Atheists can be surprisingly gullible. Don’t believe everything you hear about Pagan influences on Christianity.

We atheists can be quite gullible. During Easter this year, The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science posted an image on their Facebook page that made the incredible revelation that Easter was originally a festival for Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex. Then Emperor Constantine came and replaced Ishtar with Jesus, but you can still detect Easter’s pre-Christian origins in the Easter bunny and the Easter eggs.

70 000 skeptical atheists found this reasonable, and shared the image. Not convinced? Try saying “Ishtar” out loud. It sounds like “Easter”, spoken by Sean Connery, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, this is by coincidence. Every claim in that image was wrong. Most other languages than English and German use a word for Easter, such as the Norwegian påske, that derives from the Hebrew pesach, the Jewish Passover festival during which Jesus was crucified. It’s true, in a way, that the Christians “stole” Easter. They stole it from the same place they “stole” the Old Testament: From the Jews. During Passover, Jews sacrificed a lamb in memory of the Exodus from Egypt, and the Christians interpreted Jesus as a “Paschal Lamb” for the entire world.

It’s true, though, that the English word Easter has Pagan origins: It probably derives from the goddess Eostre ,but only because Germanic languages once named the month of April, when Easter is usually celebrated, after her. Saying that Easter is “really” or “originally” an Eostre festival because the names are related is like saying that Maundy Thursday, when Christians celebrate the Last Suppoer of Jesus, is “really” or “originally” a celebration of the Norse god Thor.

Questionable history

What makes this story particularly amusing is the source of the Easter theory the Richard Dawkins Foundation promotes: Protestant anti-Catholics who wanted to prove that the Pope was the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelations.

Looking for links between Christianity and Paganism is in fact quite the historical minefield, full of dubious theories from uncritical amateurs. It all began with the Protestants, who right from the beginning condemned the Catholic Church for being full of Pagan elements. The Saints, Protestants believed, were a form of polytheism. The Virgin Mary was a mother goddess, probably taken from a Pagan mystery religion. The Catholics, of course, defended themselves against these accusations. The argument was very heated, but they did eventually stop shooting at each other.

Next came atheists, agnostics and folklorists in the 19^th century who put Protestantism under scrutiny as well, and found even more Pagan influences. For is there not something oddly Pagan about this winter feast and spring festival in honor of a God who dies and is resurrected every year? Unfortunately their creativity sometimes got away with them. Nor were they entirely free of hidden agendas either, for it is certainly a good way to undermine Christianity, to show that its elements were stolen from somewhere else.

The neo-Pagans of the 20^th century weren’t too fond of Christianity either, and added even more instances of creative historiography to this already crowded mine field.

The result has been several centuries worth of questionable (but entertaining) historical theories, and a big mess for the more reliable historians to clean up.

Christian skepticism

In other words, there are no guarantees that atheists know what they’re talking about when it comes to the history of religion – or that Christians don’t. This may come as a surprise, but some Christians are actually quite well versed in the history of their own Church.

One such person is the Norwegian Christian skeptic Bjørn Are Davidsen, who blogs and writes books about Church myths that are popular with non-believers, such as that the Council of Nicaea in 325 decided that women have souls, that the medieval Church thought the Earth was flat, and that the Christians stole Easter, Christmas, and everything else that is fun from the Heathens.

Whenever a Christian festival approaches, a good piece of advice is to wait for the annual newspaper article that explains its supposed Pagan origins, and then check Bjørn Are Davidsens blog to see what he wrote when the same claim circulated last year.

It’s not strange that popular myths emerge about the history of religion. Much of our religious past is poorly documented, which makes it easy for motivated amateurs to see things in the fog that aren’t there. Especially since the things you see when you squint hard are so entertaining.

The real story of Christianity’s interaction with Paganism is duller, and suffers from an annoying lack of solid answers and conspiracies of cape-clad Satanists meeting under the St. Peter’s Basilica to preserve the secret of the Holy Grail.

But it’s only a little duller. Actually, it’s not dull at all.

The early Christians

The early Christians were anti-Pagans. They didn’t have the word “Paganism” at first, but they were against everything this word represents, the entire Greco-Roman religious tradition. Christian artists would sometimes borrow visual elements they were familiar with from Pagan art, which is why you could find images where Jesus looked like Apollo. And as more and more educated people became Christians, it didn’t take them long to find things to admire in Greco-Roman philosophy. But the early Christians did not go about borrowing Pagan ideas and festivals. They rejected them. The Christians were that weird and quarrelsome sect who believes that everything you’ve been told is wrong.

They took their theology and search for historical sources quite seriously. If you as a non-believer want to learn about the ideas of the historical Jesus, there are in fact several first century historical documents that are a good place to start: The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. You’ll need to read them more critically than they do in church, of course, but it was not by accident or conspiracy that these particular books were selected for the Bible, out of all the many gospels that were available. The early Christians were concerned about finding credible sources for their faith, and modern historians believe that they actually did a pretty ok job.

Other parts of the Christian tradition were taken less seriously, such as the birth date of Jesus. Not only do Matthew and Luke offer different birth narratives, but the very first Christians didn’t find this an interesting event to celebrate, and the date itself emerged only late and half-heartedly, perhaps in the 3^rd century. It is unlikely that the date was taken from the Roman celebration of Sol Invictus. More plausibly, December 25 happens to be 9 months after the death of Jesus. This would mean that he was killed and conceived on the same day, a nice symmetry.

The Christian contempt for the Pagans was mutual, which sometimes caused them to be persecuted. It’s a myth that Christians were constantly being thrown to the lions. The persecutions were sporadic, and usually came from below, among the people, rather than from above. The Christians were persecuted because they refused to take part in emperor worship and other official religious rites that ensured society’s protection by its gods. This meant that the Christians were a security threat, and a natural place to put the blame for a bad harvest. The Jews were usually tolerated, because they were an old and venerable religion, and usually kept their faith to themselves. The Christians were young and brash, and aimed to convert everyone. Rumor had it that they ate infants and practiced incest.

Surviving a persecution was not necessarily all that difficult: You just had to reject your Christian faith and take part in a Pagan ritual. But the alternative could be death. A pragmatic but brutal solution to the moral panic that emerged from time to time about the Christian peril. One of the hottest debates among early Christians was over what to do with all those who had rejected their faith under threat, but wanted to return to the Church once the persecution was over.

The last pagans

Everything changed in the 4^th century. After one final empire-wide persecution of the Christians, Rome got an emperor, Constantine, who converted to Christianity. This caused the formation of a Christian power elite in Rome, and made it convenient and fashionable to convert to Christianity. Now it was the Pagans’ turn to be persecuted, and more thoroughly than the Christians had been. Step by step, the people Christians now referred to as Pagans were stripped of their religious freedoms.

The conflict between the Christian and the Pagan aristocracy climaxed near the end of the 4^th century, when Pagan generals rebelled against Emperor Theodosius, who had made Christianity the official, and only permissible, religion of the Empire. They lost.

But all this was still only the beginning. Christianity was a city religion. It stood strong among educated and powerful urbanites, but weak in rural areas, where most people lived. Rural people were skeptical of the new gods of urbanites, (as they also are today). They were more interested in practical rituals that would ensure a good harvest than in intricate theological analysis.

The Christianization of the Roman Empire went slowly, very slowly. Even in the 8^th century, hundreds of years after Christianity had been made state religion, current and former Romans were still being Christianized, a process that partly involved missionary work, and partly the use of power and privilege. Then the turn came to the barbarians in the north, with the same pattern repeating itself. First the Church would arrive and find allies among the kings, who were eager to associate themselves with this educated, urban and powerful religion. Then they would spend the following couple of centuries combatting Pagan traditions among the common people – or at least do their best to move these traditions into a Christian framework.

Slowly, Christianity moved northwards. Much of the Christianization of the Germanic tribes took place in the 8^th century. In England it received a setback in the 9^th century when the Vikings came, but by the 10^th and 11^th centuries the turn had come to Scandinavia. The Baltics remained Pagan until the 13^th century, and not until the 18^th century was there a serious effort to Christianize the Sami people of northern Scandinavia.

