The Swedish exception
My Swedish great-grandmother was not, I imagine, left in the snow when she got feeble but there was a time when she would have been. Scattered thru every land are spots where old people plumped down near a tree and said, “Leave some porridge and barley wine and march on”. Later there were small thatched sentry boxes housing an old person a-readying themselves for the last voyage, soup and socks supplied by kind persons of the parish. At seventy I am likely to find out before long whether I have the courage to refuse expensive treatment and go find my tree. The Swedish exception shows a country in which the tribe comes before the individual and in which there is the civic courage to answer hard questions. In Sweden’s high tax Social Democratic heyday hard thinking and consensus made moderate well-being the norm — their response to Covid-19 is payback time.
As communities we have lost the habit of death. In olden days the poor, the aged and the sick were cared for by god-botherers and supplied the scientific minded with experimental subjects for the craft of medicine. We have shelved the problem of death with a branch of the hospitality trade that coaxes a million moribunds a few paces further. Is it because we are persuaded there is no after-life?
Europeans have never lacked invention: let more forests be planted, let there be last minute encounters with ferocious beasts on remote Scottish Islands, let last agonies take place in glass-sided booths in public spaces. My generation, the sixties slackers, ought to be the one to change the picture, not a National Deff to match the National ‘Elf but simply legal canalisation. And yet, and yet — there is something in me that kicks back: those pre-planned rational exits with the connivance of a GP and the unsteady agreement of the nearest and dearest, people slipping beneath the waves on their own timetable with barely a murmur…
Inventing a new culture around voluntary withdrawal calls for more than just legality. All deaths leave people behind and all cultures are marked by their funery rituals, ours is the the maladroit mis-en-scene and the municipal car-park. By ceremony (investing in an imaginary journey of the deceased) we pre-figure and accommodate our own end. The bedside injection does not recognise the tribal identity, it is domestic in an ugly way. My mother’s bag of shopping sits there on the kitchen table, meals not to be made, but her corpse in the soft lit public chamber with the dulcet music is a member of a particular tribe, the tanned leather sack which contains her is tagged Germanic, archaic.
If their Bergmannian wager comes off, a Sweden stripped of a high proportion of non-contributors will take a Great Leap Forward by sleight of hand into the post-covid European dynamic: a Northern tendency reinforced by Sweden’s exceptionalism — technocratic, pragmatic; the strong man states in the east — catholic and overtly racist and, bringing up the rear, what you might call the holiday regions to the south and west — fun loving shady dealers. These caricatures hold in an EU unbalanced without the UK and over-stressed by nationalistic responses to Covid-19.
The crisis has opened the real world to view as tho we were idly looking thru a cut-out at a building site. Rotated bottom up it reveals its workings: the business of testing for the virus in the UK is snapped up by accountancy firm Deloitte. This leads to logistical incoherence and grave delivery defects. Over in the far corner the company contracted to caretake our Personal Protection Equipment quarrels with its landlord who switches off the power. As the real world shows its bum, the dirty tide mark of the black economy (its hidden motor) becomes visible. Here in France the charity Restos du Coeur has reported a thirty per cent swell from people who have lost their (undeclared) income.
There will be more surprises to come. Covid-19 has given the altermondialists the radical de-growth they have been shouting for and it doesn’t look too pretty. When you take shopping away from the people you don’t leave them much. The networks of self-help and creativity being built on-line and in the back streets won’t scale up as quickly as the resilient control spine being grafted into the body politic. In a world of key workers versus the rest there will not be much room for farmer’s markets. Fantasies about indigenous unemployed getting out into the strawberry fields voluntarily have vapped into charter flights winging in guest workers with their incomprehensible tongues, Priti Patel be damned.
De-confinement? Any addict will tell you that absolute severance is easier to handle than moderation. Look at the big picture: evolutionary pressure from a gross event operating on human systems, masked and distanced individuals grappling with the implications of novel procedures and norms. Immense flurries of selfie videos to be digested by Artificial Intelligence and aggregated as real-time modelling of a new society: Dominic Cummings’ third battle — conflating post-covid and post-brexit Britain. The nightly Whitehall press conference morphs into a television show with rival presenters chasing an edge. Hot on the tail of super-modernity, the politicians are knights without armour who need to tease a fickle public as well as beat the beast. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, by transcending the Covid-19 cloud and coming out the other side battered but sane, has edged nearer towards the Regal status he has always craved. His zany manner covered by the fine British tradition of batty kings, he is well positioned for the succession drama that is now not so far down the road. Prince Charles would do well to watch out for unexpected staffing changes in his entourage and listen out for the phrase,
“I’m so sorry your majesty, we seem to have difficulty getting a line…”
