While organisations such as QAnon are doing a cracking job of seeding cultural dislocation, Sweden has hit upon a much more efficient way of disrupting social cohesion. It decided to decree a cultural canon – a top 50 of its national treasures – and invited citizens to nominate individuals, entities and achievements to be arbitrated by an august panel. Disaster: meet your optimal recipe.
First problem: Abba didn’t qualify. Just shy of half a century’s domination of every global cultural outlet from Broadway and Hollywood to karaoke and shower-singing, the pop supergroup missed out because it was deemed … too young.
The cultural-canon exercise was inaugurated by a previous government and mired in political squabbling from the get-go. It was further constrained by what was intended as tactful cut-off point of 50 years to avoid the risk of including anything that might date badly or fall into ignominy. Abba just missed the cut, whereas Ikea’s original head office qualified.
Also included were Pippi Longstocking, ball bearings, the Nobel Prize, paternity leave and freedom of the press.
Reindeer farming missed out. So did the world-storming Swedish inventions Candy Crush and Minecraft. Given the former’s incursion into other countries’ productivity levels and the latter’s rapacious monopolisation of children’s precious attention spans, conferring honours on them would have been geopolitically risky.
The idea was inspired by the Netherlands’ cultural canon, which has been incorporated into its schools’ curriculum.
The Dutch had a heavy weighting of historical events, figures and eras, minimising controversy. Few would dispute the contribution or influence of William of Orange, Vincent van Gogh, Hieronymus Bosch, Anne Frank or the Dutch traders and explorers of past centuries.
But lauding Pippi Longstocking alongside cinema giant Ingmar Bergman, the naturalist Carl Linnaeus with the Vasaloppet ski race, and trying to decide whether pickled fish or meatballs could fairly share a pedestal with writer August Strindberg was always going to inflame passions.
This isn’t the only self-image-challenging shock for Europe. Imagine Italy’s consternation at compelling new evidence that the towering winged lion landmark of Venice’s St Mark’s Square was … made in China.
Analysis of the composition of isotopes from the statue’s metal and comparisons with Chinese artisans’ stylings of lions circa 680-907 have convinced scientists at the University of Padua that Marco Polo or one of his entourage hauled Venice’s feline back from a trip east.
Worse, it’s unlikely big Leo was a gift. It’s now thought he was a Tang Dynasty tomb-guarding statue – not the sort of thing locals would have convivially pressed on a visiting European.
The terms upon which the lion was souvenired from that solemn duty will never be known, but it’s hard not to see it as having been a global rampager’s equivalent of trousering an ashtray from a pub.
Much mordant humour has ensued about getting a better deal from Temu next time and checking the icon for Huawei spying installations.
European countries have a long and not entirely proud history of appropriating each other’s stuff, most infamously the Elgin Marbles, which Greece would like the UK to return.
Abba having nicked the exclamation Mamma Mia!, arguably another cultural touchstone, from the Italians, perhaps its cultural downgrading is a wee karmic biff – not that it dents the royalties or the world’s affection.
And there’s the little matter of döstädning, Swedish death-cleaning, a tradition recently popularised globally. It’s the practice of tidying one’s affairs well before mortal decline so as not to burden those who live on after. Döstädning didn’t make the cultural canon, but the canon might itself be döstädning-ed in time.
Still, the non-Swedish world is likely divided about which is that country’s most regrettable export: impenetrable flat-pack assembly kits or the Dancing Queen earworm.
