The problems with that argument are that first, the Viking culture was mostly rural and agricultural, the raiding and pillaging was a tiny side-effect that mostly happened during times of economic hardship, not as a way of life ... and that today's Sweden is rapidly recessing back to a less-tolerant, anti-multicultural society for many reasons. You also conveniently ignore the much more bloody 'military superpower' phase in the 1600s.
It’s not Ragnar Lodbrok turning into ABBA. It’s a mostly peaceful peasant society getting tossed around by history until it became a mostly peaceful service economy - and the shaking never really stopped.
History is not a straight progress line. Ask the Romans.
If you really want to be accurate about history in what is now Sweden, let’s also mention the horrific mass graves discovered in Birka and surroundings which seems to imply that massacring whole villages, women and children included , was commonplace even before Viking times. The later imperialist period seems less brutal to me.
Pre-agricultural societies are generally much more brutal because you need a lot of territory to feed relatively few people. Agriculturalists can conquer other people and make them work for them in a way that doesn't scale for hunters-gatherers. The consequence is that the combatant/noncombatant distinction is much more blurry, and genocide is often an explicit goal of the war.
Yes! It annoys me to no end when people pretend that time is developing us into a perfect image - we're just the latest generation in a long string of improvements. Making it seem like development is predetermined.
Ask a medieval peasant and he wouldnt even be able to describe how his life is different from his father's.
It’s not Ragnar Lodbrok turning into ABBA. It’s a mostly peaceful peasant society getting tossed around by history until it became a mostly peaceful service economy - and the shaking never really stopped.
History is not a straight progress line. Ask the Romans.