jctv's dodoo

diary of descriptions, observations and opinions

How to indicate that you are a deep lover of some or even much German Culture without having to affiliate yourself to the inexcusable bits? It was a question I asked my colleagues at work and we speculated at length. Maarten came up with Dietsophile, which sounds good and pointed, but would need constant clarification. Misu then came up with the self-evident "Germanophile à la carte..." Now I can happily be a serious Francophile, Italophile, Danophile, Swissophile and Swedophile, Anglophile and Germanophile à la carte, without having that faint sense of misgiving at the back of my mind. In fact this solution might well refine my enjoyment of other cultures significantly, including those whom I was until now quite happy to accept whole and without qualification such as Italy and France. After all, they have their dark side too, as do the Germans, Dutch, English, Danes and Swedes. What have the Swiss ever done wrong?

On the train. A lady gets in at Breda. She’s dressed in a black suit, has long black hair and sits down opposite me, promptly starting a long and loud, happy conversation on her phone. She sounds Spanish even though she’s speaking Dutch. At Dordrecht people get out and she changes places so as to sit by herself. Her face is aging; her teeth are brown; she has a good figure hoisted in its tight suit. Another phone call. Why don’t they go salsa dancing? She is going. It’s been so busy. Hasn’t had time to think. She can’t be bothered with anything else this weekend. OK. Another phone call. She now speaks Spanish, a Latin American Spanish, rapid like a machine gun. I think she mentions Peru. The conductor comes by, a heavy, glum lady with unfortunate lips folded over each other like an indifferently made up bed. She wants to see our tickets. The Peruvian lady complains to her about the three hour delay we suffered the day before. The heavy, glum lady ignores her and moves her big heavy body on to the next row of seats. Feeling herself ignored the Peruvian lady turns her nervously active face briefly to me and speaks half to herself. I am ignoring her too: stuck deep in my laptop. She sits back in her seat and later we both get up out of our seats to get out at Delft. The weather is lovely. Just before the doors open she turns to me. “You work hard", she says. I smile. "Three hours delay yesterday”, she says. “Yes,  I know,” I reply, shaking my head and folding my face into what I hope is an appropriate expression: “Someone in Best jumped in front of the train. The Dutch are a sombre lot." “I used to think, 'Oh how awful'”, she replies, “but now I just wish they would try and find some other way to kill themselves. Every time!” I wasn’t sure what that last bit meant, but I said, “well…” “Anyway,” she cut in, “it must have been a foreigner, it is the wrong time of year and the weather is good.” The doors opened, we stepped out onto the shadow of the train.

In evolutionary theory the weakest lose out. There can be no doubt about that. If you are not up to the situation, you are done for. But who are the weak? Certainly not those who get help from others, or those who work together.

I have just been asked to fill in the Academic Survey 2010 of the so-called Intelligence unit. They asked me for my opinion. I gave it:

A university, like a government, should serve society as a whole and must resist the privileging of any single part of that society. Excellence in research is certainly commendable when it concerns research that benefits the whole and does not depend on the kindling of those partial desires which, to me at least, appear to be doing their best to tear society apart and make it subject to a disastrous envy and stupid rivalry. I consider a quality student one who takes part in society well. It is difficult to qualify such a person clearly (thank god) but it is not difficult to thereby render absurd all other qualifications of students that are in favour with research companies, which take as success the velocity of someone's career or the elbow-force required of graduates to take up desirable and responsible places in society. That to me is rather to be regretted. Still too great an emphasis is placed on quantifiable criteria: number of citations etc. This gives a warped image of society. The society hereby encouraged looks like an athlete who has become an invalid because of the ridiculous size of his muscles! A body made unhealthy through sport. If that isn't absurd I don't know what is.

Here is the practical product of my philosophy. I feel a little self-conscious in declaring it like this; it all sounds so heavy-handed and pedantic. Nevertheless, the times appear to require us to rethink ourselves and take a clarified position relative to the global swell of barbarism. Here is mine:

Things I cannot be for or against:

1. Capitalism

2. Socialism

3. Communism

4. Conservatism

5. Liberalism

6. Democracy

7. Aristocracy

8. Bureaucracy

9. Technocracy

10. Judaism

11. Christianity

12. Islam

13. Buddhism

14. Atheism

15. Agnosticism

16. Monarchy

17. Republicanism

18. politicians

19. lawyers

20. bankers

21. investors

22. dentists

and many other similar examples

Things I am against

1. Any form of humiliation

2. Any form of rape or bad use

3. Most forms of carelessness

4. Any form of absurd behaviour except when the subject of comedy

5. Any form of racial, religious, sexual inequality

6. Any form of injustice

7. Any form of unfairness

8. Any form of dishonesty or corruption

9. great disparity in wealth

10. people using the systems and institutions that are meant to help them take their responsibility to divest themselves of their responsibility

Things I am for

1. the rule of fair law

2. the principle of good use

3. the freedom for everyone to to pursue their well considered good

4. everybody acting so as to better their own situation without worsening that of others or any other part of the environment

5. justice as fairness

6. kindness and gentleness

7. generosity and good faith

8. tolerance and courage to defend the boundaries of good use

9. mutual respect

10. (self) criticism

11. doubt and humour

12. Honesty and sincerity

13. decorum and politeness

14. the exposure of absurd behaviour and unjustness through satire and comedy

The difference

I cannot be for or against most human institutions by themselves. They are mechanisms for living together which are, by and large, neutral in themselves and would function adequately enough or become obsolete as soon as people learned to live their life well. No institution can surive the sustained onslaught of our creative ability at subverting any system. As such I can only be for the rule of fair law by whatever mechanism it is achieved, as long as it never sacrifices the means to the end or indeed vice verse.

Institutions are made problematic by the people who constitute their working parts. They are, after all, the ones who formulate and pass laws and (fail to)live by them.

Only those intitutions, such as national socialism or anti-islamism or antisemitism, which are themselves founded on a deliberate dismissal of the great virtues are thereby rendered completely, and irrevocably unacceptable.

As such my hope is not invested in institutions but in our ability to make them work well and fairly. This requires to my mind a reindividualisation of our functioning as people. We must regain authority over ourselves and work to make the great virtues our own and live according to their advice.

For the rest we have only good use to guide us.

I was talking to a past student of mine called Geert about the parties we would have liked to have voted for..

He came up with the brilliant PVV+ (PAYVAYVAYPLUS) whose political aim is to expel everybody from Holland, including its own members.

I came up with the less impractical Party for the Machines, in Dutch the PVDM. (PAYDAYVAYEMM). I feel that machines have had a hard time shaking their image of blundering, thoughtless and unfeeling creatures, peculiarly prone to maltreatment and contempt through vandalism and thoughtless use. We are the blundering, throughtless and unfeeling creatures when confronted with the elegance and potential of machines! Anyone who has ever treated any kind of machine badly knows that it is a tender and sensitive thing and quickly stops doing what it was designed for. I recently left my phone in a wet pocket after a downpour; I know what I am talking about. Let’s treat our machines with the respect and tenderness they deserve! Man Ray set the machine free by making the iron unusable; That is not my party's way. Instead of setting machines free I want to enslave and domesticate them through greater care and devotion! Making them work effortlessly and without faltering.

As I'm in the swing of things maybe I could interest you, my dear stray reader in my two one-man organisations, neither of which exist except in a purely virtual sense and which I am committed to dissolve at the first hint of outside interest. The first is the ATA, or the Association des Terroristes Architecturales. (I chose a French name, feeling confident I shall thereby avoid the sensitive radars of the CIA, MI5 and the AIVD; after all walls have ears, eyes and even snesitive skin nowadays) The express purpose of the Association is to scare buildings that are ugly in a gentle sort of way, using a variety of means. These are of course secret. The ATA has however encountered a fatal flaw in its procedure in that all buildings which are selected expressly for their ugliness become less so as I attempt to define what it is that makes them ugly. Invariably this boils down to having to acknowledge an incapacity in myself to find beauty in them. This organisation is impatient for its first success.

The other society of which I am the founding and sole member is the society for the promotion of Dutch as the next world language, the SFTPODATNWL or, after a quick transformation of these rather abstract letters into an elegant acronym, the SOFTPODATNOWELL, which I think reflects the cool ambitions and sense of mission of the society. The aim is to have Dutch installed as the sole world language by 01.12.35813 by which time I think English, Chinese and Spanish will have had their run and be happy to pass the baton.

An emaciated and cross-eyed man opposite me, dressed in a dark blue anorak, is hiccupping loudly. After each hiccup he emits a short shriek of surprise. This feels like on the spot, under cover, live reporting.

