Welcome to the blog. On this page is found some general information about me and my work, followed by comments on this blog. There is, however, less about me personally than about the things I believe in. I write in English here and in some posts since I have friends and colleagues in other countries who do not speak Swedish, and since others abroad may wish to read me too.
Spirituality
Spirituality is a term that does not have to be used in the often too loose and undiscerning way that is common today. I find it to be the best one by which to designate my primary, general orientation.
Early on, in the 1970s, a series of so-called mystical and other spiritual experiences deepened and, on occasion, somewhat turbulently adjusted my outlook on life. They firmly established certain practices such as meditation, and reading and contemplation of the classics of spiritual literature, as the main focus of my life.
Although I thus undeniably knew some of the higher states of consciousness and of insight beyond the normal described by enlightened masters, I do not claim to be proficient and advanced in those practices. It is just that it is a fact that I was called by higher intuitions to devote my life primarily to them.
By the time of those early spiritual experiences, I had already come in contact with the Vedanta tradition and begun to practice yogic meditation. But I also studied from the beginning and drew inspiration from most of the other major spiritual traditions of the world, the other Eastern ones as well as the Abrahamitic religions dominant in the West. For as long as it existed, I was active in the Bhaktivedanta Society in Sweden. But, exploring Christianity, I also, during one period, worked for and lectured and taught in the Church of Sweden. Through the years I have been engaged in a continuous dialogue with various kinds of Christians, Jews, and Muslims.
In the course of this exploration and dialogue, I have, however, discerned what I find to be from the traditionalist Vedantic perspective some problems and limitations in Abrahamism in general, and throughout it all, I have remained primarily and basically a Vedantist. I find in Vedanta in general the deepest and most universal – in the purely metaphysical sense – manifestation of truth. The classic six darshanas, of which Vedanta is one, are interrelated and complementary perspectives on the broader Vedic tradition; my stress on the general, inclusive Vedanta here is intended to signal an acceptance and affirmation also of this broader tradition, including the other darshanas and not least Sankhya and Yoga (for more information on this, see Links).
What distinguishes human life is not only the capacity for abstract, conceptual thought and the development of tools for controlling nature. These are rather the subordinate products of the higher level of consciousness which produces in man a general broader reflection and an awareness of and insight regarding things that are for animals and plants unconscious - most importantly, the reality of death. Further, and higher, human development therefore goes beyond psycho-physical evolution, improved material conditions, logic/mathematics, science, technology, morality, humanistic culture, and scholarship, and consists essentially in making conscious what still normally remains unconscious also in human life - the nature of death, for instance, and what lies beyond it and beyond man’s psycho-physically conditioned and confined states of awareness. In other words, it consists in spiritual enlightenment.
This includes, or is accompanied by, insight regarding the phenomenal world, transcendence, the absolute, and our relation to all of this. Both the emphasis on the need for or at least the desirability of a comparatively high level of precision in this insight, achieved through intellectual discipline in conjunction with the other standard spiritual practices, and the degree of general Vedantic traditionalism, set my use of the term spirituality apart from that of many others today.
Another reason for my being a Vedantist is the continuities between pre-Christian Europe and the Vedic culture and tradition which produced Vedanta, continuities which I find must be taken into account for a proper historical understanding of European culture.
Still, the nature of Vedanta is such that I naturally stay close in spirit to the expression of universal truth - properly understood – to the extent that it can be considered to be expressed in other traditions as well. The universality of Vedanta may indeed be related to the understanding of universal elements in all traditional human cultures.
Humanities
But I am also interested in the coordination of the levels of spiritual and humanistic insight. Although my writing, scholarship, and academic teaching are probably not quantitatively impressive, I have contributed articles to academic journals and other publications since the mid-1980s, have taught the history of ideas at Lund University (and still do to some extent), and present papers at international conferences with some regularity.
I am best known for my book The Worldview of Personalism: Origins and Early Development (2006). It was favourably received, which led to a lecture tour in the U.S. and panels on it at two international conferences there. In 2008, an issue of the philosophical journal The Pluralist was devoted to the book.
I have sought to defend and transmit the legacy of the thought as well as the art, music, and literature of the West in terms of a philosophical worldview defined by concepts such as creative traditionalism, personalism, metaphysical idealism, and value-centered historicism - a worldview in some dimensions confined to the humanistic level, but always adjusted in accordance with, and thus coordinable with, the higher level of spiritual insight described in the previous section.
