Culture should be nihilistic; culture should be new and it should be utilitarian. This is the creed that resounds ever stronger through the Swedish general public. When the National Council for Cultural Affairs celebrated the New Year by appointing to its board one of the IT craze’s dizziest representatives, Johan Staël von Holstein, it seemed that the final coming together of neoliberals and cultural page leftists had become a fact.

“Generally speaking my attitude is that young, modern expressions of culture are more important than older cultural forms,” claimed Staël von Holstein just after his appointment in an interview in Dagens Industri. The interesting thing is that these words could just as easily have been taken from any career-minded young cultural writer today.

I recall a debate on literature at the book fair in Göteborg last autumn. At this event I alone got to represent the clearly eccentric view that contemporary forms of culture are not necessarily better than those from earlier periods, and that it might very well be profitable to employ techniques and motifs that are several hundred years old in contemporary art. Some of our best known poets and literary critics objected sententiously to the idea that culture does not develop by connecting to and building on traditions, rather that one should at all costs break with the past and revolt against conventions.

To talk within the humanities about the importance of maintaining a shared canon and works of the kind that Matthew Arnold once described as “the best that has been thought and said” is today considered to be hopelessly outdated both at university and on the cultural pages—and now clearly also among those decision-makers with whom our non-socialist government has surrounded itself.

With such a monumental endorsement of the idea that “expressions of modern culture are more important than older cultural forms” it must of course seem depressing to all those of us who hold a less dogmatic view of those stages in world history that intellectually have been the most fruitful, and who wish to fight to retain the knowledge that has been accumulated down the ages and refined within the graphic arts, architecture and music and literature.

But as is evident from the recently published polemical work Culture Counts by Roger Scruton, who has contributed an essay to this issue of Axess, there are happily also signs pointing in the opposite direction. Many people feel the need for contact with their historical roots and to see themselves as part of a historical continuum. More and more people consider that there is a value in society retaining phenomena and skills developed through a process of trial and error over many thousands of years. The paradox of the late 20th century has been that these trends and technical skills to a diminishing extent have been channelled through those institutions developed for precisely these purposes—the universities, libraries, compulsory school, the museums, colleges of art and architecture, etc.

This does not mean that new springs cannot be opened. One is, considers Scruton, the renewed interest in religion. Through religion it suddenly becomes legitimate to adduce history as a basis for how we should act in the present. Through religion it is possible at least temporarily to flee the nihilism that is being preached with just as great an emphasis by free-market liberals as by the academic epigones of Foucault. And through religion it may once again become possible to approach earlier artistic techniques which traditionally have been associated with the practice of religion. Among serious composers, for example, Arvo Pärt and John Taverner have approached sacred tonality in a manner that at times is expressly antagonistic to the present. And within popular culture the Narnia films (not to mention the industry that has grown up around Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings) provide examples of the hunger for the culture of previous ages with sacred overtones which haunts every new generation.

It is in contexts such as these that one should view the present issue of Axess, which takes as its starting point the unexpected return to religion in the early 21st century. The starting point has been a reflection on the relationship of the religious experience to the Western world’s equally prominent Enlightenment tradition. To what extent do religion and the Enlightenment short each other out, and to what extent do they allow themselves to be combined and perhaps inspire each other. Starting with this issue of Axess the number of pages will increase. The reason is that the review section will in future also contain reviews of Swedish language non-fiction, which in practice means that the Annex supplement is merged with Axess. The aim is in this way to create the prerequisites for more topically oriented reviews, which may more clearly inform current discussions on the humanities and social sciences.

By Johan Lundberg, Editor-in-chief

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Translated by Phil Holmes