It is difficult to know and decide upon what I feel about these elections. My first feelings, as the results came in, was as primitive as the politics of the party whose success I am so upset about. I wanted all those who voted for Geert Wilders and his revolting hate mongers to be given the order they themselves would like to impose on Islamic immigrants. All racists and all people who exclude groups on the basis of a contradiction of the first law of our constitution should be shown the border and go and live in a large country with other self-satisfied, ugly bigots. I foresee a great utopian hell, a country, perhaps the melting South Pole, like Dante’s hell, where all these misguided embittered people, who have given themselves to their narrow mindedness and who have forsaken the responsibility they have to themselves, can happily vent their moronic hatefulness and receive poetic justice. Alright that was my first reaction. I hope you will forgive me for it, I am all too human. I then thought of John Rawls and became calm. Still, I am still seething with an anger that borders on the selfrighteous. I love Holland in all its awkward bluntness and funny humourlessness, but in the PVV and its politics a predilection for meanness manifests itself which I would gladly keep hidden in Pandora's box. But I must be careful that I do not go the same way; I feel thoughts coming up in me which confirm that I too am first and foremost a primate and that I have to dig deep for my humanity, just like the man whose silly hairdo stands as an emblem for the banality of his solution to the problem of society. His kind of sad tribalism-without-a-tribe represents our inability to overcome that which can make us into very unpleasant animals indeed. My neighbour at work, a lovely Iranian lady of sophistication and great intelligence, told me she wanted to leave the country she had escaped to in order to escape horribleness overrunning Iran. I understood and asked her not to: when the going gets tough the kind need to get going. We must not answer barbarism with flight or barbarism. We need to meet it with kindness, love and forgiveness and above all, exemplary behaviour, however difficult that is. We need to encourage these sad deluded creatures, who think so meanly and who have given themselves to meanness, to become different by taking their thinking seriously. Not by giving into it and allowing a hard society to develop, but by telling them why they are wrong and by respecting our own laws by implementing them in the spirit and letter they were composed. We need to show fairness and kind resolve.

I cycle to the station in Delft. Every morning at 6:45 exactly, I emerge from my house, open the bicycle shed, take out my wife’s bicycle, then take out my own. Depending on whether my wife is working that day, I move hers to the front garden or put it back in the bicycle shed. After that I strap on my bags, and, with as elegant a movement as I can muster so early in the morning, I ride off the pavement while hauling my right leg over the saddle and settle down to enjoy the sleepy quiet of my street. At the end of it, I turn right into a larger street which quite quickly crosses an even larger street. One day, as I approached the crossing of these two, I saw two tractors with trailers full of sand, driving at full force from left to right. I was going quite quickly so while I began breaking for them, I also allowed my bicycle to swerve to the other side of the street before reaching the crossing. It was very early and there was no other traffic about. The tractors passed in a flurry of noise and power and just behind them appeared a cyclist who wanted to turn into the road I was just coming from. I hope you can still follow this. I was still on the wrong side of the road and he needed to cycle around me. Nothing very dramatic really and nothing happened. I said sorry of course, as one does. He had plenty of time to adjust and swerve slightly and we would have each gone our own way were it not for the fact that he made a disapproving and aggressive grunt with the necessary expletives. I was feeling difficult. I stopped the bike and called after him: “Why do you need to be so aggressive?” He stops his bike and turns around too, ready for the situation to turn ugly. “What?”, he said, while jerking his head upwards. I walk towards him, lower my voice and speak calmly (I am definitely the hero in this story): “Why did you need to be so aggressive just now? Yes, I'll admit I was wrong; I was on the wrong side of the road; I am sorry for that and I will happily apologize for it again, but nothing happened, surely this little inconvenience did not warrant such an aggressive and unpleasant reaction?” At that moment he said something interesting. He had by now realised I was not going to start a slanging match or worse, but simply wanted a difficult conversation. However it was early and the mood was not propitious to such conversations. Nevertheless he said something which kept me going for quite a while. He said: “It is what happens, it is natural, you react like that automatically (het is natuurlijk, je gaat vanzelf zo reageren...)” It has to be said that he said this in the sense that he found it quite natural to react in such a way to such a flagrant abuse of the traffic rules, after all, I should have been on the other side of the road. I was wrong and he was in his rights and he had felt he should make me aware of this. The fact that he did so in such an unpleasant and harsh way did not count. (I think he is beginning to take over the role of hero here, let me try to redeem it without becoming too pedantic) I found this interesting because it illustrates, and is an instance of, the mechanism whereby we invest our responsibility for the way we respond to the world in the other. I had been wrong and he had been in his right to feel angry. As far as he was concerned the nature of his response was merely his natural response. And natural means, what exactly? I don't know. Automatic. But what does that mean? Blind? Unthinking? Instinctive? Physiological? However, a different response is possible. He could have taken a wider view of the situation; he could have just been generous and smiled and said something like OOps... You always carry responsibility for your response. You can overcome your primary aggressions. They don't even need to be there in the first place, surely? Responsibility is about your answer, your response to a situation. In French and English we emphasise the response, in Dutch and German we emphasize the answerableness of responsibility (Verantwoordelijkheid) Your responsibility is precisely located in your response to the world that meets you. In your response lies your responsibility in a way that you can never divest it, for even when you invest something else with the authority do decide something for you, it is still you who has done the investment. Your response to the world, to a situation is where your chances and your responsibilities lay! You cannot divest yourself of that responsibility not even by reducing yourself to a simple machine, a coping dasein, to put it in Heidegger’s words. It is still your response. So there. He was wrong in dealing with my wrongness. There are two wrongs to be dealt with here. He then said something even more interesting, just as he remounted his bike, he turned his head and called out to me: “If we all just follow the rules, we’ll get along just fine.” I am sure that this was what he genuinely felt. The rules have a redemptive function. And that is true, they do. But to what extent? With this sort of redemption comes something rather disquieting; in its most extreme form we could call it enslavement. Rules, like traffic rules, exist where possibility and the potential for crisis exists.  It may be tempting to invest rules with an absolute authority, but would that be a good thing? It would quickly reduce behaviour to the absurd, the kind of absurdity one feels while waiting for a red light at 3 o’clock in the morning on a deserted street. Such obeisance to rules would reduce humanity to mere dasein and would put in place the conditions for another episode of collective human disaster. Rules are useful as guidelines and they can help apportion responsibility in a situation where things go wrong, after all they systematically privilege certain behaviour over other behaviour and call the one right and lawful and the other wrong and unlawful. But thay must never be more than a guide and a boundary for the process of justice. They have no metaphysical validity. If I had caused an accident, I would certainly have been to blame. But I didn’t. The thing I did wrong was, from the perspective of that particular situation, rather minimal, had minimal effect as far as that situation was concerned. His reaction on the other hand was extremely unpleasant. It made public space into nasty space, a space of hardness, aggression and malice, a space of gorilla –like behaviour, a space in which all responsibility for our humanity was being invested in the rules. I would have preferred politeness in that situation. I have not seen him since even though I still do the same route at the same time every day of my working life...but never blindly.

On the radio I heard that of the 500 richest men 60% were married to brunette's, 22 % to blondes the rest to various other shades. None were married to redheads! This was startling news, but for all the wrong reasons. If the 500 richest men are convincing as a measure of success, then ask yourself: of what game? They certainly do not deserve to be seen as the measure of success of life, but may be seen as the measure of success at earning money. The two are not incompatible, but do not in any sense imply each other. If it shows anything, surely the above statistic shows that redheads know this and have opted for more interesting things to measure their life by than greed

A song written by my friend Eric Liefkes on the occasion of a visit to Santa Maria della Consolazione, Todi

Ik was laatst in Italië

En zag een mooie kerk

Ik vroeg aan die custode daar

Van wie is toch dit werk?

Maar toen ik daar die kroonlijst zag

Toen wist ik het meteen

Dit moet een kerk van Cola zijn

Want zo is d'r er maar één!

Colaaah da Caprarolaaaah Da Caprarolaaaaah Colaaaaah!

De Bisschop van Cremona

Die wou een nieuw paleis

Hij nodigde Scammozzi uit

Die zat toen in Parijs

Scamozzi pakt z'n koffers in

Maar toen de Bisschop thuis,

Een rotschetsie van Cola zag,

Toen kon die weer naar huis!

Colaaah da Caprarolaaaah Da Caprarolaaaaah Colaaaaah!

Bramante had een kerk bedacht

Die kwam niet van de grond;

Hij had teveel kapsones, dus

Hij kreeg een grote mond

Maar toen Da Caprarola zei:

"Laat mij maar effe snel...."

Toen gaf de buurtvereniging

groen licht en kon 't lekker wel!