Elements of Pagan culture often survived in a Christianized form, especially among the Irish, who moved much of their cultural heritage on to Christian saints such as St. Brigid. Some sacred were destroyed. Christians had little interest in sacred trees, for instance. Other sacred places, such as holy wells and springs, were often reused by linking them to Christian saints. Heights on which Gauls and Germanics worshipped “Woden” (more or less) were dedicated to St. Michael. Pagan buildings were supposed to be torn down, but it was sometimes found more economical to redecorate them as churches.

Who owns Christmas?

In other words, Paganism, the label Christians gave to Europe’s pre-Christian religions, left many traces in European culture before it passed away. Some of them are with us still. In Norway it was King Haakon the Good, who brought the Christian faith home with him from England, who moved the Norse yule feast to coincide with Christmas. He thus gave us a festival that contains both the infant Jesus and home-brewed yule beer, as well as the Scandinavian word for Christmas, jul.

Does this mean that Christmas is “really” a Pagan festival, or is it perhaps instead “really” Christian, even when non-Christians celebrate it? “Really” is a dangerous word, because it suggests that once a tradition has been one thing, it can’t later change into something else. This is a boring way to look at traditions. See them instead as rivers through history, which split and join together, and change shape along the way.

When Christianity stood strong in Norway, Christmas was primarily a Christian festival, because we filled it with Christian content, (and a bit more). Today we are less Christian, and fill Christmas more with other things. Traditions change because we change. They reflect who we are, and we’re not the same as in the year 1900, 1400, or 900.

And there are far more interesting ways to search for connections between Paganism and Christianity than the ones provided us by amateur history. For instance, could it be that because humans in all places and all ages are in many ways the same, the same religious themes tend to show up from time to time in different clothing? Could it be that the reason that Christian cultures have a rich religious universe that in some ways resemble Pagan ones, is that it is natural for people to see traces of the sacred and supernatural in the world around them?

Modern Pagans

Whatever the cause, religious experimentation continues to this day, at the same rapid pace as always, despite all secular exhortations to let the gods die off. Some have even attempted to revive the ancient Pagan religions. This has sometimes been done with the aid of dubious historical theories. When Gerald Gardner introduced Wicca in England in the 1950s, he claimed that he was simply reviving a witchcraft tradition that had lived in hiding since pre-Christian times. The witch trials of the Reformation era had been an attempt to eradicate this Pagan religion, but it had survived in the dark corners and deep woods of England, and was now ready to step out into the light again.

Gardner was mistaken. But was his attempt to give Wicca roots in the Pagan past more questionable than the attempts of the Christians to find prophesies of Jesus in the Jewish scriptures? It doesn’t seem so to me.

Nor am I able to laugh at modern-day witches and other neo-Pagans, any more than I am able to laugh at Protestants, Catholics, Muslims or Jews, nor of Astarte Inspiration, the “angel school” of Norway’s Princess Märtha Louise. Their biggest difference is their age, but the old were young once too, and were equally mocked by their contemporaries.

We can judge religions by whether they are true, in which respect they all, in my opinion, fall short, or we can judge them by the effect they have on society and their followers. Here the answer is too complicated for us to place priests firmly on one side, and witches and clairvoyants firmly on the other. It depends. Christianity gave shape to Western democracy and enlightenment ideals, and deserves credit for that, but that is no excuse for the contempt monotheists and atheists often express against “Pagan superstitions” and “sects”.

A few things, though, are certain: That those who dream of a world without religion are utopians, that non-believers can be quite gullible, and that Christians are sometimes better informed about Church history than journalists and Facebook atheists. And that when new ideas emerge from the cities, you can safely ignore them for a couple of centuries.

[Translated from Aftenposten.no, Da de kristne møtte hedningene, 07.05.2013]

Ateister kan være veldig godtroende. På tide med litt religionshistorisk folkeopplysning.

Les artikkelen hos Aftenposten.no.

We know we have to do something about climate change, but all we do is sit with folded hands and wait for a climate fix to fall into our laps. Should Norway take the lead by closing down the North Sea oil fields?

2013 is one more step on the road to our future climate. We don’t know what that climate will be like. We do know that the climate won’t change equally everywhere. The impact will vary. In some places it may even be positive. But for the world as a whole, the change is likely to be for the worse.

How does one talk meaningfully about climate change? One way is to focus on specific threats, such as sea level rise, species extinction, threats to food production, and the cost of adapting to our future climate. But this is so specific that in a way it actually obscures the central issue. After all, one may think, I don’t live by the sea, I don’t particularly like animals, and I’m an adaptable person who can probably handle whatever the future throws at me. So perhaps I don’t have anything to worry about?

A better way to think about climate change is that we’re rolling the dice in a game we don’t know the rules to, and where everything we own is at stake. The result will affect not only the climate you experience at first hand, like the climate you feel on your skin on a spring day. It will also affect the climate you take for granted: The climate your food is produced in, the climate the economy depends on, and the climate that affects the international situation.

It’s possible that the rules of this game will be nice to us. But it really doesn’t look that way. And we won’t know until it’s too late.

So here we are in 2013, with the sound of dice rolling in the distance. And what are we doing about it? We do what we did in 2012, in 2009, and 2001. We talk about it a bit. This makes us sad, because it all seems so hopeless. And then we shrug and change the topic to something nicer.

The easy climate debate

One of the ways we pass the time while we wait for the new climate to reveal itself is by having “climate debates”, where we discuss whether we can really be sure about any of this. These debates usually start with one of our eternal optimists relaying a piece of hopeful news, such as the tabloid rumor that the world hasn’t gotten any warmer in the last 16 years. Or they’ve heard about an unpublished research paper that indicates that the problem may be slightly smaller than expected.

And then we’re off again with another “climate debate”. When confronted with their desperate and not very scientific optimism, the usual reply is that surely there’s nothing wrong with asking questions?

No, there isn’t. And answering those questions is fun too. Last year I wrote an article where I looked into the current state of affairs among climate skeptics, and discovered that despite all their noise and efforts, they’re no closer to an alternative climate theory now than they were, well, 16 years ago.  I enjoyed doing the research for that article, and I love hearing about the latest developments in climate science. Science is fun. And there are few controversial debates where being up to date on scientific research will help you as far along as it does in the climate debate.

So, yes, we could do a repeat of that, if you like. In response to the “16 years without warming”, I could write a couple of pages about how, when the temperature varies as much from year to year as it does in the atmosphere, it is easy to select a period where it seems to be stable, when in fact the long-term trend is rising. I could point out that only a fraction of global warming goes into heating up the atmosphere, that most of it actually heats up the ocean.

This is exciting stuff. Climate science is fun.

But it feels like a distraction. We’re talking about something that is relatively easy, climate science, while avoiding the really difficult topic: Climate policy. The climate science debate is important in some countries, but in Norway climate skepticism is politically irrelevant. There are some eternal optimists in the Progress Party, but let’s be fair: It’s not their fault that the rest of us aren’t doing anything.

Yes, I could go after the climate skeptics one more time, and a good time would be had by all. But most of my readers will think: Yes, we know this. We’ve known this for years. But what are we going to do about it? Tell us that.

And that question shuts me up. The answer is that I don’t have a clear answer, because every time I think about climate policy I end up running around in circles, until I get dizzy and give up. This bothers me.

Norway seen from the outside

It bothers many of us. We all know that climate change is important, but every time we try to grab hold of this subject and discuss it properly, it slips through our fingers, like smoke. And then we give up, and talk about other things.

Meanwhile, the CO2 level continues to creep upward by about 2 ppm per year, and seems more likely to accelerate than anything else. And we don’t even know how to start talking about it.

Maybe it would help if a sociologist from Mars visited Norway, analyzed us, and helped us to understand the hole our climate debate has become stuck in.

Oddly enough, that is precisely what somebody has done. Not a Martian, but an American, which amounts to much the same. In the early 2000s, the sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard visited a community in Western Norway to study how ordinary Norwegians deal with the prospect of climate change. The result is a book that is somewhat uncomfortable reading, Living in Denial.

Norgaard observes us through the eyes of an anthropologist, making notes about everything from local traditions to the correct equipment for an authentic Norwegian skiing trip. The year she visits this community, Norway has an unusually warm winter, and the local tourist industry suffers from a lack of snow. People connect this climate change, and worry about the future.

