In Love with a Supernatural Being. Swedish Trials in the 17th Century

 

 

 

 

Long before “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” 17th-century Swedish courts investigated supernatural love.

In 1656, Karin Svensdotter stood trial in the southern Swedish village of Sävsjö on an unusual charge: fornication with supernatural beings. Specifically, the court was investigating the young housemaid’s claims that she had a relationship with the King of the Fairies.

Svensdotter testified that several years before, she had been approached by a handsome man dressed in gold who called himself the Älvakungen, meaning “Elf King.” (Elf can be used generically for all humanlike spirits of nature, similar to the term fairy). He led her into the forest, to a great hall hidden beneath a mountain, where they danced and reveled with other elves in fine clothes. After this, Svensdotter said, her otherworldly lover began to visit regularly. Their relationship resulted in seven children, but each time Svensdotter gave birth, the Elf King appeared and carried the baby off to his own realm, despite her protestations. Witnesses testified that they had seen Svensdotter experience exhausting physical fits, which she described as labor pains, and heard her wandering the forest at night in search of her stolen children. Despite this, there was no evidence that Svensdotter had ever been pregnant.“

Svensdotter’s story and the ensuing legal trial were not as unusual as we might think today. Though unique in some of its particulars, it fits into widespread concerns in Early Modern Europe over the dangerous and seductive powers of the spirits of nature, beings that our modern terminology would broadly refer to as “fairies.” In the 1600s, Swedish society was fraught with tension between Christian doctrine, traditional beliefs, and the budding discipline of natural science: Especially after 1608, when the Bible became law in Sweden and sorcery became punishable by death. Conflicting ideas came to a head in legal trials, including many that, like Svensdotter’s, centered on a charge of forbidden love between a mortal and a supernatural being.

There’s clashing worldviews there in the trials,” says folklore scholar Tommy Kuusela, a research archivist at Uppsala University. “When people are saying, ‘I met and I had sexual intercourse with the forest spirit,’ the clergy would say, ‘Because there is no forest spirit, what you are actually saying is that you have met the Devil taking this form.’ Which could be a capital punishment.” Cases like Svensdotter’s were taken seriously because there was no room for an Elf King in the Christian order of the universe upheld by the clergy and government. But for many people in 17th-century Sweden, spirits were as tangible as animals and plants, and Christianity could coexist with older ideas about the supernatural.

Kuusela points out that “even the ones who were accused in these trials, they saw themselves as Christians.” Especially in places close to what Kuusela calls the “perilous otherworld” of the forest, people still clung to their pre-Christian beliefs in nature spirits, and made offerings to gain their blessing. Folklore reflected daily life and passed on traditional wisdom in ways that the Bible did not. “They have something they hear from the clergy, and they also have their own experiences in living at the farmstead,” says Kuusela. “The Church can’t explain how to plow your fields, what to do when you’re out hunting, and things like that. And that’s things you can get from folklore.” Some folktales attempted to reconcile the two belief systems, identifying spirits as outcast angels beholden to neither Heaven nor Hell.

One name used for such beings was rå (pronounced like “raw”), derived from an Old Swedish word for “ruler.” “This is a nature spirit that rules over a certain area,” says Kuusela, such as the skogsrå, who ruled a forest, the sjörå, who ruled a lake, or the bergrå, who ruled a mountain. Rår were often described as alluring, despite subtle inhuman features like the tail of a horse or cow, or a back that was hollow when seen from behind. They were typically female, and often amorous. “It’s usually men by themselves that meet this sexualized femme fatale of the forest,” says Kuusela. This theme in Swedish folklore may be rooted in the lonely fantasies of hunters and woodsmen, whose work kept them isolated in the wilderness for long periods. Kuusela points out that in traditional tales of the seductive forest nymph, it is she who propositions the man, despite the fact that a woman would have been considered indecent for doing the same. Svensdotter’s carousing with the Fairy King was similarly outside the norms of respectable 17th-century behavior.

When compared with other Swedish trials focusing on supernatural relationships, Svensdotter’s case was unusual both for the specific description of the being, and for the gender of the parties involved. Kuusela explains that, in the few historical cases where a Swedish woman was accused of sex with a male spirit, he was usually a water spirit called a näck. Svensdotter’s description of her king, including his palace beneath a mountain, seems to more closely match tales of the rå, including the male “king of the forest” found in Finnish and some other European folklore.

More typical examples of these supernatural love trials include that of Peder Jönsson in 1640, who was executed in the town of Söderköping for carrying on an affair with a rå in exchange for secret knowledge and good fortune (Jönsson’s wife testified that he refused to have sex with her because he had promised to be faithful to the spirit). Another man named Sven Andersson may have been executed in 1691 after being seduced by the rå of a mountain in the southern province of Västergötland, though it’s unclear whether his sentence was carried out. And in at least two cases, soldiers arrested for desertion blamed their absence on a dalliance with a Lady of the Forest.

