I love Sweden. I count the year wasted when I don’t spend a couple of weeks in the back country. I have good friends and extended family there – but I still can’t really believe that it’s the “goodest” country in the world, as a recent survey purports to show.
This isn’t just because my last extended trip there was to spend a week investigating a particularly gruesome racist murder in Trollhättan, nor because the country’s politics are in a state of farcical disarray. The Liberals have rebranded themselves with a logo that suggests they’re all on Viagra, while the former Social Democrat leader Mona Sahlin got caught falsely certifying the income of her rather dishy former bodyguard so that he could buy a fancy flat.
Meanwhile, no policeman I spoke to thought there was any chance of repatriating the 80,000 asylum seekers Sweden plans to deport.
It’s not even because “goodest” is a horrible made-up word that puts me in mind of the Swedish självgodast – which would mean the most sanctimonious country in the world. I reckon a quick straw poll of Sweden’s neighbours would see it voted the world’s självgodaste country by a substantial margin, and I’d vote for that, too. But that doesn’t make it into the best country in the world, let alone the “goodest”.
The survey that selected it as such may well, however, be the worst of its type. That’s a large claim, I know. The world is so very full of bullshit; how can we possibly pick the bullshittiest? Obviously, it helps that this should have grown out of a TED talk. Obviously, it helps that the author feels he has to invent a silly word to convey the ineffable splendour of his concept when there is a perfectly good one (“best”) available already. But what really makes it stand out is the profound confusion that it displays about the idea of goodness.
Again and again, the website explains that “goodness” is not being used in any moral sense. “We’re not making moral judgments about countries. What we mean by a Good Country is something much simpler: it’s a country that contributes to the greater good of humanity.” But how can it not be a moral judgment whether a country contributes to the good of humanity or not? If it were not a moral judgment, why should we care?
Two things are on display here. The first is the assumption that statistics can reliably and interestingly measure all the important things about behaviour. That’s a brave assumption when applied even to those countries where statistics are reliable. When you run it across the world, the results are purely ludicrous. For instance Syria is boosted to 94th place in the world rankings for contributing to “world order” because it hosts a disproportionate number of refugees. That they are all Syrians, fleeing their own civil war, is not apparently relevant to the country’s ranking as a “good country”.
The second is the idea that “morality” is only problematic when it applies to sexual behaviour. This is often charged against rightwing Christians, but it’s astonishing how much it permeated the general culture. Whether you think there are far too many moral judgments being made, or far too few, it turns out that these almost always concern sexual behaviour. The morality of everything else is held to be so unproblematic that it does not exist.
This is because moral judgments are supposed to be a matter of simple consequentialism: you add up how much suffering you think is caused by an action and balance it against the amount of good. and hey presto! An objective measure of whether something is good or bad, and by how much.
This is a worldview without tragedy or realism. You might not miss the tragedy –though I think myself that it’s the defining experience of being human; but the lack of realism should worry everyone. This kind of reasoning can lead us only to a world where miserable reality becomes inescapable. In the meantime, why not relax and enjoy the bullshit – preferably by a Swedish lake?
• This article was amended on 9 June 2016. An earlier version said about 160,000 asylum seekers were estimated to have been admitted to Sweden on false pretences. Sweden received about 160,000 asylum applications last year and has said about 80,000 of those will be rejected.
