Bøger om Nationalism

Bildung is moral and emotional maturity. Bildung is also to have the education and knowledge necessary to thrive in your society; bildung is to be deeply embedded in culture and community while having the autonomy to carve your own path in life. Bildung is always personal and unique. Bildung is a German word that has no word in English. Beginning in the 1770s, German philosophers explored bildung as a secular form of inner development and it became popular among the bourgeoisie. In Denmark, a pastor realized in the 1830s that the peasants needed bildung too, and he envisioned a new kind of school: the folk-high-school. In 1851, a Danish teacher, Christen Kold, figured out how to teach in such a way that young farmhands learned to think for themselves: he told them moving stories and let them ask questions. Once he had their attention, he could teach them new farming techniques, science, philosophy, history, religion, literature, art, economic theory, and political science. Norway, Sweden and Finland copied the folk-high-school concept in the 1860s and by 1900, a critical mass of youngsters in the Nordic countries had upgraded their skills and their thinking, and the Nordics had gone from being among the poorest countries in Europe to being among the richest. This development and the bildung that carried it also meant that the Nordics made the transition from agricultural feudal societies to modern, democratic, industrialized nation-states peacefully. As we are facing new challenges from digitization, globalization, a pandemic and environmental changes we need bildung for the 21st century and the book concludes by exploring what that might look like.

Technological development, climate change, and globalization are challenging the national institutions and modes of governance we created during the industrial era. Our old knowledge and general understanding of the world do not provide sufficient answers anymore. To maintain meaningful lives, social calm, and liberal democracy, we need to upgrade our meaning-making to match the complexity of the world we are creating.Polymodernity is an alternative to both modernity and postmodernism, a cultural code that presents itself as an opportunity if we work deliberately towards it. Polymodernity provides us with a framework for understanding ourselves and our societies in a much more complex way. It contains indigenous, premodern, modern, and postmodern cultural elements and thus provides social norms and a moral fabric for intimacy, spirituality, religion, science, and self-exploration, all at the same time. It is a way of strengthening local, national, continental, and global cultural heritage among all and thus has the potential to dismantle the fear of losing one’s culture as the economy as well as the internet and exponential technologies are disrupting our current modes of societal organization and governance. Polymodernity will thus allow us to be meaning-making at a deeper emotional level and a higher intellectual level compared to today; it will allow us a more complex understanding, which may match the complexity of the problems we need to solve. Appropriate meaning-making is the best prevention against the frustrations that generally lead to authoritarian ideologies and societal instability. Using polymodernity as the filter through which we see the world and as a template, we can create, among other things, new and appropriate education, politics, and institutions for our societies of the 21st century. A vision such as this may even give hope.