Kristiansand, June 12 1974
The Norwegians, outwardly so simple, are not really that way at all, and their outlooks reveal some deformations that are positively weird. I was particularly struck this time with the anxious, fussy egalitarianism that seems to pervade political thought and to prevail in governmental practice. How is one to explain it?
Norwegian society comes closer than any other I know, closer even than the regular “Communist” societies, to the Marxist ideal of the classless society. A few people, very few, have some money and invest it, normally in shipping, but their style of life scarcely varies from that of all the others. I look in vain in the Kristiansand area for a single example of conspicuous affluence.
Whence, then, this compulsive preoccupation with questions of relative privilege and prosperity?—this frantic determination to put down and punish an almost non-existent upper class? Obviously, there is more here than meets the eye. There is also more than one answer, for this is the point where the pseudo-Marxism of the young intelligentsia meets with the religious fundamentalism and provincialism of the rural and small-town elements, particularly along the West Coast. I think I sense, on the part of these latter, a certain cultural jealousy and feeling of inferiority before the relatively cosmopolitan Oslo, an inability to endure the thought that the country should contain others
With the young intelligentsia, things are more complicated still. There seems to be a real and burning resentment of Norwegian society as it is, an insistence on seeing it as the ally and instrument of sinister, semi-visible outside forces: imperialism, colonialism, capitalist monopolies, multinational corporations, C.I.A., what you will. Along with this goes an extravagant idealization of the under-developed world, based on the curious syndrome: poverty = virtue, affluence = wickedness. In this last, too, the young Marxists find common ground with the religious fundamentalists, for the missionaries are strong among the latter, and the image of the African tribesman as the noble victim of Western imperialism and accordingly as a fit object of Christian charity is part of their stock in trade.
That the present prosperity of Scandinavian civilization might have had something to do with moderate humans and responsible self-government, with industrious habits, with individual self-respect and independence and initiative, and with high levels of integrity in the approach to work, seems never to have entered their heads: they can see this prosperity only as a proof of guilt.
This sort of intellectual primitivism, along with the sweeping urbanization and industrialization of the country, the total surrender to the automobile, the turning-of-the-back on the sea, the failure to learn from the mistakes of the major highly-developed countries and the willingness to ape them in their worst errors-all this is causing me gradually to lose interest in Norway. . . . It simply saddens me, because I have loved the country in a way, and have felt that here, with the magnificent natural setting and the small, hardy population, there was a chance, if there was anywhere, to avoid the worst mistakes of over-development, to retain a healthy relationship between man and Nature, and to preserve the qualities of hardiness, freshness, modesty, and simplicity in people themselves.
[Kennan played no role in the Helsinki talks that concluded in July.]
Randesund, Norway, June 25
What a pity, I think to myself, that these people found oil off their coasts. Not only is it helping them to ruin the North Sea, but this is making it possible for them to postpone for themselves the desirable day of reckoning, when it will have to be recognized that mankind cannot live by the reckless squandering of energy. In the meantime, great damage will have been done.
Not all the beauty, of course, has gone. Night before last, the night of St. John’s Day, the shortest night of the year, no complete night at all in fact, we went out to the summer home of friends, in the islands, for the traditional celebration. There was . . . the lighting of the great traditional fire, long prepared, wigwam-like, near the water’s edge, fires were burning elsewhere on the shores of the little sound, and there was a great coming and going of motor boats. Then back home by motorboat through the narrow passages of Skippergaten, into the wider leads behind it, where the unceasing glow of the northern sky shone across the water and dim quarter-moon competing feebly with it from the other side….