Pink Punk

While Rawls & Me has given my mother plenty of reason to worry about my alcohol consumption over the years, a fair bit of it has been props too, and being alone with the kids, so is this bottle of Serbian rosé. Seeing the label on the temporary selection shelf, it was such an irresistible throwback to the club scene of Belgrade two decades ago that I simply had to buy it.

Beyond vacuuming and throwing away things in preparation for the big move, today's great accomplishment has been taking both kids to Parkrun for the first time in a long while. Though it took some bribing in the form of Nutella waffles, both kids thanked me afterwards, and I was reminded once again how much resistance there can be to doing the things that are ultimately good for us. Without going all-out theological with Bjørn Eidsvåg's Floden, the last few weeks of procrastination have been a hard lesson, and as such, it was a relief to finally start making progress on my co-authored article about the transition to higher education.

Otherwise, my plans of going to the library with the kids fell through when I realized that today is the National Day of Sweden and that the country has been taken over by syttende-mai-wannabes. Do not get me wrong, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with being proud of Sweden, especially considering all the great things this country represents, something that becomes even clearer with a bit of distance when living abroad. Still, it felt almost like a dream when someone wrote that she “wanted her kids to be world citizens”, as if I had almost given up on the possibility that there could be other people out there still aspiring to something larger.

Bastión de la Luna

Apparently, 18 months have passed since I last mentioned the Moon here on Rawls & Me so, with this busy week of teaching and travelling finally over, I felt like it deserved a post. Even if the Moon may hold the key to some of the sustainability challenges that we face, and I still have a lot of pent-up frustration after yesterday’s conference, I desperately need to turn a page.

And, hailing from Salnés, about 60 kilometres south of Santiago de Compostela, this lovely Albariño was precisely what I needed to do that. As discussed at length in Scruton’s “I Drink Therefore I Am”, wine does something to your thinking, smoothing the edges, and making you see the basic existential truth, what the old confession calls “confitemur partem nos habere in aversione mundi a te”: that we all have our share in the world’s turning away from God.

The Atlantic Shift

Listening to Monocle24, “The Atlantic Shift”, as if I of all people would need that. From Halifax to Hamburg, I will cross its cold waters twice this spring. Before summer, I also hope to make it to St Petersburg, Warsaw and Tel Aviv. So, spinning globe alright.

Giving a lecture on conservatism the other day, I came to think about how treacherous yet indispensable self-irony is. While Kierkegaard makes the distinction between “irony” and “humour”, with only the latter allowing for the fullness of love and reconciliation, it still seems as if even the most nihilistic forms of irony would be better than the seriousness by which many conservative people view themselves.

Yesterday, Per Gudmundson suggested that “more responsible politicians” would have closed the door for refugees from Uzbekistan (and thereby preventing Rakhmat Akilov from carrying out his terror attack in Stockholm last year). No, "more responsible politicians” would have prevented Uzbekistan from sliding into authoritarianism in the first place. As I have said repeatedly, there is no going back to a world of closed doors. The 21st century should be a time when we domesticate the global, not a time of isolationism and unchecked fear of those who are ever so slightly different from ourselves. Never before in human history have we been more alike, maybe that is also part of the reason why we seem so obsessed with whatever differences that remain?

Subarctic

It is funny how we humans are when we sleep. How the doors between the past and the present are opened, how smiles can come back and hit you when your guard is lowered.

Waking up to a cloudy day in Korea, Eddie wanted to watch some Pippi Longstocking in bed while eating one of those organic fruit pouches from California that we promised ourselves to stop buying a million times.

I turn a page and try to make sense of what the post-Korea future will be like. Similary to when I moved to Örebro many years ago, it feels like an individual choice, something that opens up for its own aesthetic and transcendental paradoxes. Always at the limit. That is there it is all created and lived. My three years in Asia have made me deeply suspicious of ideas about primordial balances, extinguished desires or even harmony as understood from a Confucian point of view. Instead I seek existential friction, friable beauty and an absolute presence that demands the highest yet has love to heal the lowest. Much as I imagine God holding the world.

Treadmill

Growing up in small-town Kalmar on the east coast of Sweden, running meant following the shoreline and the seasons. These days, in twenty-million-strong Seoul, I run in an air-conditioned basement on a treadmill. If I raise my head, I can see a golden plaque commemorating the visit to Hankuk University of Foreign Studies by Barack Obama and, in the mirror, Korean students struggling to impose discipline on their bodies. You do not have to be Slavoj Žižek to sense that there is something fundamentally unnatural about this environment.