2X Colaaah da Caprarolaaaah Da Caprarolaaaaah Colaaaaah!

Ik zit in de trein die langzamer begint te rijden omdat hij weldra in Delft aan zal komen. De conducteur roept het al om in een stem die bij het einde van de dag hoort: "Delft, Station Delft." Ik sta op om uit te stappen en ga richting het balkon. (een rare naame voor een ruimte die werkelijk niets te maken heeft met balkons maar dat heeft natuurlijk een historische rede) De automatische schuifdeur naar het balkon opent en ik stap de koudere ruimte binnen. Aldaar kom ik twee mensen tegen, gezeten aan weerszijde van de deur waar ik net doorheen ben gestapt. Links een meisje dat ik al eerder door de trein had zien slenteren met haar telefoon aan haar wang, en rechts een lange, slanke, donkere jonge man met een scheef petje. Het meisje zit in een nette houding op het opklapstoeltje. De jongen leunt lui naar achteren met benen wijd en zijn rug tegen de beugel van de deur naar buiten die zo open zal gaan en waar ik, als enige, zal uitstappen. De jongen is in gesprek met het meisje, de conversatie was al even gaande geloof ik: "eh psychologie... is dat niet zwaar dan?" "Ja," zegt het meisje, "je moet best wel boeken lezen en zo." "Ja, maar heb je ook eh..mensen al meegemaakt en zo?" "Ja, bij Parnassia, in m'n stage," "Nou, dat zou echt niets voor mij zijn, psychologie, weet je. Ik ga mijn tijd niet verdoen aan mensen die al, weet je, gek zijn, .... daar ga ik echt mijn tijd niet aan verdoen, .... daar heb ik de tijd niet voor. Als mensen al zo zijn dan moeten ze zelf maar eh... Daar heb ik geen tijd voor. Alleen als ik een witte Nederlander kan bekeren naar de Islam, weet je, dan krijg ik het goed met Allah, dat...." De trein is nu echte gestopt, de jongen vervouwt zijn armen en benen en staat op, glimlacht naar mij en maakt beleefd ruimte om mij uit te laten stappen en zegt nog: "Dag meneer."

Every working day, except wednesdays, I travel by train from Delft to Eindhoven. Usually I sit in the silent carriage where, middle-aged men and students work on their laptops or read their books and papers. However the silence of the carriage is not guaranteed and has often to be enforced by prickly men such as myself, when the level of noise from i-Pods or hilarious conversations gets too much. Because the conversations are sparse I have started collecting them. I try to recall them verbatim and leave them in their fragmented state. After all I am not trying to eavesdrop, I only record those parts of a conversation that force themselves upon me when voices are raised to a level at which they are no longer avoidable. Here is a sample, in Dutch. If you do not read Dutch, I recommend it as a language!

"Ik ben 1.65 en 67 kilo, ik denk dat moet dan maar. Zij is 1. 72 en 56 kilo, Ja. Ja ik was 7 kilo en sporten, maar het kwam er niet af. Echt heel intensief"

"Sooooh jouw ringtone is echt megafout." "I vind hem juist wel leuk. Ik moet hem nog veranderen want hij is oud." "Ja nogal!"

"Ja een beetje saai, met m'n vriendje zo." "Wat helemaal alleen met je vriendje?" "Nou en z'n ouders, nou maar ik moet 'm nog wel africhten. Zit ik lekker een dvd te kijken en dan komt ie zo en dan zeg ik van nou doe normaal, ga zitten. Ja. Nou vorige keer had ik grdronken joh, nie' normaal."

"Ik deed 6k." "Da' kan nie'." "Echt well." "Dat kan niet met een Greenie." "Nee maar ik deed het ook niet met een greenie, er zat ook een blue..."

"Mijn tante is kut. Ze ziet me gewoon niet staan. Ja ze wou dat ik een meisje meisje was. Mijn oom kijkt me nooit aan. hij kijkt altijd langs me heen..."

Today I was in the train and the conductors came and sat in the chairs diagonally opposite me. Having finished checking their tickets they collapsed their heavy bodies into the extremely comfortable seats of our carriage and proceeded to chat quietly. Behind me a man began to whistle. A flat droning whistle in which he repeated the chorus of an indifferent song he was listening to on his I-pod. I signaled to theconductors that this is perhaps not quite the kind of behaviour we want in a silence coupé but they smiled back and continued their chat. So I got up and kindly went up to the man and told him that he was whistling. After all he might not have been aware of the fact. He raised his head without meeting my eyes and looked extremely put out. How scandalous, he said, spreading his voice thickly with sarcasm. I won't do it again. Thank you I said and went back to my place. The conductors continued chatting and suddenly realised they were themselves chatting in the silence carriage and moved away. I have become a policeman and a creep.

We had made an elaborate strategy for conquering Rome. We would undertake three assaults by train, which we would catch at Bracciano at 7 o’clock in the morning to avoid the first rush of people. On the first day we would start at Caracalla and move slowly towards the Campidoglio. The next day, that is after a well deserved day of rest at the campsite, messing around in the lake, we would take the Vatican and on the third day we would do palaces, churches, streets and squares. That is what we did. The train was cold but chatty, the windows had been clogged up with graffiti saying things like “I hate women” and “I hate summer”. The first seemed personal and tragic, or merely male, but the second had my sympathy, the temperature was rising steadily well into the thirties. Getting out at the appropriate station we walked towards the Baths of Caracalla and were the first to arrive. In fact we were early and had to wait, which was good because it gave us a good view of the long front of the building. When it opened we walked around in the silent spaces. It even managed to impress Joshua for the sheer quantity of brick overlaid with stories. The brick had started behaving like geological strata, creating sharp fingers of rock and leaving canyons weathered by rain and use. We studied the way the marble had been fixed to the brick substructure and admired the floors, but more than anything we fitted our tiny little bodies into the emptiness and wondered.

It was delightful and getting warm. We decided to amble to the coliseum, arriving by passing through the triumphal arch of Constantine. Rosie thought it was strange that such history was so haphazardly mixed with the traffic. Somehow these things seem incongruous and irreverent. We walked around the coliseum which in the meantime had filled up with thousands of pilgrims of history and iconicity, masses of them, long rows. A polite young English man moved in on us as likely targets for a tour promising us we would be able to jump the growing queue, so we did, against my better judgment, which turned out to be not much better. It was expensive but worth the trouble. The guide was knowledgeable and we had earplugs and a little black box through which he sung the stories of the place with a pleasant lightness, of its statistics, its contraptions and its drama. The geology of the place has to be seen to be properly experienced. It simply does not have the same value in pictures: the endless brick, immensurate quantities of it, spilling, like lava, from the upper slopes and reaching down like ordered streams into to the central labyrinth. Each brick, manufactured individually and handled individually by several men and put in place to become part of a vast imperial machine of human cruelty, lust, hunger for fame, political control and religiosity. On the gallery you are given a wonderful view of Constantine’s arch and the rubble fields of the forae. I particularly enjoyed the way that the arches had, after the fall of Rome, been commandeered for housing; how beams had been lodged into the main structure to hold extra mezzanine floors leaving the Coliseum as we see it, pockmarked by the termitic industriousness.
We had lunch and would return at 14.00 for the remainder of the tour. It would take us around the Forum Romanum which presents a bewildering plethora of remnants often difficult to differentiate into separate objects. My favourite would have to be the temple of Antonius and Faustinus  with its ancient colonnade fronting the baroque church façade. I don’t know why, the church façade is certainly not the best Rome has to offer, in fact it is rather indifferent, and the temple front is also hardly ambitious, but the happy-go-lucky the way are condemned to each other and their awkward fit presents us with the pleasant surprise of an unlikely marriage that is happy. The basilica of Maxentius was surreal. It was hot, all the others were tired, I was alone away from the liquid crowd of determined parents and silenced children. The wind became audible and the large niches of the aisles acted like shells, behind which Mussolini’s motorway roared. Here and there lay large fragments of worked stone busy merging with the entropic whole. The arches of Titus and Septimus Severus worn rich and tottering, showing Titus on the back of his eagle; the guide shouting his stories (we no longer had little black boxes with earplugs) explained the letters S.P.Q.R and had everyone hanging from his lips. Behind Septimus Severus we ascended the staircase to the Campidoglio walking past the vast rear wall of the Palazzo dei Senatori. It had become too late for the museum and we were quietly thankful for that, although I had so wanted to show Joshua and Rosie Constantine’s foot, hand and the dying Gaul. Instead we sat on the shady steps of the third palazzo, of which I can never remember the name, and dissected the perspectival and processional plan with its oval centre, the placing and orientation of the palaces and paid our respects to Marcus Aurelius. Two weeks later when we arrived home, the film the gladiator was showing on telly which was a wonderful coincidence.

