Monday 12 December 2016

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Saturday 19 November 2016

Trump, Authoritarianism, and Opposing Worldviews

So, this happened.





The first question might well be: Why should this be a big deal for a non-American? After all, it was only a presidential election of a foreign country, which is not supposed to be the business of non-Americans anyway. The president of the United States is not almighty, will be as bound by the realities of domestic and international politics as anyone else, and certainly cannot make the country and its political system bow to his personal will. It is surprising, considering what the polls seemed to indicate, and more than a little weird, but so what?

I feel the need to bring some considerations together and justify why it seems like a big deal. Why care so much about who won the United States presidential election?

First, maybe this should have not been surprising. If Trump’s victory came as a surprise, maybe that is just an indication that something important about these times has escaped our attention.

It has been repeatedly pointed out that Trump’s success has much to do with the anger and disillusionment of American lower middle and working classes. These people are often by default suspicious of the federal government, and they have been hit hard by economic trends, loss of jobs due to globalization, and the polarization of income that shrinks the middle class. These elections channeled much repressed anger. (Meanwhile, 370 economists, including some of the best in the world, assert that Trump’s economic promises are based on fallacies and misinformation.) For people who do not expect anything good from the established political factions, any radical change may appear desirable.

However, that does not explain at all how Donald Trump, of all people, came to win as the Republican nominee. Why on earth Trump? Just how do people think he is going to be the solution to the problems mentioned above, to such an extent that he managed to win despite almost non-existent support from the Republican Party luminaries? Moreover, why do so many people on this side of the Atlantic, people who have nothing significant to gain from changes in the United States’ political direction, seem to be cheering for Trump?

The Republican Party is generally thought of as the party of an unrestricted free market, extreme individualism, and social conservatism. But as the party’s agonizing over Trump’s candidacy showed, he was not appealing to the traditional Republican principles as such. Most clearly, Trump did not gain his support because he was conservative -- he is not. He was supported because he was radical. Something else is involved than just a tipping of the scales between the two established American political powers.

The Republicans have been the party of law, order, and security since the 1960s. At a time when racial riots and unrest caused by the social rights struggles provoked fear and uncertainty, the party employed the message of hard-handed security measures and aversion to social change. Where Democrats became the party more accommodating to social reform, Republicans came to champion reluctance about extending the civil rights of minorities, even though this was not inherently part and parcel with their other key doctrines.

Thus, today’s Republican party has come to encompass mindsets that do not necessarily have much to do with each other. Karen Stenner’s detailed analysis shows that what gets grouped together as the American “political right” consists of three distinct dispositions: laissez-faire capitalism, social conservatism, and an important third feature, authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism, in the sense meant here, is the preference for uniformity and conformity in one’s surroundings, favoring hierarchy, loyalty, and strong leadership. Since the early 1990s, there has been an ingenious measurement device for the authoritarian psychological profile, which sidesteps the methodological problems of asking people directly about their political preferences. It consists of asking them about something universally human, present in every culture, having prima facie nothing to do with politics: child-rearing practices.

Questionnaires ask about the most desirable kinds of upbringing for children. The respondents are asked what features they see as most important for their children to have. They are asked if it is most important to teach children independence or respect for elders; self-reliance or obedience; being considerate or being well-behaved; and curiosity or good manners. Picking the second preference in each pair has proven to be a reliable indicator of authoritarian preferences.

What is interesting is that Trump’s success has been driven by his appeal to people with authoritarian preferences. He did not only gather the votes of social conservatives or disgruntled poor people: he gathered the votes of authoritarians, who are many, and not by any means confined to the political right.

It is important to note that authoritarianism differs from conservatism. What Stenner calls “status quo conservatism” may often support the same causes as authoritarianism, but it is importantly different. According to Stenner’s analysis, conservatism prefers stability and security in society, resisting change and preferring established practices over reforms. Conservatism is disposed to maintain the status quo, even when the status quo includes many divisions and diversity in society. Authoritarianism, on the other hand, is disposed to enforce uniformity, homogeneity, and strict social hierarchies in society, even when this means drastic measures and a radical upheaval of the status quo. Neither of the two is inherently connected with laissez-faire capitalism.

Trump’s success starts to make more sense when one considers the possibility that his message reached a large class of people with authoritarian tendencies. With his self-assured and outrageous demeanor, he portrayed himself as the kind of strongman leader who will force radical change upon the country, and disregards all kinds of typical political correctness which might stand in his way.