But they do nothing about it. There’s no arena in the local community where climate change belongs as a topic. The local politicians see it as a national issue, and bring it up only in the form of rousing but empty rhetoric. (The national politicians do the same, kicking the topic further up, to the global stage.) The local newspaper does mention the warm winter, but fails to connect it to anything larger, doesn’t make an issue out of climate change being a problem with local relevance. The topic shows up in people’s small talk, but only to express a general sense of frustration and worry.

Norgaard observes that when Norwegians try to talk seriously about climate, the conversation quickly ends up in a dead zone, grinding to a halt when everybody realizes just how hopelessly difficult this issue is. People find different ways to cope with this unease. Some cope by being in full control of the facts of climate change, and demonstrating this control with pride, while at the same time having an emotional distance to it, as if it doesn’t really concern them personally. Others cope by changing the topic to “Amerika“, that mythic country far away where the climate bully George W. Bush and his oil buddies ravage the land.

Any American who has had the misfortune of getting into a discussion about politics with a Norwegian can attest that we love to rant about Amerika. And yes, there is little to be happy about in US climate policy. But what about our own responsibility for climate change? What about our own equally ineffective efforts? Well, that brings us back to the dead zone. Fade to black, next topic, please.

Norwegians believe ourselves to be farmers at heart, a sturdy and pragmatic people who live in harmony with nature. But Norgaard reminds us that this is no longer true. We’re urbanites in an oil nation now, no matter how often we go skiing in the mountains. It’s our actions and our oil that causes climate change.

We also believe ourselves to be idealists, people who put ethical considerations above material ones. But our primary response to the climate crisis since it emerged on the global stage in the late 1980s has been to multiply our oil production, and increase our CO2 emissions.

Our part of the problem

It feels a bit impolite for a foreign sociologist to come over here and put us up against the wall like that. What did she expect them to do, these ordinary people in a small community in a small country in Europe?

Well, they could have talked seriously about climate change without joking it away, hoping it away, or shrugging it off. They could have made it a topic in the local newspaper and in local politics. If other people, in other communities, had done the same, this might have created a nation-wide pressure for a meaningful climate policy.

They could have acted as citizens who take responsibility for the world they live in.

They didn’t. Neither did the rest of us. This is why climate change has been sidelined as an issue in Norway, as in so many countries, cared about only by irrelevant parties like the Liberals and the Socialist Left.

We do have a climate policy. It consists of setting climate goals we later abandon, proposing climate fixes we fail to implement, and enacting climate policies that are compromises between the half-hearted and the meaningless.

Here’s our part of the problem: Norway emits just over 50 million tons of CO2 equivalents every year. (The global level is about 1000 times that.) This is the part of the problem we usually talk about. And then there are the 500 million tons of CO2 that are emitted from the oil and gas we export every year. Maybe they’re a little bit our part of the problem as well? We certainly profit nicely from it.

A third of our emissions go to the production of oil and gas, a third to transport, and a third to industry, more or less. Our electricity already comes from a sustainable energy source, hydropower. So in order to reduce our emissions there are two things we need to do: 1) Move our energy use away from fossil fuels, for instance by switching our offshore platforms and our cars over to electricity. And, 2) use less electricity and/or produce more from sustainable sources.

It’s as simple as that.

Round and round in circles

Well, in theory, anyway. Creating climate policies that achieve this in real life is considerably harder, as we learned when the NRK investigative program Brennpunkt looked into Norway’s “green certificates” policy last year. Green certificates are a subsidy of renewable energy sources. They were introduced in 2012, and are currently causing a large expansion of our hydro and wind power capacity.

But as the Brennpunkt reporter discovered, it is doubtful if the policy actually does anything to reduce CO2 emissions. Yes, we will produce more electricity from sustainable sources, but the offshore industry has no plans for switching to electricity any time soon. Even if they, the gas they’d no longer use at the oil platforms would just be sold off to be used somewhere else instead. Electric cars aren’t likely to take off much in the next years either, so we can’t use the power there. We could sell it, but because we’re part of the EU trading system for CO2 emissions, this will simply enable others to increase their own CO2 emissions.

The CO2 trading system effectively sets a limit on how fast European countries can reduce their emissions, and is designed so that it is often more effective for Norway to pay other countries to reduce their CO2 emissions than it is for us to reduce our own. The designers of the system may see this as proof of its cleverness, but the side effect of treating it as a law of nature is that there are CO2 emissions we actually could reduce, but choose not to. With most of the world reluctant to doing anything meaningful at all, that’s not a luxury we can afford.

There’s this moment anyone who thinks seriously about a climate solution eventually comes to, when we discover that we’re running around in circles. Here’s a nice idea A, but it won’t work because we’re not also doing B, and B won’t work because we’re not also doing A, and they’re both incredibly difficult. One may be a technological pipe dream, another may be politically impossible, and a third may have perverse side effects. And so round and round we go, until we exhaust ourselves and give up.

Objections like those brought up by Brennpunkt are clever, but perhaps they’re actually too clever. They remind me of Zeno, the ancient philosopher who proved that it is impossible to run 100 meters, because before you can do that, you must first have run half the way, and before you can get half the way, you must first have run half the way of that again, and so on down into infinity. And in a sense Zeno was right, because while you stand there and think about this paradox, you won’t get anywhere at all, while your less intelligent buddy doesn’t know any better, and just starts running.

It’s easy to forget just how simple the solution is: We need to emit fewer greenhouse gases. In order to do this, we will need to build more sustainable energy sources. And that’s it. The fact that small efforts are often ineffective is not an argument for doing less, but for doing more, and thinking bigger.

What you can do about climate change

By thinking bigger I don’t mean convincing everyone to turn off the lights in your rooms when you leave them. If everybody does a little, we achieve only a little, as David MacKay points out in his excellent book on sustainable energy. Climate change, unfortunately, requires a political solution. We use politics for many dumb things in Norway, and we ought to stop doing that. But important and difficult problems like climate change are exactly the kind of problems we need politics for.

This is where you enter the picture. Yes, there is something you can do about climate change, because a political solution requires political will. So you need to tell the politicians who represent you how important this issue is to you. Tell them what sacrifices you’re willing to make. Could you live with higher taxes? Could you accept subsidies that aren’t immediately effective, as in the “green certificates” case? How about windmills on the horizon? And one day we might start talking seriously about nuclear energy in Norway. What will it take for you to accept a nuclear power station in your home town?

Politicians do hesitate to solve climate change because they lack ideas, but because they think you will hate them. Tell them that they’re wrong. They’ll find that interesting, because politicians rather enjoy getting reelected. That’s what you can do about climate change. This is especially important of you vote for a major party. I think we all understand that nothing big will happen about Norwegian CO2 reductions until Labor and the Conservatives get behind it.

Ending the oil age

In climate policy debates everyone wants to be realist. But I feel like ending this article on a note of unrealism. I want to return to those 500 million tons of CO2 that are emitted from the oil and gas Norway exports every year. That’s ten times our own emissions, and one hundredth of the entire world. These CO2 emissions pay for our future pensions, through their funding of the petroleum fund, but we curiously silent about them. We remember the income, but not the cost this places on others.

So here is a thought experiment. Let us imagine that Norway today announces that as far as we are concerned, the oil age is over. We will not be looking for any more oil and gas, neither in Lofoten or anywhere else, and we will from now on be gradually phasing out production in our existing fields. After a while it will all be over. Everyone will pack up and return home.

What would happen if we actually did this? First, it would create a big stir, shocking, scaring and inspiring people all over the world. Perhaps climate activists in other oil countries would point to us and say, “Look to Norway – they’re leaving the oil age. We can do that too.” Others will laugh at how incredibly stupid we are.

Next, our economy will suffer. Oil and gas revenues will dwindle away. We may manage quite well for a time, but then perhaps a future global crisis pushes us over the edge and reveals what the pessimists have been fearing all along: That oil has made us spoiled and unproductive. Then we’ll be lying there with a broken back like some Mediterranean country.

The climate certainly won’t thank us. By reducing our own oil and gas production we simply make it more profitable for others to expand theirs. Norwegian natural gas may be replaced with coal, which emits far more CO2.

So it’s a bad idea. Or is it? Norway will have to wean itself off its oil revenues sooner or later. The decline in production has already begun, and the investments we need to make to keep up our production level are already dangerously large. If our oil and gas income is currently hiding major weaknesses in the Norwegian economy, might it not be better to uncover these weaknesses sooner, rather than later?

