Ye Good Ol’ Christmas Traditions

Dear Chang,^*


You are probably just dying to learn more about the curious traditions we Finns had back at the turn of the 21^st century. Like virpominen (a bit like trick-or-treating but done near Easter, and only by little girls dressed as witches, tapping people with willow-branch withes and chanting that this will make the target persons “new and healthy”); or the custom that many diners served pea soup and pancakes every Thursday; or that thing we called sauvakävely (Nordic walking) – what the hell was that all about!? Now, it was Christmas just recently, so I thought that this time around I might indulge you with some adept contemporary observations concerning our Christmas traditions.


Traditions, much like times according to Bob Dylan, they are achangin. Consider, for instance, how the Finnish version of Santa Claus, already before it got soaked with American Coca-Cola advertisement in the mid-20^th century, was a curious mixture of the actual fourth century person, bishop Nicholas (a Christian saint) and the pagan medieval character of nuuttipukki – that used to be played by young hooligans wearing a billygoat hide and horns (symbolizing fertility, I am told) and going from house to house to beg for beer and raise hell around the time of the end of Christmas (in January). Drawing from the latter tradition, Santa Claus – joulupukki in Finnish, still literally meaning Christmas-billy – used to be a rather scary character, something to frighten your children with. (By the way, that side of Father Christmas was brilliantly developed by Jalmari Helander in his movie Rare Exports [2010] (which you should definitely see, if you haven’t already).) Only an inkling of that scary side was maintained by the 20^th century Santa, in Finland no more than in other countries; it reduced to little more than parents sort of blackmailing their children to be nice lest Santa might not bring them any gifts. (You hear some of that in the songs telling us that Santa knows whether you have been naughty or nice – the intimidating aspect of which was insightfully and funnily captured by this joke in The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, performed by the great Liam Neeson, by the way.) These days, for the most part, the Finnish joulupukki is much the same as the American Santa Claus. So yes, indeed, traditions keep changing all the time; some old ones disappear, some tangle together with other traditions or novel influences, and new traditions are created too. But let me nevertheless try and offer a snapshot of the Finnish Christmas traditions as I have personally experienced them over these 40+ years of my life.


Christmas caroling, for one, is much less a tradition in Finland than in some other Western countries. You do not see groups of people touring from house to house doing Christmas caroling, you don’t. (Except perhaps some hammered students who might have come up with this idea in the middle of the night, but even that is very rare.) Yet Christmas carols, the songs that you only hear around Christmas time, do play a part in our Finnish lives and minds. This is mostly because, most of us were forced to sing these songs in school when we were small children – both some cheerful ones like “Jingle Bells” in Finnish translation, songs telling us that everything is oh so jolly, Santa packing his sledge with toys, etc., and also quite a few of the not so jolly ones, the pompously solemn, melancholic or even sad, religious hymns. I guess most of the Christmas carols written by Finns are of the latter kind.


Ours is a rather secular society, to be sure, and tends to become more so every year (I should hope), but at least in the 1980s small children were still quite ruthlessly indoctrinated with religious propaganda in countless many elementary school classes across the country, the teachers themselves usually being at least conventional Christians if not members to some revivalist movement. My first six years in school took place at Vanhankylän primary school (still a semi-rural neighborhood with lots of fields and cows and sheet), and as I recall it my first and second grade teacher, this stern elderly lady, had actually been doing some missionary work in Africa. So, yes, it was pretty “Old School” stuff I can assure you: she would play harmonium and make us sing songs like the “Hoosianna” (Hosanna) hymn (“Hosanna / The son of David / Praised be him! / The praised son of David / Who comes in the name of the Lord …”). I kid you not, Chang; I kid you not!



Many of the songs that we hear and sing in childhood, both religious and secular ones, leave deep, emotional memory traces, as well as associations with people and places perhaps. They will forever be attached to our feelings, even if we grow up to loathe their explicit message. One of my favorite philosophers, the famous atheist Daniel Dennett, starts out his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995) with a personal anecdote about the song “Tell Me Why” that he used to sing as a child, a song where they sing “Tell me why the stars do shine / Tell me why the ivy twines / Tell me why the sky’s so blue / Then I will tell you just why I love you. // Because God made the stars to shine / Because God made the ivy twine / Because God made the sky so blue / Because God made you, that’s why I love you.” That pathetic, childish song “still brings a lump to my throat,” Dennett confesses. (p. 17.) Indeed, I guess most of us who turned atheists at an older age have this sort of experiences with respect to one religious song or another.

One of the better songs, one that I am not too bitter to feel a bit nostalgic about, is “Varpunen jouluaamuna.” I just did a bit of research (googled the song’s Wikipedia page, hah!) and found out that the lyrics were originally a poem by the great pre-independence time national writer and academic, Zacharias Topelius (1818–1898), written in 1859, and that they reflected the fact that Topelius had lost his one-year-old son the Spring before. Topelius wrote the poem in Swedish, but it was translated into Finnish by K. A. Hougberg, and it is in the Finnish form that most Finns know and love it. The most famous composition to music was done by one Otto Kotilainen in 1913 (again: in Wikipedia I trust; I certainly would not know this sort of things by heart). The melody as well as the lyrics are very melancholic. (To hear the melody, you can probably find the song online – just search with the Finnish title “Varpunen jouluaamuna”; and here is a link to one version, performed by Mr. Jarkko Ahola, better known as a heavy metal singer.)

I suppose that, having started about this thing, I should actually try and offer a rough (and probably rather poor, I am afraid) translation, by yours truly, of the (Finnish) lyrics.



A Sparrow at Christmas Morning

The flowers in the vale covered by snow
The wave in the lake frozen in the chilly winter blow.
A tiniest sparrow, having eaten its summer supply
The wave in the lake frozen in the chilly winter blow.

At the steps of a little cabin stood a girl dearest:
– Come now, birdie, rejoice, take these grains I giveth!
It is Christmas, after all, you poor thing, homeless
Come here, rejoice, take these grains I giveth!

