and churches and rebuild them in culture historical reserves such as Skansen in Stockholm and Kulturen in Lund. The visitors were to realise that this was Sweden. This was how our modern nation was shaped. The dialects were normalised into Standard Swedish; folk music and folk customs were refined into supposed Swedishness; building styles and costumes likewise. We were given a national song and a national flag. Historians explained to the subjects that Sweden’s history was the history of its kings (that is to say, not the history of its people). Authority in its royal form developed into a proud symbol of national identification. Around 1900 it was not unusual for pictures of King Oscar II, Queen Sofia and their entire family to be found hanging in Swedish peasant and bourgeois homes.
The national symbols were clear, visible, tangible. As it was the state that was sending the message, it was the state people got used to thinking of when the subject of culture and identity came up in conversation. The state created arenas for communication with the citizens, Arenas for public service. The mental foundation was laid for the institutions of welfare state society. People who became too poor to be able to provide for themselves would hereinafter be able to rely on the Swedish state, not just on younger relatives and the parish. From 1842 all Swedes were guaranteed elementary education under the auspices of the state. Even the popular movements—the majority with no direct connections to the state—which developed during the second half of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century all came to operate within the framework of the Swedish-nationalistic project. When the educators of the Labour movement were organised within the Workers’ Educational Association ABF in 1912, it was against the background of the growth of the Swedish historical identity, of the origin of common values to which everyone could relate.
With the emergence of the 20th-century’s international sports competitions people learned to cheer on Sweden, something that would scarcely have been obvious some decades earlier. The final result is familiar. Some decades into the 20th century Swedes had been given a general frame of reference to which they could not avoid adopting an attitude, whether they liked the frame of reference or not. The state authorities had become an obvious communicator of views and of education. What we today refer to as public service is a historically elusive phenomenon, not so much as regards the word “service” but as regards the word “public.”
The need for knowledge has always been there, as have disseminators and communicators who have wanted to provide information. But the framework and pre-requisites for communication have constantly been changing. Finally it has been we ourselves who have decided which authority we have chosen to trust—and today the number of available authorities is greater than ever. The situation that obtained in Sweden in the 1970s, when everyone watched the evening TV news programme Rapport and followed Ingemar Stenmark down the ski slopes, was historically unique. The question is whether the Swedish state has ever had, or ever will have, the influence it had, through the media, three decades ago. I do not believe so.
Dick Harrison is Professor of History at the University of Lund.
Translated by Phil Holmes