Might it not be better to drop the dream of easy money and return to an older, more viable model: The one where you learn a skill the world needs, and then use that skill to make a living for as long as your mind and body is up to it? You’ll have a pension and welfare benefits to fall back on, but not as much as you deserve, because we have no magic wand that creates stuff. All we have is what we do. Today we have more, but that’s just luck. It won’t last. We should not grow dependent on it.

And in the long term, the world is going to have to leave a lot of oil, gas and coil in the ground, unused, if we’re serious about slowing down climate change. Unfair? Perhaps. But nature isn’t fair. Nature just is what it is. And what it is, is a system we should not release a lot more CO2 into, preferably no more than 565 billion tons CO2 before midcentury. The problem is that there are currently 2795 billion tons of CO2 in the world’s known deposits of oil, gas and coal.

At some point we are going to have to stop, and leave the rest in the ground. There’s no reason why Norway shouldn’t be the first to do this.

The realists respond

It feels liberating to be unrealistic, doesn’t it? And there would be something clarifying, I think, about the criticism and idea like this would be met with, if it were proposed by someone with political weight.

The criticism would come in four waves. First would come a vanguard of climate skeptics, with their usual mix of internet rumors, misconceptions and pet theories. Then, the naive rationalists would join in – those who have calculated that climate change isn’t all that dangerous, so we might as well cool down and see what happens. They’re cousins to those economists who, when the economy sees good times, advise you to place yourself neck-deep in debt, because their theories say that the good times are here to stay.

Then the real heavyweights would join in the criticism: The selfish, who will remind us that the oil and gas is, after all, our property, and nobody has the right to ask us not to use it. And finally will come the realists, who will tell us that, although potentially a good idea, it is political and economically impossible. Nobody else will be doing it either, so we might as well accept the climate we’re getting, and try to make the best of it.

These last two waves will be the hardest to deal with. The selfish because selfishness tends to win, and the realists because realists tend to be right.

And with these same arguments we can dispose of all other climate solutions as well, from the most cautious to the most radical: Electrification of the North Sea oil platforms, CO2 tax increases, and subsidies for electric cars and sustainable energy. They can all be dismissed with the same arguments, from the same critics. Only the cheapest climate solutions survive, the ones that don’t matter.

But if this is how it is going to be, let us at least be honest with ourselves. Let us admit that the fairy tale we’ve stumbled into is not one of the traditional Norwegian ones where a poor but kind-hearted boy finds great riches and lives happily ever after, but the H. C. Andersen one where your magical shoes keep on dancing even when you no longer want them to.

And let us also admit to ourselves that our self-image as idealists and simple, pragmatic farmers is undeserved. We’re not those people any more, if we ever were.

We’re certainly allowed to keep on hoping, though. I’m sure the politicians will think of something, eventually. Or perhaps the scientists? They’re awfully clever. For there’s one part of the Norwegian national character nobody can take away from us, as we sit here and wait patiently for others to deliver the climate fix: Our beautiful, dumb hope.

Les artikkelen hos Aftenposten.no.

The recent years of financial turmoil have taught us how little it sometimes takes to trigger a financial crisis. We’ve lived through so many of these moments now, and in a way they’re all really the same moment, repeated over and over again like in a nightmare: A stock market, a bank, a currency, or an entire economy, stands on the edge of the abyss. We know that if it falls, it will take others down with it, and they in turn may bring down others. If this is allowed to go on unchecked, the whole world economy may be in danger.

Sound familiar? It should, and there’s no reason to think we’ve seen the end of it. As a market libertarian it pains me to say this, but much of the global economy and financial system as we know it today is fragile.

It’s fragile in much the same way as a vase standing on the edge of a table is fragile. Perhaps the vase has been in your family for a hundred years, much like an old and respectable bank, but that is of no help whatsoever if it does in fact now stand on the edge of the table, and somebody bumps into it. It will fall, break into pieces, and be gone for good. The fragility of the vase follows from the material it is made of – and from the stupidity of the person who placed it on the edge of the table. Later they’ll offer all sorts of excuses. How could they have predicted that anyone would bump into it? It was quite unlikely, look, here are the calculations. But these excuses are of no help to anyone. The vase is gone.

If you look around you, at things big and small, at objects, organizations and systems, you’ll find many examples of things that are fragile, and can be destroyed if the right person bumps into it in the right way. But the Lebanese-American thinker Nassim Taleb argues in his new book Antifragile that there also exist things that are the exact opposite of fragile. Things that are not merely robust, but beyond robustness, such that accidents and chance events tend to make them better and stronger – much like a vase that becomes harder to break every time you drop it on the floor.

One example of this, according to Taleb, is the aviation industry. Whenever an airplane has an accident, an attempt is made to discover why, correct the problem, and prevent it from ever happening again. The paradoxical result of this learning process is that it becomes safer to fly for every plane that crashes. The plane itself is fragile, but the airline industry is the opposite of fragile – unexpected events improve it.

You see the same phenomenon in industries where the level of competition and entrepreneurship is high. The nightlife in your city gets better for every restaurant that goes bankrupt. The bankruptcy itself is a sad event, and negative for those concerned, but the overall result of bankruptcies is to improve the quality of those that survive.

Your body, too, deals with certain types of stress by improving. When you exercise, you expose yourself to an unexpected strain. You tear and stress your muscles, and it hurts. But after a few days you’re not just all right again, you’re stronger than you were before. Your muscles are the opposite of fragile – stress makes them stronger.

Nassim Taleb’s new word for this opposite of fragility is antifragility. I love neologisms, and enjoy creating them. The right new word sharpens the mind, and makes useful concepts easier to think about. Antifragility lights up a part of the world we often overlook: Things that grow stronger from chaos, uncertainty, resistance and stress.

Searching for black swans

Nassim Taleb is best known for his previous book, The Black Swan from 2007, (which I have discussed earlier). In it, he warned that economists, politicians and social scientists tend to underrate the importance of unlikely events. They believe in a world of friendly bell curve distributions, where what is unlikely is also unimportant. In reality, it is unlikely events that shape history. The September 11 terrorist attacks shaped an entire decade of international politics. The Harry Potter novels conquered the imagination of an entire generation of children and youths.

In retrospect, both of these events seem inevitable, but this is only a comforting story we tell ourselves to make the world seem intelligible. Reality is chaotic. The friendly stories come later.

Based on his experience from working in the financial industry, Taleb believed that this industry was particularly ignorant of the importance of negative, unexpected events, and thus also particularly vulnerable to them. He warned that the mortgage institution Fannie Mae was sitting on a basement full of dynamite, and might explode any moment. Then the financial crisis came, and proved him right. Many have claimed that they predicted it. Taleb bet money that it would happen – and made a profit.

After The Black Swan and the financial crisis, many have hailed Taleb as a prophet, and asked him to predict “the next Black Swan”, misunderstanding Taleb’s gloomy message, which was that such predictions are impossible. Black swans are, and always will be, unexpected. Taleb had not predicted the events that would topple the financial markets. He had simply observed that they were poorly prepared to deal with the unexpected.

Consider the vase that stands on the edge of the table. You don’t need to predict who is going to bump into it, or when, or why. All you need to do is ask yourself what will happen if somebody does bump into it. It will fall down, and break. Which means it’s a good idea to place it further in on the table.

Taleb believes that not only is it impossible to predict the specific events that will push the vase over the edge of the table, it is harmful to even try. So what should one do instead? What is the financial equivalent of moving the vase away from the edge? In 2007, Taleb had no answer to this question. Now, in Antifragile, he does, or at least he proposes a perspective for finding one. Financial institutions should give up trying to predict the unpredictable, and instead do something about their real problem: Their fragility. They should try to become robust to unexpected events, or, even better, antifragile. Had they done this in the early 2000s, they would have survived the financial crisis we had, but also all the other financial crises we could have had instead.

In practice this means replacing the misguided quest for perfect predictions with simpler heuristics, such as favoring situations with an limited downside and an unlimited upside over those with a limited upside and an unlimited downside.

Unlimited upside

Taleb aims much broader than at saving financial markets. As the examples at the start, of airplanes and restaurants and muscles, illustrate, he sees fragility and antifragility everywhere in the world around us.