To the girl flew the sparrow, tiny darling:
– Greatful, I do take these grains from thee
And God surely will once reward you for this.
Greatful, I do take these grains from thee!

– I am not, my child, a bird from this world.
I am your little brother, I came from Heaven above.
The crumbs that you gave to this poor thing
Fed your little brother from the land of angels. 

Melancholy aplenty, that’s what I am saying. Yet you will need to understand that, for most Finns, Christmas carols, including if not especially the more melancholic carols, are attached to mainly positive feelings. They also help construct the right kind of framework of mind, if only because they are usually never played outside December: they guide us into the proper mood or ambiance. (And, unsurprisingly, people in the marketing business will eagerly exploit this, play these songs at the malls and in the shops that you visit, starting from around late-November already I think. That way, you would really need to be braindead in order not to know it is getting near to Christmas time.)

What else should I tell you about Christmas in Finland these days? Well, traditionally, people buy presents, send Christmas cards, decorate their homes with colorful lights and stuff, turn off the electric lights indoors perhaps and light a few candles instead, and they expect Dad to carry home a Christmas tree. At least, that is how it used to be; it would seem to have changed to an extent. People do still give presents, especially in families with children, but as I understand it the sum the average family spends on gifts is not what it used to be before the recession/stagnation (which has lasted for, what, a decade now?). Christmas cards are being sent less and less each year, too; though that has nothing to do with the recession but is simply due to the fact that younger people, and even my very middle-aged generation, have just opted out from that tradition (I myself have not sent any actual Christmas cards for twenty years, although we do slip one inside the gift package that we mail to my parents and sister). Even the Christmas decorations are pretty bare these days, especially in childless households, and most loners and childless couples find the Christmas tree just way too much trouble; they might settle for a Christmas wreath or a branch or a mere treetop of a spruce. It is different with families with kids – as it should be, I think: even for an old diehard atheist like me, it is somehow a heartwarming notion that children get to experience the joy of Christmas – the smell of a fresh spruce tree carried inside, the decorations, the candles in the otherwise dark rooms; yes, the whole shebang. Traditions, or customs, are among some of the most peculiarly human things: there is a sense in which they make us human; and they certainly creep into our minds when we are children and come to constitute a part of who we are. They change in time, of course – indeed, we change them ourselves, simply by changing our ways, little by little; but we should not try and change everything at once (even if that was possible, which I do not think it is).


Now the day before Christmas, the jouluaatto is very special in Finland; it is a holiday in its own right. (Perhaps I should point out that while joulu is Christmas, aatto is the postfix that can be added to signal that it is the day before – we also have juhannusaatto, for example, the day before juhannus, the midsummer’s day, the latter again being the official holiday (though people actually get hammered in the aatto evening and suffer from hangover the day of juhannus); and Finnish being the most flexible language in the world (thus thinks I), one can conceivably and quite understandably use the term aatto also in just about any creative combinations, like to say that it is syntymäpäiväni aatto – the day before my birthday; or, perhaps, kesälomani aatto – the day before my summer vacation.)


Annyhoow, there are a couple of special traditions that Finns enjoy during the jouluaatto. Most significantly, at noon that day there is an official event known as the Declaration of Christmas Peace. It takes place in Turku (where I live), the old capital city (though when Turku was the capital, Finland was not independent) at the South-West coast of Finland. And this one is a real Tradition with a capital-T, mind you: it goes way, way back to the 14^th century! (There have only been a few short intervening periods, like the years 1712–1721 of a particularly terrible Russian invasion and occupation of Finland; possibly the years 1809–1815; and, in the 20^th century, only in the turmoil of 1917 when Finland had just declared her independence, and in 1939 – which was the Christmas of the Winter War and they feared Soviet air raids.) The declaration is read out loud by a city official, and since 1886 this has been done from the balcony of the Brinkkala building near the Cathedral of Turku. The words of the declaration, read from a parchment, have changed slightly over the centuries, I have been told, though the message has remained essentially the same – it is to declare the Christmas time to have begun and to remind everyone to celebrate it peacefully (threatening offenders with harder-than-usual punishment), and to wish everyone a merry Christmas. The current form of the text dates back over a hundred years. Here is how it goes:


“Tomorrow, God willing, is the graceful celebration of the birth of our Lord and Saviour; and thus is declared a peaceful Christmas time to all, by advising devotion and to behave otherwise quietly and peacefully, because he who breaks this peace and violates the peace of Christmas by any illegal or improper behaviour shall under aggravating circumstances be guilty and punished according to what the law and statutes prescribe for each and every offence separately. Finally, a joyous Christmas feast is wished to all inhabitants of the city!”


The declaration has been broadcast on the radio since 1935, and has been televised since 1982. But there are always thousands of people gathered under the balcony and nearby too. So, yes, it is a mass event (as well as, of course, a rather Christian one), and yet the security measures around the event have been relatively scant; this Christmas, however, there was much more police presence and they had also cut off the motor traffic from all sides of the venue, obviously reacting to the terrorist attacks in France earlier last year and in Germany just a couple days before Christmas (where a terrorist drove a truck to the crowd). These are some of the signs of our times, I am afraid.


There are also some special programs on TV all jouluaatto day, like The Snowman animation with its classic theme song Walking in the Air (sang by a boy soprano, I just recently learned from newspaper). I hear that the movie and the song are something of a Christmas classic in some other countries too.


Then there is the very Finnish tradition of Christmas sauna. We Finns, of course, like our sauna any day of the year and many families traditionally bath in sauna every Friday, say, or every Saturday perhaps; but the Christmas sauna, bathing in sauna the Christmas Eve, is nevertheless a special, traditional, nostalgic occasion for many if not most Finns. It is a moment of calming down, taking time for yourself – indeed, many people, myself included, like to enjoy their Christmas sauna alone – relaxing in that warm, steamy and dimly lit room, far away from everyday troubles.


