Taboe, ontwikkelingen in macht en moraal speciaal in Nederland

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Summary
Taboo, on power and morality in Dutch society

This book is about ‘taboo’, a word that came into use in Western-Europe as a term for those avoidances which are ‘natural’ for the people obeying them. The question I wanted to answer was this one: How did people come to obey these taboos, how did they break them and how can one explain these changes. The inducement to these questions were the surprising events in the sixties and seventies of this century in Dutch society. What had been going on in those telecasts, teach-ins, demonstrative occupations of official buildings and other events where taboos were broken?

In answering these questions I used the developmental perspective worked out by Norbert Elias and I tried to find out in what way these recent events were linked up with long-term social processes of ‘taboo-isation’ and ‘detaboo-isation’.

On enquiring into the development of the concept of taboo it soon became apparent that in the development of Dutch society, as well as in that of Western-Europe as a whole, three periods were of special importance and on these I focused my research concerning specific subjects such as ‘men and women’, ‘adults and children’, ‘the naked body’ and ‘religion’. These three periods were the second part of the eighteenth century, the period round about 1900 and the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century.

The crucial conclusion concerning the first period was that in Western-Europe the word ‘taboo’ acquired two functions which are not clearly distinguished up to our own day. In the first place the word was introduced as a primitive concept and it referred to the restrictions of certain tribes which were quite senseless in the eyes of West-European explorers. Some decades later the word was introduced again, this time as a civilised concept, and it referred to the restrictions or avoidances obeyed as a matter of course by West-Europeans themselves, and which were, in the eyes of some people, as senseless as the taboos of primitive people.

Research on the use of the word and on the habits it referred to

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proved that in a mutual comparison primitive taboos are more a form of ‘constraint by others’ and civilised taboos more of a form of ‘self-restraint’. The added conclusion was that these civilised taboos arose especially in the second part of the eighteenth century. In that period the self-restraint had been intensified to such a degree that the people involved considered their own reservedness as natural and developed a tendency to transfer ‘behind the social scenes’ much which in their eyes had become questionable.

The conclusion that civilised taboos originated in the 18th century must not be misunderstood. In fact they form part of a development which was already identifiable in the course of the Middle Ages. It concerns a development characterised by Norbert Elias as a process of civilization in which human beings learn from generation to generation to control and transform their impulses in a more balanced and acceptable way, while the feelings of anxiety, of which this control and these transformations are functions, gradually occur less due to direct threat by others, and more through self-induced anxiety, so that they avoid ‘by nature’ what they fear.

This civilising process is not autonomous in the sense that it starts itself and keeps itself going. Broadly speaking it is conditioned by social developments in which, under pressure of competition, the activities of human beings become differentiated and again integrated at a higher level, while more people become interdependent in increasingly different ways and within a wider scope. Generally speaking in these developments the power-relations become more complex, the power-differentials decrease and the people involved have to consider each other more carefully and have to control their impulses accordingly.

Relying on the word ‘taboo’ and other evidence one can ascertain that in the second part of the eighteenth century this development had increased to such an extent that the control of more direct impulses and the avoidance of strongly emotional events had become, especially for the middle-classes whose chances of power increased in direct proportion to their growing economic and national connections, a matter of course.

The central conclusion concerning the second period is that round about 1900 these essentially middle-class rules of conduct were challenged, in the Netherlands and elsewhere. This breaking of taboos gave those who did the breaking a feeling of relief and release.

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Whether it concerned the intercourse between the sexes, the generations, social strata, the body or religious ideas and practices, people broke taboos which in their opinion were connected with domination and constraint, or, in other words, with power-differentials which they wanted to lessen or even eliminate.

They got what they wanted in a way. In accordance with the accelleration of the processes of integration and differentiation, in the second part of the 19th century there was a corresponding increase in the chances of power for the lower and more peripheral groups - women, youths, intellectuals of the upper classes and the lower classes in general - when compared with those of male elites in trade and government. In so far as these restrictions expressed the domination and higher status of the powerful they could be said to have had the chance to break taboos.

Less attention, however, was paid to the new and greater demands people made on each other within the new connections of greater complexity and smaller power-differentials, in work-relations, at home and elsewhere. Those who broke taboos and fought all sorts of restrictions were not fully aware of the fact that they imposed new ones in accordance with the greater interdependency.

Their feeling of release and relief was probably too strong for them to be able to gain this insight. Probably also for propagandistic reasons, the new restrictions were presented not as such, but as ‘natural rights’. And perhaps the self-restraint of some people belonging to the higher middle-class, but strongly involved with the lower strata, was so intense that they could not conceive of more equal relationships as not being ‘natural’.

In a way this misunderstanding was shared by those who viewed the changes negatively. They took seriously their opponents' ideas of release. But where the supporters believed in a spontaneous solidarity once taboos were broken and power-differentials had disappeared, their opponents feared a lessening of mutual regard. That was how the two camps confronted one another. One camp was against restrictions because they were connected with power-differentials, which, in their opinion, were too great, the other camp defended these differentials because it feared a loss of human dignity. Neither camp saw clearly how a new and wider form of self-restraint became a new demand and a new skill, sometimes simply by way of preaching solidarity and awakening a slumbering con-

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science, but more often through purposeful actions in education, in social work, in the new corporate life and also in official legislation.

The central conclusion concerning the third episode was that the tensions and problems mentioned above repeated themselves in the sixties and seventies of this century. Again there was an accelleration in the process of integration and differentiation and at the same time power-differentials between and inside social groupings decreased and taboos were broken.