Fragility is simply any condition where the potential upside is limited while the downside is unlimited, a situation where things will probably turn out well, but only a little well, and in the worst case they may end in disaster. The best a bank with large loans and investments may hope for is to get their money back with a bit of profit on top. But in the worst case, they’ll lose more money in a day than they’ve earned in total since the last crisis.

Or, imagine that you own an uninsured house. The best thing that can possibly happen to your house, and the most likely, is that nothing will happen to it, and it remains standing just as it is. But the worst that can happen is that it burns down and you lose everything except for your debt. Fragility feels safe, but the fact that the upside is more probable is outweighed by the fact that the downside is so horrible.

Antifragility is the opposite of this, a condition where the potential downside is limited, but the upside is unlimited. A situation where things will probably go badly, but only a little badly, and in the best case they will go really well. An everyday example is that you ask someone out for a date. The worst, and most likely, outcome is that they decline, which is sad but no disaster. But the best outcome is that you will find someone to spend the rest of your life with.

Or let’s say you write a novel. The worst, and most likely, outcome is that you will have wasted your time, because nobody wants to read it. Again, this is sad, but no disaster. You’ve lost time and effort, but it is a limited loss. But the best possible outcome is practically unlimited: That you will have written the next Harry Potter or Fifty Shades of Grey.

Antifragility is frightening, but the fact that the downside is more probable is outweighed by the fact that the upside is so wonderful.

Which of these situations you’re in determines how you feel about random events. When you’re fragile, chance is an enemy you want to protect yourself from. When you are antifragile, chance is not only a welcome friend, but a necessary one. Randomness will do nothing good for your uninsured house, but it could do wonders for your novel.

In an antifragile system, what is negative on one level may be positive on a higher level. As readers, we benefit from all the countless authors who are probably wasting their time writing books nobody will read, because among them there will also be a few good ones. And it’s because of entrepreneurs who start restaurants that will probably go bankrupt that food lovers can pick and choose among the good ones that survive.

Taleb sees these people as martyrs and everyday heroes. They get the downside, we the upside.

In an antifragile system, we must embrace randomness and stressors. If instead we protect ourselves against it, all the benefits of antifragility disappear. If nobody dares to write novels, because they’re afraid of failing, we will get no more Harry Potters. If you stop stressing your muscles, because you can’t stand the pain, they will waste away. And if you avoid adversity in small things, you will be unprepared to deal with it in large things.

The Swedish psychiatrist David Eberhard has argued that Scandinavians are addicted to the feeling of being safe. They would rather live their lives from beginning to end in a sterile bubble, free of pain and stress. But sooner or later the bubble bursts, and when it does, you are as fragile as an animal born in captivity that is released into the wild.

Not quite libertarianism

Safety-obsessed politicians aim to create a safe economy, free from downturns, bankruptcies and layoffs. But protecting the economy by preventing failure is like protecting your body by avoiding exercise. And when the crisis finally does arrive, despite all your best efforts, it will do more damage than if you had allowed yourself to weather it earlier. You end up with an economy of dinosaurs: Expensive, unprofitable, and too big to fail.

This may sound like market libertarianism, and it almost is, but not quite. Taleb detests the naive rationalism of many economists. He sees them as ornithologists who would teach birds how to fly. And their dream of a highly efficient global economy is making the world more fragile.

Taleb does not disapprove of all economists. He borrows heavily from Friedrich Hayek, the patron saint of pragmatic libertarians. Hayek’s main idea was that it is not possible even for a well-intended central government to control and run an entire economy. They simply do not have access to the necessary information, which is distributed among all the actors, all the companies and individuals who make up the economy, and can never be gathered in one place. Therefore the economy should be free and decentralized, so that each of us may make use of what little we know.

Hayek is an undogmatic libertarian. A social democrat who reads Hayek will probably become a smarter social democrat.  Want a welfare state? Sure, if you must, but try to not be a naive rationalist who tampers with forces you don’t understand. It’s this pragmatic aspect of Hayek Taleb builds on, in a way that is in direct conflict with many liberal and libertarian ideas. They too suffer from naive rationalism, the belief that if only we remove all rules and all regulations, everything will just magically turn out for the best. Open borders, super states and unlimited globalization, the more freedom we have, the better the outcome will be.

Too soon to be optimistic

But while freedom and antifragility overlap, they’re not the same thing. Antifragility is a particular kind of freedom: Decentralized, redundant and small-scale.

If you want to learn if something is fragile, robust, or antifragile, there is a simple test you can perform: Sit down, wait about 1000 years, and see what happens to it. Time eats away the fragile, allows the robust to stand unharmed, and strengthens the antifragile. If a technology, tradition or institution has already survived for a long time, it is either robust or antifragile. (Religion is here to stay.)

But if something is brand new, it is too soon to tell. Taleb dismisses optimists who believe that the world is becoming ever safer, ever richer, and ever more peaceful, and that this process will continue forever. It might, but we don’t have enough data yet.

Wars are fewer these days, but the last one we had in our part of the world was also the deadliest war in history. The one we might have had in 1962 would have been even deadlier. How deadly will the next great war be? We have only had nuclear weapons for 70 years. After 700 we can breathe easier, and after 7000 we can relax a little. There have been other periods of growth and peace before the current one. They didn’t last forever.

And when the next disaster finally does occur, Taleb believes it will do more damage in a world of tightly knit, efficient, debt-ridden, naive-rationalist super states than in a world of redundancy and slack.

Theoreticians believe we can safely take on all sorts of risks. We can take on the risk of debt, and the risk of climate change, because their calculations predict that it will turn out well. But reality is meaner than their theories.

The ethics of punditry

Taleb directs his harshest criticism at the world’s economic, political and journalistic elite – the Davos man. He accuses them of being corrupt, because they have found a way to cheat the system , so that they keep the upside when things go well, but the rest of us get the downside when things go badly.

The financial crisis taught us that in the financial sector, profits are private, but losses are public. And whenever a pundit makes a mistake, those who listened to their poor advice get the downside, while they themselves usually keep their jobs. Thomas Friedman was an enthusiastic supporter of the Iraq war. He hoped it would democratize the Arab world. He got nearly everything wrong, but he still writes for the New York Times.

Joseph Stiglitz estimated that Fannie Mae was rock solid. Now he claims that he predicted the financial crisis.

There’s an uneasy tone in many newspaper articles about Taleb. Reviewers complain of his unnecessarily large ego, and that he often speculates about subjects he probably doesn’t know much about, such as dieting. Both of these accusations are correct. But I wonder if some of this uneasiness is also caused by a guilty conscience. Taleb’s ego is a useful excuse for changing the subject from his uncompromising attitude towards the media.

So what is it that he actually wants? Surely he does not want to punish experts when they make bad predictions? Well, yes. That is exactly what he wants.

The ancient lawmaker Hammurabi would execute engineers when the houses they’d built collapsed. Taleb does not go quite that far, but he believes we have a lot to learn from Hammurabi, and that it is unethical to have an opinion unless you have something to lose by it. Warmongers should send their own children or grandchildren into the war. Financial experts should invest in their own advice. The least anyone should be exposed to when they make a bad prediction is public humiliation.

I like this idea, so I will begin this year with a promise. When 2013 is over, I will write an article that lists all the errors I’ve made in this column for Aftenposten. Factual errors, misunderstandings, bad analysis, and most importantly failed predictions.

It costs me nothing, nothing at all, to write some words in a column. The least I can do is try to draw attention to my own mistakes, (as when I, like Thomas Friedman, thought the Iraq war was a good idea.)

Ytringsfrihetsdebatter blir ofte veldig rotete. Mange blander prinsippielle argumenter og nytteargumenter, opererer med dobbeltstandarder, definerer “ytringsfrihet” slik at de slipper å være mot den, og later som om deres standpunkt ikke har noen bakside.

Selv er jeg er en sterk tilhenger av ytringsfriheten, både som juridisk prinsipp og som et ideal vi bør strekke oss etter til daglig. Men Ytringsfrihet handler også om de mørke sidene av ytringsfriheten. Om løgner, konflikter og hat. Og du møter dilemmaer som viser hvor vanskelig dette egentlig kan være i praksis. Ytringsfrihet er et spørsmål hvor selv de beste løsningene kommer med en høy prislapp.