Another interesting hypothesis, also put forward by Stenner, could explain why the political force of authoritarianism has not been more evident before. The hypothesis is that authoritarian tendencies are often latent until “activated”, and they are activated by perceived threats to social order and personal security. The hypothesis makes a lot of sense, thinking about the effectiveness of the standard political maneuver: underpinning the support of the ruling regime by turning people’s attention to an outside threat. According to Hetherington and Suhay's study on Americans, it is not only those with pre-existing authoritarian tendencies who are susceptible to the effect. Also people without those tendencies may respond to real or imagined threats by becoming more authoritarian. That is, by turning to strong leadership, traditional values, and unity of the group.

When people experience uncertainty and fear, it seems to be a natural reaction to turn to one’s community for safety, and become less tolerant of diversity and differences of opinion in that community. People feeling threatened, either by physical dangers or by rapid changes in social norms, tend to seek safety, consciously or unconsciously, from forceful leaders and uniformity, strict norms, and structure. The racism that arises from activated authoritarianism is not so much racism as such; it is, to use Stenner’s term, more general “difference-ism”. This may explain the otherwise completely baffling phenomenon where hostile attitudes, once they have become prominent against some minorities, seem to target also evidently harmless groups, such as disabled people.

If it is true that (to simplify) scared people are more prone to attach to authoritarian leaders, this may tell something illuminating about totalitarian societies and dictatorships. It is easy enough to understand that people can be scared into submission in a dictatorship. But the result of living under a constant threat may be deeper than simple reluctant submission. It might be that people can be scared into actually supporting authoritarian regimes – the regime is a self-feeding machine that constantly provides the impetus for its own support.

According to Stenner, the authoritarian psychological profile favors

“ ... structuring society and social interactions in ways that enhance sameness and minimize diversity of people, beliefs, and behaviors. It tends to produce a characteristic array of stances all of which have the effect of glorifying, encouraging, and rewarding uniformity and disparaging, suppressing, and punishing difference.” (Stenner, "Three Kinds of Conservatism", Psychological Inquiry, 20, p. 143)

So, authoritarianism seems to be the preference for homogeneity and strength in unity and the distaste of diversity and difference. It is certainly a widespread trait, although one rarely encounters it in a completely outspoken or unqualified form in politics or social life – at least until now. But there seems to be a less radical preference, which is closely related to the authoritarian mindset, but even more humanly universal and comprehensive: the preference for order and hierarchy. What I have in mind is a mindset that does not oppose diversity as such, but demands that any existing diversity is made sense of by classifying it in clear and permanent ways. It demands that things, phenomena, and people have labels and that they wear those labels on their sleeves.

Very many people who could be described as conservative or authoritarian seem content to accept the existence of various kinds of diversity if that diversity is made clear-cut and intelligible by labels and classifying concepts. Let there be blacks in the neighborhood, as long as they keep to themselves and do not try to become one of “us”; let there be equal rights for women, as long as women do not try to become men and take over “men’s jobs”; let there be equal rights for homosexual couples, as long as homosexual partnerships do not constitute “marriage”. Nobody likes to find out that their long-lasting ways to make sense of the world have gone obsolete, and that their concepts no longer mean what they used to mean. Sticking to traditional meanings of concepts and inherited worldviews is, like authoritarianism, an expression of the tendency to seek safety in order and tradition when the world outside seems to change too rapidly. It is probably no accident that populists like Trump use name-calling so extensively. Sticking easily remembered, emotionally loaded labels to everyone and everything speaks directly to his target audience. It feeds the audience’s urge to classify, simplify, and know what is what.

Finally, there might be an explanation as to why these preferences seem so deeply alien to some. On the face of it, a preference for order and homogeneity over ambiguity and diversity is a perfectly intelligible need, and certainly not in any obvious way irrational. Why is it so baffling and repulsive to many; to such an extent that well-educated people struggle to even understand where authoritarian tendencies come from?

