COMMENTARY: Born out of angst – culture policy of The (True) Finns party
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By Samuli Tiikkaja
Timo Soini, the chairman and presidential candidate of The Finns (also known as the True Finns) party, dropped a new bomb on Monday. He said that the denunciation of postmodern art in the party’s parliamentary election manifesto was an election trick aimed at annoying people who take things too seriously.
This means that according to Soini the sentence in the election programme, according to which The Finns feel that “maintaining the Finnish cultural heritage takes precedence over support for postmodern modern art” did not mean that art should be restricted in some way.
“It was a deliberate provocation. We knew that there would be an outcry”, Soini says now.
Why was this a new bombshell? It is because the party’s chairman is admitting that the party wrote things in its election programme that it did not mean.
Soini has worked very hard to get the True Finns to be taken seriously. But now Soini claims that the election programme of the party was actually meant to be a humourous publication.
Are the voters of the True Finns laughing now that it came out that this was a provocation and that it was not a real election programme? Or do they perhaps feel that they have been hoodwinked?
Another populist movement comes to mind – the one, whose members sang about struggle and revolution 40 years ago.
Later these members of the hard-line faction of the Finnish Communist Party, who admired violent class struggle in their songs, calmed down somewhat: “I don’t suppose we were really serious”.
“Some like it and some don’t”, Soini said about “post-modern fake art”. Although Soini is making excuses for his party’s cultural policy ideas, it is clear that the “deliberate provocation” came from genuine disgust toward modern art, regardless of the genre involved.
There is nothing new here. New art has always provoked negative reactions.
For instance, last week the Lahti Symphony Orchestra had a concert which featured the music of the Finnish modernist Ernest Pingoud from the 1920s. This composer who fled the Russian Revolution to Finland was denounced in the press in his time as a “musical Bolshevik”.
A milder version of the derisory expression was “musical leftism”, which referred to modernism and atonal features, as the opposite of “ordinary music”, as critic Toivo Haapanen wrote in the Valvoja-Aika magazine.
The Finns party’s concept of art links up amazingly well with this conflict: The Finns party is in favour of “ordinary music”. That is why it is possible to launch the term “musical True Finn”, or more broadly a “cultural True Finn”.
Lurking in the background of a concept of culture opposed to things that are new is something that is very familiar to the Finnish people: anxiety.
Angst is one of the basic concepts of existentialist philosophy. According to existentialism people are free to choose the manner and nature of their existence. This freedom to choose is nevertheless also an obligation. The obligation to make choices causes anguish in people.
When confronting new music, for instance, a person must take a stand on it in some way. Anticipation of the confrontation already carries much meaning. Should I try to understand the music by finding out how it works, or will I submit to the idea that I cannot like it under any circumstances?
Some reaction or other is necessary, and this causes anguish. If, after the confrontation, it feels that there is no understanding, the anguish is greater still.
After that one easily voices a condemnation that is as adamant as the disparaging remarks that athlete Seppo Räty famously said about opera as an art form.
Or, if elections happen to be coming up, an election platform might be drawn up, praising the works of the golden age of the national romantic period of Finnish art, and denouncing “postmodernism”.
Naturally, cultural attitudes are not the same as political views and tradition.
For instance, the most conspicuous politician of the Left Alliance at the moment, Minister of Culture, and presidential candidate Paavo Arhinmäki, is not defending elite culture in the manner that Claes Andersson, one of the party’s former leaders, once did. Instead, he feels an affinity toward American street culture.
In each case it can clearly be seen that this is a question of a meeting of the new (the “post-modernism” of The Finns party) and the difficult (Arhinmäki’s first ever visit to the opera last summer) and the anguish that arises from it.
Usually “new” and “difficult” can be seen as synonyms, as everything that is new is difficult for everyone, but when that which is new becomes familiar, it ultimately takes away the difficulty as well.
It is easiest of all to listen to the same music that one has always listened to. The musical taste of many people is often set in their tender teens, and people listen to the hits of their youth for the rest of their lives, overwhelmed by nostalgic rapture.
And when something completely new comes along, the result is anguish – angst.
Each person can imagine constructing his or her own persona out of small pieces in which various aspects of life are treated using different criteria. A person who is a True Finn by musical taste can vote Social Democrat, and can be in a bourgeoisie profession (I know at least one such person).
If a person were a robot, this kind of mixture of values would cause a programming conflict, but human psychology is complicated, and there is enough tolerance for mistakes that living with the error is possible. Anguish can certainly emerge, and it does.
For instance, the record company Love Records, the voice of the political song movement of decades past, was sold last year and put in the hands of multinational imperialists, and considerable amounts of capital appeared in the pockets of the former owners. At least one of the sellers, Peter von Bagh, appeared to be so stressed when Helsingin Sanomat asked him about it, that he completely forgot where the money had come from.
Perhaps Björn Wahlroos, a former outspoken opponent of capital, who is currently the chairman of the board of a multinational bank, also treated his existential angst by buying a luxury home in the Östermalm district of Stockholm. At the same time, the same bank is terminating employees.
The Finns party’ way of reacting to anguish seems to come in two phases – at first an affront, and then downplaying of that insult.
Things that are new and foreign to their realm of experience are confronted with a sharp-tongued hedgehog defence, which later has to be explained away as irony, sarcasm, or provocation.
This would suggest that people in the party would lack faith in the power of words, which are seen mainly as safety valves for when anguish boils over – or at least this is the explanation that is given in retrospect.
The relation between words and actions need to be examined in connection with all politicians. But in the presidential elections only one candidate so far has voluntarily submitted himself to the idea that the voters are compelled to think in connection with every statement if the candidate really means what he says or if it is just a provocation.
No wonder if the voter is also starting to feel anguish.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 17.12.2011
SAMULI TIIKKAJA / Helsingin Sanomat
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| 20.12.2011 - THIS WEEK |
 COMMENTARY: Born out of angst – culture policy of The (True) Finns party |
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