In terms of global perspectives, I have defended what I describe as a qualified pluralism, building partly on Claes G. Ryn’s application of his value-centered historicism in A Common Human Ground: Universality and Particularity in a Multicultural World (2003), but taking into account to a greater extent the distinctly spiritual traditions. It represents a vision of unity-in-diversity, a higher form of cosmopolitanism, which, in addition to the purely metaphysical understanding of universality, views universal values on the humanistic level not as abstractions and uniformities but as concretely manifested in and through the various cultures, peoples, and traditions. This view allows both for the preservation of multiplicity and differences, and for bridge-building and new syntheses.
It is also in line with this understanding that I have studied comparative (East-West) philosophy, religion, and spirituality, and, again, drawn not least on the Vedanta tradition in my own thinking as well as in my spiritual practice. As an integral humanistic level within a comprehensive Vedantic metaphysics (and the partly corresponding metaphysics of early Western traditions) the described worldview is provided a corrective with regard to the tendencies towards superficial modernist linear progressivism which, elsewhere, often characterize its constituents.
Promoting East-West scholarly bridgebuilding, I have participated in many seminars (including my own) at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, taught Western philosophy at Bhaktivedanta College in Belgium, and contributed to the moderated internet forum Vaishnava Advanced Studies (VAST). The latter is probably where most of my writing is found.
I have also been involved in exploring the possibility of starting a new, independent, traditional liberal arts college in Sweden. I am a member of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters (see Links).
Politics
The mentioned worldview also includes political philosophy, which accounts for much of my interest in politics and some aspects of my interest in political history. My political positions are determined by the insights on the spiritual and humanistic levels briefly indicated above.
I sometimes describe myself as a European post-paleoconservative. Paleoconservatism is a term introduced by Paul Gottfried for the purpose of distinguishing a more genuine form of American conservatism from neoconservatism, but I use it as applicable, and needed, also in the European context. The term post-paleoconservatism too was first used by Gottfried. By this designation, I mean to say that, having gone through and assimilated most of paleoconservatism, I find it lacks political representation today and seems to be no longer politically viable as such. The conservative parties of Europe have long ago relinquished conservatism altogether, and never even seriously tried properly to renew and develop it. Instead, we have seen a wholesale adoption on their part of the simplistic globalism, the multiculturalism and mass-immigrationism, and the general political correctness of the liberals and socialists.
The historical left – including liberals - has of course sometimes been justified in rejecting the right as oppressive and too rigid and inflexible in the face of new historical circumstances and scientific and other developments. Yet at the same time it has for the most part been inseparable from the underlying, problematic cultural dynamic of Western modernity in its main form. It has certainly sometimes effected needed, beneficent reform. But quite as often it has been an unscrupulous, violent, and often fully financed instrument of mere centralization and control. As such it has also enslaved the peoples and nations in new and insidious ways in the name of liberation, equality, and a base conception of democracy. It has systematically destroyed much of their cultures and traditions for the benefit of what can be called new pseudo-elites, i.e., of people who do not make creative use of the partial truths of modernity but affirm its stark ideological falsehoods, and whose work is thus predominantly anti- and countertraditional (in somewhat broader senses of those terms than the ones defined by René Guénon).
The partial truths floating about here and there in honest leftists’ view of corporate capitalism etc. need to be disentangled from their obviously false theoretical setting (there is no historical, material, rational, metaphysical, theological or other necessity about the historical left’s particular conceptions of the processes of modernity or their implications) and related to the larger and deeper analytical whole in which alone the truths and the meaning of their few valid perspectives can be fully understood. But I also find it important to note that the left-right paradigm can be exploited today for general ideological obfuscation, for dividing critics, and for thus consolidating problematic current power structures.
While some of the practical achievements of European social democracy should be affirmed and accepted, a viable creative supplementation of conservatism cannot come from the left itself, as such. It must still be part of a creative traditionalism, but it must constitute a new moment in its creativity, allowing it to develop more innovatively, in fresh and sometimes surprising ways, and to become more assertive. It must free conservatism from the tired spirit of undue compromise and politically correct drift that has so long dominated its mainstream. Not least, it must intelligently restore and renew some essential things which conservatism has relinquished and rejected in the course of this drift.
Among those things are the sound values of national community. I believe the most significant political development in Europe today is that essential elements of true conservatism, abandoned by the formerly conservative parties, have been taken over and inserted into their own political framework by the broadly, and more or less, “nationalist”, or rather, national conservative parties of Europe, that this has provided the needed supplementation, and that the result has proved to be politically viable.
This fruitful development already implies to some extent a return to the legacy of the alternative modernity of the nineteenth century, the exploration of whose potential was interrupted by the calamities of the twentieth, which produced, among other things, the extreme and radical nationalist ideological experiments whose lesson should now have been learned. This legacy can now, with the right intellectual and political leadership, be renewed and developed in terms of its own proper understanding of freedom, democracy, humanism, and the moral order. This, in turn, will be the necessary basis for the alternative European cooperation – “plus modeste mais plus efficace” - that will have to replace the disastrous current European Union.