Les innledningen her.

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I media

Sigurd Tenningen: Ytringsfrihet som ideologi. Morgenbladet, 10.05.

Gunnar M. Ekeløve-Slydal: Liten, men viktig bok. Fri tanke, 29.04.

Hans Rustad: Første forutsetning: ytringsfrihet. Document, 23.04.

Anne Sofie L. Bergvall: Ytringsfrihetens paradoks. Studvest, 23.04.

Lars Gauden-Kolbeinstveit: En norsk John Stuart Mill. Minerva, 23.04.

Kristan Hegertun: Ord må møtes med ord. Vårt Land, 15.04.

Panorama, Radio Norge, 14.04.

Ordet er fritt. Morgenbladet, 12.04.

Even Gran: For eller mot ytringsfrihet? Fri tanke, 09.04.

Andreas Wiese: Den vanskelige ytringsfriheten. Dagbladet, 05.04.

Knut Olav Åmås: Frie ytringers mørke sider. Aftenposten, 03.04.

There was more to the Soviet Union than repression. At their best, their dreams were as ambitious and humane as in the West. But optimism couldn’t save a rotten system.

1956 was a significant year in the history of communist Europe. It was the year the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian dream of building a more humane form of communism.

But it was also the year when the Soviet Union began to thaw, allowing its own people to dream new and bolder dreams.

Stalin had died, the Gulag camps were being dismantled, World War II was long gone, and the great famines were a generation past. Carefully, Khrushchev began to ease the pressure that kept the Soviet people in line, allowing new ideas to be thought and put into practice. In the arts, in books and in movies, people were now allowed to be people again, human beings before Party members – provided, of course, that they didn’t undermine the authority of the Party.

And the economists of the Soviet Union conceived a grand vision of bringing the planned economy into the computer age, creating a communist paradise of abundance.

Let’s just skip ahead to the conclusion: They failed. There were a few years of optimism and relative freedom, and then it ended. Brezhnev tightened the grip of the state, the economy stagnated, and after one last attempt under Gorbachev to fix communism, the last glimmers of hope faded away from the eyes of the last optimists. The communists had been unable to give their people wealth and abundance, and they were no longer as willing to use power to subdue them as before. So they gave up, and communist Europe expired.

But there really was a period in the late 1950s and early 1960s where you had an excuse to be optimistic. There was repression, and there was poverty, but in between all of that you could also catch a faint glimpse of something rather beautiful: Communism at its smartest and most human.

The Mosfilm dream factory

It’s the Soviet movies of this era that hold the greatest appeal to me. In the long, bleak decades of Stalin’s reign, movies were few and worthless. One of them ends with one of the most absurd scenes in movie history, where daddy Josef flies in over the ruins of defeated Berlin almost like a god descending from heaven. He lands amid a great mass of people from all the nations of the world, who sing in his honor. These are movies by and for the kind of people who applaud continuously for ten minutes after their leader has spoken because they’re afraid of being the first to stop.

But Soviet filmmakers hadn’t gone away, just gone into hiding in film schools, where they kept their heads down and taught what they knew to their students. When Khrushchev cautiously lifted the Iron Curtain, both old and new filmmakers stood ready to film the Soviet dream.

The most watched movie of the Soviet Union in 1956 was a comedy that made fun of senior managers and their stuck-up, self-important ways.  In Karnavalnoya Noch, a group of young economists are planning a New Year’s party for the department they work for. Their director, a pompous fool, wants to ruin the party by filling the evening with old-fashioned music and talks on serious subjects, but the youths have no fear for serious old men of the past. In the movie’s hilarious climax, they manage to outmaneuver the director, and bring off a party filled with nothing but song, dance, food, drink and fun. As the movie ends, the clock strikes 24:00, the year is 1957, and a new generation stands ready to bring the Soviet Union into the future.

Other movies from this period have a darker tone. They show people working hard in ugly industrial buildings. The streets are muddy, and paradise is far, far away. But it is human beings, not the state or the Party, that stand at the center of these movies. The people are basically good, and carry great and beautiful dreams for the future. Even the war movies are primarily about the suffering of ordinary people.

These are movies by and for people who know that the road to paradise is a bitter one. But they see a gleam of hope in the eyes of young dreamers, who look at all of this, all the hardship and suffering, and say: It’s our turn now, and we’ll do our best.

Is it any wonder these movies make me wish I could be young in the Soviet Union in the 1950s? Never mind all those western hedonists with their easy lives and superficial pleasures. Come to Moscow, where you can work hard and feel at home!

Computer-age prosperity

There’s spring in the air in these movies, much like on a mild February day in Oslo. It doesn’t feel propagandistic or artificial, it feels human. But it’s difficult to ease the pressure in a dictatorship. Once you begin to allow people to think for themselves, they’ll soon start asking hard questions like why their leaders are all bandits, and why the gap to their neighbors in the west continues to increase.

If the planned economy had been a success, it is possible that the thaw could have gone more smoothly. And there were some economic achievements. The Bolsheviks, with all their conscienceless idealism, did turn the Soviet Union into an industrial nation with a highly educated population. But by the late 50s, Stalin’s economy was running out of steam. To bring it further, Khrushchev would need to find some new ideas.

Those new ideas are the topic of the novel Red Plenty by Francis Spufford. It’s a semi-fictional historical novel, but Spufford keeps track of what’s real and what isn’t so carefully that you can read it as a history book. He tells the story of the economists surrounding the math genius Leonid Kantorovich, the only Soviet citizen to ever win the Nobel Prize in economics.

Kantorovich wants to build a computer system that can be used to determine all the prices of all the goods in the Soviet Union. Optimal prices will help the economy to grow at a speed that is simply not possible in a market economy, where prices are set aimlessly, and companies waste their energy on destructive competition.

Khrushchev has made a promise: The communist utopia will be introduced, more or less, by the year 1980. The economists around Kantorovich believe they can fulfill that promise.

They fail, of course. One reason is political. Nobody likes high prices. It’s no use pointing out that an artificially low meat price causes meat shortages, and that therefore the smart thing to do is to increase the price. Economists understand this, but people see only the surface result, higher prices, and become angry. In the West, politicians have a convenient excuse: They can shrug and blame “the market”, that mysterious force beyond political control. But under communism, the Party has taken responsibility for the entire economy. When prices rise, they get the blame.

Spufford takes us to the massacre at Novocherkassk in 1962, where workers protest against higher meat prices. The army and the KGB are called in, and open fire on the crowd, killing many. Food prices are a deadly serious business. The leaders who take over after Khrushchev, Kosygin and Brezhnev, understand this, and reject the idea of a computer system that determines prices without political control. They refuse to make themselves hostage to a computer program. Instead, they introduce more cautious reforms that do not really achieve anything at all.

They’re conservative. They believe it’s better to preserve what one already has, an industrial economy that provides a fair enough standard of living, than to risk it all on something new. The economy stagnates. And when 1980 arrives, people joke that you can get arrested for anti-Soviet slander if you read publicly the promises of the Khrushchev era.

A nation-sized poker game

But even with support from the political elite, the Kantorovich plan would not have worked. A computer system is no better than the data it has to work on, and the economic date in the Soviet Union are rotten.

In theory, Gosplan, the state planning ministry, is in full control of everything. It gathers reliable economic data from every part of the country, creates an efficient plan, and sends its orders to every manager in every factory, near and far, like stone tablets to Moses. Your plan is to buy so and so many tons of raw material, and deliver so and so many units of finished product. If you achieve this, you’ll get a huge bonus. Go for it!

In reality, the economy is more like a gigantic poker game. Nobody ever tells the truth, and the only way to fulfill your quota is by cheating, and relying on favors from friends.

In the book Factory and Manager in the USSR by Joseph Berlin, from 1957, emigrants explain what life is actually like in the Soviet factories. It’s a surprisingly entertaining read. A market economy is more fun to be part of than to read about. A planned economy is the opposite: More fun to read about than to take part in. It’s a bit like Alice in Wonderland, absurd but recognizable.

