The Pillars of Society: Six Centuries of Civilization in the Netherlands

197 Pages·1971·3.312 MB·English

by  William Z. Shetter (auth.)

TEESSIDE POLYTECHNIC
LIBRARY
THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY
The Pttlars
of Society
SIX CENTURIES OF CIVILIZATION
IN THE NETHERLANDS
by
WILLIAM Z. SHETTER
MARTINUS NI]HOFF / THE HAGUE / 1971
© 1971 by Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
AI! rights reserved, including tbe right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
ISBN-13: 978-90-247-5080-1 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-011-6443-6
001: 10.1007/978-94-011-6443-6
Contents
An introductory word
1 The pillars of society . 4
2 Some rules of the game 15
3 The emergence of Holland 28
4 The Burgundian ideal 42
5 The birth of a new symbolism 57
6 The ingredients of political Hberty 71
7 The anatomy of a Golden Age 84
8 A manner of speaking .. 95
9 A mythology of the visual 105
10 Literary reflections .... 119
11 Noontime: Sara Burgerhart 129
12 Mid-afternoon: Camera Obscura 139
13 Evening: Small Souls ... 149
14 Contemporary challenges 163
15 The horizons of the culture 177
Notes ............. 184
An introductory word
A recent book analyzing the contemporary political structure in the
Netherlands calls the key chapter The rules of the game'. Another
one, written in the Netherlands a few years ago and attempting to give
a picture of some of the most characteristic features of the country's
social organization, symbolizes its essence with a cartoon about card
games. A world-famous historian derives an entire book about the play
element in culture from the culture of the late Medieval Netherlands.
In trying to account to myself for the unity of the culture of the
Netherlands over a wide range of phenomena and through many
centuries of history, I found myself toying with the thought that the
elusive but characteristic flavor of the culture might be approached by
means of the currently fashionable idea of a game. With proper
restraint, it ought to be possible to explain some fundamental things
about the culture by means of a small number of quite simple rules,
the sort of habits and tendencies that are not always easy for an
insider to notice but that are obvious enough once pointed out by
someone who has had to learn them. Ideally such rules ought to be
the kind about which it can be shown that cultural history is a large,
panoramic playing out of them and that conspicuous creations like art
and literature are in some sense manifestations of them. Past achieve
ments and present pattern ought to be inseparable from each other.
It is this kind of a presentation of the culture of the Netherlands that
is being undertaken in the pages to follow. There are no startling new
insights into historical events nor radical reinterpretations of art or
literature, but rather a running commentary on present and past that
singles out what seem to me to be the deeply rooted themes that
constantly generate the events and works we see up on the surface.
The most radical departure from any other treatment of the history
and structure of the culture is probably the close attention given to
the language itself. Having always felt a vague dissatisfaction at the
way the language is seldom treated as if it had much relation to the
development of political systems or the creation of artistic phe
nomena, I resolved that if I ever had occasion to present the culture as
a totality I would correct this by attempting to show that the
language is probably the prime exponent of the rules being followed
by the culture. Though social dimensions in the way the language is
used are going to be of central importance, I should hasten to add that
I assume no control of the language on the part of readers. All Dutch
quotations will be found in English at the bottom of the page, and all
translations, incidentally, are my own.
The chapters to follow, then, are an attempt by an outside observer
to explain something of the nature of the culture of the Netherlands
to other outsiders. The number of these chapters readily betrays its
origin in the academic semester, and I cheerfully acknowledge the
stimulating discussions with students without which this would prob
ably not have taken concrete shape. However, it is not intended
primarily as a textbook but more generally as an exercise, for anyone
interested, in a type of cross-cultural understanding. Large numbers of
members of my own culture have close contact with that of the
Netherlands, and it can only be called unfortunate that the modem,
industrialized face worn by the Netherlands today effectively masks
the striking uniqueness of the cultural patterns under the surface that
continue to provide the country with its own style in the European
context. It was attempts to explain these underlying cultural patterns,
first to myself and later to others, that gradually led me to perceive
that social patterns, the using of the language, and the achievements
of the past were all part of the same fundamental rules.
Some serious-minded readers will no doubt object to the overly light
hearted way in which the 'game' idea tends to be applied to very
2
weighty and complex matters. My only answer would be that a degree
of irresponsibility is always a hazard in a brief presentation of a large
subject, and that I trust the attentive reader will sense where a grain of
salt is appropriate. A more serious objection, and a legitimate one, will
be that the picture here is too selective, never even mentioning many
important persons and events, and worse, that it has a habit of
treating the culture as if it always existed in isolation. The best answer
to this is to disclaim any pretense of offering a complete work on
cultural history and to point out that understanding of the total
cultural picture will be greatly enhanced by some additional reading.
In fact, the publisher'S concurrence with my wish that the cost of this
sketch be kept as low as possible means that in the absence of the
illustrations and maps that it would have been good to include, the
reader will find it necessary to have an illustrated cultural history at
his elbow as he reads. The histories to which I am most indebted and
the cultural histories that will be most useful to the reader are listed at
the beginning of the Notes, which are to be found immediately
following Chapter 15.1
While I was still in my teens, I once began corresponding with a young
lady my own age in the Netherlands, and soon after this found
myself buying a little do-it-yourself grammar of Dutch to see if I
could manage to compose an intelligible sentence or two. At that time
I would no doubt have been astonished if someone had predicted that
over twenty years later I would have gotten to know the country well