The next day we spent messing around with water to prepare ourselves for the assault on the Vatican. We arrived early enough by train and metro, but the queue in front of the entrance to the museum was already impressive, mass tourism requires extraordinary logistical savvy. Victoria and Rosie went off to find something that they needed in a chemist and Josh and I waited outside the bastioned walls of the Vatican for the queue to move. Actually it went pretty quickly and we were in while the museum was still relatively empty. We went straight to the Sistine chapel in order to beat as much of the converging masses as possible and were duly rewarded. We were able to sit for ages, cranking our neck wondering things and telling stories. I was near to tears and they occasionally brimmed over. I think Victoria felt the same. The whole thing reduces you to silence; not the stories of Michelangelo’s determination and perseverance; not the technical details about its composition and all that, just the thing as it appears in its majesty. All the other stuff can take second place and hover about in the background. The whole chapel, surfaces with stories, man created by pointing him out , a story of flesh and aura, the work and effort of the last judgment, a story of specific gestures, the fear and remorse of those bound for hell, of the human dignity of the prophets, the painter’s haunting empty skin, the whirl of angels exhibiting the instruments of passion, the column and the cross. We sat there for ages looking and quietly chatting the four of us, every so often the din around us would become deafening and the guards would tell us to be quiet and respect this chapel and so we all duly did, for a short while, but people could not contain themselves and the murmur would gradually swell until it burst again punctured by the sharp, routined cautions of the guards. We left with the feeling that something very special had happened to us. Much later in our wanderings around the museum we had to move through the Sistine chapel again to get to somewhere else, by this time it was completely full, a sea of heads staring up. It had something impressive, worrying and even slightly nauseous about it. It was like a giant underground carriage filled to the brim with standing passengers seething with questions and being told to keep quiet.

Later we went to the Stanza’s of Raphael and picked out the characters on the Parnassus and the School of Athens, watched the fire and the man jumping from the wall, as well as the babies being saved and the worried mums and the pope blessing something. The frescoes are wonderful and it would be wrong to compare them to the Sistine chapel just because they are so close, that is cheap. They require greater distance, so that the background knowledge about their composition, historical context, their technique as well as a fair bit of general knowledge and anecdote can come to the fore and do its thing. But they are wonderful. At the same time we were also very tired by then so we had lunch in a café and then wandered the long halls of the Vatican. We stopped at the paintings, Raphaels’ Transfiguration and Caravaggio’s entombment and then we did the Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere and the amazing torso of Hercules. By this time we were emotionally overloaded and began to giggle, giving imitations of the sculptures and not caring what others thought about it. I discovered for myself a couple of curious holes with feet protruding from them and Rosie gawked horrified at a lady god with countless breasts arranged like the fruit of a papaya tree.
We went to St. Peter’s and first rested on the steps of the colonnade while I went to queue for the security and clothing check for the church. Rosie and Victoria were both found to be too bare and Victoria decisively ripped her shawl in two so that she could cover her shoulders and Rosie could cover her legs. They then walked past the unfortunate ladies who were not quite as resourceful and were following a fruitless strategy of anger and complaint to which the men judging these delicate things were quite impervious. Years and years ago, Victoria and I had entered St Peter’s and “discovered” the Pietá by Michelangelo. We could not hold back the tears then, and we did not manage to this time either. What is it about this thing? It certainly does not have that power when seen on a photograph. Is it the context in which it presents itself? The route, the turning, the walking through, the change from heat to cool, light to dark, harsh to rich surfaces, the surprise, the sequence of spaces and events, the solemnity and enormity of the scale and the absurdly heavy splendour? Is it the surprise of it happening upon you as you enter from outside, while your eyes adjust and you turn to the right and you see this thing? Is it the light and shade on the marble? Is it the pathos of a mother showing her son as a gift to those who know not what they do? Is it the malleability of the marble-as-flesh-and-cloth? Joshua and I stood in front of it. Rosie and Victoria stood a little further back. I don’t know whether Joshua was moved, but he was certainly impressed. There is a place in his mind for Michelangelo, who, until then, together with Raphael, Leonardo and Donatello had been teenage mutant turtles. He seemed quite happy to stand there for a long time soaking up this extraordinary confrontation. Then we carried on around the church. It was a shame that I could not show them Bernini’s staircase, which had been closed off for some reason. So we ambled through the church, letting the materials and the grand gestures perform their magic on our saturated minds. We looked at the empty chair suspended in the air by angels, we looked at the baldacchino, watching its columns do their firework display and we looked at the door with the bellowing swaths of marble, we looked at the floor and the we came out into the heat of the day and spent a happy half an hour sitting in the shade of the colonnade together with hundreds of other people.
On the third day we decided that I would go in early by myself and the others would follow in the afternoon. So I got out at the Spanish Steps, took the elevator in the metro station because it looked so dingy and emerged into the early morning with a view of the Villa Medici to my right and Rome at my feet. I passed by the Palazzo Barberini along my pilgrimage to the San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. I arrived much too early to enter but spent a long and happy time looking at the façade and the way it is placed in the street. It is unfortunately placed. It would be less so if it weren’t such a busy crossing full of traffic roaring by. The four fountains are curiously wooden in their posture and delightfully childish when compared to the ultra-sophistication of the San Carlo. It is a wayside church, and as you pass it, the façade plays its jingle, showing an extraordinary depth for so small a building. The interior space is musical because, like music, you are enveloped by it. The façade is a melodic theme within the interior of the street; its music is that of daily life crowned. Just occasionally you hear the haunting sounds of a well sung melody in the distance and it makes you turn your head and concentrate and as you pass, the melody intensifies, pushing everything else to the background, reducing the world to a whisper. That is what happens when you pass the church. But the material of its façade is no delicate marble. Just a rather lacklustre travertine; it does not shine. If its materiality helps sing the melody at all, its effect is to dampen it somewhat; its material quality is not easy to celebrate, such as the weird translucence of marble, the easy bewitching beauty of Helen, the broad divinity of gods etc. The San Carlo is a Cinderella, whose beauty needs to emerge from the material by those who recognise it, who have prepared themselves for the way the travertine is turned into liquid, how it explores its own limitations and is orchestrated into a set of rhythms and counter rhythms which only Bach properly knew how to respond to.
I passed ministries with their cockerel guards and Jay-like chauffeurs, waiting for their puffed up quarries to be taken her and there and then saw the curious side views of the twin facades of the Santa Suzanna and my target the Santa Maria della Vittoria. Their facades are taller than the naves lying behind them; at the same time they are thicker than mere screens but stick up haughtily for anyone walking along the road to see that they are no more than facades, beautiful facades, facades worthy of a church offering itself to the street like a beautiful woman or an aristocrat. They need their show to work. Facades are faces, they are what makes Martin Buber’s I-Thou singularity so compelling. I write my face and you read it. My face is for me to write and you to read. Through discourse we are allowed to hope for agreement as to what my face says. Be warned, I am canny and political. These churches speak to the street and the street either listens or doesn’t. I walked along and stopped in front of the Santa Susanna which was closed. I turned around and looked at the round church and then walked on to the Santa Maria della Vittoria and entered. A thin sprinkling of devout ladies, were busy with their devotions and their wishes. A priest about his daily rounds through the church to put everything in its place, saw me coming and resigned himself to another day of having to reconcile religion and tourism. And I just stood there, desperately wanting to take photographs and at the same time feeling ashamed of thereby disturbing the business of the church. I was the first tourist of the day, but not for too long. About five minutes later the drip of sight-seekers increased. Most of them went straight for the Bernini ticked it off and went on their way. I watched them look, and looked at them watching. They rehearsed the bits in their guide and felt happy to move on. They had a busy day. There is much to see and it is hot. I had the luxury of my own time and took it. I sat down and soaked up the volume filled to the brim with material sacrifice. Everywhere the liberal wealth of devotion translated into marbles, patterns and brilliantly executed joints and coverings: layers upon layers of theatricality, folding and refolding and everything playing the role of devotion with such conviction. Of course there was St Theresa but there was also someone on the other side, complementing her, buried like Snow-white in her glass coffin waiting for the prince to come in and kiss her. There are the skulls and bones of polished marble puzzled into the floor and a whole series of altars completely ignored by the tourists because they simply cannot bring us to the ecstatic heights so quickly as the Cornaro chapel can. I looked at the faces of the Cornaro family, saw them entranced by the dubious miracle of a young angel, smiling knowingly before piercing Theresa with the arrow of Christ. What I had forgotten was the role of all the surrounding stuff, the immense wealth of material that enshrines this moment of ecstasy.