Because of his significant career as a leading intellectual in Swedish social democracy turning conservative due to growing doubts about socialist ideology and the moral, social, and cultural realities of modernity, as well as, later, under the influence of spiritual and religious experiences and insights, Tage Lindbom became one of my most important theoretical inspirations in this field in the first half of the 1980s. We stayed in contact for the rest of his life, and in the mid-1990s, I was one of those who organized the evening meetings with Lindbom where mainly younger but on occasion also some prominent older intellectuals gathered to hear him speak about his life.
But the creative traditionalism I have sought to defend differs from Lindbom’s position in affirming the possibility of an alternative, partial, selective modernity as one of its integral parts, a modernity defined in terms of the worldview outlined in the previous section, and thus making possible the higher, qualified forms of democracy and freedom within the framework of the Rechts- and Kulturstaat.
I have taught the history of political philosophy at the City University in Stockholm, and lectured at the political think-tank Timbro and for the Swedish conservative party and related organizations.
(For more on politics, see the comments on the Links in the section Blog below.)
Psychiatry
I have provided dialogical advice to people with psychiatric disorders and their relatives, in and out of some organizations for such people, on the basis of my own familiarity with ”abnormal” psychological states gained in connection with some of my early spiritual and mystical experiences.
Having found my own experiences of this kind only occasionally painful and primarily interesting, I advise against the use of certain antipsychotic drugs or neuroleptics, which I find to be often more destructive than the disorders themselves. As is today well known, such drugs can cause persistent adverse effects, like tardive dyskinesia.
In the last few decades, through the impact of anti-psychiatry psychiatrists like R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, but primarily through figures like Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and several successful novelists and influential autobiographers, mental illness has become increasingly fashionable, trendy, something that confers aesthetic and intellectual status – to the point that some who speak of their illness can now be suspected of trying to exploit it for the purpose of making themselves interesting in the eyes of others.
I see this phenomenon as yet another expression of the legacy of romanticism in one side of modernism, and insist on the need for rejecting the implied relativism and defending the existence sound criteria of mental health and disease. I also think the whole ideological and cultural climate of the contemporary West is to a considerable extent such as to contribute to the generation of mental disease and, above all, to make it much harder to cure it, since, not least as manifested in the world of psychotherapy, it fails to encourage and teach patients how to simply pull themselves together, which is in most cases a necessary prerequisite of and sometimes even sufficient for recovery.
But I have come to agree with some analyses of and to understand the problems with the philosophical errors and the ideological abuse (not just in the Soviet Union) represented by mainstream psychiatry, and this has influenced my political and cultural analysis of the contemporary society of which psychiatry is a part. The standards I defend are therefore not at all those of the other, rationalist and scientist side of modernity.
Of course, I do not deny that there is also real, pathological mental illness. And there is certainly good psychiatry alongside the bad. But I try to point to what I think is the potential value and deeper meaning of many psychiatric disorders. I suggest they can have the function of breaking down lower orders of the mind and the ego, and establishing higher ones of the spirit.
Adequately handled, and refined in accordance with a proper moral and humanistic understanding, experiences in abnormal states can be further developed in the direction of spiritual enlightenment. I recommend that they be understood in the perspective of wider historical, cultural, philosophical, and spiritual references than the ones currently available in psychiatric diagnosis and treatment and in psychological therapy and councelling.
Arts
Although I have no creative achievements of my own to point to here, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry are central to my outlook on life, on both the spiritual and the humanistic level, and an integral part of all of the positions and activities described above. They are probably what I devote most of my time to.
I have been writing a collection of poems which, over the years, I have shown in different versions to, and discussed with, some of my literary friends, without however submitting it to any publisher. Beginning as a few somewhat hastily written love poems in the context of a vision of the relation between the Vedic and Jewish religious traditions, interspersed with unrelated meditations on nature and a few other, existential and Western cultural themes, it has developed continuously over three decades.
A well-known poet and critic who read one – by now relatively early – version of it in the early 1990s, while praising some individual poems and parts or aspects of others, found it (possibly quite rightly) to be as a whole too abstract. At about the same time, however, I did a public reading of some of the poems, which, judging from the response of the audience and the comments afterwards, was, remarkably, a success.
I have long regarded the work on these poems as part of a necessary process of development, deepening, and refinement of poetic perception and expression, of finding the proper voice in poetry, rather than something that will necessarily be completed in what I would be prepared to accept as a publishable form. But it should be included here since it is, I think, quite as much part of what I am about as anything else described on this page. Even if it is the only one, the mentioned reading was an outer and public manifestation of this work which I fully stand for, and I regard it, as such, as in a sense a sufficient contribution of mine to poetry.