On those rare occasions when a woman was brought to trial for a supernatural relationship in Sweden, it was usually because she had given birth to a child with an unusual appearance, raising suspicion about the father’s identity. Kuusela connects this to the belief elsewhere in Europe that such babies were “changelings,” fairies secretly swapped for stolen human children. Parallels to Svensdotter’s case can also be found in contemporary trials from other parts of Europe. In 16th- and 17th-century Sicily, when the island was ruled by Spain, dozens of women testified that they had been visited in dreams by fairy-women called the Doñas de Fuera, Spanish for “Ladies From the Outside,” who led them to opulent parties where male fairies lavished them with attention.

Kuusela notes that Swedish fairy trials “can, in a way, be compared to the witch craze” that gripped much of Europe at the time, which also arose from conflicting systems of belief and fear of Satan’s influence. According to Göran Malmstedt, a cultural historian at the University of Göthenburg, “one of the main thoughts that caused the big trials in Europe” was “the idea that all witches are together in a conspiracy with the Devil.” This went against an older concept of magic as secret knowledge held by individuals, including the spirits themselves. According to Malmstedt, häxa, the Swedish word for “witch,” was borrowed from German and not used widely until the 1670s, when Sweden’s biggest witch trials were held. Before that, Swedish magic-users were called “troll-men” or “troll-women” or simply kloka, meaning “wise.” 

 

 

Witch-hunts and witch trials were already declining in the rest of Europe by the time they reached Sweden. During the height of Swedish witch trials from 1668 to 1676, about 300 people were executed. Even then, says Malmstedt, “in the central government, I think there were some doubts about those ideas. But on the other hand, you can see on the local level that priests and local judges were taking these ideas very seriously.” In some cases, interrogators used intimidation and torture to get the narrative they wanted from the accused. “Those that didn’t confess, they couldn’t execute,” says Malmstedt, so “most of them were forced to confess by torture.” Peder Jönsson, executed for a supposed relationship with a spirit, was initially only charged with using magic to find lost items, but the court presumed that he must have learned the spell from a demon lover. Jönsson embellished his testimony with each round of questioning, first adding a rå with the traditional foal’s tail, later describing her as more overtly demonic, with the legs and hooves of a goat. 

 

 

Unlike Jönsson and many others, Karin Svensdotter was not accused of actively using magic. Instead, her physical convulsions and shocking confessions, including her false pregnancies, were rationalized as supernatural in origin. As recently as the 19th century, communities without modern medical knowledge might blame fairies for unexplained illness, writes scholar Richard Sugg in Fairies: A Dangerous History, because “they gave an otherwise frighteningly arbitrary condition a meaning—a known and accepted place within a shared framework of explanation.” In Witch Trials: A Worldwide Chronology, encyclopedist Mary Ellen Snodgrass describes Karin Svensdotter as a fantasist whose invented encounters “enlivened the boredom of domestic farmwork.” But based on her distress at being separated from her alleged children, Svensdotter seemed to believe her own explanation for what had happened to her.

The allure of fantasy as escape, or the perception of dreams or delusions as reality, may have played a role in Svensdotter’s interpretation of events. Malmstedt describes dreams being used as evidence in some of the Swedish trials, where “people thought that they had been in contact with evil powers in their dream.” Even if these dreams and fantasies were accepted as being magical in origin, there was still the question of whether they had actually taken place. “There was a debate among Church people in the 17th century,” says Malmstedt. “Were all these stories really true? … Or was it illusions?” Had people like Svensdotter been sleeping with the Devil? Or had the Devil bewitched them to think that they had?

Kuusela adds that “this is also a time when we were exploring [and] learning more about nature.” Supernatural love trials inspired fascination from scholars and sparked debates like whether spirits were made of flesh and blood, whether humans could produce children with them, and whether sex with a cow-tailed rå should be considered bestiality (which was “a real, actual problem” in Swedish society at the time, says Kuusela, resulting in more executions than witchcraft). Just as early trials sought to explain the spirits in Christian terms, some of the later examples attempted scientific explanations. In a case from 1706, the head of the court reasoned that the horse-legged beauty described by the accused was no immortal spirit, but an actual horse/human hybrid. 

 

 

As for Karin Svensdotter, the court ruled that her fairy romance had not happened in the literal sense, but that Satan had tormented her with illusions. This meant that she was not guilty of witchcraft, but a victim of it; a noteworthy outcome, given that her trial happened at a time when there was no consensus whether fairies and elves were imaginary, or demons in disguise. The lack of witnesses to supernatural events may have played a role in the verdict. Malmstedt explains that a quorum of reputable witnesses was essential to convict someone of witchcraft.

