78 Hans L Zetterberg
that Anna has spent days preparing. Her Christmas table is a ”supersmorgasbord.”
The stagnant climate of opinion in the world of the Svenssons is hardly conducive to new ideas and directions or hospitable to multiplicity and diversity. These have been sacrificed for the security that predictability and control afford. Sven and Anna would counter, however, that they prefer an orderly state of affairs to one torn by conflict. They would never view order and conformity as encumbrances, for these, they believe, are virtues that are an end in themselves. Sven would respond with righteous indignation to the suggestion that his mental outlook might stultify diversity and originality. He would point out that his Party has always stood for reforms and on the side of the weak against the powerful and wealthy. The ideology of his Party extols such principles as freedom and an open exchange of ideas as well as solidarity and equality. But the freedom and openness Sven pays such ardent lip service to must be on his terms, within his normative frame of
reference — and he cannot see the contradiction.
The Svenssons care about their family and relatives, although they do not always show they do. They hide a hurt realization that their grown children do not spend as much time with them as they themselves did with their parents. They can talk about the weaker bond between the generations, but it is unthinkable to them that it might have something to do with the stipends they received from the government to help raise their children. Welfare benefits improve the quality of contacts between generations, they say. You don’t have to talk about money all the time.
”To belong” is the Svenssons’ imperative. He and others like him constitute the infantry of the large voluntary associations, the traditional popular
movement — the labor movement, the free church movement, athletic organizations, and so on. But he is suspicious of the new
movements — the environmentalists, women’s lib, the peace movement. He belongs to a life-style grouping that we call ”the Group-Faithful.” If their numbers today are compared with all other life-style groupings combined, they would be a minority of the Swedish population, but they make up single largest life-style cluster in the country. They appear to be on the decline, but their values and attitudes still permeate the Swedish climate of opinion.
