The Rational Humanitarians 85
A democratic debate over issues like these is a debate among rational experts, and the solutions proposed have the appearance of applied social science. Gone are the rabble-rousing, folksy, electioneering politicians; enter the technocrat with his briefcase of statistics and research reports and his academic degree. In the same fashion, the daring, intuitive business entrepreneur is replaced by the expert in planned and programmed expansion, and the clergyman who surrenders to holy mysticism is replaced by the one who treats Christianity as a sensible blueprint for a good life in a good society.
According to Weber, rationality is a double star steering the course of history; the multiplicity in human thought is organized into systems; the vast repertoire of human behavior is organized into unified instructions. The former means, among other things, that rationality secularizes religions, demystifies nature, breaks the spell cast by art, exposes the secrets of magic, and demasks power. The latter means, among other things, that rationality routinizes everyday life, organizes working life, ritualizes spiritual life, calculates business life, and pushes governments into bureaucracy.
The Swedish version of rationality does not have the clean stringency of its French counterpart, the pragmatic touch of the British intelligence, or the German rationalist’s energetic pursuit of perfect solutions. It is marked more by moderation than by logic driven to its final conclusion. Its key word is (the untranslatable)
lagom, which means both ”reasonable” and ”middle-road”. This stance is akin to the British commonsense rationalism that views abstractions as something foreign. If Sweden ever becomes fully socialized, it will achieve its socialism by rational negotiations leading to middle-of-the-road positions, not by revolutionary doctrines propagated by intellectuals.
There are, of course, short-term fluctuations in the trend toward Swedish rationality. The fifties saw an increase in rationalism; the seventies experienced a rise in anti-intellectualism, made manifest in an increased interest in New Age astrology and oriental mysticism, and in unreasonable fears of computers, nuclear energy, use of pesticides, and so on. In the seventies, some policies were adopted in Sweden to avoid events that are improbable by rational analysis. But in the main, Sweden remains a nation in which rationalism is a pervasive cultural theme.
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