Svensdotter’s congregation was instructed to pray for her deliverance, and she was sent home with a silver cross for protection; an echo of the “elf cross,” a cross or star symbol used in Sweden to ward off malevolent spirits. The Fairy King apparently ceased to visit Svensdotter following her trial. It’s unknown what happened to her after this, but cases of men and women consorting with forest spirits would continue to be brought to trial for decades.

By the 18th century, a new worldview founded in science had begun to spread, in which people sought rational explanations for unusual events and did not fear the Devil’s malevolent interference to the same extent. This meant that witch trials were increasingly viewed as spurious nonsense. The last execution for witchcraft in Sweden took place in 1704. Accusations of black magic made in the 18th and 19th centuries were liable to be thrown out of court by higher authorities who no longer took them seriously. But as people continued to live alongside and derive their livelihood from nature, belief in nature spirits persisted well into the modern era. Kuusela notes accounts of men claiming to have met a forest spirit recorded in the early 20th century.

In a changing society where the Church sought to enforce its authority, trials prosecuting fairy romance were signs of a power struggle between two very different understandings of the world. Stories of supernatural love affairs forced people to examine their own beliefs and question what was possible, or acceptable, within their own reality. Folktales, says Kuusela, “are actually stories about ourselves.”

The Real-Life Origins of Taboo Fairy Romance. By Andrew Coletti. Atlas Obscura, December 17, 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What does Sweden's Response to COVID-19 Tell Us About Sweden?

You have probably heard that Sweden – a wealthy, egalitarian democracy with a homogeneous, public-spirited and obedient population – has not locked down in response to Covid-19. Instead, it is business as usual, with the government merely issuing recommendations to law-abiding citizens. The goals are to save the economy, reach herd immunity and defend democratic liberty, all at once. But something has gone wrong. The economic forecasts are bleak, herd immunity has not been reached, and the normally biddable Swedes have somehow malfunctioned and ignored the recommendations. Compared to its Scandinavian neighbours, Denmark and Norway, Sweden’s deaths per capita are high. So the strategy has failed – but the surviving Swedes, sipping beer in the Stockholm sun, have barely winced.

This, at least, is what many media outlets are reporting – partly in Sweden and to a far greater extent internationally. But the picture is wrong, and it does not help us properly to assess the Swedish situation. It lacks an accurate understanding of the strategy, of how the virus has spread, and how it has had unequal effects in a country much less homogeneous than is commonly assumed.

 “Business as usual” is the first and biggest myth, created more by the radical actions of the rest of the world than by any lack of change in Sweden. In reality, Covid-19 has dominated news and conversation for months. Daily press conferences by the Public Health Agency began on March 6, and a “high risk” alert followed four days later. Ever since, advice about hand hygiene, distancing and self-quarantine for those with symptoms has been ubiquitous. Risk groups, such as those over the age of seventy, are advised to stay at home and limit socializing. All non-essential international travel is advised against, and long-distance domestic travel is discouraged. But the measures do not consist solely of recommendations – there have also been legally binding restrictions. Unnecessary entry from outside the EU, EFTA and UK is not allowed, public gatherings are limited to fifty (down from an initial 500), and visits to retirement homes are banned. Post-sixteen and university education have both gone online. Many organizations have individually made further changes: buses and trams entered via the middle door; distanced train seating and no ticket checks; plastic screens protecting staff in supermarkets; closed changing rooms; and distanced seating in libraries. Swedes were encouraged to spend three public holidays (Easter, Labour Day and Ascension Day) as well as one festival (Walpurgis Night) at home – leading to the curious and internationally reported case of Lund municipality using manure and drones to discourage Walpurgis celebrations in the city’s main park.

The scale and pace of these changes is unprecedented in recent Swedish history. And the fact that other countries have taken even more extreme action doesn’t reduce the impact Swedish residents have felt. Behaviours and norms have been shaken up. Working from home has risen from 15 to 57 per cent. Public transport use in the three most densely populated counties, containing the cities of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö, halved during March. Anonymized mobile data shows that people have moved significantly less during the pandemic, and surveys show a majority of respondents claiming to follow the Public Health Agency’s recommendations to a high degree. For most people, the recommendations, bans and new ways of relating to public space have changed their lives dramatically.

Beyond these measures, the impact of Covid-19 in Sweden is hard to summarize because the pandemic varies both geographically and demographically. This is, of course, true of all countries: total lockdown in a crowded flat is very different from that in a spacious country house; and poor, urban areas are the most vulnerable to infection the world over.  But Sweden’s relatively light approach has created a situation where people’s experience of the virus varies to an especially wide degree.

