Holland and The Light of Experience

A Dutch river scene as painted by a 17th century Dutch artist

At the end of July the wife and I went to the reunion of the Dutch side of the family (The wife is half Dutch). This reunion was held in the historic town of Weesp, not far from Amsterdam. A highlight of the day was a trip down the wide River Vecht in a flotilla of boats transporting the extended family. The weather was perfect; it was sunny and neither too hot nor too cold. 

As we travelled I was very much reminded of the Dutch artists of the 17th Century and in particular episode VIII of Kenneth Clarke's Civilisation series which was entitled The Light of Experience. At the start of this episode the camera pans across the flats of Holland in the light of early morning. Clarke then goes on to explore the new ethos that had started to surface in 17th century Holland. By the 1600s something in human thinking had clearly changed since the medieval period: This was now post-reformation Europe and no longer the world of Catholic Christendom. In the 17th century Holland had turned into a thoroughgoing capitalist nation and in that respect was even further ahead than England. Quoting Kenneth Clarke on the ethos we find in 17th century Holland (My emphases):

[There was] a revolutionary change in thought: The revolution in which divine authority is replaced by experience experiment and observation……when one begins to ask the question “Does it work?” or even “Does it pay?” instead of asking “Is it God’s will?” one gets a new set of answers…..to try and suppress opinions one doesn’t share is much less profitable than to tolerate them. This conclusion should have been reached during the Reformation, it permeated the writings of Erasmus,…alas a belief in the divine authority of our own opinions afflicted the protestants just as much as the Catholics……

...too right! ....as I can testify from first hand experience of protestants! Instead of having to face down one Pope one is confronted by hundreds of little popes, each one quite sure they are God's mouth piece! Protestantism's factiousness was a consequence of the new individualism promoted by the reformation: The individual was no longer part of a collective Catholic kingdom which ensured salvation to all its members as matter of course (provided they were obedient to the church!). Instead under the reformation the individual was alone before God with the responsibility of  interpreting the Word correctly and working out his own salvation. Putatively, salvation was by grace alone and yet many protestants somehow made, and continue to make, heavy weather of just how one is to rightly appropriate that grace; they have a tendency to insist that all sorts of proprietary conditions of belief and practice must be observed before one has the right to make claim to that grace! That is, "grace" has to be "earned"!*  This is the paradox of Protestantism. As Clarke points out Protestants could be just as bigoted as those that went before them! But there was one big, big difference: In the West God, it seems, was no longer keeping His eggs all in one basket. The day of the open Gospel had come.

The idea that one's eternal destiny is not the collective responsibility of the church but in large part one's own responsibility is easily carried over into to the world of commercial concerns and the individual's seeking of worldly wealth. Hence commercialism, which turns out to be a very effective catalyst for production and economic growth, was encouraged.  Holland in the 17th century was a microcosm of what was to come. But the pathologies of capitalism also became apparent. The free market encourages people to just follow their noses without regard to the long term & macro-scale effects of what they are doing. In free market economies this has a tendency to result in power-law inequalities in wealth and chaotic fluctuations in production.  (See here)

***

I was asked by one of our Dutch relatives if I would like to collect people's photos and put a selection of them in an album. This I did and I compiled a pdf. As I found the visit very instructive as well as enjoyable I decided to risk slipping in a short appendix at the end of the album praising Holland's contribution to the world's industrial civilisation. I have put this appendix on the end of this post. In this appendix I dared to venture the theory that the Dutch may have influenced the thinking of some of the self-imposed protestant exiles from England who wanted to escape the persecution of the official English protestant establishment. On second thoughts, however, I must bear in mind that although I still think this thesis is possible, non-conforming protestants, tolerated after the toleration act of 1689, could only participate in government after the repeal of the test act in 1828. 

The River Vecht as we saw it at the end of July. 

APPENDIX III
A personal reflection: The Dutch Golden Age.

For me, as an amateur historian, the setting of the 2018 reunion in typically Dutch environs was of special interest.  According to Wikipedia (My emphases):

Many economic historians regard the Netherlands as the first thoroughly capitalist country in the world.  In early modern Europe it had the wealthiest trading city (Amsterdam) and the first full-time stock exchange. The inventiveness of the traders led to insurance and retirement funds as well as phenomena such as the boom-bust cycle, the world's first asset-inflation bubble, the tulip mania of 1636–1637, and the world's first bear raider, Isaac le Maire, who forced prices down by dumping stock and then buying it back at a discount. In 1672 – known in Dutch history as the Rampjaar (Disaster Year) – the Dutch Republic was at war with France, England and three German Bishoprics simultaneously. At sea it could successfully prevent the English and French navy entering the western shores. On land, however, it was almost taken over internally by the advancing French and German armies coming from the east. It managed to turn the tide by inundating parts of Holland, but could never recover to its former glory again and went into a state of general decline in the 18th century, with economic competition from England and long-standing rivalries between the two main factions in Dutch society, the republican Staatsgezinden and the supporters of the stadtholder the Prinsgezinden, as main political factions.

As we can see from the above passage, in the Netherlands water could be both ally and enemy; it could defend as well as attack. Old Weesp, as we saw at the reunion, was surrounded by defensive channels punctuated by fortifications.

The 17^th century was the Dutch Golden age,  a period when Holland ranked as one of the most advanced economies among Europe’s nations.  It is, I believe, significant that during that century English non-conformist Protestants had found refuge from the persecution of the English state by settling in Rotterdam. It is my conjecture that when these Protestants eventually returned to England they brought back important lessons about the running of a modern state and also on how to do business. Many of these Protestants were at the forefront of the 18^th century industrial revolution in England, a revolution that depended on a thoroughgoing commercialisation of the kind they had seen in Holland. We can perhaps conclude, then, that without the Dutch Golden Age there would not have been a modern world!

Sir Kenneth Clarke’s acclaimed series of programs on Western Civilisation includes an episode on the Dutch Golden Age. Clarke gives credit to the important place of Dutch culture in the formation of the modern world. As we travelled on the River Vecht on that warm June day in 2018 the content of this episode was on my mind.    

Footnote:
* Take for example the discussion I had with fundamentalist Nigel Wright who would be unlikely to accept me as a saved Christian until I fulfilled his conditions on belief and practice: See here