Wikner opened his lecture with the words: ”One of the conditions of finitude is this, that every progress within her is bought with a sacrifice.” What this meant was that here on earth, nothing is free. Wikner elaborated the thought: nature itself creates the conditions and the basis for the development of spiritual culture. Nature constitutes ”a totality of forces, which culture can take into its service”. The so-called spiritual forces, for example, must be supported by physical ones. Diligent studies, therefore, we have the strength to conduct only if we also take care of our body and our health.

But it is also the case that genuine studies require sacrifices. Poetical souls suffer in agony when they are forced to study dry philosophy, for example the philosophy of Boström, Wikner claimed; and he knew what he was talking about since he himself was a poet who had written the most abstract of philosophical treatises. ”Any major cultural cause is a fortress to be conquered”, he emphasized. Civilization requires continual sacrifices, privations, discipline. Only thus may it be acquired. That this also means sexual privation was clear to Wikner. His book, Kulturens offerväsen (”The Sacrificial Nature of Culture”), actually contains a veiled defence of his own sexual disposition, a homosexuality that he could only confess posthumously, in the memoirs that he left behind.

What is really ”natural”, he asked in the lecture. It is natural for a tree to grow straight up. But if for instance a rock prevents the growth of the tree and forces it to deflect – must we denounce this as unnatural? Wikner saw the same pattern everywhere. Poor parents must make sacrifices so that their children will be able to study. Young people who wanted to study had to sacrifice sexual life and marriage until they had taken their exams and were able to support a family. Self-discipline was required at all times. But Wikner never doubted that what could be bought for this price was the highest and the best. The pioneers who had led the development but perished in the struggle had sacrificed themselves for the common good of humanity.

The poor man’s struggle for education that Wikner had talked about was something that a later generation of Swedish writers would experience in new forms. In the breakthrough generation of working-class writers, this struggle it is a recurrent theme. There are classical episodes. Vilhelm Moberg has told of how he single-handedly acquired a travelling library for his home county in Småland and pretended to lend the books to living and dead members of the parish, carefully recorded with names and titles.

In reality, he read all of it himself. Ivar Lo-Johansson in Södermanland resorted to another strategy. He travelled around the countryside on bicycle and sold books to people he knew, carefully selected with the plan to be able to borrow them back later. This was also the golden age of ABF (the worker’s education association) and the educational idea of the worker’s movement. The idea was that the struggle of the worker’s movement was not only for material things. It also concerned the spiritual side of life; it was a struggle for education and, as such, required the greatest of sacrifices. These were thoughts that were then lost, as the building of the welfare state continued. Today, the idea of working-class education is as dead as the working-class writers. Today, the problem is not that young people have to struggle to get into the schools, but that they are setting fire to them.

Perhaps the now prevalent low evaluation of culture in the proper sense is simply the result of the fact that it is so easily attainable, that no recognizable sacrifices are required to get access to it. The successful capitalism, the happy democracy is, as Herbert Tingsten underlined in his book Från idéer till idyll (”From Ideas to Idyll”) from 1966, a utopia come real. For those who lived in the countries of welfare capitalism and mature democracy, there was nothing more to strive for. Culture no longer required any sacrifices and therefore seemed worthless.

Everything that the poets had written or the thinkers had thought now seemed irrelevant, since humanity had already achieved all reasonable goals it had ever striven for. Tingsten described the state of happiness achieved with a characteristic mixture of contentment and aversion. In one place he writes: The very word happiness, to me, is rather odious if it only means a calm well-being, if it doesn’t have a streak of spirit and ecstasy, if it doesn’t represent a culmination between many varying moods.

The same goes for a number of other prestige words. A good conscience has to alternate with bad conscience, affection and community is not possible without dislike and alienation, love is unthinkable without egocentric obsession, the good and the evil are star brothers, just like God and the devil. Without struggle, culture dies. Tingsten took comfort in the idea of ”the herrings and the shark.” The peaceful democracies are the herrings, which are kept vital and alert by the threat from the ever-lurking enemy, the shark: communism. The presence of this evident enemy was the difference between the happy democracies after 1945 and the perplexed democracies, consumed by self-doubt, which existed after the great apparent victory of democracy 1919: ”The country is no longer deserted.” What is the situation today, after ”the end of history”?

Communism has fallen. The shark is no longer there (only some smaller fishes of prey that can be kept at bay with small means). The herrings are still there. The goals have been achieved or are about to be achieved through more of the same (democracy and market economy). There are no longer any fortresses to conquer, it might seem. Perhaps, then, no longer any cultural causes either. The comfort/discomfort felt by Tingsten would have been tremendous, had he still been among us. Pontus Wikner might have been a celebrated gay activist. In his own day, he dreamt of a triumphal chariot of civilization that would not demand sacrifices, a veritable chariot of Elijah, ”the wheels of which are airy enough not to crush anyone, and into which the man Elijah can ascend complete, without having to leave anything more than his cloak behind.”

Would he have thought that such a heavenly trip was imminent today? Or would Wikner have stressed something that he also says, namely ”that human education is constantly creating new needs”, so that there is never any risk of all wishes being fulfilled. His basic thought – the sacrificial nature of culture – probably remains. There is no culture without sacrifices, not even in Sweden 2010.