Geographically speaking, there is no single “Swedish situation”, but rather a “Stockholm situation”, and several smaller, sparser situations in the oblong country’s vast north and smaller south. Greater Stockholm county hosts just 23 per cent of Sweden’s population, but it has had 34 per cent of the country’s cases, 46 per cent of its deaths and 38 per cent of its intensive-care cases; and the virus has spread disproportionately in some of the city’s boroughs. Excepting some Stockholm-bordering counties, the rest of the country, including the densely populated Skåne, bordering Denmark, has seen a much slower and less fatal spread. The areas overrepresented in Covid-19 statistics are geographically tiny parts of Sweden. In other words, it feels perhaps like “business as usual” in the Croatia-sized Västerbotten County (twenty-seven deaths), but less so in the Camden-sized Stockholm borough Rinkeby-Kista (eighty-five deaths).

Demographically speaking, the Swedish strategy seems to be disproportionately affecting the poor, precariously employed, densely housed and foreign-born (as indeed is happening in other countries, such as the UK). The three hardest-hit areas of Stockholm (Rinkeby-Kista, Skärholmen and Spånga-Tensta) have very high proportions of foreign-born residents – 60 per cent, 51 per cent and 42 per cent respectively. That the foreign-born are overrepresented in cases has been confirmed by the Public Health Agency. While the Swedish strategy allows many of the better off, securely employed and well-housed to work their white-collar jobs from home and self-isolate if necessary, some immigrants cannot. It is true that some immigrants work as translators or doctoral researchers, but many more work as food deliverers, care workers, cleaners and bus drivers. Those in the latter professions are unable to work from home, and often work in non-unionized jobs, on low wages and insecure contracts. Immigrants also live, on average, more densely. In other words, Sweden is no different from any other country, but this precariousness – jarring with the romanticized perception of Sweden from abroad, and Sweden’s own idealized self-image – makes the judge-the-risks-yourself pandemic strategy markedly inequitable. The more privileged can choose to remove themselves from risk or to take risks (such as eating out or socializing in larger groups), knowing they are less likely to suffer, while a precariat delivering their food, cleaning their houses and transporting them around keeps society running.

This divisive strategy has been broadly popular in Sweden. Opinion polls suggest that support for the strategy and Public Health Agency is high and has only recently begun to waver. This image of nonchalance around a potentially failing strategy is captured, perhaps, in the “stable, honest and rational” Chief Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, whose popularity has been immortalized in tattoos, rap songs and merchandise. But there is still plenty of sometimes high-profile criticism. Sweden’s opposition parties have increasingly challenged the government and its strategy, as have editorials in the major papers. Johan Giesecke, the Chief Epidemiologist from 1995-2005, has publicly defended the strategy, while his successor of 2005-2013, Annika Linde, has been much more critical. There is a sense of frustration around the communication and execution of the strategy, if not its actual content. Tegnell tells me via email: “Many international sources describe the strategy better than most Swedish ones, who we believe have done it quite badly”.

The approach might be failing, but not on the terms that many media believe. It is true that herd immunity has not been reached, and the economy has not been completely saved – but those were never the goals. Instead, the aims are to slow the spread, protect the vulnerable and keep the health system from being overburdened. Mistaking the former goals for the latter comes from believing that, like in most countries, the government directs the strategy. In Sweden, the government is constitutionally mandated to give guidelines for the work of bodies like the Public Health Agency, but agencies themselves are the primary originators of detailed plans such as those for pandemic responses. The sociomedical strategy comes, therefore, in practice entirely from the Public Health Agency, and is implemented by bodies including the Civil Contingencies Agency – neither has directly economic or political mandates. This government/agency distinction explains partially why Sweden differs from Denmark and Norway, both of which had early and near-total lockdowns, closing their borders and schools – measures not recommended by their health agencies, but taken by politicians anyway.

That this strategy has become the subject of fascination and debate both in and outside of Sweden is not entirely down to the death toll. It is also because of how we have grown used to thinking both about Covid-19 and Sweden. We have become familiar with the idea that the pandemic puts whole populations through a collective suffering and collective set of risks. Simultaneously, we cling to a long inculcated but outdated picture of Sweden as the kind of homogeneous country that ought to excel at this task. On the contrary, the pandemic has shown clearly the stratification of Swedish society, the stark economic inequalities and the cracks in the care, health, welfare and employment systems. But instead of trying genuinely to understand these things, we seem to prefer to puzzle over why the real Sweden is not like the Sweden of our imaginations.

Not the country you imagine :  Why is Sweden such an outlier in its response to the pandemic?  By Benjamin R. Davies. The Times LiterarySupplement , June 4, 2020. 

The architect of Sweden's coronavirus response has defended the country's controversial decision not to go into lockdown, while admitting "improvements" could be made with the benefit of hindsight.