After the sauna, we eat. The most traditional item in the Finnish Christmas table is the ham – a roasted thigh or butt of a pig, usually crusted with breadcrumbs and served with some mustard on the side. Now, as I say the most traditional item, I am not thinking farther than less than a hundred years back, though: some sort of roasted meat has been traditional much longer, but until the early decades of the 20^th century it usually wasn’t pork that they ate; mutton was much more common back then, I’ve been told. And over the past decade or so, turkey has been making its way to the Finnish Christmas table; in some households it has taken the ham’s place. There are also more and more vegetarian households, and there are some vegetarian alternatives to the ham (some of them made to look much like the ham). Anyways, the ham is still by far the most common centerpiece of a Finnish Christmas table. It is usually baked in relatively low temperatures, for hours and hours (usually for more than one hour per kilogram; and the bigger hams weigh more than 10 kilograms easy). Believe me, that bad boy comes out tender and juicy – sweet Jesus how tender and juicy at its best (insert the drooling sound by Homer Simpson here)! Even if you don’t usually eat pork (as is the case with yours truly), this is the one time of the year that you might consider making an exception!


Other very traditional Christmas foods include a variety of fish dishes like gravlax, or perhaps salmon in some other form, and herring served in various different sauces – garlic, tomato, or mustard sauce, for example. You might also see some roe served in the Christmas table. In addition, there is usually rye-meal bread, perhaps such that is deserving of the particular label joululimppu (a Christmas loaf). Rosolli salad – made of potato, carrot and beetroot – there will usually be also. And at least in my childhood home we always had some dried plums (prunes, right, although my dictionary says the term is obsolete now in this meaning?) in the table. Come to think of it, I do not know whether dried plums are very common a dish in the Christmas table, but they are traditional to me. And they are good for your plumbing (plum -> plumbing?). Otherwise that good kilo block of ham that you ate Christmas eve might take a week (I am only slightly exaggerating) to go through your system; and come the day of reckoning you would be crying to sweet Mary Mother of God to help you deliver the end product. But with some good plum fiber in your gut even the heavy stuff will travel through your intestines as smoothly as a freight train. In many families they also drink kvass at the Christmas dinner. (I personally hate that sewage myself.) And perhaps most essentially, there must always, always be these couple of very particular types of casserole foods served at a Christmas dinner: it will invariably include at least some rutabaga casserole and some carrot casserole. More often than not there will also be some (smashed) potato casserole. Liver casserole might also be served, but that is nowhere nearly as closely associated with Christmas as rutabaga and carrot casseroles in particular, for liver casserole (sold by many big convenience food manufacturers in Finland, most often in 400 g boxes that feed about one person each) is a pretty normal everyday food item in this country (most often eaten with some lingonberry jam), whereas you won’t see any carrot or rutabaga casserole being served outside December. You just won’t – that is something that we simply do not do here, ever. Meanwhile, it is equally unimaginable that there might be a Christmas lunch or dinner without those dishes.


After dinner, and all through the Christmas holidays, we Finns eat loads of chocolate. Several boxes of chocolate; yep, a good couple of kilograms of that stuff might well be consumed by a given person (say, me, for example) over three or four days. And it is not just chocolate that we eat, no. There is this one other traditional delicacy that belongs to Christmas for many of us: these quite specific, pear-tasting, ball-shaped, green marmalade jellies called Vihreät kuulat (Gröna kulor in Swedish); I tried to look for the preferred English translation from the manufacturer’s (Fazer – a company established in the 19^th century by one Mr. Karl Fazer and still owned by the family) web page but couldn’t find the product from their English page. The retailers seem to market the product under various names, as Green Marbles (would be my preference), Green Jellies, or Green Balls. The last one is probably not the most enticing translation, although it could give rise to some pretty legendary – though tragic, absolutely woeful, and my sincerest apologies and condolences to anyone who has actually lost someone like that – events, because the said delicacies are pretty big in size, and it is also imaginable that some poor kid might take a couple of them into one’s mouth at the same time (I remember doing that myself as a child, actually, the idiot that I was; but do not try that at home, you fools!) and accidentally choke to death if they got stuck to his throat, thus becoming known as the fellow who choked on a pair of huge balls that he was sucking at Christmas night.


^*) Chang is my imaginary 25^th century cultural anthropologist, reading my ancient blog texts in order to better understand the turn of the millennium Finnish culture – see the last couple of paragraphs of my second post in November 2016.

Interesting Times; or, President Trump – What Could Possibly Go Wrong

I do not intend to discuss topical political issues very often in this blog, but the election of Donald Trump as the next President of the United States seems too momentous an event in the history of Western civilization to pass over without a comment.


Like most Europeans, I would have preferred Mrs. Clinton (or just about any conceivable candidate) over Trump – and Bernie Sanders over Clinton.


When I say “most Europeans,” I do not, of course, mean all Europeans: quite a few people here, even some in Finland, seemed quite OK or even delighted with the result. Most nationalist populist politicians and their supporters, for one, greeted the news with joy. They hope that it will help their own cause, give their political aspirations credibility and inspire supporters. And it might just do that.  Much like Brexit earlier, Trump’s presidency will serve as proof of the fact that nationalist populists can win. Which, of course, they can (the movie and movie-within-a-movie villain played by Charles Dance stated as much in Last Action Hero [1993]: “here, in this world, the bad guys can win!”).


But even outside nationalist populist circles, there were many people who seemed, I don’t know, more exhilarated than aghast about Trump’s victory. Some of them may have been conservatives who think that Trump, although by no means your regular bible-bashing Republican uncle, must be closer to their values than Hillary Clinton. They may be wrong about that, but it does explain their reaction. There were also many who – much like all too many potential voters in America – thought that Mrs. Clinton would have been only marginally the lesser of two evils. I have a very hard time accepting that argument, but again, it explains their reaction. Much more understandable to me is the fact that some anti-globalization folks could at least take some consolation from the fact that the outcome was effectively a protest against free trade. I can see that bit of silver lining, too: Farewell, TTIP!


