Monsters in Paradise

JotunheimenComing down out of Jotunheimen in the early morning hours, the crackling fragile ice of Nigardsbreen dropping behind us, we listened to Sigur Rós for the first time since leaving Iceland. I had taken a brief pulse of walk-around violence in Reykjavík before jumping in our 4×4 in the Thorsmork highlands and beating the poor beast down through 30 klicks of bad road and twelve random river fords, each fraught with mild uncertainty given that we didn’t have a snorkel on the Suzuki Jimny manual (manual!). The BBC reported on the issue of violent crime in Iceland in an article by an American researcher who made the country the topic of his doctoral thesis. 90,000 guns in the hands of 300,000 citizens and nary a murder.

And Norway makes Iceland look quaint with its massive sovereign wealth fund that controls 1% of all securities worldwide. Social services, low levels of inequality, 4th highest GDP in the world, 48 weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave–these are the features of a society that has chosen to follow the uniquely Scandinavian model of growth and peace.

But unlike Iceland, Norway joined its near-neighbor Finland in horrific style when Anders Behring Breivik murdered a whole bunch of kids who were involved in a summer program on a lake island northeast of Oslo. Karl Ove Knausgård wrote the definitive piece in the New Yorker on the events and aftermath of that day I need to write something else about Knausgård and his style of writing in both My Struggle and recent New York Times pieces titled My Saga, but the Breivik piece sums up something that is I think critical to our attempts to understand these horrific events. Basically, there is nothing that can be done. We can take away the guns, slowing people down or reducing their effectiveness. We can try to intervene early with troubled youth. We can overreact and put metal detectors in every corner of society.

I sometimes imagine a society where acts or potential acts of violence are impossible because there is an ever-present eye watching everything and everyone, but it is an impersonal watcher that processes the scenes for specific cues about threats rather than the panopticon of old. I feel safe and secure in this imagined world, and see stun-rays shooting Breivik as he emerges from his Oslo flat intent on detonating the first bomb. That future may happen yet, but it only can correct for and not explain the monsters in our paradises.

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