Return To the Middle Ages
D URING the First World War it was usual for the Allies to represent their cause as that of democracy, which was defined as the free and spontaneous movement of the human spirit, unfettered by logic. Germany, on the other hand, stood for machine-like regularity and cold, calculating rationality. Henri Bergson and Gustav LeBon grew quite eloquent on this theme. During the Second War, the roles were reversed. This time Germany was the country of blind instinct and wild emotional surges, moving in a kind of somnambulism and thinking with its blood. The West stood for reason and logic, for an ordered view of life in conformity with permanent rational values. In defiance of all respectable historiography, the United Nations were made the heirs of the cool and tranquil culture of Rome, with Christian universalism added, whereas Germany represented the survival of the frenetic barbarism of the Nordic pagans. Even the boundary line was supplied: it was the Wall of Limes in southern Germany, which marked the farthest outpost of permanent Roman settlement. Now that the Third War is in the offing, the boundary line has been changed, but the protagonists remain much the same. The Wall of Limes has moved to the Elbe, a shift which makes naturalized democrats of the Germans, who a short time ago were regarded as the mortal foes of democracy. On the west bank of the Elbe today stands Christian democracy, a sort of Joan of Arc, the champion of reason and natural law, while atheistic Bolshevism, foe of this two-millenial culture, glowers from the east bank. The reader can document this picture from his daily paper. There is nothing new or out of the way about this. The Incas, before conquering an adjoining people, used always to spread the story that their enemies were cannibals and deserved what they were about to get. What the Incas said may or may not have been true, but it is certain that the current representation of the East-West dispute is false. The idea of a unified Christendom with a common heritage was always a myth, and the myth itself was shattered at the Reformation. Democracy, again, is the product of the spiritual individualism and the secular rationalism which replaced the theocratic conception of a law of nature of the middle ages, and is altogether inconsistent with that conception. Ten years ago no one would have had the face to talk the kind of history that is now current.
The organization of the soul : Elias and Foucault on discipline and the self
C E N T R A L to the various ways in which the history of Western subjectivity has been approached since the nineteenth century is the concept 'discipline'. The premise underlying the bulk of contemporary social theory is not only that there has been a transition from tradition to modernity (Bendix 1967), but also that being modern means being disciplined, by the state, by each other and by ourselves; that the soul, both one's own and that of others, became organized into the self, an object of reflection and analysis, and, above all, transformable in the service of ideals such as productivity, virtue and strength (Sonntag 1988; Rose 1990). The history of Western societies is seen to be characterised by an increasing objectification and disciplining of subjectivity, an ever-intensifying ordering of the soul, which, coupled with increasing individualization, seems to have turned us moderns into thoroughly self-controlled, administered, not to mention depressed 'autistic neutrums' (Kamper 1986: 92-112). Karl Marx observed the disciplinary effects of factory labour, the 'dull compulsion' of the commodification of labour itself, and the emergence of a working class which 'by education, tradition, habit, looks upon the conditions of [the capitalist] mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature' (Marx 1954: 689). Georg Simmel also examined how personality accommodates to the requirements of an urban capitalist environment, emphasizing that punctuality, calculability and exactness become part of modern personalities to the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign traits and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from within' (Simmel 1964: 413). Of the classical social theorists, Max Weber had perhaps the keenest interest in discipline, since for him the discipline associated with ascetic Protestantism played a crucial role in the development of Western capitalism, perhaps even constituting its uniqueness in world history (Breuer 1978; van Krieken 1990).
The Resistance of the Netherlands Churches
T HE Dutch resistance against National Socialism cannot be described or understood unless special attention be given to the resistance carried on by the Dutch churches. Most of the time as a single body, and from the beginning to the end of the German occupation, the churches openly testified and protested on every occasion that there was special reason for doing so. They protested against the persecution and the sterilization of Jews; against depriving the people of all rights and liberties; against the terror and the raids; against immorality; and most of all they protested against the introduction of National Socialism in the press and in the schools, in the Labor Service, and in propaganda directed at the people. The churches did not remain silent