It was so exciting. I had wanted to go there for years. We drove from Garbagna, where we were camping, and were listening to a girl singing about her humps, her humps her lovely lady lumps check it out... The I saw the building.

The music was Rosie’s choice I hasten to add; I nearly caused an accident in the excitement of having seen the cemetery; got a few drivers understandably and even justifiably annoyed as I had to change my mind twice about which way to go; parked the car on the far side of the extremely long façade, so that we had to walk our way to the entrance in the late morning July heat intensified by the molten tarmac carpeting the full length of our pilgrimage.

The entry on the left hand side of the façade is announced by a clustering of flower kiosks with bored, kindly ladies and sleepy gentlemen. As we passed through into the main building, and despite the memory of the long façade we had just walked along, we were struck by the endlessness of the galleries doubling up on each other, fading into the distance. It is immense. Measureless sleep. The first thing we noticed, apart from the familiar mood of duly processed death, was a small gravestone (gravestone number 580) of a favourite nun, Madre Domenica Teresa Solari whose memory was being honoured with small battery-lit candles with images of Mary, silver coloured hearts, flowers and other plastic stuff.

The cemetery is laid out around a central carré, with at its head, raised against the hill, a large white marble pantheon flanked by large L-shaped open galleries. Behind the pantheon, stretching to the right into the hills one can see the exotic structures of wealthy family tombs: Byzantine domes, gothic spires classic pediments, Egyptian stuff all of them set amongst poplars and cedars curiously reminiscent of the way small buildings were set within the painted landscapes of the tre- and quattrocento.

The upper deck is accessed by a large central staircase up to the doors of the Pantheon, which was closed, unfortunately. The central open square is full of gravestones rather less ambitious than the ones we specifically had come to gawk at. To the right of the original complex the cemetery was later expanded with a second carré.

Wrapped around three sides of the main central square there is a double row of galleries. The outermost, receiving its diffuse light from the occasional round-arched clerestory window placed high against the vaulted ceiling, presents long straight walls filled with dusty light and dotted densely with the faint splodges of reasonably fresh flowers and other devotional decorations surrounding the innumerable drawer-like graves stacked up ten or eleven gravestones high,, each one with its own carved administrative number. Tall ladders, temporarily abandoned here and there along the way, have been provided for the use of wives, mothers, husbands, fathers, daughters and perhaps the occasional son to maintain the  graves of their loved ones. This sight is impressive enough.

Then, parallel to these endless halls of devoted to the third person singular, the main gallery wraps itself around the central square. Open on one side with an arcade, these galleries have large niches on the blind outer wall, each filled with a sizeable theatrical performance of grief, consolation, biographical narrative and warning. Between the columns opening out onto the central square, smaller, more compact tombs are set within the open arches, which though smaller are just as spectacular because of their backlighting. As you amble along you are walking over the gravestones belonging to these family graves. My son counted well over two thousand.

People started commissioning fancy sculptured grave ensembles in the mid eighteenth century (even though the present cemetry, as designed by Carlo Barabino, wasn't opened until 1851) and by the second half of the nineteenth century the need to keep up appearances and the healthy competition between specialised sculptors, created a climate of unrivalled macabre ostentation, perhaps best illustrated by the walnut seller, a lady who simply saved all the money she made selling walnuts, to commission her tomb. May she rest in peace.

We were the only ones to be walking through the cemetery at that time. The gallery, a boulevard of grief, presents the curious spectacle of the life of death to visitors strolling down its pleasantly wide, well shaded streets, where angels talk with souls and father time is cross and sombre, while grimacing death dances lecherously with nubile, young, shrouded girls, pliant and charged as the objects of our desire. Strolling from one carefully staged scene of grief, commissioned by a doctor surrounded by the symbols of his trade that appear to have come to life, to another devoted to the wife of a wealthy merchant, disconsolate at his loss, but impeccably dressed, pommaded and infinitely respectable in his eternal pose of conjugal and Christian piety, we see beautiful naked ladies contemplating skulls, naked men and women, strong and heroic, wrapped around each other in hungry desperation. Here the doors to the after life have been left open in the pyramid so that the living can peak in, even if they only see darkness; there a man sits stretching his legs in his comfortable chair set within the niche facing the side, contemplating an idea he is not sharing with us. Old ladies looking behind them are dressed in their finest lace shawls, girls, remarkably like the original illustrations of Alice in Wonderland, are lost in this strange world where the hard boundary between life and death appears no longer respected. They sit or stand on tiptoe or are lifted to the busts of their grandfathers by their buxom mothers to offer a last kiss. As one looks from the lower galleries to the raised galleries flanking the pantheon, you see also the backs of the sculptures set within the arcades, which, because of their position no doubt have been given almost as much love and detail as their front. What is most striking is the way the thick layers of dust have made all these sculptures appear their negative, as if they have been lit from below. Sometimes the mis-en-scène shows an extraordinary compositional daring and sophistication. The dynamics of angelic flight, or the dramatic gesture of a last act of generosity. Others delight because of their miniature detail and yet others because of the way the light makes arms, legs, folds, breasts and tummies turn liquid. But all this can be seen elsewhere. What makes this place unique is the way people show their extraordinary ordinariness eternalised in stone, their crumpled humanity as they participate in the grief of their family which has to compete and stand out relative to the family next door. There is one that stands out for a different reason. It is certainly not my favourite but it is strange, it is a sculpture of a man in his late forties or fifties dressed in a loin cloth, standing poised on a slim tall pedestal leaning forward with his arms raised one finger pointing up and a stern expression. Is he a prophet? Is he warning us of something? Surely we already know. We can hardly escape it here. I didn't inlcude my picture of him here. I found him worrying.

the walnut seller

Beste mijnheer Wilders,

De beschaving is flinterdun, dat zal hij ook altijd blijven zolang hij is aangeleerd. Dat is maar goed ook, maar hij heeft daarom veel zorg en liefde nodig. Ik wil u daarom vragen de andere politieke partijen een kans te geven antwoorden te vinden op de zorgen van u en uw kiezers. Voor dat u het weet maakt u de maatschappij die u zo zegt te waarderen helemaal kapot. Een paar richtlijnen:

Maak van de rechtstaat geen beul. U heeft gelijk wanneer u zou stellen dat niemand in onze maatschappij zich mag ontrekken aan de wet. Daartegen moet krachtig, billijk en zonder de waardigheid van ieder mens te vertrappen worden opgetreden.

Word geen hufter tegen hufterigheid. U heeft gelijk wanneer u zou stellen dat niemand in onze maatschappij zich onbeschoft of hufterig mag gedragen. Hufterigheid met hufterigheid bestrijden werkt niet. Als mensen zelf gaan doen wat ze afkeuren in anderen, zijn ze niet lekker bezig. Een mens kan hufterigheid alleen effectief te lijf door het goede voorbeeld te geven.

Vrijheden mogen geen gevangenis worden. U heeft gelijk dat de vrijheden die hier in Nederland gelden, duur verworven zijn. De scheiding tussen religie en staat, de gelijkheid van mensen ongeacht hun geloof, afkomst, kleur, kunnen, sekse of seksuele geaardheid zijn daar goede voorbeelden van en uiterst waardevol. Discrimineer daarom dan ook niet op basis van geloof of afkomst. Een goed middel onze duur verworven vrijheden te waarborgen is wellicht, zoals u suggereert, een sociaal contract dat iedere bewoner van Nederland zou moeten kennen en ondertekenen alvorens het stemrecht te krijgen.

