GoKawiilThe old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born
When I was living in the UK, one of the more common responses people had to me being Icelandic – beyond the strangely common “I hate Björk” refrain – was some comment about Vikings or Norse mythology.
I’m guessing my name helped prompt those. We all have very traditional Icelandic names in my family.
If the comment caught me at the wrong time, I’d occasionally reply in my usual literal-minded way:
The Vikings were coastal raiders and Iceland is an island in the middle of bloody nowhere. Once Iceland was settled in 930, we were mostly a nation of farmers and substantially Celtic. We were probably the least ‘Viking’ of all the Nordic countries. Besides, we converted to Christianity in the year 1000, so we were only pagan for a few decades at most. The Icelandic Sagas are a bit like cowboy movies in that they’re the events of a few short years spun into a nation-building mythology that’s well out of proportion to their historical impact.
The idea of us being a “Viking nation” has a strong hold on people’s imagination. But we’ve been a Christian culture for a thousand years. Longer if you account for the few settlers like my ancestor Auður Djúpúðga who were Christian a century before the rest of the nation converted.
One of the pitfalls of growing up in a Christian culture, one that sticks with you even when, like me, you’ve been an atheist most of your life, is a tendency towards knee-jerk millenarianist thinking.
“This changes everything!”
No matter the flavour of Christianity, a core idea baked into every aspect of the religion is that singular revelatory events can fundamentally change the world. There’s the “before”. Then the “event”. Then an “after” that has been completely transformed. In Christianity itself this is usually associated with Christ’s chaotic transit schedule – “He is here! He has left! He is about to arrive again! Now he’s leaving again! But he’s also somehow always been here! And not.” – but the mode of thinking is common throughout literature, philosophy, and storytelling in the Christian west.
When we tell our stories and spout our opinions, we are very prone to statements along the lines of “this changes everything!”.
... continue reading