The rest of the more-excited-than-horrified reactions to Trump’s victory were probably due to the same psychological mechanism that might cause one to feel excitement about seeing a site of some terrible accident (presuming that there are helpers there already, perhaps a police officer shouting: “Move along now, nothing to see here!”). You know: it is just awful – blood and dead and injured people everywhere – but also oh so very exciting, you just have to slow down and have a looksee. Some of my European Facebook friends may have felt something like that: At least that Trump guy is entertaining, they were saying; it will be very interesting to see what he does next.


“Interesting” is right. There is a well-known saying, usually mistakenly characterized as an old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times” (see the Quote Investigator’s study of the phrase) Let us just hope that it does not get as interesting as it did in the 1930s soon after Sir. Austen Chamberlain, a British statesman, used this saying with reference to Hitler’s politics.


Just how bad could it get this time? Some fear it is going to be Word War III in a year or two; others say things will not change very much at all, that it will be something akin to the era of George W., or Reagan. My guess is that it is going to be somewhere between these extremes – World War III is, gods forbid, a relatively unlikely scenario; but neither should we kid ourselves into thinking that this will be a near-ordinary or perhaps only slightly over-the-top (occasionally even amusing) republican administration. Trump’s campaign was a spectacle of Strong Leader show-act, bullying and bigotry, misogyny, appalling egotism, hatred, and a barrage of outrageous untruths – countless many untruths, often just repeated time and time again until many people thought they were true. It was the very epitome of post-truth politics. (I hope to write something about post-truth politics later; no room for it here if I am to keep the length of this one anywhere near-readable.) Some say that it was all just campaign talk; that actual administration will be very different. We can only hope. But I do not think that one can run a campaign that is altogether separate and different from one’s personality; and one’s personality is bound to shine through in one’s administration and actions as president. And during these past few weeks already, the president-elect has gone back to his post-truth campaigning ways, tweeting totally unsubstantiated claims like that millions of people were allowed to vote (Clinton) illegally in the elections.


Now, Trump promised lots of changes, but we should keep in mind that, usually in democracy, changes take time. It is quite likely that, for most of his supporters, their disappointing weekdays will not change all that much; that it will be back to the same old sorry humdrum run-of-the-mill business as usual – still struggling to make ends meet, although now with the added bonus of hearing news about huge tax-cuts to corporations and to the rich that Trump and his Republican allies will be carrying out. Yes, one of the things that he promised was “to drain the swamp in Washington”; but talk is cheap – or, as it is often put in G. R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books: words are wind. What Trump is actually doing – surrounding himself with other millionaires, billionaires, lobbyists and Wall Street people, testifies to what we already knew: that he never had any intention of delivering. Helping out the poor is hard work, and not in the real interests of populist demagogues, because they would have to step on the toes of many of their rich friends; so most populists, once elected to positions of political power, join the political establishment. Indeed, like so many right-wing politicians before him, Trump and his posse will at the very least do their best to take your money and run.

And that, I should stress, would be the best case scenario. I mean, you better hope that most of Trump’s promises mean nothing; that your money is all that his administration will take from you. As is often the case with the most interesting times, the humdrum run-of-the-mill is the best that we can hope for; things could turn out far worse. Although concrete positive developments take time in democracy, horrible developments can happen quickly. As I write this, it seems that Trump will be surrounding himself with some pretty extreme right-wingers, climate change-denialists, fundamentalist Christians, even people who call themselves alt-right (and who others call racists). Among other things, he aims to put your healthcare system in the hands of an avowed critic of public healthcare; appoint as his secretary of labor a millionaire who is against any raises in minimum wage and has no objections to machines replacing workers; education in the hands of a person who wants to privatize education; environmental protection in the hands of a fossil-fuels advocating climate skeptic; and your armed forces in the hands of an apparently trigger happy general nicknamed Mad Dog. This is more “an anti-government” than a government, as Eugene Robinson just put it in his opinion piece in The Washington Post.

It is so systematically the very opposite of what would be good for you and good for the planet that it is just ridiculous. Working together with the republican senate, Trump’s cabinet will appoint extreme conservatives to the Supreme Court; will certainly undo most of Obama Care; do their best to increase the gap between the poor and the filthy rich; and if Trump stays true to his threats to exit from the Paris climate treaty …, well, then, there goes the planet. (The climate issue was one of the biggest concerns that, for example, Noam Chomsky had with the prospect of Trump presidency before the election.)

We better all of us (all of us living on this planet) hope that the exit from the Paris treaty will be one of the several campaign promises that Trump chooses to break. There were some positive signs indicating that that might be the case (as well as a couple other reasonable back-steps by the president-elect) in Trump’s interview with the New York Times, so let us stay hopeful at this point.

Some people worry – and I have to admit that the thought has crossed my mind too – that things could go even worse. Truly nightmarish scenarios have been mentioned. You can probably guess what I am referring to: Life-on-earth-ending little hiccups – a “Dr. Strangelove” sort of incidence or something of that general variety. Can anybody claim to be 100% sure that Trump, given his personality – the apparently unlimited ego combined with a demonstrably thin skin – cannot be provoked to start a “War to end all wars,” or at least to inadvertently help set in motion a chain of events that later escalates into World War III?