Maybe somewhere on the bottom of all this lies a fundamental difference in worldviews. On the one hand, there are people who see order as the basic, “default” feature of the world. There is a pre-determined natural order for things to be, and undesirable things are conceived as resulting from the order’s being disturbed in one way or another. Order is the default state of the human race and society. Whenever there is a deviation from the order, this is attributable to some external agent, malicious or delusional, who must be stopped before it breaks the world’s rightful structure apart. On the other hand, there are people who see change as the basic, “default” feature of the world. The only permanent thing is that everything changes. History, the story of the human race, or the fates of societies do not follow any pre-determined path, and much of the developments that shape our lives are attributable just to random chance. People are fellow travelers in a chaotic and unpredictable world that is not in any way inherently hospitable to them. The way to survive is to build unity where there once was none, adapt, and develop. Circumstances change, and societies change with them, whether we like it or not. The only relevant choice is between controlled change as opposed to chaotic and unpredictable change.

Something like the first worldview may be an unspoken and non-reflected part of the authoritarian disposition, as well as those more moderate mindsets that share features with it. The inability to understand or relate to the first world-view, on the other hand, could be part of the reason why the needs of authoritarians and their means of responding to threats seem so alien to many. If something along these lines is right, it is no wonder if authoritarians tend to be climate change deniers. It goes against a basic building block of their worldview – the conviction that if things are just left to run their course, things will fall back into their rightful order.

Why is the election of Donald Trump a big deal? Because he cannot be dismissed as a singular accident, a mere charismatic snake-oil salesman, or a very-probably-one-term president brought about by a critical amount of protest voters. He awakened politically a subset of people that is permanently there and can be mobilized to support ruthless and radical leaders, especially when there are high levels of fear and uncertainty in the society. His success is part of the same nationalist, isolationist, and disunifying trend that is growing in European politics, in Brexit, and elsewhere. Now, when Trump’s themes, his campaigning style, and his surely conscious choice to rather appear vigorous than worthy of respect, have won him the White House, it is hard to believe that the same methods would not be copied in European politics sooner or later. The European Trumps are probably already on their way.

Thursday 28 July 2016

Collective stigmatizing does not belong in Western values

[My letter to the editor published in the newspaper Keskisuomalainen 26.7.2016. This is about a proposal by The Finns Party Youth, the youth organization of The Finns Party, which is currently taking part in the Finnish coalition government. The title was provided by the editors.]

The Finns Party Youth proposes the section about agitation against a group to be removed from the Finnish penal code (ps-nuoret.fi, 21.7.2016). This would render it lawful to collectively stigmatize a group based on ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or disability, as long as this does not involve direct incitement to violence. According to the organization, the penal code sections about agitation against a group and defamation of religion are detrimental to defending Western values, as well as hindering open discussion about criminal acts and human rights violations. 

It is rhetorically clever of The Finns Party Youth to appeal to Western values and human rights. However, anyone who holds that it is necessary to engage in agitation against a group or sect, as it is characterized in the penal code, to defend the aforementioned rights and values, needs to explain what his or her conception of Western values is like in the first place. At the very least, those values should include the principle of esteeming persons as individuals, based on their particular merits and deeds, and not as parts of their native cultural or ethnic groups.

Nothing prevents one from talking about tensions between Islamic and Western cultures or the threat of fundamentalist terrorism without expressing the critique in agitative terms. Reacting against an ominous phenomenon is not, and should not be, the same thing as reacting against an ethnic or religious group collectively associated with that phenomenon.

The media, politicians, and ordinary people always have a chance to defend Western values and oppose the threat of violent fanaticism without collectively judging groups as wholes. When masses of allies can be found behind the fences we construct for ourselves, why should we be blind to them? The yearly Arbaeen Procession of London Muslims in December 2015 abandoned its normal non-political nature and turned into a protest against ISIS and terrorism practiced in the name of Islam.  Occasions like this get limited media coverage, maybe because they do not fit into a simple narrative about the relationship between Europe and Islam. Anyone who is concerned about human rights violations, terrorism, or societal problems, can rest assured that the majority of European Muslims share the same concerns. 

Promoting our vital values through cooperation instead of confrontation should be a value in itself.  At least if one is genuinely in it for those values, and not merely categorically against certain groups of people in the name of homogeneous culture. 

Wednesday 13 July 2016

The best thing about geocaching

Last August, I was amazingly spontaneous for once. I suddenly started geocaching.