Haat levert meer haat. U heeft ongelijk wanneer u de groeiende haat jegens individuen en groepen niet actief helpt tegenwerken door uw invloedrijke positie in de maatschappij daartoe aan te wenden. De kiezers onder uw invloed zijn redelijk doch wanhopig. U heeft ongelijk wanneer u politieke middelen gebruikt die de problemen die u signaleert alleen maar erger maken en de maatschappij hatelijk en hufterig maken. Een maatschappij gebaseerd op haat en afkeer zoals die U aanmoedigt is geen optie. Het afwijzen van individuen en groepen zoals u doet, is geen optie. Het afwijzen van de redelijkheid zoals u die afwijst is geen optie. Daar komt alleen maar ellende van. Dat weten we.  Geef daarom alstublieft de andere politieke partijen een kans oplossingen in het redelijke te zoeken. Met uw aanpak bent u bezig meer dan u lief is kapot te maken

Met vriendelijke groet, Jacob Voorthuis

Kyoto, The First Day

Dear Mr Wilders,

Please stop your damaging crusade against Islam. It will destroy the very country you profess to fight for. A country is a place where there is a special climate, an atmosphere; it is a place where the people and their environment are organised into institutions; a country has built, of its own peculiar mix of ingredients, its own culture, its own morality. Destroy that and you have destroyed the country in all but its name. You will have created a new country of course, but in your case you will have created a hateful country, lead by stupidity and resentment, jealousy, hubris and conceit. It will be a poorer country. I don't want your self-serving battle against invading windmills. I love my country as it is, full of all-sorts. It is rich. Racists, bigots and the xenophobic are the real foreigners to a nation state because they define their nation only in opposition to the other. Their obsession with the other makes them forget themselves, makes them into what they become obsessed with: the chimera of the object of their hate, their mirror image. They understand only borders and the myths that these borders are said to enclose and exclude: the monsters of prejudice and irreducible dislike. They believe those borders to be the issue, the line defining a metaphysical unity against chaos. That is a primitive way of defining yourself. It belongs to a way of being we should have learnt to do without by now; it belongs to a sort of people we will always have amongst us and who deserve their place in society as everyone else does, but who should not be put in a position of power. Their rule would institute a defeat of the reasonable and of justice as fairness.

A nation is not a place particularly defined by its borders and its myths, for they constitute but a crude approximation of the full thing. A nation is more fully defined by its institutions to help people find a way to live a life with the possibility of fulfilment and the real promise of dignity. The best we can hope for is to gather enough to live by and the social resources to build and maintain a sense of our own dignity, a dignity constituted and reinforced by the dignity of others. There is enough to go around. We can achieve that dignity, not by trampling on the dignity of others, for that disqualifies our own; not by seeing ourselves shaped by the rivalry with others but by simply defining our own terms, our own sense of the good.

I am appealing to you as one human being to another: hate and exclusion serve no purpose but ugliness, destruction and sadness. If you feel you want to be seen as a great man, why not take an example in president Obama's speech held at the University of Cairo a few days ago, in which he laid out a clear map for peaceful cohabitation and mutual respect? Following his map we could actually get somewhere. You might play a real role there instead of pursuing this sad, self-defeating and ignorant stand you have taken. The course you are on will perhaps serve your hungry and lustful ego for a short while, but only as long as people are beguiled by your strong words, your confident dismissal or others, your cunning sarcasm and your simple message. There will come a day when they will be made to see the other side by the sheer force of the example before them: the product of your vision; they will see what a hateful world you and others like you have created and what they themselves have helped to bring about. On that day they will deny you, they will turn their back on you and they will make you the scapegoat of their own weakness, their own stupidity in having made the mistake of supporting you, in having given you the power you think you have been given. You will become the object of a hate as senseless and as pointless as the hate and lust and greedy expectation that you now promote in your hungry followers. And who will be able to blame them? They will only be able to blame themselves. They will forget to do that, they will straighten their ties and dresses, readjust their expressions, tame their lust and instead they will blame you.

Look at the world you are creating. The pathos of indignation you spread and the hate you stir puts you on the level you have defined for the group you single out for your hate. You have yourself created and instituted that "level"; you have defined it by proclaiming the supposed backwardness of Islam. However, your own elevation into the realm of the indignantly righteous is but a trick of perspective. You inhabit the very level you have lowered others on to. The mythical enemy you portray, is you yourself! The islam you describe is your own mirror image! That is not to say there are not stupid, misguided and evil people within Islam. Of course there are. There are such people within all institutions, including the Christian tradition, the communist and democratic traditions, within the nicest families, within ministries and parliaments. There are people who profess a faith but fail to live by its laws and spirit, who nevertheless pretend to speak for their God, a God, by the admission of their own sacred texts, they cannot know. It suits you well that these very people have spoken so loudly, so vociferously for their God recently. But this small group are not the religion they claim to represent. They are just they, themselves bitter, misguided people like you. They are just people. We are all just people, like you. We can change only by thinking through our stupidity. The backwardness you see is what misguided people have made of themselves. To blame it on their institutions is precisely what is wrong. Institutions are only ever as good as the people making them work. What people make of a religion is not the religion itself. Your Islam is not Islam. You have made your narrow view of Islam from examples that can easily be found within every institution, including your own, your hateful party of sad people proclaiming a freedom that will merely reinforce the borders of a new and hateful prison full of self-punishment. That is what you have made, a prison for yourselves. It is people we must encourage to change. What we need to get rid of is this misguidedness, this bitterness and this stupidity. But then we need to look not just at the misguided people within Islam, but also at you and your lot. Grow up! Stop showing off your pride in ignorance it certainly does not fool those who know how much the Islam has contributed to the world. It shows that you see the world in black and white. You are in fact not very good at seeing, that is your problem. You haven’t exercised your seeing adequately. You are no athlete of perception! At the same time your vision panders to all who have not the time or the inclination to educate themselves, perhaps because of their misguided pursuit of dreams that will probably prove empty. Little do they know that in education, in the generosity of thought, their dreams can be better realised than in following your imprisoned, sad view of Dutchness.

You make a mockery of Democracy, by attempting to make it into a tool of the misguided and the ignorant; you destroy democracy by deliberately abusing the weakest part of its mechanism, namely the right of the uninformed and the misguided to have a say. That is democracy’s strength and weakness. Democracy must be prevented from becoming a dictatorship of the majority, it has to stay a mechanism in which the government for the people and by the people, can make sure it defends the rights and duties of its minorities even if only to prepare for the eventuality that those very minorities might one day become majorities. We wouldn’t want to do unto others, what we would not want done unto ourselves. You mock the word freedom by using it in the name of your party. Freedom is not the freedom of the strong to hurt and belittle the weak. That is a very paltry freedom, the freedom of the bully. It is not a freedom that we should ever resort to. Freedom stands for the right and duty of everyone to pursue their own sense of what is good. The clever trick in that sentence is the realisation that it forces when you ask the question: how can a good be considered good if it sets out to deliberately destroy the good of others?

A healthy society can surely only be achieved only if everyone is allowed their dignity and their freedom to pursue their good, a freedom you deny a whole group of people out of hand! You thereby show your foolishness, your lack of a good grounding in ethics and justice. I can recommend a few books you might enjoy. Of course there have been excesses committed by individuals who feel themselves part of a group, part of a religion. There always are excesses. Mary Magdalen excesses and Judas excesses, Golden Calf excesses. Quite a few excesses are committed in the name of free speech. I personally hated what Theo van Gogh said in his Columns, it abused the notion and spirit of free speech even if it stayed within the letter of it. I certainly did not want him killed for it. I hated the way Pim Fortuyn tried to give extremism a human face, a face of the reasonable, but I did not want him killed for it. In the first instance because I enjoy discussion, and in the second because his martyrdom would give birth and space and nourishment to people like you. I hate what you say, but I hope you will not be killed for it. Imagine the monster that you will spawn by your martyrdom!

I try actively not to find you absurd, not to make fun of your appearance, not to mock you. I hope you see that this letter is not an exercise in cynicism and sarcasm. I genuinely hope that you will come to see that you are embarked on a road that leads to a dreary wasteland, to a country devoured by suspicion and hate. Nor will I change my tone should you ever feel the need to become as rude to me as you are to others. We have to be generous, even to the destructive forces within a society, by dealing with them fairly and squarely within the judicial system of our country, and if our judicial system is not performing adequately, we need to reform it where it needs reform, but not dismantle it! We need to encourage moral courage. The courage to give everyone their due. As Walt Whitman said: “I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.” That is not to say there are not things wrong in Holland. Of course, the crimes committed by a small group of young people, new Dutchmen, is unacceptable. But we have adequate laws and regulations in this country to deal with them and deal with them we must, but fairly, without feeling the desire to humiliate and belittle. People trying to find a better life here should be treated with the respect any person venturing out to better their life should be treated with. The desire to better your life is the main thrust of any healthy society. We must deal with such people fairly. Fairness makes us deserve the name human being. Any compromise on that score is ruinous; it lowers us to the beasts we have imagined and painted for ourselves and have subsequently become so frightened of.