Am I 100% sure that that cannot happen? Of course not – there is always that chance as long as there are huge arsenals of nuclear missiles on this planet pointing every which way, and Trump if anyone is famous for his unpredictability; but I do not think that that is all too likely either. Give it, maybe, a 1–2 % chance over the next four years? No more than that, huh? Well, not a hell of a lot more, at least, I would say. One would have to be much more than just very, very egocentric and megalomaniac a person, and more than just thin-skinned and prone to holding grudge: one would have to be a raving-mad fanatic to risk nuclear war, and fanatic is one thing that Trump clearly is not. A demagogue and highly self-centered, even childishly immature person he may be, and prone to authoritarian management, to hubris and bullying, yes; but a fanatic? That does not seem right. Of course, even a 1 or 2 % chance may in this particular case feel insufferable, the outcome under discussion being nothing less than the end of the world. And yes, if you allow yourself to think about that, it is a disturbing thought. We might not call it Red Alert yet, but it is a sort of Orange Alert (pun intended – yes I am referring to the color of Trump’s face in some television appearances earlier). But ca. 98–99 % chance of human life not necessarily ending due to nuclear war for another four years is pretty good, is it not? And one can only live with the odds that one is given. I mean, what else could I do but to take it as it is? I need to get some sleep, too – not lay awake all night staring at the ceiling, thinking about Trump’s stubby fingers so very close to the red button. (Then if the nukes started falling, I would have even worse chances of survival if I were suffering from sleep deprivation: it not only impacts your health, but also slows your reaction time!)


Other kinds of nightmarish scenarios has been discussed by Trump’s opponents, too. Some would remind us that quite a few democratic nations have been known to slide into totalitarianism. Could that happen to Trump’s America, too? This is a man who threatened that he might not accept the result of elections should he happen to lose; a man known for inciting racist and ethnic bigotry; plus a man who has said he is open to some pretty extreme methods (torturing suspected terrorists, “taking out their families”) in the war against terrorism.


But no, I think the chances of America sliding into totalitarianism are even smaller than those of an all-out nuclear war over the next four years. The situation there is just so different in comparison to just about any nation that has ever gone down that road: there is a long history of democracy, democratic institutions having been pretty much inalienably forged into the very core of the nation’s government. There is the freedom of speech, most crucially, including freedom of the media, which dictators would always need to suffocate in order to stay in power. To be sure, as (the professor, economist, and the Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton) Robert Reich notes, Trump has made some ominous moves that look like attempts to control or undermine the media; but at the end of the day I think the freedom of press is too deep-rooted in the American value base, right next to the Stars and Stripes, the national anthem, and the almighty dollar. That said, I do hope that you folks stay vigilant there in the U.S. and oppose any and every move toward totalitarianism. Peaceful resistance is the way to go, of course (civil unrest would only offer welcome pretext for a wanna-be despot to increase surveillance and police presence and to cut civil rights).

There are other ways besides a full-scale nuclear apocalypse and establishing a totalitarian dictatorship that Trump could cause immeasurable suffering in this world. Besides bombing and using drones against terrorists (or “terrorists”) and their families and supporters – much of which has been going on under Obama administration, too, let us not forget – Trump might be willing to use extreme techniques like torturing suspected terrorists. And I suppose he will use trade embargos that could deny some populations sufficient food and medicine. Lacking food and medicine can kill you just as surely as bombs. Yes I do worry about that sort of things. And in this connection, it is not his thin skin that worries me the most: rather, it is that Trump, like all true egomaniacs, seems to lack compassion. (Can you imagine him shedding tears in public, like Obama did after the school-shooting in Connecticut? I do not think so, not unless those were angry tears that Trump would be shedding for someone insulting his fingers or something.)


Moving over to Europe now, there is also the very scary possibility that the fact of Trump’s victory will precipitate the rise of nationalist populism here: that far-right nationalists will soon be governing every other nation here, too, and that this will spell the end of EU and of much of international cooperation that has helped prevent wars between major military powers since the World War II. The worry is that international politics might head back to the dark ages, to something like Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes amongst nations. Next spring, there will be presidential elections held in France, and gods forbid should Marine Le Pen win. That sort of development – a sort of chain reaction or domino effect of nationalism – is the horror picture painted by Tobias Stone, among others, in his blog for the Huffington Post. Stone raises worries that Trump’s U.S.A. and the nationalist, anti-EU governments in Europe might be unwilling to stand up against Putin’s Russia, thereby allowing it to grab some more lebensraum (or whatever that word is in Russian) by occupying, for example, the Baltic states (for geopolitical reasons, perhaps, or because motivated by domestic pressures – trying to suppress civil unrest by creating external enemies). Needless to say, that sort of development would be extremely dangerous.


Yes, chilling nightmare scenarios aplenty in the air these days. Interesting times, I keep saying. But to end with a somewhat smaller-scale – or, at least, less apocalyptic, although such that will almost certainly impact millions and millions of people – worry, one that most people may have not thought about yet because there are all those more prominent apocalyptic visions occupying our minds: consider what it will be like raising children in America over the next four years, trying to teach them to be nice to other people, tolerant and honest, unselfish and not too self-centered. Try teaching that to your kids, and then Trump comes on TV – ranting and raving, threatening people, making outrageous, unsubstantiated claims, boasting how great he is. “Yes, little Johnny, that is indeed our president, the highest-ranking man in this country, elected to lead us; but nevertheless it is wrong to be a self-centered narcissist, a mean bully and a bigot, to lie to people and threaten them.” It will be a hard sell when the evidence stares you right in the face, showing that a self-centered, mean, lying bully can get to the highest, most prestigious positions in your society.


Presidents may not be role models to grownups these days but they do matter a great deal to the worldview of a small child. The first female president of Finland, Tarja Halonen, likes to tell a story she heard when in office: apparently, some young boy had actually asked his parents: “Can boys become president too?”

Halonen served for twelve years – two terms, which is the maximum these days in our country, too – so there was a whole generation of children growing up thinking that a woman president is the most natural thing in the world!