You know – as it says on the website, it’s the world’s largest treasure hunt. There are boxes and containers all around us, big, small, and tiny, in urban and rural areas, stealthy buggers just waiting for a newbie player to download a free app showing locations and descriptions of caches and to go find these little treasures. It is a hobby that first saw the light of day around the turn of the millennium, with the advent of the new advanced GPS technology. Some pioneers of the technology wanted to test GPS accuracy by hiding containers in the woods and seeing if others would be able to find them based on their coordinates. That turned out to be more fun than could ever be expected. Now, as we all have a GPS device in our pocket, millions of people are into geocaching.

I had known about the concept, but I had never given it more thought. Last summer, however, I was under more workload than usual, and I had a craving for something new and exciting to refresh my head in the evenings. Then I happened to land on the geocaching website and signed up to see if there are caches in the area, only to find out that the nearest one was... 150 meters from my front door, by the side of a little footpath I knew so well?

That’s when it hit me: the exhilarating feeling that the world around me was suddenly full of little secrets. Little hidden treasures that you did not see until you went looking for them.

I’m certainly not writing from the expert position of a hardcore hobbyist. My current cache count is 74, which is not much compared to the thousands or tens of thousands that geocaching veterans have. Still, in those few months when I have had time for it, geocaching has given me loads of fun and enjoyment, and I have become familiar with the good, the better, and the best things about it. Speaking about those…

For one thing, I went geocaching for exercise. Jogging and cycling are good for health, but so hard to keep doing regularly without extra motivation. Geocaching provided that motivation. Suddenly I was spending my evenings on long cycling trips or discovering recreation grounds that I never had known to exist. That was great.

Even better was the way geocaching makes your surroundings come to life in a novel way. I was jogging up remote hills, going down forest footpaths, inspecting walls, park benches, statues, and streetlights, reaching into innocent-looking bushy pine trees to make them give away their secrets. Uninteresting places that used to serve only as life’s wallpaper started to become my places. They now had stories and memories attached to them – my story of finding their secret, and the story of the kind soul who placed and maintained the cache for the enjoyment of others. It was like the world started to be populated with these little rabbit holes that most people knew nothing about. There is some unashamedly childish joy in it.

However, it took me some time to start appreciating the thing I now consider the best thing about geocaching. The best thing is that this activity is possible for me in the first place.

After having started in the USA, geocaching has gone worldwide. The global map of geocaches shows quite clearly, however, which parts of the world are geocaching-friendly. Europe is pretty much covered in caches, as are North America and Australia (well, the parts of the latter two that are not covered in ice and sand respectively), Japan, and New Zealand. Elsewhere caches are much more sporadic.

No wonder, of course. It makes sense that a purely recreational activity like geocaching is strongly correlated with general standards of living. It is something you do just for fun, and that requires that your days have hours that are not needed for more vital things. Being able to do things for fun is a luxury in itself.

But there is a deeper point. Geocaching requires that you can trust your environment – or maybe more to the point, that your environment trusts you. In very many parts of the world that just is not true. I’ll explain what I mean.

Geocaches need to be well hidden (and kept secret!) for two reasons: to provide a challenge to the seeker, and to avoid being vandalized. That is why they are either in relatively remote locations or extremely well hidden in busier locations. In either case, looking for a geocache unavoidably involves some snooping-around type of behavior that could look suspicious in mistrustful eyes. Sometimes, when looking for a remote forest cache, the thought has crossed my mind that someone could imagine me going to a drug stash – or even more unfortunately, someone could have unknowingly placed a cache near a real drug stash. It is only because those possibilities were improbable enough that I felt comfortable hunting for the caches. Before I explicitly thought about it, I had never really appreciated the fact that my environment poses no significant dangers of that type.

The same goes for urban caches. Sometimes I found myself searching for a cache in an empty parking lot or by the side of a vacant building. I was very aware that if an onlooker, guard, or even a policeman should come and demand to know what I’m doing, I would owe them an explanation. But for a long time, I just took for granted the obvious fact that, luckily, I am of the right color and right appearance that I could always reasonably count on the other to trust my explanation – and that I am in a country where people generally ask before shooting. It could so easily be otherwise.

