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For heavy duties

narcissism has wide. But should life thus be just a duty?




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

There is no new social and cultural criticism the former MLA Göran Rosenberg has presented to us through the release of The duty, the profit and the art of being human.

It also contains no speculative angles or enough private scandals to explain that the book has kept on the bestseller lists for professional literature in the months following Bonnier's publishing release last November.

The success is probably due to the minor and finely tuned tone Rosenberg strikes when he addresses the most basic questions of our existence and coexistence. Maybe explain the also that the Norwegian book industry's most important self-celebration, the literature festival at Lillehammer, invited the journalist, author and documentary filmmaker Rosenberg to attend a number of events during the week that went on.

The book's obvious appeal can be a symptom of a significant cultural change trend that is related to an increasingly inflamed security policy situation on a global scale – we search against traditions, talk about roots and morals with a completely different seriousness when lives are threatened by violence, hunger and terror. It becomes important to relate to something that is more overarching and larger than the individual human life.

It may also be a symptom that a cultural lowering of norms and obligations, moral boundaries, and a sense of belonging has caused the reading classes to react to hedonistic and narcissistic culture.

Maybe it's because of both. But to explain Göran Rosenberg's recent success in such ways is to downplay the very basic insights of the five essays in The duty, the profit and the art of being human undeniably it gives responsive reader.

“The individual does not choose to become a social being. She must be a social being before she can become an individual, ”Rosenberg points out. It is a basic sociological insight. But Rosenberg goes further and places the emphasis on "society" and "security" when he later writes: "An inner conflict is the lot of man. To be constantly torn between what she wants for herself and what she has to sacrifice for others… The great ideologies of the West have all been stories of the final union of the individual and society, freedom and security. ”

Rosenberg's argument is that the emphasis in our time is too much on the side of freedom and the individual to belittle a certainty and understanding of the conditions we are born into and which shape our personalities. The personal sacrifice and submission to duties is crucial for creating meaning in our lives – to become full and also free people, he believes.

In our culture, the emphasis is on individual rights, rather than the associated duties, explains Rosenberg. On universal reason-based norms rather than an emotionally determined morality. On selfishness rather than sacrifice. On the individual rather than the traditionally bound community we are born into and are part of.

The rhetorical question forces itself on: Have we forgotten "the art of being human?"

We have shown it, the author replies. And instead, we have placed the profit where the duty previously reigned. He is nevertheless quick to point out: I do not put anything negative in the word profit and see nothing out of date in the word duty. To me, the two words represent only two different driving forces in human existence, both necessary and inevitable, both incompatible with each other. " I repeat: "Incompatible with each other." Are they always?

In any case, Rosenberg links the tendency to overestimate freedom and underestimate the security of everything from contract theories in political philosophy, through ideologies such as neoliberalism and even sociobiologism, to the transition from a family-based care production to a welfare state professional care in nursing homes and hospitals. It is an overall and almost all-encompassing perspective. Sometimes it is also apt. It then becomes clear why one is related to the other and the effect of one on the other is probable. But just as it is, one is struck by how global the cultural catastrophe description should be on about 250 pages (not including the note-taking system).

When you have also heard the cultural criticism before, it is only tone of voice and the mild worry that we will forget to look at each other that remains. It is not small, perhaps, but it is surprising as Rosenberg writes essayistically – he fails to cultivate the double vision and meta-reflection as the genre opens up. The result quickly turns black and white, and Rosenberg is in danger of crossing the line between an apt cultural critique and an embrace of the right-wing conservative views – which is surprising from an old ml.

Rosenbergs has an awareness of this himself. In the essay "Duty" he discusses two views on the origin of morality – that of Hume and that of Kant. The former links morality to human emotions. The latter to reason. Both can be abused, Rosenberg writes: “One was radicalized in a revolutionary movement, communism, which predicted the liberation of reason from feeling. The other in a reactionary movement, fascism, which predicted the liberation of emotion from reason. " Of these, Rosenberg is almost fascism: “Duty is not freedom, in which Kant was right, but without feeling no morality, and without morality no duty, and without duty no freedom. Hume was right about that. "

This celebration of community and duty – it does not have to be so dangerous – and Rosenberg largely avoids this trap. The problem is that he does not make it clear which community one should join – is it indifferent? And what duties should one follow – is it also indifferent? How about elevating the nation or ethnic group to the most important community and cultivating the duty to the fatherland? Is it as desirable as the obligations and communities Rosenberg apparently has in mind: If someone is to have the right to care, someone must have a duty to give it, etc.

The class struggle's editor Bjørgulv Brannen has stated in an interview with Rosenberg, which Braanen himself has written, that the book can either be read as "a middle-aged man's value-conservative concern or as a struggle against the expansion of neoliberalism in Swedish society."

The truth, however, is that the book is at one and the same time both value conservative and critical of neoliberalism. There has never been any contradiction, and unfortunately it is becoming less and less.

Å optional reading Rosenberg as an attack on neoliberalism would also be reductionist. Neoliberalism is only one, albeit important, symptom for Rosenberg. His concern is rather than an attack on a particular political ideology alone, an attack on a human view – the Swedish, but also the "western" culture's human view.

“A narrative about man and the world, whether we call it religion or ideology or common sense, works only as long as man does not perceive it as a story but as the world as it is. When we become aware that we live in a story, in a world constructed by ourselves, we begin to question both the story and the world it constructs for us, ”Rosenberg writes et sted. Seeing oneself from the outside in this way destroys the illusion that ensures meaning and coherence, Rosenberg seems to think. But rather, it is precisely this ability that enables us to take up our positions, connections and obligations in such a way that both reason and emotions are involved in the turns. It is by constantly challenging one's own value-based and political basis that this can be refined and strengthened.

The story Rosenberg himself presents in The duty, the profit and the art of being human – with some clear heroes, and some clear sinners (most of the latter) – is thus no exception. The book could with advantage have been sea "Aware that it is a story."

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