Matthew Moore

TED Talks Psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices, whether we’re left, right or center. In this eye-opening talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most.

Barack Obama sends a message to those running for the Republican party presidential nomination:

“You want to be commander in chief? You can start by standing up for the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States, even when it’s not politically convenient.” —Speaking at the Human Rights Campaign National Dinner on Saturday

Here is the video of the incident that Obama is really responding to. During a GOP nominees debate the audience booed a gay soldier asking a question via video link. Watching on, none of the candidates condemned or commented on the jeering from the crows.

On the Saturday morning as the sun rose over Norway accurate details of the previous day’s tragedy were reaching the public. The death toll on the island of Utoeya had grown from a handful to scores by this time.

Helle Gannestad, a photojournalism student in Oslo, stayed up watching the news of the devastation come in. Whereas others would not know for many more hours, Helle already knew close friends of hers has been shot dead the day before. Like millions around the world, she too was following on Twitter and she tweeted: “Når en mann kan forårsake så mye ondt – tenk hvor mye kjærlighet vi kan skape sammen.” Her tweet went viral. It was retweeted over 100 times and made it into the newspapers in Norway.

When I wrote to Helle a few days after the shooting she explained what inspired her sentiment: “I was thinking how small and negligible I am in all of this – I wanted to help, but couldn’t.”

“I tweeted this as I was awake in the middle of the night watching the news. It was Saturday morning, about four or five o’clock, and the number of dead were increased to over 80. It was a hard moment, I felt so small and alone.”

She tells me it translates to something similar to this: “If one man can create this much pain, imagine how much love we can create together.” It’s a thought which eloquently and succinctly captured the indomitable mood of the Norwegians in the days after. It’s unsurprising that when searching for the right tone and words after the event, politicians in Norway came to repeat hers.

“Our thoughts are other places, but the last couple of days, I have, of course, thought more about it – since it has meant this much to so many.” Ms Gannestad said.

Their concerns were with what they had lost not what they thought of the culprit nor what they thought should become of him. Such dignity and restraint is anomalous to the malignant anger which is expected in the aftermath of 21st century terror.

But why was it so? After the 9/11 attacks, when the emblem of the West was demolished and America received its greatest shock the rhetoric was fierce and the mood was tense. The bombing of Oslo and the shootings in Utoeya tore the fabric of Norway’s leading party’s youth wing – a symbol of the future not just of that party but of the country. They were equally as shocking for a quiet country where crime is very low and yet the attacks didn’t evoke the same outrage.

And fairly or not, the inevitable comparisons between Stoltenberg and George W. Bush were made. Standing on the wreckage of the twin towers Bush waxed revengeful with his “we’ll hunt down those responsible” promise of comeuppance. Stoltenberg, however, displayed a more civilized tone calling for greater democracy, humanity, transparency and unity*. In both cases each leader’s very different response was met with approval and received widespread support.

In July, the death toll wasn’t known before the US and UK media start speculating about the kind of meager sentence Anders Behring Breivik would get in Norway. “Why Norway’s worst mass murderer will be given a jail sentence of only 21 years” one headline read. Elsewhere journalists was aghast that, if convicted, Breivik would serve at Halden prison – the “most humane in the world”. There he’d live in a wooden fortress, not a concrete one. And his wooden fortress won’t be surrounded by a barbed wire adorned cage, no. There the perimeter is disguised behind trees to remove a sense of institutionalism. “This liberalism is all too much for the British, but the Norwegians aren’t vengeful,” Alice Thomson of The Times rightly noted.

There are many more examples of this difference between Norwegian society and that of the US: from taxation to education to justice.

And it can also be seen in the way Norway has a deeply set welfare system which receives bipartisan support whereas the thin, relatively new, government support available for the less-off in the US is constantly a source of great political contention and seemingly always under threat. That’s another of the things that separates Norway.

In a sad irony the characteristics of Norway which enraged Breivik most, are the same ones which have united a wounded nation and impressed the world.

“The murderer was obviously a misfit in his society; the things he raves about are mostly those where feminine societies distinguish themselves from masculine ones,” Dutch sociologist Geert Hofstede wrote in an email.

Hofstede has measured cross-societal traits for thirty years and after interviewing thousands of people he ranked countries on different defining characteristics. One of those characteristics is “Individualism” while another is “Masculinity”. Countries that have a high ‘masculinity’ rank are countries where the people are, in Hostede’s words, ‘assertive’ and occupied predominantly with themselves while those with a low ranking tend to be ‘cooperative’ and place value on ‘each other’.

“The masculinity side of this dimension represents a preference in society for achievement, heroism, assertiveness and material reward for success. Society at large is more competitive. It’s opposite, Feminity, stands for a preference for cooperation, modesty, caring for the weak and quality of life. Society at large is more consensus-orientated,” wrote Hofstede.

Hofstede contends that Norway is a cooperative unassertive society in a way that is utterly different to the US. Norway has a ranking of eight while the US is at the opposite end of the scale with a rank of 63. In short, Hofstede wasn’t surprised by the Norwegians’ reaction to the attack. Such behaviour, his research supports, is typical of a nation with a strong sense of community and a proud history of rehabilitation.

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* Frank Rossavik a social commentator in Norway issued me with some caution days after the incident. “On the one hand,” he wrote in an email “Norway is to some extent this very open, liberal, democratic society that we have been good at marketing. And I think the PM and other senior political figures are sincere when they say they want to keep it that way. But I am not sure they will succeed.”

In Norway the police have been for some time armed with intrusive techniques commonly used in the UK and the USA for gathering evidence.

“We do have a lot of surveillance, we do have a police with quite a lot of ‘tools’, we will implement the EU data retention directive. The police now want more of these ‘tools’, the first court hearing this week was closed, despite protests, etc. So I am not really sure.”

I think this point can be distinguished from the broader point that Hofstede’s research supports which is that as a people their mindsets are very different. Governments across the world operate against the grain of public demand.

It’s impossible for a white boy from Glasgow to imagine what it is to be a black girl in America. This poignant video, is as close as I may ever get. Here a sixteen year old girl from a school on the upper west side of Manhattan made a film where she recreated an experiment that was used in the Brown v Board of Education case in 1954. The experiment showed that the notion and practice of segregating schools under the banner of ‘separate but equal’ was untrue and unjust. In the experiment, created by psychologists Kenneth B. Clarks and Mamie Phibbs Clark, they gave black toddlers a white doll and a black doll and asked them to pick their favourite, the doll that was ‘good’. Overwhelmingly the children picked the white doll. The only test in which the kids picked the black doll in numbers was when asked which doll is most like them.

Kiri Davis found that this identity crisis still existed.