Right now Americans are enthusiastically embracing another game that sends people out to explore: Pokémon GO. Much like geocaching, it makes players go into the wide world searching for an element of magic and mystery added to the everyday world – although in this case in the form of virtual creatures rather than physical things. The sudden explosion of success enjoyed by Pokémon GO has immediately made evident some unwanted consequences this type of game may have. There was an incident of robbers using the game to lure victims into their trap. And there is this story of a black American man starting the game in high spirits, then quitting with the sad realization that playing could very realistically get him killed. It is something that an unfortunate geocacher could realize as well. In many places, wandering around a random location seemingly searching for something can be more than just potentially goofy. If your appearance is wrong, it can be lethally dangerous.

Geocachers sometimes run into bad experiences, but those rarely seem to be more dangerous than angry landowners claiming (rightly or otherwise) that a cache has been placed on their private property. (Geocaching is governed by a strict ethical code.) Still, when thinking about going to an urban cache, I tend to consider quite carefully if the cache is placed so that someone could misunderstand my intentions. Even if the answer is no, another thought nowadays sometimes crosses my mind: If I was a black man, could I do this?

Moreover, it is very easy to forget that it is a blessing to live in a society where an activity like geocaching is allowed to exist in the first place. After all, it is a kind of playful secret society. The players have confidential information about hidden objects that contain notes; the logbooks of geocaches generally contain only dates and names of their finders, but in principle, they could be used to exchange any kind of messages. In a more authoritarian society there would surely be a need to keep a much more serious aura of secrecy around the geocaching hobby, just because of the endless suspicions it might raise, no matter how innocent the motivations of the players. After a totalitarian revolution, geocaching would be among the first things to be banned.

There you have it: my opinion on the best thing about this splendid hobby. Geocaching is an expression of freedom. Being able to do it safely is an indication that you are allowed to make the world your playground. The world around you exists for you and other fellow citizens, not the other way around. You are allowed to go out there and spontaneously do things – to go out and play – protected by the prima facie assumption that you are not doing anything bad.

I’m glad I started geocaching because I came to appreciate my privileges in a new way. The kind of basic trust the game requires is not a part of the permanent structure of the world, something that could be taken for granted. It is something that orderly societies have achieved through many struggles and something that can very easily be lost. And that basic trust is something that some people around me may not be enjoying, even though their lack is invisible to me.

I have never appreciated that basic trust more than nowadays.

(Credits for Pokémon GO-related posts in G+ to Janos Honkonen and Kaj Sotala.)

[EDIT 18.7.2016: Some Russian authorities have realized that Pokémon GO is a threat to society.]

Tuesday 5 July 2016

What are you bad at?

I have never had to recruit anyone or interview a candidate for a position, and I wonder what it is like. I assume that a recruiter always wants to find out the things the candidate is capable of doing. It would seem natural to do this by asking: What are you good at?

I think I would take a different approach. I would ask: What are you bad at?



It takes some guts to stick your neck out and declare that you are good at something. Take languages. I, for one, would be reluctant to declare that I am good at any language, my native tongue Finnish included. Outside of any particular context, one compares one’s native language competence to the masters of that language. When I think of someone who is good at Finnish, I think of Eino Leino. I am not like that, so am I good at Finnish? Or am I good at English, when I do not have nearly native-like fluency in it, like some people I know? On the other hand, if I had to list languages I am bad at, the result would basically be the list of language skills in my CV, minus Finnish, and possibly English. It would not occur to me to say that I’m bad at Japanese (because I do not know any Japanese), but, I tell you, I’m really bad at Swedish and a bunch of other languages. An interviewer would get more out of me by asking what I am bad at. Moreover, if I were a recruiter, I think I would see more favorably a person who comes up with loads of things she is bad at, compared to one who only can list her strengths.

The reason is a platitude: Becoming good at anything goes through a necessary period of being bad. More specifically, it takes a period of being abysmally bad to even become “just bad” in anything. A person who is bad at many things is just a person who does many things – probably a person who has a passion for doing more things than the hours of a day allow. Saying of oneself that one is bad at X tells that the person implicitly counts X as belonging to her skill set (for me, like Swedish and unlike Japanese), and, moreover, understands X well enough to be able to say that she is not good at it yet. What a sad life it would be if we were forced to always only cultivate our strongest skills, never having time to become bad at anything!

Learning a new thing involves more than being awful at it. It also involves the gradually dawning, embarrassing, gut-wrenching understanding of how awful one actually is. Understanding the nuances of a skill develops faster than the skill itself. It is no wonder that something like the Dunning-Kruger effect exists: the unskilled systematically overestimate their competence, because they have not (yet) reached an understanding of what competence demands.