and developed an increasing fascination with its people and its history.
This 'outsider's view' will seem to many of them to be a bit idiosyn
cratic here and there, but I would like to think it offers a perspective
that is just different enough to be interesting without being wrong
headed. It is offered as an attempt to repay my debt to the many
people who enriched my experience - often without realizing they
were doing it - by patiently helping me during these years to learn
the language and understand something about the culture, and I hope
it will be accepted in this spirit.
April,1970
3
The pillars of society
1
Since it is only reasonable to expect a title to give fair indication of
what is to come, we ought to start by making sure our general title
awakens all the right associations. To most speakers of English, the
word 'pillars' in this context probably suggests first of all important
people, in Dutch cultural history perhaps people such as Erasmus,
William the Silent and some of the great 17th-century commercial and
political leaders. To some it might also suggest the basic institutions
that hold a society together, such as democratic government or
religion, or perhaps even more abstract things such as peacefulness,
decency and tolerance.
If the title conjures up these images, it has done at least part of its job
right. We are about to start considering precisely this kind of high
lights as we follow a varied and colorful civilization through the most
important and interesting periods of its history. The Netherlands is
the most densely populated country in Europe, and is situated in a
strategic corner of the continent where for many centuries it has been
exposed to an intensive traffic in goods and ideas. Not only is the land
itself derived from other places, as a Dutch historian pointed out - it
consists largely of sand and clay washed down by the large rivers that
cross it and laid down on a foundation brought by glaciers in the Ice
Age· - but nearly all the cultural advances we immediately think of in
connection with the Netherlands were really borrowed from else
where. The Burgundian courtly culture came from France, late Medie
val painting from Italy, Calvinism from Switzerland, Renaissance
4
The pillars of society
poetry from Italy, and even the 17th-century painters, probably the
most distinctively Dutch of them all, did not develop their technique
from nowhere but got much of.it from the Italians.
To say all this, though, is of course to say nothing very significant,
since such cultural manifestations are always the results of a slow
development and a borrowing back and forth across borders. What is
significant is the particular synthesis made by one people of a con
stant cultural bombardment from without - how it shaped its bor
rowings to its own particular needs and made them into a uniquely
individual expression of itself. Much of what we feel to be important
Dutch contributions to our Western civilization - painting perhaps
first and foremost, but equally important the development of exacting
observation in science, the evolution of a novel, republican, form of
the state, contributions to international law and to education and
trade - is well enough known that its importance hardly needs to be
defended here. Quite the contrary, it has become so familiar that
there is a considerable danger of our accepting these surface manifes
tations of a culture without troubling to ask the question how it came
about. Surely achivements such as these can only be the products of a
viable, well-functioning society, a people responding to the complex
challenges of an environment (whether these be physical, economic,
military or some other) by creating a culture that provides each
member with an image of the whole he is a part of. We will return in a
moment to the idea of culture and consider just how we are to under
stand the term.
If we want to be more than merely casual observers, then, we will
want to know what kind of a people it was that found its expression
and its image in what we call the civilization of the Netherlands, and
- to the extent that we can - why it responded the way it did to the
particular pressures and challenges imposed on it. We will see in due
course that the period in which this culture reached its fullest develop
ment lasted almost precisely a century: from 1555, the date of the
accession of Philip II to the Spanish throne, the fatal event that soon
5
The pillars of society
led to the revolt of the Netherlands, to 1648, the date of the Treaty
of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years' War and established the
independence of the Dutch Republic. It is in this climax period, the
culmination of several centuries of development that set the tone of
all subsequent history and gave the culture of the Netherlands the
stamp it still bears, that we will want to ask who and what the 'pillars'
were; which persons were most responsible for the development of an
integrated and cohesive society; which cultural institutions are the key
ones that give us insight into the direction developments are taking.
To ask these questions intelligently we ought to make sure we have
some understanding of the contemporary culture of the Netherlands
that is the direct heir to this past. And this brings us back once more
to our title.
Since we are about to undertake an exercise in cross-cultural under
standing, it seemed excusable to allow the title to contain a pun which
requires for appreciation of it certain very important information
about modern Dutch society. The play is on the same word 'pillars',
which in Dutch is zuilen, a word with a similar architectural meaning
but a vastly different sociological one. The 'pillars' of society in the
Dutch sense are social arrangements that can justly be called a purely
Dutch invention, since sociologists seem to be in agreement that there
is no reasonably exact parallel to be found in any other modern
society.i Zuilen, in a word, are the confessional-political blocs into
which modern Dutch society is divided and which thoroughly perme
ate nearly every aspect of contemporary life in the Netherlands. Their
number varies depending on the observer and how he chooses to
define them; they are very complex and resist easy definition, but
they are so important to an understanding of life in the Netherlands
that most of Chapter 2 will be devoted to an attempt to explain their
function. At this point we need not go any farther than a remark or
two about their relation to the past, to the civilization of the
Netherlands as it developed especially in our century-long period on
both sides of the year 1600. In the present-day Netherlands we have a
society thoroughly split up into a small set of groups such that a
6