In one of the stories Berlin shares, an inspector comes to visit a factory that has failed to deliver the machines it was supposed to produce. At the factory he comes across row upon row with nearly finished machines. He asks the director about this, who explains that although the machines are almost finished he is unable to deliver them, because the specification clearly calls for them to be painted red, but he only has green paint left. He fears he will be sent to jail if he violates the requirement. The inspector does not dare to grant an exemption, because then he too could end up in jail. They ask for permission from people higher up the system, everyone is too afraid to say yes. Nobody wants to stick their neck on. Finally, after a long wait, a message arrives from high up in the ministry, saying that yes, it is okay to paint the machines green instead of red.

Decisions at all levels of the economy are made from a combination of fear, greed for bonuses, and greed for status. In a market economy, the power of greed has been harnessed, and mostly aids the economy. In the Soviet Union, there’s more money to be made by sabotaging the economy than by aiding it. You can lie about how much materials you need, and how much you are able to produce. You can lie about the hidden reserves you have stashed away in a secret storehouse. You can lower the quality of your products in a way that the quality inspector can pretend not to notice. There are lots of options, and they all have in common that they make the economy less productive.

Instead of an open market where anything can be bought for money, the Soviet Union has a hidden gray market where anything can be arranged through the exchange of favors between friends, or blat. Blat is not only useful, but absolutely necessary, because there’s always something that goes wrong with the plan, an unexpected event that requires improvisation. Everyone is in on it, because otherwise you would never get anything done.

A market economy has salespeople, charismatic people who convince you to buy things you didn’t know you wanted to buy. The Soviet Union has professional buyers, tolkachi, charismatic people who convince you to sell things you didn’t know you wanted to sell. It works, sort of, except for the end consumers, who are poor in both blat and tolkachi, and get only the crumbs off the table.

There was nothing in the reforms that were planned under Khrushchev that could have fixed this. The Soviet economy was eating itself. The system was rotten.

A bit like us

A long time ago, in a world far away? Yes, but apart from the genocides, the famines, the slave labor and mad dictators, the distance between the Soviet Union and our own society is actually not as great as one might think.

All large private and public organizations, also in our own society, suffer from sub-optimization, a problem where the actions that benefit an individual employer or department actually harms the overall goals of the organization. This is not a communist problem, but a planning problem, and the larger an organization is, the more difficult it is to make plans. The Soviet Union turned itself into one single gigantic organization, and therefore they also had gigantic planning problems. Our own are smaller, but otherwise similar, especially in our largest organizations.

Every company that believes it can plan its way into the future carries a bit of the Soviet legacy with it.

The communists were like us in another way as well. They believed, as we often believe, that if you only you dream hard enough, if only you believe, you can change almost anything. The Chinese Maoists went the furthest in this. They declared war on reality itself. Soviet idealists were less fanatical. They were more like us. All they wanted was an affluent society without suffering, populated by rational people. Making this happen was simply a matter of political will.

What the Soviet Union needed in the late 50s and early 60s was not idealists and optimists, but cynics who could tell them that their system was rotten, and pessimists who could tell them that much of human nature is rotten too. Systems can sometimes be improved, but human nature is what it is, and always will be. All you can do is try to make the best of it.

The Soviet dream of the Khrushchev era appeals to me. I love the spirit of their movies in particular. They really do make a part of me want to go live in Moscow in 1957. But I know how it turned out in the end.

I think of this whenever I look at the big dreams we have today, in our own society, dreams of peace and prosperity and technological miracles.

Will people fifty years from now look back on our own age and say the same thing, that what our time would have needed most of all would have been more cynics and pessimists?

If you ask sex workers want they actually want, the answer is not prohibition, and not the “Nordic model”, but safer working conditions and respect. And their wishes are no longer as easy to ignore as they used to be.

On International Women’s Day this year, March 8, Norwegian feminists marched under banners with slogans like “Prostitution is violence” and “Enforce the sex purchase law”. They believe that the sex trade is a form of buying and selling of women’s bodies, and that it is a patriarchal legacy that should be abolished.

Strikingly absent beneath these banners were the supposed victims, the prostitutes themselves. When one listens to sex trade prohibitionists, one gets the impression that sex workers dream only of being rescued from the hell their lives have become, and that abolishing the sex trade will liberate these women from the pimps and johns who abuse them.

Instead, many sex workers feel betrayed by mainstream feminism. It is difficult enough, they feel, to learn to deal with dangerous clients, STDs, social stigma, and the criminal underworld. Now, on top of that, comes an army of activists who have little knowledge but a lot of power, offering “help” that makes their working conditions more dangerous, not less.

The closer someone is to the sex market, the less likely they are to favor prohibition. In Norway, Pro-Sentret, the City of Oslo’s support service for prostitutes, and PION, an interest group for Norwegian sex workers, have been warning for years that the war on prostitution harms the people it is meant to aid.

This is also true internationally. Demands for strict laws against sex work tends to come from groups who, either from ideological or religions reasons, dream of a world entirely free of prostitution. Sex workers themselves have more modest dreams: They want safer working conditions, and to be treated with respect. They have little interest in ideological utopias. Their own safety and well-being comes first.

New voices

Sex workers have been saying these things for years, ever since the first well-meaning social activist tried to shut down the first brothel. We’ve usually found it easy to ignore them. But this may be changing. A growing number of current and former sex workers now emerge into the public sphere, clear their throats, and ask that we listen to what they have to say. They’re smart, they argue like a well-aimed stiletto heel – and they’re not at all impressed with the debate the rest of us have been having about their profession all these years.

Brooke Magnanti first became known under the alias Belle de Jour in 2003, when she began blogging about her life as a London call-girl. She wrote about good clients, difficult clients and everyday challenges, with dry humor and charm. Her blog was not reality porn, but the story of an ordinary woman who happens to have a strange, frustrating, but on the whole fairly enjoyable job. The blog made her famous. She turned it into two best-selling books, and a TV series, Secret Diary of a Call Girl.

Eventually, Magnanti revealed her real name. It turned out that the money she had earned as a call-girl had paid for a university education for a career as a research scientist. And in 2012 she used her science qualifications to throw herself into the prostitution debate with the book The Sex Myth, where she debunks the myths that dominate our debates about sex, porn and prostitution.

According to one of these myths, tens of thousands of prostitutes in Britain are victims of trafficking. But there is no factual basis to this claim, she writes. The police can’t find them. There are real victims of trafficking in Britain, both in the sex trade and other professions, but nowhere near that many. Such numbers grow as in the H. C. Andersen tale of the feather that turned into five hens. One person reads a speculative number in a newspaper. Then they double it to be on the safe side, and spread it onwards, where the same thing happens again. And again. And again. Nobody bothers to check where the number came from. It takes on a life on its own, separate from all connections to reality.

Prohibitionists often cite figures about how awful life is for prostitutes. They are victims of drugs abuse and sexual abuse, and they hate what prostitution has done to their lives. But the basis for such figures is often sketchy. The sample population may include only particularly vulnerable and self-selected groups such as female streetwalkers who have actively reached out for help – and not, for instance, those who haven’t, or brothel employees, escorts, men, or transsexuals. And the data may or may not have been gathered and analyzed in a scientifically sound way.

And the prohibitionists are silent about the side effects of their war on prostitution. Magnanti writes about the red light district in Sheffield, a street where good lighting and a high level of activity created a relatively safe working environment for prostitutes, who were able to cooperate to avoid dangerous clients. But then the city government decided to chase them away, embarrassed by their visibility. A few years later, Magnanti is a student in Sheffield, and takes part in the autopsy of a young woman. She had been a prostitute, and was stabbed to death in one of the dark, lonely side streets the streetwalkers were now forced to operate in.

Our culture has a disturbing fascination with “dead hooker” jokes. We find them funny and edgy. Brooke Magnanti does not.

Safe working conditions

Another woman who has taken the journey from sex work to writing about it is the American journalist Melissa Gira Grant, who has written several scathing articles about how the war on prostitution increases the danger of being a sex worker. Trafficking is a genuine problem, but activists stomp onto the field like panicked elephants, doing more damage than good. They target advertising services like Backpage, forgetting that the indoor market such services makes possible is much safer than the outdoor market.

Some activists even target support services for prostitutes, aiming to shut them down – just as the International Women’s Day parade in Oslo in 2012 called for the closing of Pro-Sentret, the primary support service for Norwegian sex workers.