This way lies a general problem of motivation in learning. In your quest of reaching the blissful gardens of competence, what keeps you wading through the seemingly endless wastelands of ineptitude, where your fate is to first become awful and then increasingly aware of your awfulness?

Here is one answer. Very often, what you count as awful turns out to be, objectively speaking, incredibly useful. It is time to go back to the example of languages because nowhere is this truer than in the case of languages.

For a long time, languages were taught in schools in terms of grammatical rules and strict translation assignments. The message was: This is what you have to do to speak and write right. It seems that many people claim to “not know” a language they spent years learning at school, just because they cannot produce it perfectly. How could it be otherwise, if perfection is the only point of comparison one ever gets? But generally, the world outside is not interested in whether you go by the rules. It is interested in whether it can communicate with you.

What does it take to be able to communicate in a language? Or rather, let’s be ambitious. What does it take to be able to communicate in a language perfectly? The answer seems to be: A thousand words and a bit of grammar.

The thousand most commonly used words of a language get the job done. A thousand words are not much. Sure, they cannot be learned in a week, but once they have been learned, they are a powerhouse. Even the hundred most common words of a language have an enormous scope. According to polyglot Janne Saarikivi, the hundred most common words comprise 25 percent of spoken language. And with a thousand words – well, it is not possible to translate all that one wishes, but there are enough resources in the thousand words to devise alternative ways of saying anything one may wish to say. If you do not believe, check out the principle in action: xkcd cartoonist Randall Munroe’s book Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words. Spacecraft launch escape system? “Thing to help people to escape really fast if there’s a problem and everything is on fire so they decide not to go to space”. Exactly. I wish we could force politicians and academicians to stick to the thousand most common words for a week.

Man, I feel motivated to learn more Swedish. I’m already bad at it.

Tuesday 28 June 2016

Iceland, you make us look even worse

I have to admit: It gave me some serious goosebumps. Iceland just beat England 2-1 in the Euro 2016 playoff. The effect on this side of the screen was a mixture of admiration for the Icelanders and a sense of sympathy for the English. It must sting to first have your Brexit-pumped masculine national pride rise through the roof, and then get your ass kicked by Iceland in a game you invented. I assume that now they know approximately how this guy felt.



There was another aspect in the experience of watching that ass-kicking spectacle, though. That aspect was due to a very specific fact: I am a Finnish guy who likes international football.

To make a long story short, Finland has never qualified for a major international tournament. And it is fair to say that there have been, well, numerous efforts. The sport is not without traditions in Finland. The 1912 Olympics tournament saw the Finnish team, back then officially appearing under the flag of Russia, finishing fourth. That still stands as the country’s best international achievement. Let’s face it – if your main bragging rights is a fourth place from a tournament that has long since lost any real significance, dates back to a time when you were technically not a country, and to an era when about five countries in the world knew the concept of sports, things could be better. But as a Finnish football fan, you quickly learn to take what you can get.

Football in Finland in later days has had its peaks, however. We have had Jari Litmanen achieving greatness in Ajax in the 90s. We have had Sami Hyypiä captaining Liverpool FC. A couple of decades ago, there was even something you could call a “golden generation”. There were a bunch of high-class European top professionals. But even they never qualified for any international tournaments. They were good, though – occasionally they had to score an own goal by their own goalkeeper’s arse in the second minute of added time to escape such an anomaly. That’s how good they were.

In later years, it has been a bit worse. Nowadays that arse-goal counts as “the good old times”.

But here’s the thing: It was all supposed to change for the Euro 2016. Now 24 teams would qualify. That would give at least a sporting chance to weaklings like Finland. And to top it all, for once we had luck in the draw – or so we thought. Finland was drawn into a group with Northern Ireland, Romania, and Hungary, which was unanimously, and excitedly, assessed as relatively easy. Much like going up Mont Blanc in a wheelchair is relatively easy if you first tried the Himalayas.

The result? A point from Romania, a point from Northern Ireland, matches that absolutely nobody wants to remember, a sacked coach, and a comforting feeling that at least some things in the chaotic world are still permanent. Meanwhile, Iceland swept the floor with the Netherlands and qualified.