Another anecdote to wrap this up: when I was a child myself, there were no restrictions on the number of terms that a single person could serve as the president of Finland, and there was this one bald dude, Urho Kekkonen (1900–1986) who reigned (and boy did he reign – in those days our president had more power than nowadays (though not nearly as much as the U.S. president)) for a good quarter-of-a-century no less, from the mid-fifties to the early-eighties (apparently because people knew that Kekkonen had good personal relations with the Soviet leaders and they were afraid how our big bad neighbor might react should we fail to elect their favorite man). So in the late-seventies, early-eighties anybody just over twenty years of age, young adults, in this country, would have known no other president than Kekkonen. Indeed, the very name Kekkonen had effectively become synonymous with president, at least in the minds of children. No wonder, then, that when I was like four in the late-seventies and someone asked me, what would you like to become when you grow up, it seemed obvious to an ambitious young man to go for the top job in the country, and I replied: “Kekkonen!”

The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Blogosphere: The What and Why of This Blog

In this post I address a question that I left open in the last one: what kind of a blog will this be?

I’m afraid I don’t really have a simple and precise answer to that. One vague notion that I do have is to make this a bit like a very general-topic newspaper column. You know: the kind that could pick up just about any topical affair and scrutinize it, express opinions about it; or might just as well get all laid-back and muse about some old anecdote or a historical fact; or perhaps ruminate about some funny, or sad, little everyday incident that piqued the columnist’s interest the other day. The topic could be anything, but there would be a recognizable style and a way of dealing with the topics in the blog. It would be drawing from a variety sources, pointing out some surprising connections and contrasts between the topic and some other phenomena or ideas or theories. That could be my goal; that, and to do it with some humor.

So there will not be any one specific field that I will be covering in this blog. To narrow it down as much as I can, and put some label on it, I could say that this will be a semi-philosophical, cultural-anthropological blog with a sociological twist. Of course, that doesn’t narrow it down very much, because just about anything can be viewed as a cultural-anthropological and a social phenomenon and considered from a (semi-)philosophical point of view. But perhaps, since I am best familiar with Finnish culture and reasonably well familiar with the more general, broadly Western – European and North-American – culture,  it would make sense to assume that I will mostly be discussing issues related to those cultural spheres and dealing with them mainly with conceptual tools rooted in those same spheres.

Some of you, the ones with some experience in blogosphere, will now smirk, thinking that this will not be a very good blog, then. You are probably right. This will in all likelihood be a wretched, pitiful, piece of shiatsu blog.

That, at least, judging by the few blogs about blogging that I would take a look at before starting. One thing that all those blogs about blogs (blog-blogs?) had in common was that they stressed how crucially important it is to have a sharp focus, a specific topic, a definite niche in mind for the blog. That was the blog-bloggers’ First Rule of Blogging, in effect. The Second Rule of Blogging was that the topic would have to be something that one is really, really passionate about – something that one could keep talking about endlessly.

The reasoning was that, people read blogs mainly to find answers to some specific kinds of questions, and if your blog isn’t really providing – week in, week out – precisely the kind of answers that they are looking for (specifically about cooking, for example, or gardening, or fashion and lifestyle, or computer games, or travelling, or Manchester United, or Japanese architecture, or ice-hockey, or politics, or some TV-series, or Hollywood celebrities, or a musical genre or some band, or whatever), if it instead discusses any random topic in one post and something very different in the next, then the readers will obviously look elsewhere. The blog will not be attracting following. And that would be a bad thing, I suppose.

Okay, that makes sense, yes; but the main problem I am having with these basic rules of blogging is that I don’t think that there is any very restricted topic that I would care to go on about “endlessly.” Well, maybe something related to my work: I could write almost endlessly about some philosophical or social theoretical topics, for instance; but I do not feel like starting a professional or a strictly academic blog. I already write about those things many hours a day and the idea of doing even more of the same in my free time feels somewhat repulsive. Second, I really, really don’t see myself as a “one topic man”: I have many interests in life, and I most certainly won’t be starting several blogs to cover a number of them. I have a life to live, mind you, so one blog – and one, two or at most three posts per month – will have to do. (I am the kind of guy who takes his sweet, sweet time with anything he publishes, rewrites everything several times over more often than not, so that alone will prevent me from publishing several posts per week, even when I get an inspiration right away.)

So, will anybody be reading the blog? Therein lies the question, I suppose. I would certainly not be expecting any mass following; no Blogger of the Year Award for me, most probably. And I am fairly certain that I won’t be making any money out of this; though, that said, I admit that the economic possibilities of blogs remain rather hazy to me and I actually have no competence to estimate the likelihood of some big-ass company contacting me and offering thousands of euros for a good review of their toothpaste or whatever. (Go ahead and suggest that, please, all you big companies – I will probably sell out immediately, I could be your bitch!)

They probably won’t be contacting me though, if only so many people read this blog. And why should people read my blog!? I have no reason to offer, nothing. I might make an interesting point every once in a while, or say something slightly amusing, but there are no doubt thousands of blogs that make more interesting points and make you laugh so hard that you will be pissing yourself, and present all that with much more eloquent and compelling prose. You don’t even have time to read all those thousands of blogs, so why spend any more time on my most mediocre one!? As a human being, which I presume that you are (unless you are an artificial intelligence browsing through these words some time in near future, reading perhaps a million pages per second (in which case I trust you won’t mind too much having wasted this one millionth of a second to read this one; carry on, now)), you will have a very much restricted attention space, as well as a limited life-span. So why indeed should you waste your precious time with my bullshit?

In miniature form, the problematic has always been there; I am reminded of how the sociologist Randall Collins (1998) described the field of philosophical debates in his Sociology of Philosophies (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press):

 “Imagine a large number of people spread out across an open plain – something like a landscape by Salvador Dalí or Giorgio de Chirico. Each one is shouting, ‘Listen to me!’ This is the intellectual attention space. …

           [To get others to listen, one] can pick a quarrel with someone else, contradicting what the other is saying. That will gain an audience of at least one; and if the argument is loud enough, it might attract a crowd…. The tribe of attention seekers, once scattered across the plain, is changed into a few knots of argument. [But there is this thing that I call t]he law of small numbers[. It] says that the number of these successful knots is always [only] about three to six. The attention space is limited; once a few arguments have partitioned the crowds, attention is withdrawn from those who would start yet another knot of argument. Much of the pathos of intellectual life is in the timing of when one advances one’s own argument.