As the coronavirus pandemic swept across the world and governments scrambled to enact emergency lockdown measures, Sweden was labeled an outlier for its seemingly relaxed approach that imposed only light restrictions on daily life.

Its measures were markedly different from its Nordic neighbors, keeping most schools, restaurants, salons and bars open. It did, however, ask people to refrain from making long journeys, placing an emphasis on personal responsibility. Sweden's Covid-19 death toll now stands at 4,542, while Denmark's is 580 and Norway's is 237, according to Johns Hopkins University.

"There are things that we could have done better but in general I think that Sweden has chosen the right way," Sweden's chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell said Wednesday, in an interview with Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Much of the criticism around Sweden's response has focused on the high death rates in care homes. Tegnell admitted the country's Public Health Agency "didn't know that there would be such a big potential for the disease to spread in elderly care homes, with so many deaths."

"We knew that group was very fragile and that we would get a lot of deaths if they got infected. But we didn't know that the disease would enter so easily and for the spread to be so big," he said.

Tegnell said the country's main strategy of social distancing still "worked well" and he "can't see that we should have done it in a completely different way."

In a news conference later on Wednesday, he reiterated: "We still think that our strategy is good. But there are always improvements that can be made, especially when looking back in time."

He was responding to reports on comments he made in an earlier interview with Swedish radio, which were widely interpreted as an admission of a failure. "If we were to encounter the same disease, given exactly what we know about it today, I think we would reach a conclusion to act somewhere in between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world did," Tegnell said in that interview.

Asked if too many people have died too early, he replied: "Yes, absolutely. That is what we will have to think about in the future, if there had been any way to prevent that," he explained.

The Swedish government has announced it will launch an inquiry into the country's coronavirus strategy and the measures taken, with details of what form it will take expected before summer.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven told the country's Aftonbladet newspaper: "I am in charge of the government, and that is why we have used the strategy that we have applied all along."

He said parts of Sweden's strategy to limit the virus were correct, for example, because the healthcare system was not overwhelmed but "at the same time, we must admit that the part about the spread of the disease within the elderly care, that has not worked, that is obvious, we have too many older people who have died."

Last month a CNN report found people dying in care homes accounted for around half the country's total death toll, with many grieving families saying their loved ones never received any medical treatment.

Leli Sedghi said her 92-year-old father died in a Swedish care home without ever seeing a doctor after falling ill with Covid-19. "It's haunting me," Sedghi said.

Asked if he thinks this is happening, Tegnell told CNN at the time it was a "very difficult question to answer."

"You have to remember these people are very old and extremely ill and normally you don't move these kinds of people from their homes to hospital care," he added.

On May 15, Löfven rejected the "narrative" that "Sweden is doing so totally different than other countries," saying "that's not the case."

"Life is not carrying on as normal in Sweden. Many people are staying at home which has had a positive effect on limiting the spread of the virus," he said during a news conference.

"Of course we are painfully aware that too many people have lost their lives due to Covid-19. Just like several other countries we did not manage to protect the most vulnerable people, the most elderly, despite our best intentions."

Lofven said his country's strategy was to "make sure that the measures that we implement and decide upon should be long-term because we regard this as a marathon." He said Sweden did not want to have to implement decisions, take them away, then bring them back again.

In mid-May, Sweden's Public Health Authority revealed that despite the country's more relaxed approach only 7.3% of people in Stockholm had developed the antibodies needed to fight the disease by late April. The figure was roughly similar to other countries that have data and well below what is needed to create "herd immunity" in a population.

Sweden's strategy was criticized by researchers in the country early on, who said that attempting to create herd immunity had low support. But the authorities denied that achieving herd immunity was their goal.

Herd immunity is reached when the majority of a given population -- 70 to 90% -- becomes immune to an infectious disease, either because they have become infected and recovered, or through vaccination. When that happens, the disease is less likely to spread to people who aren't immune, because there just aren't enough infectious carriers to reach them.

Sweden defends not locking down over coronavirus, but admits failing to protect the elderly. By  By Sarah Dean and Per Nyberg. CNN , June 3 , 2020. 

Who on earth is right? We cannot all be right.

One country has all but dropped off the Covid-19 radar: Sweden. Just two months ago, it held hands with Britain in rejecting total lockdown and trusting “social distancing”. Then on 23 March, Boris Johnson did a U-turn, leaving Sweden and, to a lesser extent, Germany, on its own. Since then the divergence has become radical and political. Sweden’s centre-left government, darling of Bernie Sanders and world liberalism, is suddenly lauded by the libertarian right.

