Modernism entailed not least a rebellion against what were in some cases rather strict rules that previously dictated how people should paint paintings, make poems, design buildings, write novels, compose music etc. The reasons that people found it necessary to challenge and explode the traditional languages of form were numerous and frequently interwoven.

To some extent, it was a matter of wanting to protect serious, well-meaning culture from homogenisation, which was viewed as a threat, as culture suddenly became a concern for each and everybody. As a result of technological innovation, ordinary people gradually could consume music and poetry via gramophone records and radio. Many people suddenly had access to pictorial art via ever cheaper reproductions, and more and more could take part in narratives via newspapers, inexpensive books and movies.

Artists, writers and culturally creative types who considered themselves serious reacted to this development by frequently pointing out that the aesthetic value actually lay in deviating from what was popular. When rhymed, metered verse became the property of one and all via the pop music industry, the new, modernist poets reacted by writing poetry that was as hard to sing and as difficult to set to music as possible: poetry without fixed metre and without rhyme.

When pictorial art could be spread to a greater public via newspapers, magazines and cheap chromolithographs, the reaction of pictorial art was to become non-figurative and move away from mimetic representation and the creation of illusions in order to instead emphasise what is particular to and distinctive about painting: brushstrokes, layers of paint, formal elements. When a traditional narrative could achieve widespread circulation via newspaper serials, cheap novels and feature films, novelists reacted by abandoning traditional narrative structures. And when music could easily be reproduced on the radio and on gramophone records, composers reacted by demolishing harmonic systems and abandoning traditional tonality.

The new conditions at the turn of the 20th century for disseminating and receiving remuneration for art, music and literature thus meant a revitalisation of culture in general. Without this revolt against 19th century norms for the creation of culture, some of the true artistic pinnacles of Western culture would never have seen the light of day. I am thinking of works by Marcel Proust, T S Eliot, Amedo Modigliani, Bela Bartok, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Richard Strauss and so forth.

When people reacted to commercialism, mass culture and the homogenisation and banalisation of art, it was in the hope that aesthetic conceptual forms could be maintained and developed in the modern era. Of course, there was also a belief that it was possible to maintain the elitist cultural project as it had developed over the centuries. What the composers, painters, and writers that I enumerated above all have in common is that they personified to a very limited extent the kind of more destructive break with the Western cultural tradition of which they were a key element in the history of modernism, a break that is usually explained by the brutality of the First World War engendering a sense of the bankruptcy of European humanism and the Enlightenment. This was also a tradition of thought that would turn out to have the future at its feet.

In this issue, as we consider the development of art music in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, we do so mainly by examining two strains: one involving a kind of modernism that is running on empty, in which a break with conventions and rules is transformed into new conventions, and one reflecting the opportunities of reconnecting with tradition in order to derive from it the same kind of revitalising energy that people were to get a hundred years ago by breaking with traditional rules.

But the second theme in this issue, which can be found in the insert published for the annual political gathering Almedalen Week (but which is being sent to all subscribers), is also linked to the aversion to the Western cultural tradition that has characterised a large part of the 20th century. In this section, we consider the strange reactions of liberal commentators to Ayaan Hirsi Ali over the last few years, in terms of both the Swedish and international debate. Here too, one can see how typical Western self-criticism, which in a way has been a condition for vitality in European culture over the last few centuries, also has a destructive side.

The experience of Western guilt and evil essentially allows classical liberal and Enlightenment-oriented positions to be criticised in terms of political extremism. Increasingly, it is becoming harder to distance oneself from undemocratic oppression when it is found in representatives of other cultures besides that of the West.