Although even more slowly and with still less concrete results (and I hope pointing this out protects this statement from seeming unduly pretentious), something similar is going on inside me with regard to the other mentioned arts.
Blog
I have continued to write occasionally for newspapers and magazines, i.e., non-academic publications, and also to speak now and then to non-academic audiences. But I have never maintained any continuous media presence or visibility, and scholars are, of course, normally not well known. For these reasons, very many could perhaps not be expected to find and follow this blog of their own accord. Nevertheless, it has been suggested to me that I should have a personal website, so I thought I should perhaps at least start this modest blog, and fill it with some of the things I mention in my publications, presentations, and conversation. It could be convenient to be able to refer those who want to go deeper to it. It is not clear to what extent I will use it for my own writing.
On the Facebook page is found information about my Facebook profile - including lists of my Facebook groups and pages - and my general view of Facebook: I used to take Facebook seriously before they introduced the new Info tab, with which I find most of its value is lost; I now use it only occasionally.
There is a perhaps extraordinary number of links, all of them to websites and blogs where I find things of importance and relevance more frequently than elsewhere, and which I recommend all to visit and read regularly. But my adding a link does not - needless to say perhaps - imply that I endorse everything on the respective sites.
Quite a few are simply too liberal in the broad sense in which the term is used today. Others, alongside the many social, cultural, and historical analyses with which I agree, defend libertarian (classical liberal) political and economic positions with which I disagree. The ideology of both contemporary (twentieth-century) and classical (eighteenth- and nineteenth-century) liberalism are clearly at odds with the philosophy and values outlined in previous sections on this page. I am also against the current money system – of both capitalism and socialism – largely controlled by private international banks, whether or not it uses the gold standard.
A few sites, in their defence of the white peoples and their culture and society against the anti-white essence of the current political correctness, sometimes tend towards a reductionistically biological view of man which as an idealistic personalist and “spiritualist” I of course cannot endorse. Pointing this out, however, is not the same as denying that there is also a dimension of nature and biology that must be taken into account, and, more generally, an ethnic diversity in humanity which, while certainly not absolute or wholly changeless, is important and has a value in itself. Those sites also contain much of importance on the culture and history of the European peoples, to one of which I belong. Not least, on them are found valuable analyses of the nature of the current political correctness and globalization.
Those analyses do not for me imply that an alternative, higher globalization of sorts is not possible, an alternative along the lines suggested above (under Humanities), which rejects the heretofore predominant, controlling ideologies and interests. Because of my very different philosophical presuppositions, I disagree in this and other regards not just with the reductionistic racial identitarians but also more broadly - although I acknowledge some important partial truths - with the European nouvelle droite and its American counterparts. Humanity - and all life - is of course interrelated, and indeed in a deeper sense than the globalists think. It is certainly possible to achieve greater peace and harmony etc., on the condition of a higher degree of humane cultural development and spiritual enlightenment within a framework of renewed traditionalist recognition of the constitutive elements of order.
Then it should be said that some sites are undiscerning in their anti-Muslim and pro-Jewish positions, while others are too sweepingly critical of Jews and, in a few of those cases, silent with regard to problematic developments of Islam.
The Neo-Vedantist sites are included primarily because of the undeniable historical importance of this movement for the spread and cultural integration of Vedanta in the West; Neo-Vedantism in itself has serious weaknesses.
More examples of things I do not endorse could of course be given. But all of this is a price I suggest should be paid in our complex world. This far I find that, alongside whatever else there may be, and even as they contradict each other, all of the sites contain enough important information, truths, analyses etc. that are relevant to my own positions, to warrant inclusion of the links. My readers will be intelligent enough to understand that I do not - and indeed that no one could - agree with everything.
“Literature” is a subsection on the Links page, which contains links which are not to websites or blogs but, for instance, to sites with archival material, and Wikipedia pages. The open, collaborative, and evolving character of Wikipedia was from the beginning at least interesting, even when, in its early days, the quality and reliability of the articles were low. There are still problems; for instance, Wikipedia cannot be taken seriously when it cites sources such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center (and their counterparts in other countries) as authorities on conservative organizations and individuals. The quality of many of the articles has improved, however, so that Wikipedia is today sometimes a useful resource for blogging (not scholarly) purposes.
For those who wish to go deeper still, the References page provides a bibliography with selected titles of relevance for my posts, by category, and with links. On the Contents page are found all posts, with links, by category and in order of publication. The Index will take some time to complete with links, but meanwhile, the Search function in the sidebar can be used to find the posts containing the names and subjects entered without links.
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