Axess is ushering in the new decade by expanding its format. We are extending our review section with an additional eight pages, which means that we are intensifying our coverage of foreign non-fiction. We are doing so not least because we see a dearth of this in the other media in this respect. As the national newspapers increasingly move toward integrating their entertainment sections with traditional cultural material, which in essence means a growing focus on the latest trends in Swedish literature, pop music, fashion, food and film, we stubbornly continue to head in the opposite direction and are investing in a classic liberal education and making room for views that are part of the international debate but which have a hard time resonating in Sweden.

While other publications are making endless cutbacks in academically oriented criticism in favour of Teflon thinking and position-taking, we are trying to create space for the kind of critical, penetrating perspective once taken by the newspapers’ cultural review sections but now increasingly being replaced by an anxious eye that follows where opinion is at the moment.

The development we are reacting to can be described, indeed, as an abdication of the elite, which is the theme for this issue of Axess. The causes of the disintegration of the elite are numerous, but one cannot disregard the growing relativisation that has characterised a large share of the trendy academic theories that have emerged in the last few decades. In Cultural Studies, for instance, there have been appeals ever since the 1970s to level the concept of culture: no cultural means of expression is considered to be more relevant than any other. Based on this perspective, one putatively critical of power, it has been stressed that serious culture is governed by ideology and therefore one of many means for power to influence people in various ways to hold certain views.

As a result, the forms of expression in high culture are presented as being not essentially different from advertising texts or political propaganda. Views on art that can convey something essential about life are said to be cultural constructions without any basis in reality. High culture, once considered to shape personality, is now said to be simply one of many ways to dupe people into adopting views that are patriarchal, crypto-racist and the like.

These ideas have intermingled with the commercial mass culture’s focus on the superficial and the banal, as well as with the shift in the educational system away from authority-based instruction, but also with trends in the media. A structure that levels opinions is being created on-line which is fully in keeping with and encouraged by the tendencies noted above. Newspapers see an opportunity to make money off blogging students reporting from world metropolises like New York and Paris. And a school system where everyone is a “researcher” and where the ultimate goal of instruction is said to be critical thinking that defies authority fans the development of Internet communities in which people take “critical” approaches to various “official truths”: about terrorist attacks, about the Second World War, about vaccines, about the environment and so forth.

At the same time, it cannot be denied that the levelling structure of the Internet can also have advantages in the long run and perhaps even counter the destructive consequences of the abdication of the elite. Yet the abdication of elites and authorities of the past does not necessarily mean that society will become more pluralist and more tolerant of various divergent views. What has in fact happened is that one elite has been replaced by another, one with less rigid but considerably more ill-defined rules of what ideas and views are comme il faut. On-line, however, platforms can be created that constitute alternatives to the hegemony of views that has grown increasingly stronger in Sweden in recent years.

With the Internet, we also have the opportunity to keep up to date with the international media, which means that people can gain perspective on the Swedish media, where many of the guiding lights of the international intellectual world, like Samuel Huntington, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christopher Hitchens, are described as intellectual midgets, who can in no way bear comparison to professed giants of the Swedish intellectual world like Dan Jönsson, Lena Sundström and Per Wirtén. The radical reshaping of our media that will most likely take place over the next decade thus need not be only a bad thing. On the contrary, with any luck, it could lead today’s media heads to realise that their view that people are only interested in lifestyle issues and politically correct nonsense chatter does not hold. In the long term, instead, it may become clear that the media platforms most likely to survive are predicated on people seeking knowledge and their curiosity about patterns of life in eras and cultures that are distinctly different from those of 2010 Stockholm.