Like millions, I have become an armchair epidemiologist. The reason is instinctive. I am being ordered daily by my prime minister to live in fear of my life. I have come to exist in a miasma of R-rates, antigen tests, infection fatality ratios and “excess deaths”. Now, as Europe and the world emerge blearily to survey the wreckage of lockdown, the question is still left hanging. Was Sweden right?

The one table that glares at us daily is the international league table of deaths per million. Even if the aggregates are unreliable, there is a crude reality to a body count. Yet the only conclusion to be drawn from the figures is that the league table is no help to policy.

There is no correlation between fatalities and lockdown stringency. The most stringent lockdowns – as in China, Italy, Spain, New Zealand and Britain – have yielded both high and low deaths per million. Hi-tech has apparently “worked” in South Korea, but so has no-tech in Sweden. Sweden’s 319 deaths per million is far ahead of locked-down Norway’s 40 and Denmark’s 91, but it’s well behind locked-down UK’s 465 and Spain’s 569.

Sweden’s light-touch policy is led by two scientists, Johan Giesecke and his protégé Anders Tegnell. The latter currently leads Stockholm’s strategy with daily matter-of-fact media appearances and 73% popular support. Unlike in politicised Britain, ministers do not regularly appear.

Tegnell has been emphatic throughout. A degree of social distancing and avoiding crowds is enough. As for lockdown, “Nothing to do with [it] has a scientific basis.”

To Giesecke, a mild-mannered veteran World Health Organization virologist, Covid-19 is “a tsunami sweeping the world”, but he notes that it threatens older, sick people above all. He admits that Sweden’s higher-than-average death rate shows it made mistakes. “At first we failed to shield the old and vulnerable.” Its economy has suffered from a collapse in exports, but it has kept itself open and at work, and has not seen the surge in “all-causes excess deaths” of the UK and other high-lockdown states. This surge seems to be increasing due to a partial collapse in other areas of critical health care.

Where I find Sweden’s policy more of a gamble is in its faith in developing a “collective immunity” that will protect it from future outbreaks. Giesecke talks of half of all Swedes probably infected in some degree, and tests suggest that a quarter of people in Stockholm have the virus and will probably – but by no means certainly – be protected against any resurgence. This compares with just 2% of people in Oslo. That divergence in vulnerability can only be tested in the event of a second spike.

More to the point, there is no evidence of mass immunity having developed anywhere else. In Germany another lockdown sceptic, the virologist Hendrik Streek, thinks countries could be approaching one third immunity, which could be hopeful. But as policy, the idea is unnerving to many. Such was the fear generated by “herd immunity” in Britain in March that the phrase itself has become barely mentionable.

Yet according to Tegnell, whatever we think, “there is no other escape” but to find ways of living with this virus. There is no sign of a vaccine on the immediate horizon. We cannot ruin the world economy indefinitely. Better to concentrate on protecting our health services against it, should it return.

The half-Swedish commentator Freddie Sayer has been closely monitoring this debate from the UK. He makes the point that with each passing week the rest of Europe moves steadily closer to imitating Sweden. It is doing so because modern economies – and their peoples – just cannot live with such crushing abnormality as they have seen these past two months.

Britain now faces a challenge. I believe early criticism of Boris Johnson was unfair. He had a respectable case for proceeding on an evidence-based approach, had he only concentrated his attention on the high-risk health and care sectors. In his U-turn he opted for the politics of fear. He now has workers terrified of working, and parents terrified of school. He has frightened his economy into inertia.

I share the view of scientists such as Cambridge’s David Spiegelhalter and Oxford’s Carl Heneghan that this virus is unprecedented in its infectiousness, but that it will pass. The chief variant will prove to be how governments reacted, and the toll they took on the rest of their healthcare and the wider economy.

Sweden gambled in its response, but so did the rest of the world. South Africa’s lockdown threatens it with economic and political catastrophe. The UN warns that the world could lose four years of growth at a cost of $8.5 trillion. Famine and further disease will be rife. That was surely the greater gamble.

As Europe emerges from lockdown, the question hangs: was Sweden right? By Simon Jenkins. The Guardian, May 22, 2020.

As an Italian living in Sweden, I have become accustomed to surprise by the many ways that Sweden is different—not just from Italy, but from its own reputation as an exceptionally virtuous country and a model society. This double estrangement is especially dismaying during this public health crisis.

By letting its citizens live their life mostly as usual, the Swedish government’s soft, non-interventional approach to the pandemic has challenged the paths undertaken by other countries and the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO). Sweden has decided to go lagom—a Swedish word that means “just right,” neither too much nor too little; few restrictions have been imposed; people are mostly asked to keep clean and physically distant. Sweden has also decided not to track the disease’s spread and their testing lags far behind other countries. This may be a realistic choice in anticipation of a lockdown that would be unsustainable for people and for the economy, but it still feels odd. The “right” response to the pandemic has been elusive, but different local approaches do say something about our conceptions of politics and society—about our ideas of life and attachments and the links between private values and public choices.

