DEI FORUM NORDICS - My experienced of the conference

Yesterday I was invited to attend a conference about diversity and Inclusiveness. The paradox was that I experienced exclusion when trying to ask questions. I was also verbally abused by a man who claimed that it was inappropriate to ask certain questions. Later I met with many people from the conference with whom I had great discussions.

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Yesterday I was invited to attend a conference about diversity and Inclusiveness (DEI). As I’m a strong proponent of viewpoint diversity and heterogeneity, so I thought it would be a good idea to go there to listen what they hade to say, and to partake in some of the discussion.

The conference had been going on since the morning, and I arrived approximately half past three in the afternoon. I got my own badge and was welcomed in.

A good start!

At the conference, I met with the person who had invited me; we met earlier this week when she was doing a talk for another organization.

On stage was a panel of people discussing various topics concerning relations at the office. One person made a remark that people at the office did presentations in uralic-finnish.

Finland has a long history, and for most of its history, the dominant language was Swedish. Sometimes during or after the viking era, what is now southern Finland became the Eastern part of the Kingdom of Sweden, which was then called Svitjod. The capitol was Uppsala. In order to understand the geography of the country, you must imagine it orthogonally to current geography; that means, it wasn’t south-north, but rather east-west. Svitjod centered around lake Mälaren and across the southern quark.

3500 years before the present, tribes migrated from the Ural mountains - the Sami and the Ural-finnish tribes (Lamnidis et al. 2018). The Sami settled in the northern coastal areas, but was later pushed out by the uralic-finns. Both remained minorities, with no written culture. And with no written language, any culture will remain tribal (Pagel, 2019, lecture 3).

Swedish was the trading language, meaning that most people in Fennoscandia spoke Swedish. And still do. Trade is key for progress, and because the uralic-finnish tribes didn’t learn Swedish, they never experienced the same progress. But Swedish had another advantage, it originates from European languages. That means that if you understand Swedish you're close to understanding English, Italian, and German.

Influences from Europe, renaissance, science revolution, and enlightenment reached Sweden, including the eastern part of the Kingdom. In 1550 the Swedish King Gustav I Eriksson Vasa (1496-1560) founded Helsingfors. In 1640, queen Christina (1626-1689) founded Royal academy of Åbo which later moved to become Helsingfors university.

On May 3 1808, during one of many wars between Sweden and Russia, Russian troops invaded Sveaborg - a fortress erected by the Swedish military, starting 1748. At the time of the Russian invasion, more than 5000 people lived at Sveaborg. It's likely that vice admiral Cronstedts (1756-1820) decision to surrender saved thousands of lives.

The defeat made eastern Sweden a principally of Russia, and likely traumatized the population. That in turn may be the likely reason why fennomani emerged in 1810. Finland now sought to find an identity not only independent from Russia, but also from Sweden. Even so, the Swedish language remained dominant. Finland also kept the Swedish constitution.

Swedish-speaking Runeberg (1804-1877) wrote Finland’s national hymn, later to be translated to uralic-finnish.

In 1835, a second attempt to form a written uralic-finnish history was made when Lönnroth (1802-1884) gathered myths or sagas that had until then been communicated by oral tradition, into the epic of Kalevala.

In October 1917, When Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) staged his famous coup d'etat, eight months after the Russian revolution, Lenin also gave Finland its independence.

Swedish remained an official Finnish language. Today 47 % of the Finnish population speaks Swedish. Few in the North, but likely most people in the south.

So, why is a person at a conference about diversity and inclusion excluding Finland's first and still official language - Swedish? I asked that question, but the person had no good answer. The likely explanation is that she only got information about uralic-finnish.

After the panel discussion, we had a coffee break. And as I was pouring coffee into a paper cup, a big man approached me, saying that my question was very inappropriate and said I should have asked the question off-stage so to speak.

This kind of attempt to suppress freedom of expression is coined verbal violence, and is the opposite to diversity and inclusion. Thankfully the threatening man walked away.

After that the last panel was conducted; my interpretation was that most of the attendants conformed to ideas like gender hypothesis, safe-spaces, and discrimination against gender and skin-colour but not language.

After the conference I met a record number of people who approached me to say hello and add me on Linkedin. That was really inclusive. The plan was to go to a restaurant, but there was left-overs from lunch (which I didn’t attend) and we had a standing talking dinner.

Then we moved downtown for drinks; many of the people joined, and it was all great. One person had studied gender-stuff, and because I'm an anthropolical/evolutionary psychologist, some viepoint diversity occurred. The gender person claimed the data from interviews can lead to an explanation (cause-effect), which of course is false. When the place closed, we moved to another place.

Other discussions emerged between person A, B and me, partly about Finland’s original language and ways to communicate with other people Person A argued that uralic finnish was Finland's first language, and then used anecdotes to support the argument. This is what Lamnidis et al. 2018 writes:

Linguistic evidence shows that Saami languages were spoken in Finland prior to the arrival of the early Finnish language and have dominated the whole of the Finnish region before 1000 CE.

When that didn't work she applied stonewalling which is part of the construct of relational aggressiveness, the opposite to diversity and inclusiveness. The cause of stonewalling and relational aggressiveness is the release of cortisol which blocks the hippocampus and activates the amygdala, triggering flight-flight responces. Its important to remember that things like this originate from within and are explained by lack of emotional and social adjustment during childhood (Österberg, 2004).

Because I know something about emotional psychology (Österberg, 2001), I gave a few suggestions for an alternative explanation and to emphasize reasoning (Pinker, 2011). I also offered B to deconstruct my argument and improve it. That didn’t work immediately, but after 11–20 minutes, B:s facial expressions changed, indicating that he had internalized what I had said. And maybe he will reflect on it for use in other interpersonal encounters forward in time.

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