Mr Wilders, you are doing serious damage to my country, a country I feel immensely proud of precisely because of its history of tolerance, its enjoyment of otherness, its ability to give concrete form to freedom, and its own weird and wonderful organisation. The 17th century was made great by the immigration of Portuguese Jews and Belgian economic refugees, by the presses which published books that could not be published elsewhere, by being amongst the most educated countries in the world at that time. The eighteenth century saw Holland investing abroad and sadly wasting what it had built up. A misplaced hubris, much like what you are exhibiting now, has too often plagued us. The nineteenth century saw us struggling with the new. The Second World War saw both the best and the worst we are capable of: heinous cowardice and disgusting arrogance as well a true heroism and generosity. The reconstruction of Holland after WWII was an extraordinary feat of will and creativity. During the 50's, 60's and 70's of the last century Holland showed how a different way of looking at people was possible. Our purple government during the nineties, far from a societal disaster, was a model of the third way; a precious culmination of that pluralism unfairly dismissed by demagoguery and jealousy, harping on the mistakes and abuses that you find everywhere, in every leaky system. Society is about muddling on, trying to find everyone a place within it. What a fool Pim Fortuyn was to destroy what was most precious, by facile arguments and marketable slogans; what a pity that we did not have the courage to reform from within that which was genuinely wrong! The Dutch, or at least some of us, let’s say 15% of our voting population, have become a truly spoilt people; too attached to our extraordinary comforts and mindless luxuries. We have let the culture of complaint, which used to keep our institutions healthy, go too far; we are forgetting what kindness and generosity mean. Now is the time to exercise our moral courage and to find that courage in applying our laws fairly, treating all people with the dignity they deserve and thereby anchoring our own dignity, our own worth; helping ourselves by helping others to build a life. Please do not destroy precisely that which you yourself profess to defend

Yours sincerely,

Jacob Voorthuis

Voorburg, where I live, is a satellite town of The Hague with more than its fair share of leafy country houses as well as the honour of having served Spinoza for a few years while he stayed with a painter friend of his. Most of the country houses have been dismantled in the surge to something; that is the stuff of history. Two of the most beautiful that are left, straddle a gigantic, virile viaduct designed in the fifties, that cuts Voorburg into two unequal parts. On the one side, visible from the train to Utrecht, is Constantijn Huygens' retreat Hofwijck. It is a perfect cube set on a plinth making it roughly a 3:2 volume standing on its shorter side, covered by a pyramidal roof and crowned by a solid chimney. The Garden was schematically shaped in the figure of a human being, with the building as its head. The emblem is, I think, self explanatory. On the other side, visible through the glass sound screens along the edges of the viaduct as one drives into The Hague, there is a large building from the late eighteenth century called "In de wereldt is veel gevaer". It is my favourite. There is a story about this building. In the nineteenth century it used to be a boarding school for young gentlemen. This may of course account for the haunting inscription above the entrance which, translated literally and with all the words in the same order reads: "In the world there is much danger". The old Dutch sentence has the same awkwardness to modern Dutch ears as the literal translation in English might convey to modern English ears. Situated along the canal De Vliet, the word gevaer (of which there is a lot in the world) refers not just to danger but is also meant as a pun on the sailing of boats which in itself can be dangerous. Anyway, I cycle past both buildings often enough and enjoy them for their proprotions, their modest attempt at grandeur, their wonderful windows. Hofwijck was the country residence of Holland's foremost politician during the first half of the seventeenth century, when it was the richest country on earth. Despite that, it has something peculiarly unassuming about it. The other is not just beautiful because of its generous windows and its truist emblem, but it is also beautiful because of the rumour, which I have not had substantiated, that the Orange family housed one of their more unfortunate offspring there, a young princess who, apparently, delighted in climbing up the tree in the courtyard and then demanded that the gardener strip naked to come and rescue her.

Hofwijck, Voorburg

Wilders and his double.

It turns out that a sizeable minority of educated people in The Netherlands support Geert Wilders in his campaign for free speech either covertly or openly. (Volkskrant 23.02.2009)When a well known lawyer called Spong managed to get Wilders to face charges of inciting hatred last month he received a tsunami of hate-mail which, it turns out, included a large number of mails from people whom one would describe as educated, people who have received tertiary education of some sort. This has, quite naturally, become the focus for public reflection in The Netherlands. Of course, if Wilders' campaign were just a campaign for free speech I would support it myself. "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." Voltaire's dictum is a useful trick to ensure an open society, institutionalising Parrèsia, the need to be able to speak the "inconvenient truth" (that is, sincerely held or well-informed opinion) so as to avoid the spiralling consequences of injustice at the hands of the politically biased, the administratively absurd, the wilfully cruel, the socially misguided, the misanthropic love of contempt as well as the simple mechanics of rivalry and revenge. Despite the real evidence to support the idea that Wilders is a defender of free speech, I myself feel that he is not. There is more to his campaign, a dark side. This darker side may be unintentional but I rather doubt it. Ultimately, his is a campaign that uses the problem of free speech to justify calling The Netherlands "Our Country". But who is us?

We, the Dutch (new settlers and old) have built up a morality, a culture of practices and attitudes of which we are proud. We can, we feel, pursue our own good, as long as it does not harm others; that good, because of the geography of The Netherlands is often found in complex and sophisticated cooperation. Holland is after all a big pump that needs to be kept going at all time in order to stop us from drowning. We like to help those who are less fortunate than ourselves through institutions of welfare as well as personal charity, and if that help turns out to be rather unhelpful we are not frightened of reform; we tolerate the use of soft drugs; we give light prison sentences in decent prisons because we are sceptical with regard to the benefits of punishment and believe that a return to society can best be achieved by giving people a sense of dignity; we have gay marriages, gay parades, we support people with a legitimate desire for euthanasia, we hold religious and philosophical freedom as high virtues and freedom is taken by most to mean the social sanction to pursue an own sense of what is right. On top of all this we tolerate a lot of vulgarity and barbarism on our television. At the same time public criticism of our institutions is almost obsessive. The paradox of a complaining society is doubly applicable in The Netherlands: lots of people complain a lot, which generally helps to keep our institutions on their toes, or at least exposes, their rotten apples. At the same time we hardly seem to profit from that institutional health as people are constantly complaining. When things do go wrong they are endlessly discussed in the media and around the coffee dispensers at work. Our politics is generally boring, which is better than a politics which is exciting. Despite cultural differences, we feel that there are things which need a universal approach, genocide being one of them. It is for that reason we are proud of the international court of justice, which is housed not half a mile from where Spinoza, our greatest second generation Dutchman, lived in Voorburg. I am not sure how many people subscribe to this self congratulatory list of wishful thoughts, but I am sure many would at least recognise most if not all of the issues as what we believe we stand for. They are all things I myself heartily support even though I do not practice all of these virtues and tolerances personally. I like the idea of an open society, in which I can construct a sincere personal search for whatever truths can be found, and for behaviour that is helpful to the promotion of a society in which everyone can find a place with dignity. I appreciate the comfortable and secure network in which I am able to bring up my family. One would be excused for feeling that it does not get much better than this. The Dutch, for the moment at least, appear well clear of dictatorship: populist individuals or populist democracies where strong men or enthused majorities dictate the terms. Instead we discuss things endlessly and believe in consensus, or rather in what Rawls called a reflective equilibrium, which really comes down to discursive exhaustion.

Civilisation is a thin and fragile veil. It has never been more than that. It needs to be cherished, worn elegantly and maintained with great care and devotion, never confusing means for ends. Surely the only legitimate goal for a society can be the attempt to provide a dignified place for everyone. Anything else leads to exclusion, injustice and the triumph of the violent: a pecking-order society where people know their place and are not allowed to explore it. Surely it is preferable to have an open society where everyone is given a chance at a dignified existence, where issues are discussed and discussed again rather than giving full reign to selective processes favouring the violent, the macho, the narrow-minded, and the happy to hurt. We know that side of history, we've been there. Honesty, sincerity, charity and generosity are good tricks for the happy evolution of the self as a part of the greater whole. I believe that, however naive it might seem.

Perhaps our Dutch liberties have ultimately contributed to creating a selfish, materialistic, overly individualistic society but I don't think so. Liberties are of course highly sensitive to abuse, otherwise they wouldn't be called liberties. The fact that they are called liberties indicates that they are a product of history in which their status as liberty cannot be taken for granted. They have been won. It is we who abuse our liberties and not our liberties that abuse us. Whatever our liberties, we are our own problem, our own worst enemy. It is not our liberties which are the cause of a society that people now see around them in every affirmative event, it is people letting go, both in what they do, allow and the way they perceive the world around them. An open society, with all its tempting liberties, requires a great deal of self-discipline to negotiate. It requires people to say what they think. As such even a Geert Wilders must have his say. However, it requires practice, the development of an attitude whereby, for example, the letter of a game rule promoting free speech is not confused with the spirit of it. To be allowed to pursue truths and understanding does not mean we should be allowed to indulge in hate and wilful contempt. Geert Wilders should be allowed to say what he thinks and then should be challenged in open discussion, by example. There have to be ground rules. If you want the freedom to be allowed to pursue your own good you can only get it within the framework allowing everyone that freedom. The game rule of free speech cannot distinguish between the search for truths and the helpful and the contemptuous and hateful, which is why we have to allow the latter in order not to compromise the former. And that is right. We have to tolerate the intolerant, the hateful and the contemptuous. We have to allow the rude, but we do not have to like them or support their rudeness, or leave it unchallenged. However, we can only counter such things with the gentler weapons of openness: open discussion and example. We do not have to invite him to say his hateful things about the Islam over and over again in every public Forum. Hyde Park corner is good enough for him. He needs no more and we should not feel obliged to give him more. It is simply not very helpful or nuanced what he has to say. It is filled with tribal thought.

