The first round of the Finnish presidential election is on Sunday. There are nine candidates and if none of them get over 50 % of the votes in the first round, the top two advance to a second round, two weeks from now. Currently, it seems like a second round is almost a certainty, though it is still not certain who will advance.
It really feels like an end of an era when Paavo Väyrynen, an MP (or MEP) for five decades and a minister in eight cabinets (and a presidential candidate in 1988, 1994, 2012 and 2018), has fallen to the category of "several more who attempted to get on the ballet, mostly anti-NATO and/or antivaxx types".
I don't know if this is too much of a personal thing to ask you on a forum this public, but what you wrote about Olli Rehn somehow reminded me of what *might* be an extensive similarity in my personal trajectory in terms of my world view, maybe partly relating to just being of roughly the same age (I believe) and growing up within a broadly similar cultural milieu, later having kids, taking on responsibilities etc., but in part also ending up in some peculiarly specific places at the same time, such as close to the Orthodox church, although with you I don't know how exactly. Anyway, if (and to the extent) you feel this is not the proper place and/or time to share something like this that you maybe consider a personal or private thing, please feel free to ignore this or keep it on a level comfortable enough for you. Maybe you could choose to approach this through two slightly different emphases or degrees of generality (e.g. opting only for the first): first, telling about your journey *away* from the "the Left" and towards maybe something more heterodox, wholesome or different in some other way, or alternatively, telling basically the same story but, especially with the latter part, going deeper and more personal up to ultimately how you took on to live a life of religion and the reasons for doing this as a member of this particular church.
As for me, should you want to know (although we don't know each other IRL, and me hiding behind this pseudonym makes this kinda dumb):
I've been an Orthodox practically from the get-go, getting it from my mother, so in that sense it's not an entirely recent development. I'd say I've always had a respectful and at times more curious but mostly just quite neutral attitude towards it. Had someone asked about it regularly after age 12 or so, I would've said I was an atheist, but there have been periods where I've more seriously tried to get deeper into the theology, i.e. not just interpreting Jesus as a model and teacher in the secular moral sense or something like that, but developing my own interpretations and at times supposedly even being able to interpret and justify some near-dogmatic positions in a sensible way, mostly by understanding the symbolism-heavy stuff and the ever-present argumentation-by-mysticism as a sort of (convention of) language for speaking about things human words and logic cannot fully convey — an issue that became generally easy for me to grasp in a much "fuller" way after I was drawn (by curiosity and the long-present interest for the sublime) into dabbling with various psychedelics alone and with a few select friends in the liminal age of entering into early adulthood, ultimately going through a couple of the most meaningful experiences of my life at least so far. After those, I wasn't yet drawn so much towards any organized religion, but it certainly made me better understand that aspect of spritual practice and religious life, and the importance of having some well-established contexts and ways of integration as well as advice available for instances, especially with such potent mind-manifesting agents, where the users typically have no prior religious, spiritual or secular framework for interpreting, integrating and embedding in their lives what are potentially profound experiences, or even the most primitive shared language for communicating with others about and making efforts to express the "inexpressible".
As for the left-wing tendencies: In my youth, I wasn't formally part of any left-wing party, or movement, for that matter, save for the occasional demonstration and the like, such as the big one in Helsinki — by modern-day Finnish standards, at least — against the Iraq War in 2003. Yet I would've then described myself left-wing for sure, even "counter-culture" in general attitudes and inclinations, despite of my early openness or ambivalence toward many typically almost "non-lefty" interests among my general interests in (deep) history and human behavior, like evolutionary biology, ancient genomics, behavioral genetics, even all the way to the battles around the rise of evopsych and the even older but still continuing culture wars within social science, etc.
Today, I think I have even a harder time to classify myself in terms of religious belief and political stances.
I sure don't want to describe myself an agnostic: I'm afraid people would think of me as a simpleton of sorts, speculating on the unlikely empirical existence of the spaghetti monster or whatever, an in-this-world, part-of-this-world "being" in a necessarily physical sense, not God in the same metaphysical understanding as, say, David Bentley Hart (who I've only recently started reading, though). "Spiritual but not religious", in turn, is a dead-giveaway of the kind of new-agey vibe-surfer ultimately doomed to solitude and separateness along with some random collection of experiences and half-assed ideas without a rigorous framework of common, accumulating and robustly passed-on knowledge, that is, culture and cultural evolution, which also happens to be the secret of the success of our species.
Politically, I'm still "instinctively" a leftist: I just can't often stand your average right-winger, although I must admit I do have a soft spot for thoughtful, not overtly moralizing conservatives. But the current left and most liberal tendencies, too, extending to the adjacent mostly Gen Z cultural and identity games, feel ever more alien and counterproductive when they just further drive the political polarisation (including by gender) and in their part the closing off of the (often mixed-gender!) shared spaces of mutual understanding, acceptance, fun-having and self-moderation that were often still there to be found in my youth, which kind of seemed to moderate and prevent the radical escalation of people's political world views, and which I still see as advantages of a small and uniform enough nation, assuming they're not completely beyond preservation.