Despite the disagreement among analysts and foreign media on its appropriateness, they explain Sweden’s soft way of managing coronavirus as a reflection of Nordic individualism, trust in institutions and in fellow citizens. People will do the right thing out of sense of responsibility, it is thought. They do not need to be coerced into a lockdown because they can be trusted to act properly. Yet crowded streets and bustling play parks may tell a different story.

In Sweden these days, high schools are closed, and university classes have moved online, but university canteens are open. People are encouraged to work from home, and a ban on meetings of 500 people, later reduced to 50, was introduced in March and extended until December. Yet elementary schools, where social distance is hard to observe and certainly more than 50 gather, remain open and compulsory. There are no restrictions on supermarkets, shopping malls, indoor amusement parks, or public transport and trains. I see no change when looking at crowded restaurants and cafés, or holiday celebrations. Young people seem to hug and kiss more than usual. It is also spring, and the warmth and light make people here come back to life after the long winter. My neighbors in the countryside invited three different families to stay over for Easter weekend, and they all happily shared the house and meals.

April 30th was the day of Valborg celebrations all over Sweden. In Uppsala, where I live, alumni of all ages usually convene at 3 p.m. outside the university main library, Carolina Rediviva to welcome Spring. It is the “donning of the caps” at the address of the Vice-Chancellor who waves back from a balcony. Bonfires, eating and drinking and other spontaneous celebrations follow. This year the events are all canceled due to coronavirus. The concern is that people, especially students will gather anyway. Walking through town I saw fewer people strolling around, but the ones I saw were often carrying wine and spirits. Loud music reverberated across students’ buildings, which made me think the parties had moved inside.

The minister of interior, while speaking in defense of the Swedish way to fight the pandemic, has threatened harder measures should the population not respect recommendations for social distancing. Meanwhile, in Lund, another university town, the municipality has dumped manure in public parks to discourage gatherings. Soon we will know if warnings and nudging have been effective.

According to Our World in Data, Sweden recorded 812 new confirmed cases on April 25, the highest daily count so far, which helped push the total number of confirmed cases over 20,000 by April 30. As of May 8, in nearby Denmark, a much more densely populated country, the number is 10,083; in Norway, 7995; and in Finland, 5673. The total confirmed COVID-19 deaths in Sweden has passed 3000, a relatively small number when compared to Italy, the United Kingdom, or the United States, but much worse than Sweden’s neighbors: Denmark (512), Norway (209), and Finland (255). Sweden’s 301.1 COVID-19 deaths per million people—compared to countries that chose a lockdown—does not reassure: United States (228.61); Denmark (88.74); Norway (35.97); Finland (35.92). Half of the deaths occurred in nursing homes.

Sweden public health authorities have admitted that things went wrong in nursing homes, but have not fundamentally changed their approach. On its website, Sweden’s Public Health Agency states that: “as long as siblings or other members of the family do not show symptoms of disease they can go to school, preschool, or their workplace.” Children of parents with coronavirus, for example, attend school, as long as they do not appear ill. With the curve rising and hospitals struggling, parents, like me, who would rather keep their kids home, are constantly reminded that school is compulsory in Sweden. In many cases—and at odds with Sweden’s soft approach to the public health emergency—parents are warned that they will be reported to the social services for keeping their children out of school. Meanwhile, schools admit that they can do little to protect kids from the virus, beyond showing them how to wash their hands properly and use hand sanitizer.

The government’s mild and contradictory measures largely rest on the view of state epidemiologist Dr. Anders Tegnell, who believes that the soft approach will help the country cope in the long run because the virus is here to stay, and sooner or later most people will probably get it. Swedish media and a former Prime Minister Carl Bildt have expressed confidence in the Swedish character and traditions—a combination of trust in institutions, loose family ties minimizing occasions for contagion, and a ‘natural’ inclination to social distancing—to see the country through the pandemic.

Some have voiced concerns over the lack of protective equipment for healthcare workers. Others say the relaxed measures have resulted in too many deaths. In an editorial in the Dagens Nyheter, a major Swedish newspaper, a group of scientists from the Karolinska Institute, Uppsala University, and Chalmers University of Technology called the architects of the strategy “officials without the talents to predict or control the epidemic,” and urged the government to intervene with “radical measures.” But such dissonant voices and sporadic organized resistance, for example, among teachers, are rare. For the most part, the Swedes back up the government and its choices. Polls show growing support for the governing Social Democrats and Prime Minister Stefan Löfven in the last few weeks.

