Iceland review - 2014, Síða 45

ICELAND REVIEW 43
In his address during the formal opening of the Icelandic
Parliament in 2013 the Prime Minister described an
ideal society, a utopia (his own words) where every-
thing was as it should be. “Most people on this earth would
think that what I have described is a far-fetched ‘utopia’,
an imaginary fairytale country. But to us, Icelanders, this is
not a distant dream.” In case you’re wondering, one of the
reasons we are so close to achieving our utopian dream is
that we are “an independent country and can make our own
luck.” So could Iceland become a new utopia? And would
we want to live in a utopia?
The need to believe in the possibility of an ideal soci-
ety is not new. Plato, in The Republic, written around 380
BC, portrays an ideal community, utopia, and describes
a society run by philosopher kings. According to Plato,
either philosophers must become kings, or those now
called kings should philosophize. Sir Thomas More in his
Utopia, published in 1516, describes a fictional island in
the Atlantic where life is run along highly organized lines
so as to maximize wellbeing—although in this particular
utopia each household still had two slaves. Sir Thomas was
probably being ironic when he described this island as a
desirable place. The idea of utopia is part of the old battle
between good and evil. If you could travel, briefly, to the
Persian plateau around 2,600 years ago you would find
the prophet Zarathustra telling people about the one true
deity, Ahura Mazda, and the battle between two twins, one
good, the other evil. As always in these tales, there was the
promise that once the battle had been won there would
be eternal peace and happiness.
Much the same is true of other religions and ideolo-
gies that throughout history have promised that they
have found the right way forward, the solution to our
problems, the way to utopia. As Isaiah Berlin pointed
out, the problem is that once you believe you have
found the one right way, the elusive solution to our
problems, then no sacrifice is too big to make—because
no matter how big the sacrifice, it will all be worth it
when we arrive in utopia. In this way communism and
Nazism justified war and suffering.
The belief that a state has the capacity to create a
better society—to improve the lives of its citizens—has
a dark side, even in the supposedly benign form that
this belief took in Scandinavia. Social engineering,
the power to adjust incomes, expenditures, employ-
ment and information led, in the case of some of the
Nordic countries, to the temptation to change the
very individuals. As Tony Judt pointed out in in his
book Postwar, eugenics—the science of racial improve-
ment—fitted well with the ambitions of well-meaning
social reformers. If one’s goal was to improve human
condition, why not use the scientific methods at one’s
disposal? In Norway and Sweden, and to a lesser extent
in Denmark, this led to over 100,000 people being
sterilized between 1934 and 1976 in order “to improve
the population.”
icelAnd