i met with an interesting #swedish man for the second time in as many weeks yesterday lunchtime. he told me an interesting story about the #vikings.
he said they’d started out as farmers. aware of the turn of the seasons and good husbandry of the land (if husbandry is a thing we still say these days).
and then there comes a time in the life of every grouping to decide whether to expand or contract. rarely, it seems, does the option exist historically for a sustainable #circulareconomy-style of maintaining oneself in simply a “steady as she goes” way: neither excessive growth nor dispiriting decline.
the #vikings went both #west and #east. i think this is what my #swedish friend indicated. for sure what he said was that the ones who went left, kinda, went across the sea. they became just about rightly known for the violent behaviours, their rape and pillage, and just about anything that an unbound soldiering will commit.
the ones who went kinda right, meanwhile, ended up quite differently. no seas for them; rivers instead. and instead of soldiers of destruction and fear, they became traders of exchange and cooperation.
the difference? why, i mean? my #swedish friend explained as follows: when you travel upstream or downstream on something like a river, eventually, some day, you have to return exactly the way you came. and this means your reputation matters: what you did to people — or, at least, what they perceived you did — will define the nature of the welcome you may get as you return downstream or up.
this environmental reality — not in the sense of ecology and sustainability (though, then again, maybe yes!) but instead in the sense of HABITAT — inevitably served to condition the #vikings who travelled via rivers compared to those who had chosen to ride the waves.
when you know you need to meet again, quite often you will keep something of your capacity to hate — or alternatively, equally, your capacity for the deepest love — quite to yourself.
it reminds me of something the british prime minister gordon brown once observed, i think in a book he wrote and i bought, on matters of independence. being a scot himself, he knew more than most in my homeland of such questions. and more than most, even today. (tbh, i wish i had met mr brown and then had occasions, from that point on, to exchange views from time to time: for me, he should’ve been the most erudite philosopher of the best philosophy school the uk might have cared to produce, if the study of philosophy hadn’t been summarily marshalled out of the british education system, precisely by people who knew its value and dangers … not by those who were unaware.) (i hope, as i say this, not mr brown, himself!)
so. anyways. to the topic of today’s post.
being what mr brown once made absolutely clear: the world, the world that rightfully we want to forge and rebuild, should never contemplate dependence as a sociopolitical advantage or path; should rarely support independence and know quite clearly why before proceeding; and should almost always promote and deliver only INTERdependence.
being, that is, what came out of the travels of the #vikings who kinda went right, NOT left, in my #swedish friend’s fabulously engaging narrative on the powers of space and the geographies of where we may exist.
interdependence: yes. this is a lovely word. and mr brown was right. and the #vikings who kinda went right, too.
much more what humans are: much more what we both want and NEED to want to be.
and so this for me defines the whole idiocy of #brexit: for in this narrative, the #europeanunion all this time, to more or less effective degree, but resiliently in the end, and robustly to this day, has stood for interdependence. that is, the #vikings of trade not pillage. whilst the #uk chose to use as a facile excuse its condition of island race to justify its isolationist instincts: that is, the #vikings of pillage, not trade.
in democracy, #gooddemocracy, everything needs tweaking all the time. if we don’t, it’s not purposeful: it’s no longer in possession of its true purpose. barter, exchange, dialogue, listening, responding, rethinking, understanding, and apologising … these are all qualities and virtues a #gooddemocracy exhibits. and where, as in the #uk for many years now, we see little of these … well, the word “good” obviously no longer applies.
and perhaps today, especially these days, we find that the term #democracy in the otherwise beautiful #unitedkingdom is firmly visible through its profound and wicked absence.
so.
then.
admire what it is to be a #viking, always? maybe so, yes. maybe after all.
one caveat, mind, before i finish.
as i don’t know the source of this story — i mean the book the #swedish man referred me to on his explaining the anecdote under discussion — i don’t know if the authority in question tells a historical truth or not. and even if it does, to what ideological end: you never know, do you?
but choose the path of trader … no? surely this can’t be bad in itself.
from ww2 to the eec to the eu of now is quite a journey.
soldier … trader … human be …?
yes.
whomsoever the authority, this works for me.
thank you mr brown.
and thank you, jaan.
mil's page 