Is the proclaimed belief in the Swedish character and individual responsibility at the heart of the country’s response to coronavirus? As an observer, that’s not what I see. Rather, it seems the mark of an organicist society, one in which individual freedom always gives way to public good, where individuals’ goals and expectations are shaped by the will of the government. Indeed the secret of Sweden’s exceptionalism rests in a social compact that limits—not expands—people’s reliance on each other because it fosters dependence on the state. The Swedish formula, I think, combines anomie—lack of social and moral norms, not individualism in the liberal sense—with organicism.

In Sweden, government action against coronavirus is relaxed and contradictory, and so are people’s responses. At the root of the synergy is a unique pact between state and citizens. The state provides for people’s material needs so that they will not have to depend on each other for their welfare nor be exposed to chance. In exchange, citizens trust the state to make decisions in their interest. Trust, or the confidence that a party will act fairly and in the interest of the other party, is an essential element of society. When there is trust, people do not need to act defensively or attack out of fear of being attacked. In the absence of complete information, trust supports stability and reduces uncertainty.

Yet trust maintains an element of conditionality. Trust is gained, but it is also tested and revoked if not honored. For trust in government to be a good thing, citizens need to keep doubting, examining, questioning, and judging governments and their choices. In an organicist society however, tests on trust cease. And, with blind trust in the government, people are relieved from the responsibility for what happens around them—even to them—to their fellow citizens and to their family. For over a century the Swedish state has committed to taking care of the children, the sick, and the old. Yet the bargain is dangerous for its citizens because taking responsibility, listening to one’s own needs, and taking care of others is what makes us human and protects us from arbitrary power.

A 2006 best-selling book in Sweden Är svensken människa? Gemenskap och oberoende i det moderna Sverigea [Is the Swede human? Community and Independency in Modern Sweden], makes a similar argument. Its authors, Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh, both challenge and reinforce some stereotypes about Swedish people. They describe the contract between individuals and the state as fostering a form of both radical individualism and total dependence. They call it “the Swedish theory of love”.

In contrast to the Millian idea that democracy flourishes where individuals can choose their life commitments and exercise independent critical judgment over institutions and policies, Sweden offers a model of democratic success that favors stability over freedom, dependence on the state over interdependence among citizens. Swedish society, to quote a key Swedish idea, is folkhemmet, the “people’s home”—a place where, just like in a family, all members have their place and their needs taken care of.

What has struck me as an outsider in Sweden is people’s privateness, which is not the same as individuality. In the Swedish homes that I visited, life is organized around social rituals and habits that leave little to individual initiatives. Such rituals, I have noticed, defeat socio-economic differences or political and geographical divides, and in some sense do make Swedes equal. From the décor of the kitchen and dressing room, to food, to how to celebrate Easter or when to allow kids to eat sweets, the Swedes I have met tend to reflect the Swedish way.

The key ideas of Nordic social democracy are linked with the Lutheran tradition and its strict, non-mediated relationship between the individual and God. Full commitment to that relationship leads to salvation. Similarly, an unchallenged, exclusive relationship between the individual and the state is regarded as the path to well-being. Denmark and Norway share the same Lutheran roots, however, they have made a very different choice in the face of the pandemic, enforcing a preventive lockdown to control the spread of the virus. So the source of Sweden’s distinctive way is hard to place. Perhaps the quasi-religious allegiance to the state was facilitated by the Social Democrats’ long hold on the country. The Swedish version of social democracy was inaugurated by the social-democrats—the SAP [Socialdemokratiska Arbetareparti]—in the 1930s and has largely dominated its political life ever since.

Swedes trust the government and its choices to be ‘just right.’ And here the notion of lagom appears less humble than one may expect. If the social compact promises that decision-making processes will produce ‘just right’ outcomes, governments don’t need good arguments to justify their actions. And if the Swedish approach to coronavirus is at odds with scientific evidence, it needs little justification, only citizen’s trust.

By accepting the compact, citizens agree to embrace the majority view and stand behind government decisions. And the state, committing to take care of its citizens, releases them from the burden of moral choices. Yet, even Rousseau, considered by some as the founder of an organicist view of politics, believed that only the never-ending effort to balance individual interests and the public good could produce a “general will.” Sweden, by contrast, appears to have ‘solved’ this tension, together with other daunting questions about values, as if basic, competing political ideas such as equality, freedom, justice have been permanently settled. Welfare protection, material comfort, and social cohesion are obtained by putting aside conflicts of values and moral dilemmas to focus on managerial tasks. Sweden seems to have succeeded in the shift that so concerned Weber: turning politics into the management of means.

The Swedish organicist model of democracy encourages citizens to suspend their capacity to choose. And if practice makes perfect, individual agency and moral literacy—as well as untold numbers of lives—are at risk.

Sweden’s Relaxed Approach to COVID-19 Isn’t Working. By Adele Lebano. Boston Review , May 8, 2020.