— Collins, p. 38

 

Not just philosophers and intellectuals and artists, but most human beings, social animals that we are, would like to share our opinions with others; and, alas, the attention space in any field, around any issue, is highly limited. There can only be a couple of superstars in any field of action (if there were more than a couple, they wouldn’t deserve the label “superstar,” now would they). In a broad field, where there might be hundreds of thousands of participants from all around the globe, there will be a wide variety of lesser stars and then mediocrities; and these could again be classified and ranked into many sublevels. The mediocrities, the nobodies of the field, are destined to disappear without almost anybody noticing. Well, their family and friends will notice, of course, and will mourn their loss; and to those folks, Jim-Bob will be “Jim-Bob, the philosopher,” because they remember Jim-Bob went into some fancy university, got his PhD, and even published an article or two in some philosophical journal. (Plus he could win any argument in the local tavern; any argument!) Indeed, but the rest of the world will not remember Jim-Bob, as a philosopher or as anything else. And now, with the internet, the scene has exploded: it is not just the academics (and there are more of those, too, than ever before – hundreds of thousands of them) and non-academic intellectuals like famous novelists, and journalists and politicians and celebrities, who will be trying to make their opinions heard: now there are several hundreds of millions of people shouting in the internet: “Listen to me, I have something to say!” We are attention-seekers; and we have opinions, of course we do. Perhaps you know what the character “Dirty” Harry Calahan, played by Clint Eastwood, said in the movie The Dead Pool [1988]: “opinions are like assholes, everybody has one.” So now there are hundreds of millions of these assholes gaping in the blogosphere, all calling for our attention.

So many assholes, so little time! As limited beings, we must wade through those a-holes, paying most of them only minimal if any attention, trying to find those few that deserve our consideration. Of course, who you are will give you some guidance and help you restrict your attention to some of the more promising a-holes. For example, we more-or-less scientifically minded, leftist-liberal atheists who vote for the Green party, we prefer certain kinds of – what we like to think are relatively well-argued and scientifically founded – a-holes that are best compatible with our leftist-liberal, secular and environmentalist worldviews. But even in that particular field there is so much competition that I find it hard to believe that my little a-hole will attract – or deserve – much attention.

Or, to borrow the ever so slightly more eloquent words (as translated by Charles Cotton) with which Michel de Montaigne, an early-modern age French philosopher addressed his reader in the foreword to his Essays in the late 16^th century:

“Reader, thou hast here an honest book; it doth at the outset forewarn thee that, in contriving the same, I have proposed to myself no other than a domestic and private end: I have had no consideration at all either to thy service or to my glory. My powers are not capable of any such design. I have dedicated it to the particular commodity of my kinsfolk and friends, so that, having lost me (which they must do shortly), they may therein recover some traits of my conditions and humours …. Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book: there’s no reason thou shouldst employ thy leisure about so frivolous and vain a subject. Therefore farewell.”

 — Montaigne, Essays

Too long; didn’t read? Well, long story short, Michel here mentions (with some considerable false modesty and a twinkle in his eye, of course) a couple of good reasons for publishing his Essays – reasons that might just be good enough for me too to publish a few blog posts. Surely my blog could get the attention of “my kinsfolk and friends” – some people who already know me, my family and friends and perhaps some other associates; and it might just mean leaving some sort of legacy behind – so that people can remember some of my “conditions and humors.”

What is more, one never knows whether such a legacy, eternalized here in the internet (at least until the great, knowledge-age-ending EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse), or some all infrastructure-destroying impact of a comet on earth), might one distant day be found by some chance someone – someone with a similar mindset, perhaps. Say, four hundred years from now, in the year 2416 …?

Of course, if these texts do indeed survive the next four hundred years, they might also be of interest to an historian, or to some cultural anthropologist studying the turn of the millennium, perhaps specifically the tiny speckle amongst world cultures that was once known as Finnish culture (which might at that point have been dead for a couple hundred years already).

In 2416, if humanity has survived (and not been reverted back to the pre-digitalization era), they will probably be utilizing some pretty awesomely powerful AI engines to browse through and analyze millions and millions of web pages from around this period in a matter of seconds; but let us assume that a human mind – whatever that is like in those days, probably quite a bit enhanced by AI implants and some cognitive software running in a quantum cloud and accessed directly by those people’s cyborg brains – will every now and then take special, personal interest in some of the pages the AI picks out, immerse itself with the text, perhaps be moved by some universal human theme or be amused by some funny cultural difference, just like we today might be moved by some universal human themes and amused by some cultural differences when we read Montaigne or other authors from the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

Are you picturing this – a scholar in 2416, coming across the humble blog posts of yours truly and finding there something interesting? I propose to call that 25^th century cultural anthropologist Chang (motivated by speculation that China might well be a dominating world power in those days). So, hello, Chang! Bless you for stopping by; hope you will find these silly scribblings useful to your scholarly purposes!

                   

A Dinosaur in the Electronics Shop; or, My First Blog Post

So I decided to start a blog. It sounds trivial, perhaps, to most people under the age of 60, but it was a huge step to me. Let me use this first post to elaborate on why.

Though I am only middle-aged – forty-something – I have always sympathized with the elderly who find it hard to keep up with latest technology. I feel kinship with people like the 17th century astronomer, Johannes Hevelius (1611–1687) who – as described by John Gribbin in his Science: A History – was so suspicious of the then relatively new technology of telescopes that he would still in the 1670s refuse to use them and rather used open sights observation instead:

“In a correspondence beginning in 1668, [Robert] Hooke implored him to switch to telescopic sights, but Hevelius stubbornly refused, claiming that he could do just as well with open sights. The truth is that Hevelius was simply too set in his ways to change and distrusted the new-fangled methods. He was like someone who persists in using an old-fashioned manual typewriter even though a modern word-processing computer is available.” (Gribbin 2002, 169.)