These changes did not occur during or just after the war. During that period taboos were broken, but in an opposite direction. There was a sudden increase in the ‘constraint by others’. In regard to this sort of threat people involved had to keep a tighter control on themselves but other restrictions, which had, to a great extent, been ‘natural’, lost much of their validity.

Especially where the compulsion and threat by others were strongest one had to impose extreme restrictions on oneself to preserve one's chances of survival and for that very reason one sometimes had to still one's conscience. In this way the command not to fight was broken and the commands against stealing and lying were obeyed less strictly. At the same time the network of interdependence crumbled and people lived, generally speaking, in smaller units where the importance of primary power-sources such as physical strength, weapons and food increased.

It was fifteen years before the leeway was made up and before possibilities of further development, which arose because of the involvement in the war of non-Western European countries, were realised. By the beginning of the sixties prosperity, security and a mutual identification as ‘we Dutchmen’ had been restored. In many respects the pre-war level was even surpassed.

Especially for the generation that had not consciously experienced the war and the post-war worries these attainments were ‘natural’ and so contestable. Young people, especially those who were involved in the rapidly expanding educational institutions, broke taboos and by belittling the old values of decency, the importance of money and patriotism, they awakened the latent anxieties of the older generation. They also argued for ‘release’, for which the decreasing power-differentials gave them and other rising social strata an opportunity.

Again the misunderstandings I mentioned above arose. Especially

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the social groupings emancipated during the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century feared a loss of respect for what they had achieved, and, consequently for what they regarded as ‘human dignity’.

In fact the supporters of these changes did give them some reason for their anxiety. Arrogantly they waved away these worries. They argued and fought for ‘release’ and, like an earlier generation, for a wider solidarity and more equal relations between human beings, too. This, however, did not just come about, but required higher forms of self-control. Perhaps they were so full of hope that they were blind to the new restrictions. Perhaps they, too, presented solidarity as ‘normal’ for propagandistic reasons. Also, their moral indignation at inequality and power-differentials and the resulting forms of self-control was so great that it made impossible any clarity of vision on the greater restrictions and demands that they felt to be necessary.

In a way they were blinded by their own enlightenment, one could say they were ‘enlightenment-blind’. On the one hand ‘enlightenment’ refers to their notion that human behaviour is learned and what is learned is a reflection of power-differentials and also to their capacity to ‘unlearn’ the prejudices corresponding with these differentials and to judge people not according to these prejudices but according to their own value. ‘Blind’, on the other hand, refers to their incapacity to see that their own attitude, however humane, is not human in the sense of ‘normal’ or ‘natural’, but is learned as well and preconditioned by relatively small power-differentials and a relatively high level of self-control.

This tension expresses itself in their social behaviour and in their vision on social problems. The supporters of change emphasized that people in general, but especially the ‘powerless’ who did not come up to their standards of human dignity, had to be understood and not condemned. They are not vicious, but victims of oppression. Accordingly the remedy has been sought in social work, through which the ‘socially inadequate’ can be rehabilitated. But precisely because those who feel pity conform to that standard as a matter of course, they are unable to appreciate that human beings are not by nature either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. ‘Goodness’ too is learned, and what is learned is generally a reflection of specific power-relations.

Those who are ‘enlightenment-blind’ tend to compare their one-

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sided representation to an opposite perspective. In this more gloomy version human beings are unreliable by nature and only a solid education can make them really ‘human’. In addition - and also in contrast - the requirements of discipline seem to apply in the first place to the ‘powerless’, while the misdemeanours of the ‘powerful’ are more easily forgiven.

Most people are probably aware of both visions and their choice for one of the two strategies is determined in accordance with their position in the power-structure. Yet with the recent taboo-breaking the first vision seems to have become the more popular and the related problems can be observed in different social fields. In this summary I confine myself to two examples.

The first one concerns a telecast on ‘rape’. A taboo was broken. What had been anxiously avoided was now openly discussed. But as is often the case when taboos are broken the attention and understanding were directed towards the victims, the weaker ones (women in this case) and the behaviour of the stronger party (men) was condemned simply as being ‘inhuman’. The conclusion was that men ought to take women much more into account.

Whereas in the second part of the nineteenth century prostitution had become a feature of public life and a public abuse, now rape and sexual abuse had been denounced and a more equal relationship between men and women became the accepted ideal, although this was not represented as such, but as being ‘natural’ and ‘normal’. My aim in writing this book was not to acknowledge neither to deny these rights but rather to show how a blind faith in them often makes it difficult to develop and maintain a clear vision on the problems of dealing with one another in a more equal way.

The other example concerns the rise of terrorism. In the sixties and seventies the theory that violent behaviour must be understood rather than condemned found general favour. Criminals were made and not born. In the course of the seventies people who adhered to this vision were painfully confronted with its distortion. Love and understanding did not bring to reason those who used brute force and harsher treatment became necessary.

It could be that this ‘enlightenment-blindness’ is more deeply rooted in the Netherlands than elsewhere. Material and cultural integration is highly developed, peace is relatively lasting. These conditions require a high level of self-control: people can occasion-

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aly ridicule mutual regard, but they can nevertheless rely on it. It is only when they come into contact with people from outside their own national figuration or with those who hold a marginal position within it that they become aware of the fact that this type of conduct is not ‘natural’, and that those who become accustomed to it are in this sense in a vulnerable position.

This vulnerability, which occurs when taboos are broken can be regarded as a part of, and symptomatic of, an accelleration of the civilising process. In so far as people involved are not aware of their growing vulnerability, the accelleration of the civilising process has passed them by unnoticed, however enlightened they may take themselves to be.