Liberties, being sensitive, being open to abuse, quickly become the focus of suspicion. Dealing with the symptoms often makes us believe we are dealing with the disease. But our liberties are not even the symptoms of a disease. The disease is not even a disease! Our tendency to overdo things, to overshoot the mark, to go too far or not far enough is simply part of who we are: individuals engaged in an environment, a society. Liberties are attempts to open up society and we should defend that openness, despite occasional abuse, despite the fact that liberties become the focus of suspicion from people who believe that it is the liberty that is at fault, who do not like self-discipline, but who feel it is safer to impose discipline from without, from the security of system. At that moment Wilders takes centre stage. Wilders is being received sympathetically by the educated because they are fed up with the small everyday examples of what they see as Islamification, an assault on our hard won culture: rude Moroccan boys making the streets of Holland unsafe for the girls to dance in or to cycle home at night. It is not just because they terrorise, but also, and in equal measure, because they are felt to terrorise. A foreign morality is challenging the hard won liberties of being allowed to bare your legs in public. The article in De Volkskrant cited the specific example of a Turkish lady openly disapproving of the bare legs of her neighbour. Such a small domestic example made part of national mythology suddenly leading its own life. What about people who say something about spitting in public? What about people who chastise children getting into mischief? What is the problem with telling somebody that you disapprove of something? Can that somebody not respond? Because we feel so intimidated, the question quickly becomes: whose country is it anyway? And this is where Wilders offers release. He stands up and says. Ours! If you want to be in our country you have to live according to our rules! A dictatorship of the autochthonous.  As if things like that are privileges. In fact with every new arrival the discussion has to start out all over again. No liberty is a good in itself. No liberty can or should be taken for granted. They are all situational and conditional. Most Islamic people in Holland just want to get on with their lives. If there are a few who are becoming desperate, perhaps we should address their desperation by allowing them their dignity. Perhaps we should take the time to discuss things with them instead of feeling intimidated by Turkish ladies.

So it would appear that we have to re-establish our right to have bare legs, we have to address the question whether our blatant, open, explicit and ubiquitous sexuality might have to withdraw a little. It has to be said that I do not bare my legs in public, except perhaps on the beach and even then rather reluctantly. My legs are not my strong point. Nor, it has to be said are my neighbours of Turkish descent. They are all Dutch. On one side my neighbours live in social housing and on the other in very large villa's each of them worth several millions. In urban terms this is not unusual in Holland. A lot of Dutch cities have the poor and the rich living in very close proximity, often at right angles: large tree-lined avenues with large houses from which sprout narrower side-streets for social housing or the generally less well off. My house is literally caught in between the two extremes of Dutch culture. It makes for interesting ambling around my neighbourhood. Just down the road, in a sweet, rather picturesque street of terraced housing originally built for the railroad workers in the early twenties of the last century, lives a rough family whose front garden looks as if it has been bombed. Two scooters and two scoot mobiles have replaced the shrubs and evergreens that usually frame our curtain-less windows. The frequent exercise of the engines makes up much of the music of the street, syncopated with guttural, monosyllabic grunting exchanges punctuated with Homeric laughter. At New Year’s Eve this family sends most of their monthly benefits up in the air in an endless chain of colourful and above all loud explosions. They are Dutch and very unpleasant users of public space. On the other side, that is on Millionaire’s row, there live people who drive obscenely large cars and who simply ignore everyone else who do not. Both groups appear to have a hand glued to their ear while brawling into their cell phones. The funny thing is that the people I have just described on both sides, in fact only make up a tiny minority of the total population of these two streets and yet, for most of us, they somehow constitute the full image of it. People, happily going about their business in a quieter way are somehow less visible it would seem. We mind about the supposed Islamification of The Netherlands but I am much more worried about the asocialisation of the Dutch. Don't get me wrong, I am extremely pleased to live in Holland. I still believe it to be at the forefront of social innovation. If Holland sounds as if it is in crisis this is partly due to the fact that people are happy to speak their mind. And that is a good thing. Geert Wilders may be internationally the most visible part of Holland, but he does not constitute the full picture of this country, which appears able to combine the happily anarchic with the institutionally disciplined; the institutionally ponderous with the personally tenacious. He is merely a part and a product of all that contradiction.. I don't believe antisocial behaviour is any worse here than anywhere else in the world and I do appreciate the hard edged debate we seem to be able to have here. So what is my problem?

My earlier entry concerned the question whether I should also have to defend to the death someone going on and on about things I do not agree with. (See 13.02.2009) Do I have to become a passive supporter of what someone says by keeping quiet, because of his right to say unpleasant things? No! Of course not! I can speak out as well. I can argue against people who have shown themselves to be ruled by hate and dislike for the other. I can show them my door and tell them to leave and think again. But the fact that Wilders appears to be supported by educated people does cause me to pause. This was a surprise, a bit of a hit below the belt. I felt cheated. Education cannot prevent misguided bias it would seem. Why are supposedly educated people attracted to the theories of Geert Wilders? The only answer can be that they are not educated enough. They need more education. They need to be shown why his way is unhelpful.

You cannot defend an open society by posing a closed one to defend it. That is, to my mind what he is doing. An open society must stay open, must tolerate the intolerant, must adapt through discussion and example, can only address intolerance through argument and example, not though laws and exile, not through hate and the implicit condoning of violence against those who think differently. By blaming a religion wholesale Wilders has disqualified himself as a serious critic of human liberty. No system cannot be undermined by the people that profess to represent it. No set of rules cannot be subverted. No quality is absolute, universal or general. No good intention automatically translates to a good result. No wish is ever complete. We need to keep talking. We cannot blame our institutions for the stupidities, intolerances and cruelties perpetrated by its members. It is people who make institutions. Institutions are abstractions. We, people, are responsible for our institutions as people. It is not Islam that is bigoted, it cannot be. Its members may be. But so are many members of Dutch society. Islam was for a long time the religion of the most sophisticated culture in the world. It is people who are bigoted, whatever systems they institute to further that bigotry. A system is never more than that, a system. Let's not fail to look at what happened in the Catholic Church recently: how can a Christian Bishop have wondered so far from the extraordinary, special and immensely brave morality of Jesus Christ, a Jew, to adopt such an extraordinarily mean and cowardly view of the Holocaust? It is deeply worrying but however worrying it is, it is he and his followers that need to be challenged in discourse and not the institution they represent. Institutions are abstractions.

Wilders is right of course to want to defend our liberties. My opinion is that he is going about it in a way that is misguided and in the end will prove to be merely destructive. Geert Wilders "does not mind gays" and is not anti- Semitic, he is of a new kind of extremism inaugurated by Pim Fortuyn some ten years ago. But however nuanced his opinions, he can only maintain his support by also attracting people with more basic discriminatory powers. Proud of the liberties the Dutch have claimed for themselves since the 17th Century (see Simon Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches) he represents a politics so in love with these liberties that he is willing to sacrifice means to ends by creating a polarized state poised for counter violence and hysteria, a state of rude, hate-mail sending, lynch-hungry people to defend and thereby destroy it. He may himself be courteous, but he, Like Pim Fortuyn before him helped unleash the furies kept in Pandora's Box. Their own subtle distinctions get lost in the fray. Wilders will prove yet again, for the umpteenth time, that stupidity, bigotry and hatred of people merely generates more stupidity, bigotry and hatred. If we want to defend our liberties, something I believe we need to do, we need to defend them by upholding them in our way of life and as an example, in a Ghandian or Rawlsian way, by showing and illustrating that they can lead to a full life, with a chance for a dignified existence with an unconditional respect for our neighbours however bare their legs or covered their heads. We must not lower ourselves to bigotry in order to fight bigotry. That has been done too often. It merely creates more of the same. Wilders is the mirror image of that which he hates most! I shall be kind to Turkish ladies who mind about my bare legs, I shall be considerate and kind to people driving large cars and ignoring the rest of the road-using world. I shall smile at young men growing up in a bombed out gardens roaring their scooters, even if it kills me.

Racism is guided by an aestethics of banal difference.