Call it a “temporary dive”, but today was worse than usual. I struggled to sustain my motivation, to make it last through those six kilometres and thirty minutes – my mind flickering like a television screen between channels, from morning windows high above Lower Manhattan to Türkenschanzpark in Vienna’s eighteenth district. Fifteen minutes in, it all turned black. Not miserable noir melancholy black, but simple emptiness – void.

Yet I am too much of a hobby psychologist not to be at least somewhat fascinated by my own emotions, by the fact that I do not normally feel like this. So I kept running. The meter reached six kilometres and I stepped down. The void had lifted, but it made me think again about social ontology – about how the world appears to other people, and to what extent it is only “broken” in an epistemological sense. Perhaps I should go to church tomorrow, if only to renew my faith in one possible set of answers.

The Monocle Cafe

Monday morning in Tokyo and time to work away a few hours in the comfort of the newly opened Monocle Cafe in Yūrakuchō. Bright Scandinavian wood, master brewed coffee and in the background the Monocle radio station broadcasting from London, everything fine-tuned in a manner that definitely would make Tyler proud.

Late last night at the Conrad Tokyo, Anna and I were talking about reason and rationality. To me, these have never been entirely positive words. Like Stephen Toulmin, I believe that they always need to be balanced with humour, irony and emotional spontaneity. In Cosmopolis, Toulmin made his famous argument that even the Enlightenment itself, often characterized as “the age of reason”, should better be understood in relative rather than absolute terms, that it was about using reason to challenge the privileges of tradition and authority but also about recognizing effective limits to that very rationality (just think of the ending that Voltaire gave to Candide!). The same should be true for any future society, that we should seek a future more open to critical thinking and reflexivity while accepting that things will always be idiosyncratic and full of ambiguities. With those words, I return to my work.

Strandkorb

It could have been Heiligendamm right after the sandglass of summer has turned cold. One of those imaginary extended moments which has both time and presence. When everything is at once simple and concrete, the coldness of the air, the grey skies across the Baltic and the self-enclosed bubble that does not gravitate in any one direction. Thinking about it now, concentration can easily slip, it can be rainy morning drives through Baltimore or Arabian deserts at night, but in this fictional moment there is just the right amount of extension in space and time.

I guess we all feel uneasy about ourselves sometimes. We wonder what others think, if we are too extrovert or introvert, if what we say is really funny or if we should better be quiet. How do we know? We are after all in a “non-neutral evaluative setting”, we ask other people to take on the task of fundamental ontological mediation, and as much as eternity can be in their eyes, they are not God and should never be asked to pretend being either.

But in silence we have a window towards the transcendental, a glimpse inside ourselves, and a space that we need to fill with presence. It takes courage to do that, to not escape.

Yet, night will fall also over Germany and aesthetics can at best soothe but not heal. We are an irreversible product of what has been; the reality of our actions as much as we want to be judged by our intentions and ambitions (at least while we are young but hopefully until the very end). God alone can redeem.

The Audacity of Hope

In February this year, I was sitting in the basement of a Benedictine monastery out on the plains of Missouri. Next to me I had my friend, father Daniel, whom I had to come to know while studying German together in Vienna back in 2004.

We were having a long and winding theological conversation. About the trust God has shown to the world by not being manifest in it, by not letting his Son come here armed to the teeth but rather as a lamb to be slaughtered.

Living and teaching at a seminary college, Daniel’s experience of being a Christian was inevitably different from my own. In the secular university world, faith does not come as a natural discussion point. I know that most of my friends are either agnostic or atheistic and then it appears as if the only way to preach the Gospel is by actually living it.

Which I, of course, fail miserably in doing. In my heart I know that revelation is not to be brought about through philosophical thought experiments but through love. At the same time, I have not become a Christian because I am so good but instead because I want to confront the darkness within me and seek forgiveness for what is broken.

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One day I would like to go into theology and do work on the demarcation between politics and faith. It is not surprising - given the revolutionary scope of the Sermon of the Mount and other core elements - that real-world Christianity has had substantial difficulties in addressing political issues. It may be first now, in its 21st century, that Christianity is ready to embrace its true potential, as in radical pacifism, environmentalism and real solidarity with the world’s poor. At the same time, there is an imminent danger in turning faith into institutional crafting; it is the Grand Inquisitor and not Christ who tries to build paradise on Earth.

Yet, to refrain from acting is not an option. The question however is if we will be able to do it without falling victim to utilitarian calculations as we start thinking that the end justifies the means. By now we should know that it never does.