That’s why Iceland’s heroics in the Euro 2016 come with an extra twist. It is like the final and ultimate insult added to the gaping, incurable injury that is known as supporting the Finnish national football team. I mean, earlier we at least had a handful of excuses. You know, the usual – the long winter, lack of resources, poor facilities, small talent pool. You cannot expect a small nation trapped in the Nordic conditions to really compete in the world’s biggest sport, not even momentarily, you said (and tried very hard to ignore that Sweden exists). And then you watch Iceland beat England and march into the quarterfinals.

Yes, Iceland, the nation about the size of the city of Tampere, physically existing as an ash-farting little island in the middle of the north Atlantic. It is not quite the center of the footballing world – or the center of anything else. Hell, if a country’s history involves a major emigration event from there to Greenland, it is not exactly Rome. But man, those Icelanders are a tough tribe. It is safe to say that after England was decimated by a country that literally has to send in every fourth of its professional footballers to even field a team, the Finns are finally out of excuses.

That is when a Finnish football fan finds a way to combine crazy creativity with self-pity. The idea is this: Could we just fold the national football team? Decide that we do not want to do this anymore? Is that a thing you can do? Has anyone tried?

I mean, the voice of reason has to step in at some point. We could just count our losses and admit that we never quite got the hang of this football thing. We could keep amateur football, but leave the international play to others, and use our limited resources for something that has even a minuscule chance of success and does not produce national traumas on a yearly basis, right?

The more you think about it, the better the idea gets. We could make pacts with football academies and national football associations abroad. In the rare cases when a kid with football talent grows up in Finland, we could dispatch them to a partner country, to learn the language and integrate there, so that they could quickly acquire new citizenship. We could still enjoy seeing Finns in international games, only in other countries' squads. It is sure that many more of the kids would reach that level after not having to spend their youth in the footballing equivalent of Mordor. If we negotiate the agreements right, we could reap great rewards. I mean, Norway has not been that strong in international competition lately, right? Let’s strike a deal with them: You get all our football talents, and you send us some of your cross-country skiers (preferably some of the less asthmatic variety). We would even gladly take just that one guy who is the fifth-fastest sprint skier in the world, but never sees international competition because a single country is only allowed to send four athletes. Everyone would be happy!

But then again, maybe it is not good to mess with the basic building blocks of national identity. A Finn feels at home in a cozy mixture of humility, self-belittling, and general pessimism. We like to be regularly reminded that life is ultimately a hopeless march toward new disappointments. After we somehow got disturbingly good in hockey, sports do not serve that purpose quite like they used to. At least we can trust the good old football squad to always carry that flag. Who am I kidding? In the next campaign we will be cheering for them again, knowing that even if they do not qualify, they will always continue to provide unforgettable experiences for new generations. There will come a year when they’ll wait until the third minute of added time before the inevitable arse-goal.

But lastly, and finally seriously: Iceland, you are awesome. I hope to visit someday.

Birth of a blog

I think I need a blog of some sort.

And behold, I think I just created one. That happened quickly.

It’s not because of a burning ambition to get read. The main reason for creating this is simple: It seems that occasionally I write texts that have no other natural home than an outlet of this sort, and maybe it is worthwhile to save at least some of them from being buried and forgotten. They are texts that do not go directly to academic writing (which is something I do) but are lengthy and/or otherwise unsuitable to be social media posts (which is not something I do much anyway). That last remark actually is one more reason for creating a blog. I am not active on social media, and I am also in general terrible at keeping in contact with people. A blog at least provides a way for anyone who is interested to ascertain that I continue to exist. 

About the blog’s name: Although I’ll be writing here in English, the name is in Finnish, mostly because it seems that every single meaningful combination of English words already serves as the name for someone’s blog. It translates to ”Lucien’s Library”. It alludes to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, where Lucien’s Library was a place containing all the books that were never written, but merely dreamed of by their potential authors. That’s where all my books are.

Well, except for my PhD thesis, but I don’t think that qualifies as a real book. Anyway, it exists, dates back to last year, and is called ”The Problem of Other Minds: Themes from Wittgenstein”. Mentioning it merely serves to inform that I do academic philosophy, which may explain the direction of some future content here. Not all of it, however, and maybe not even the most.

I guess that when starting a blog, one also assumes self-inflicted pressure to write fairly regularly. So, it is probably wise to begin with something infantile enough to set the bar comfortably low. So here goes with the next post, not with much seriousness...