But I'm interested in what you said about the possibility of Finland going to war. Can that really happen? Do you have any kind of military presence or would you have to depend on the kindness of other countries? How big a threat do you think it really is?
It really feels like an end of an era when Paavo Väyrynen, an MP (or MEP) for five decades and a minister in eight cabinets (and a presidential candidate in 1988, 1994, 2012 and 2018), has fallen to the category of "several more who attempted to get on the ballet, mostly anti-NATO and/or antivaxx types".
I don't know if this is too much of a personal thing to ask you on a forum this public, but what you wrote about Olli Rehn somehow reminded me of what *might* be an extensive similarity in my personal trajectory in terms of my world view, maybe partly relating to just being of roughly the same age (I believe) and growing up within a broadly similar cultural milieu, later having kids, taking on responsibilities etc., but in part also ending up in some peculiarly specific places at the same time, such as close to the Orthodox church, although with you I don't know how exactly. Anyway, if (and to the extent) you feel this is not the proper place and/or time to share something like this that you maybe consider a personal or private thing, please feel free to ignore this or keep it on a level comfortable enough for you. Maybe you could choose to approach this through two slightly different emphases or degrees of generality (e.g. opting only for the first): first, telling about your journey *away* from the "the Left" and towards maybe something more heterodox, wholesome or different in some other way, or alternatively, telling basically the same story but, especially with the latter part, going deeper and more personal up to ultimately how you took on to live a life of religion and the reasons for doing this as a member of this particular church.
As for me, should you want to know (although we don't know each other IRL, and me hiding behind this pseudonym makes this kinda dumb):
I've been an Orthodox practically from the get-go, getting it from my mother, so in that sense it's not an entirely recent development. I'd say I've always had a respectful and at times more curious but mostly just quite neutral attitude towards it. Had someone asked about it regularly after age 12 or so, I would've said I was an atheist, but there have been periods where I've more seriously tried to get deeper into the theology, i.e. not just interpreting Jesus as a model and teacher in the secular moral sense or something like that, but developing my own interpretations and at times supposedly even being able to interpret and justify some near-dogmatic positions in a sensible way, mostly by understanding the symbolism-heavy stuff and the ever-present argumentation-by-mysticism as a sort of (convention of) language for speaking about things human words and logic cannot fully convey — an issue that became generally easy for me to grasp in a much "fuller" way after I was drawn (by curiosity and the long-present interest for the sublime) into dabbling with various psychedelics alone and with a few select friends in the liminal age of entering into early adulthood, ultimately going through a couple of the most meaningful experiences of my life at least so far. After those, I wasn't yet drawn so much towards any organized religion, but it certainly made me better understand that aspect of spritual practice and religious life, and the importance of having some well-established contexts and ways of integration as well as advice available for instances, especially with such potent mind-manifesting agents, where the users typically have no prior religious, spiritual or secular framework for interpreting, integrating and embedding in their lives what are potentially profound experiences, or even the most primitive shared language for communicating with others about and making efforts to express the "inexpressible".
As for the left-wing tendencies: In my youth, I wasn't formally part of any left-wing party, or movement, for that matter, save for the occasional demonstration and the like, such as the big one in Helsinki — by modern-day Finnish standards, at least — against the Iraq War in 2003. Yet I would've then described myself left-wing for sure, even "counter-culture" in general attitudes and inclinations, despite of my early openness or ambivalence toward many typically almost "non-lefty" interests among my general interests in (deep) history and human behavior, like evolutionary biology, ancient genomics, behavioral genetics, even all the way to the battles around the rise of evopsych and the even older but still continuing culture wars within social science, etc.
Today, I think I have even a harder time to classify myself in terms of religious belief and political stances.
I sure don't want to describe myself an agnostic: I'm afraid people would think of me as a simpleton of sorts, speculating on the unlikely empirical existence of the spaghetti monster or whatever, an in-this-world, part-of-this-world "being" in a necessarily physical sense, not God in the same metaphysical understanding as, say, David Bentley Hart (who I've only recently started reading, though). "Spiritual but not religious", in turn, is a dead-giveaway of the kind of new-agey vibe-surfer ultimately doomed to solitude and separateness along with some random collection of experiences and half-assed ideas without a rigorous framework of common, accumulating and robustly passed-on knowledge, that is, culture and cultural evolution, which also happens to be the secret of the success of our species.
Politically, I'm still "instinctively" a leftist: I just can't often stand your average right-winger, although I must admit I do have a soft spot for thoughtful, not overtly moralizing conservatives. But the current left and most liberal tendencies, too, extending to the adjacent mostly Gen Z cultural and identity games, feel ever more alien and counterproductive when they just further drive the political polarisation (including by gender) and in their part the closing off of the (often mixed-gender!) shared spaces of mutual understanding, acceptance, fun-having and self-moderation that were often still there to be found in my youth, which kind of seemed to moderate and prevent the radical escalation of people's political world views, and which I still see as advantages of a small and uniform enough nation, assuming they're not completely beyond preservation.
Wow. Some choices.
But I'm interested in what you said about the possibility of Finland going to war. Can that really happen? Do you have any kind of military presence or would you have to depend on the kindness of other countries? How big a threat do you think it really is?