The idea seems to be to save prostitutes by making their lives intolerable, and that this is okay because their lives are already so awful that they won’t notice the difference. When prostitution itself is seen as a form of violence, a bit of extra violence is nothing to be concerned about.

Grant skewers Christian and feminist activists who believe that all sex workers are sex slaves, because many of them say they would rather be doing something else. But many of us would rather do something else if we could. Many would like the option of a better job, or the option not to work at all. But we must choose from the alternatives we have. For some people, that means selling sexual services. This line of work is not always glamorous, and for some it can be tragic, but it’s only when somebody actively takes away your ability to do it in a safe manner that it becomes intolerable.

Which is why the message from people who have experience from the sex trade is often such a simple one: That all they really want is safe working conditions, and to be treated with respect.

Most of them speak up online, under pseudonyms, but they’re not hard to find. They write in personal blogs, or in group blogs such as Tits and Sass. They’re on Twitter.

In Norway, “Frøken X” recently teamed up with the think tank Progressiv to propose that prostitution should be legalized. In interviews she explain that she sees herself as an entrepreneur, and wants to start a union for sex worker. Her inspiration is Brooke Magnanti. In the March 8 parade in Oslo this year, she marched under the unofficial banner “My body, my business”.

The importance of respect

These activists prefer the term “sex worker” over “prostitute”. They do this do emphasize that selling sexual services is a job, not a state of victimization, and to join forces with other professions feminists also often want to abolish, such as stripping and pornography. In the public imagination, a “prostitute” is a tired junkie hanging out on a street corner, waiting to be rescued by some middle class angel. A “sex worker” is an adult human being with a difficult job, a person you treat with respect.

Respect is really the key to this debate. If you lack respect for sex workers as human beings you can, as a representative for the Salvation Army in the US recently did, refer to them as “cum receptacles” in the same sentence as you defend their human dignity. You’ll prefer to talk about sex workers, never with them, and you’ll chase them away (or even harass them) when they contradict you, calling them liars and privileged exceptions.

I wonder who refers more frequently to sex workers as “whores”, men talking dirty, or feminists?

Having respect for sex workers as human beings means listening to what they have to say. If you offer an idea about how you can help them, and their response is to laugh, shake their heads, and say that you haven’t understood this at all, the respectful thing to do is to rethink your views. Perhaps there really is something important you haven’t understood?

The sex purchase ban

It’s awfully mean of the sex workers to insist that we listen to their views about their own profession. We were getting along so well without them.

We thought we knew who they were. Some thought they were the nymphomaniacs of their customers’ fantasies. Others believed they were helpless victims waiting to be freed from slavery. But now here they are themselves, claiming to be just ordinary people, who have a job that is difficult and sometimes dangerous, but as diverse as any other professions. That neither the sex fantasies nor the nightmares are correct. That they’re a service profession with good sides and bad sides and that they themselves know best what to do about the bad sides.

When Norway introduced a ban on the purchase of sex in 2009, it was with all the best intentions. The law would spare the sex workers by punishing the clients, making it legal to sell sex but not to buy it. Thus sex workers themselves would not be victimized. But the inspiration for this law was an odd one: The Swedish sex purchase ban from 1999. In Sweden, the government takes the position that all prostitution is a form of violence, no matter what. The purpose of the Swedish model is not to clean up the industry, but to abolish it.

A main aim of the Norwegian sex purchase ban was to combat trafficking by reducing demand for sexual services. This is a good goal in theory. Traffickers use lies and intimidation to exploit human labor, for instance by tricking them into being smuggled into a foreign country, where they end up working under slave-like conditions.

But it is unclear how much trafficking there really is in the Norwegian sex market. The proposal for the 2009 law offered no estimates of the size of the problem it was intended to solve. Neither did the Government action plan against human trafficking (2006-2009), nor the Stridbeck report from 2004. (To be fair, they did talk with “two women who work as prostitutes”).

Trafficking was already illegal before 2009. Based on which facts exactly did we arrive at the conclusion that we needed more? How will we measure the success of the law if we don’t even know what it is intended to accomplish?

One problem we definitely haven’t been able to solve is violence against sex workers. In the Pro-Sentret report Farlige forbindelser from 2012, sex workers explain that they experience a high level of violence in their work, and more so in the outdoor market than the indoor market. The sex purchase ban has made sex workers feel more isolated and vulnerable than before. The law “worked”: Demand has been reduced. But the result is that sex workers now work in a buyer’s market, where the clients set the terms. And it is the “good” clients who have disappeared, the ones who behave well.  Sex workers now have to compete over the remaining “bad” clients, who argue and push limits. Prostitution has become more dangerous.

But then, creating safer working conditions for sex workers was never a goal for the sex purchase ban in the first place.

The road to Karl Johan street

Sex workers are experts on their own lives. When they’re allowed to speak for themselves, instead of having others speak on their behalf, even Nigerian prostitutes, who made themselves notorious in Norway with their aggressive sales tactics in the mid-2000s, emerge as human beings, not faceless victims. In the FAFO report Afrikanske drømmer på europeiske gater from 2006, these women talk about the road from Nigeria to Karl Johan street in Oslo. It’s a road that owes more to poverty and hope than to threats. The road is long, with long detours in Africa, then Italy and Spain, before they choose to move on to what they hope is a more lucrative sex market in Norway. Some of them didn’t know what they were going to when they left Nigeria. Many are disappointed with the life they’ve found in Norway, and most of all with having to work on the street. Being a streetwalker is the most difficult and dangerous form of prostitution. But return to poverty in Nigeria? Never.

Eastern European sex workers tell similar stories in the report My life is too short; I want to live now from 2006. In the early years, many Eastern European girls were lied to about their future in the West, but these days everyone know what they’re entering into. Some have been trafficked, but found it an easy fate to escape. “Lina” used an agency to help her get out of her home country. They sent her to Southern Europe, where she was exploited by pimps. She ran away, and returned home, but then used the services of the same agency once more. This time they sent her to Norway. She preferred taking the chance of being exploited over taking a low-paid secretarial job at home.

In other words, it’s not just privileged sex workers like Brooke Magnanti who protest against the nightmare stories we’re told about prostitution. Many live a hard life, and they tell us this themselves. They want, and need, help – but help to solve the problems they actually have, not the problems ideologues say they ought to have. They want to build a good enough life in the real world, not sacrifice themselves for a feminist utopia.

They want what we all want: To be listened to and treated as adults.

This does not mean that sex workers should get whatever they ask for. We still need to regulate labor immigration, as well as street sales. But when we listen to their stories, and take them seriously, we learn that what makes their work uniquely dangerous is the laws we use to combat it.

Where are the good feminists?

In this article I’ve talked as if all feminists want to abolish prostitution. If you’re a feminist yourself, I hope this annoys you a bit. That was the intention. In reality, of course, many of those who support the rights of sex workers do so in the name of feminism.

But in a way, a political movement belongs to those who are most skilled at using it. And it’s the abolitionists who are in control of the feminist brand.

One sex worker activist explains that she is tired of listening to women who claim that they are “good feminists” who support sex worker rights, but never do anything to take the movement back from the “bad feminists”. She accuses the “good” feminists of just sitting at home with their sex toys and feeling satisfied with how liberated they are. Meanwhile, it’s the “bad” feminists who organize and do lobby work. They’re the ones who create new laws and set the agenda.

Therefore, feminism belongs to the bad feminists, and should be abandoned.

This is a bleak picture, but there’s a truth to it. If you’re one of those who believe that feminism can be more than the dusty slogans of this year’s International Women’s Day parades, where were you when these slogans were voted on? Where will you be next year?

And what do you intend to do with the fact that a dangerous women’s profession has been made even more dangerous – in the name of feminism?

This is not about whether you like prostitution, or whether you think it is right to sell or buy sex. Places where money and sex mix are places where we often see men and women at their darkest.

But human nature is what it is. We should try to make the best of it.

The very least you can do is ask the people you want to help about what sort of help it is they actually need. And then listen to their answer.

Jeg har et kapittel om blåbloggens vekst og fall i Kristian Bjørkelos bok om norsk blogghistorie.

Boken kan kjøpes fra Humanist forlag.

Prostituerte er kvinneyrket feministene avskyr. Nå vil de selv delta i debatten. De ønsker trygghet og respekt, ikke tvangshjelp.

Les resten hos Aftenposten.