I know that feeling. I am never, ever among the first wave of people – pioneers and well-connected technology-enthusiasts – to adopt latest technology, among the people who actually create that technology or have access to prototypes and beta versions already. Nor am I in the second, or usually even in the third or fourth wave – I am no tech trend-setter, or quick to follow those trends, or eager to get my hands on recent stuff that some peer group thinks is cool. Actually, I am not even among the fifth; or maybe even the sixth wave of new technology adopters – those sensible, or parsimonious, or even somewhat over-cautious or miserly consumers who follow the lead of trendy people only a couple years later, when the new tech or some of its later modifications or updates is very old news already but perhaps about half cheaper than it originally was. To carry this – admittedly, pretty retarded – wave metaphor to the bitter end now, I am the guy carried to the shore on the seventh wave of new technology users, clutching to some old technology to keep me barely afloat, coughing up salty sea water from my lungs.

Not because I am old (old enough to remember the time without smartphones, even the time without the not-very-smart cellphones, the time without the Internet, or home computers in fact – they would only make their invasion to Finland in the 1980s, when I was a schoolkid), but because I was­ born old, in this respect. Another way to put it: I have a skeptical attitude toward all things novel, especially toward new technology. It is a matter of personality, I fear – I wouldn’t get high scores on “Openness to experience” in any Five-Factor personality test (see Wiggins ed. 1996). I am forever a pessimist about what the new technology will offer me; to me that glass is always half full of poison. (Sometimes I actually feel like taking some consolation from the inevitability of death: that one day I will no longer have to try and adapt to the ever-changing technological environment, get to lay my weary head to eternal rest, away from the toil and trouble.)

But now here’s the point I am trying make: I know that this is an unhealthy, indeed crappy attitude to have, and I am trying to fight it. I am well aware of the great potential that ICT and digitalization hold in education (see Kivinen, Piiroinen & Saikkonen 2016), for example; as well as in the entertainment industry, of course (I enjoy many digital era TV-series masterpieces like GoT very much, which would have been impossible to create twenty years ago); and more generally in the economy. I know it could be argued – though remains highly controversial and debatable at this point, and is beyond my capacities to evaluate with any confidence – that digitalization and automatization will bring exponential orders of magnitude more innovations and economic growth that will in the end benefit everybody (although, many experts would admit, in the short run tends to increase inequality, shrink the middle-class and widen the gap between a small elite of super-rich and the huge masses of miserable poor) (see, e.g., Brynjolfsson & McAfee 2011). So I am not saying that we should turn back the clock, back away from this post-industrial age of ours. And I am trying, trying so very hard to be more open-minded about new technology; in fact, every now and then I do take steps to learn to use some. And guess what: usually when I get down to it, try and learn it, it turns out to be a lot less difficult than I had imagined; the hardest part really was just to get going and start doing something about it.

For example, in the summer of 2013 I bought my first smartphone, an iPhone 5, which was actually quite a new model at the time, less than a year old (so I was, for once in my life, actually something like a third-waver in adopting that particular piece of technology), and I found it about as intuitively usable as people had been telling me. The device has since then enhanced my standard of living quite a bit, I think; me and my iPhone, we are inseparable now (except when I go swimming or play in a chess tournament where electronic devices are banned). I warmly recommend a smartphone to anyone who still doesn’t own one. (This was not a paid commercial; unfortunately.)

Other great personal success stories include learning how to use TV’s remote control (we didn’t have one in my childhood home until a couple years into the 1980s, for in the 70s we still only had a remote-less black-and-white TV); writing my first email in the 90s at the tender age of 22; getting internet access to my home some ten years ago; and then learning how to use online bank services so that I could finally stop queueing in the physical bank office every other week to pay my bills.

Hooray for me! But I still have some way to go; here is a short list of some of the things that I still haven’t done once in my life:

• Established a YouTube account (although I do watch videos on YouTube, duh).
• Used Spotify.
• Used Instagram.
• Edited (with any kind of success) any video on a computer.
• Subscribed to Netflix or other such paid streaming services to watch movies or television (although I have used some similar services that are included in my cable-TV package).
• Played computer games online with people I didn’t know (with or without those headset thingies that I see them wear)
• Used Skype
• Used Snapchat, or had any other live discussions online (except through Facebook / Messenger, which I do use – like my mother and millions of other senior citizens)
• Used almost any single smartphone application currently fashionable among sub-20-year-olds; no, better make that sub-30-year-olds
• Done any programming (to me, programming looks as mysterious and incomprehensible as, for example, the playing of a piano concerto looks to an utterly unmusical person (which, as it happens, I also am)).

Anyways, here goes one thing off that list; off the bucket list, if you will: I am starting a blog. By gods, I am making myself proud today!

What kind of a blog, though? Well, that, as they say, is a topic for another post.

In truth, I have already pretty much written that second post, too, but gather that it is prudent to keep blog posts relatively short, or around couple thousand words at most. (Actually, quite a few bloggers recommend keeping it even shorter, like 600 words max, but that would probably not agree with my temperament at all; with a couple thousand words limit, though, I can live.)

So thanks for reading this virgin post of mine; I’ll be cutting this crap right about n-- ....

Literary References

Brynjolfsson, Erik & McAfee, Andrew (2011). Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. Lexington, Mass: Digital Frontier Press.

Gribbin, John (2002). Science: A History. London: Penguin.

Kivinen, Osmo, Piiroinen, Tero & Saikkonen, Loretta (2016). “Two Viewpoints on the Challenges of ICT in Education: Knowledge-building Theory vs. a Pragmatist Conception of Learning in Social Action.” Oxford Review of Education 42(4). DOI: 10.1080/03054985.2016.1194263.

Wiggins, Jerry S. (ed. 1996). The Five-Factor Model of Personality: Theoretical Perspectives. New York and London: The Guilford Press.