Calvinism and vice (WAS MDMD(3)--Just a thought)

[Doug Millison]

from The Embarrassment of Riches:  An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in
the Golden Age, by Simon Schama, p. 467-468 (UC Berkeley Press paperback
edition)

"What both the Calvinist homilies and the misogynist satires document,
however, is the Dutch male fixation -- part fantasy, part reality -- of
lairs of vice lying in wait for the unsuspecting....the brothel was quite
plainly an antihome, a counterhome, just as in this system of moral
opposites the tavern was always thought of as a counterchurch. The
procuresses were the antimothers:  their wrinkles those of evil rather than
of piety, their prayers to Satan rather than to God. And the girls
themselves made up a kind of antifamily lodged in an antihome where they
unlearndall the eswhich the bona fide home as organized to instill.  (Until
quite recently, the red-light establishments in Amsterdam struck tourists
as quaintly cozy, travesties of the Dutch bourgeois household or the
bric-a-brac bibelot shop, full of knickknackery, lace curtains, bibelots,
and potted plants, with their own gaudy version of gezelligheid.) In the
seventeenth-century moralists canon, the musicos and speelhuizen were
schools of vice, just as home was the great school of virtue. On their
premises, dirt, theft, squalor, deceit, drunkenness, immoderation, inverted
humanism's domestic norms:  cleanliness, honesty, comfort, sobriety, and
moderation....the world of virtue and vice lived in practice in a kind of
symbiotic interdependence ....This benign disingenuousness was of a piece
with other varieties of moral pluralism in which inconsistencies of
principle were set aside (though not completely suppressed) for the sake of
effective social management. To compare a whorehouse with a lottery, a
doelen feast or the stock exchange (and there were some ministers of the
church who did exactly that) is not to cast aspersions on the latter but to
point up the many -- but connecting -- ways in which the Dutch managed to
sustain a set of regulating ethics while living in the midst of an
otherwise uncontrollable fleshly appetite-provoking world. For as the
anonymous author of 't Amsterdamsch Hoerdom succinctly put it, "the world
cannot be governed Bible in hand."

-Doug

At 9:45 AM 7/8/97, Doug Millison wrote:
>Consider Amsterdam today. The Oude Kerk, dedicated to St. Nicholas, patron
>saint of sailors, famed for its 16th century stained glass windows known as
>Nieuwe Vrouwenkoor (depicting the life of the Virgin), with a late gothic
>spire that rises in the center of the city's red-light district, photogenic
>prostitutes on display in picturesque lace-curtain framed picture windows;
>drugs cafes with multiple varieties of marijuana and hashish on the menu;
>funseekers lurching in the canal maze of streets --  not so much a combat
>zone where low-life criminals are left alone to prey on one another but
>instead a safe, well-planned ghetto of cheap indulgence, a carnal
>Disneyland, the stops clearly laid out on tour bus routes on the tourist
>maps, with salvation close at hand in the Oude Kerk. All quite tame here in
>the metropole, compared to Cape Town.
>
>-Doug
>
>At 9:19 AM 7/8/97, Steven Maas (CUTR) wrote:
>>Dixon, or Pynchon, asks the question--". . .how can there be any room for
>>excess in this gossip-ridden Town. . . ?"  and answers that it's ". . .as
>>if Judgment be near as the towering Seas and nothing matter anymore,
>>especially not good behavior, because there's no more time--the bets are
>>in, ev'ry individual Fate decided, all cries taken by the great Winds, and
>>'tis done."
>>
>>So I was wondering, is, or was, there in fact a strain of Dutch Calvinist
>>thought that would lead the Cape Dutch to imagine that once Time was about
>>to end it no longer mattered what one did, that one's fate was decided and
>>would not change no matter what?  This seems to go well beyond the
>>Elect/Preterite dichotomy, where even the Elect are expected to follow
>>certain codes of conduct.
>>
>>        Steve Maas
>>
>>Meg submits for our consideration this excellent, though inexplicably
>>lacking references to Librarians and NoCal dope dealers, excerpt from
>>chapter 8, page 78 of M&D:
>>
>>>       "He [Dixon] feels like a predatory Animal,--as if this Town were
>>> ancient to him, his Hunting-Ground, his Fell so mis-remember'd in nearly
>>> all Details, save where lie the Bound'ries he does not plan to cross.
>>> Tho' how can there be any room for excess in this gossip-ridden Town,
>>> crowded up against the Mountains that wall it from the virid vast
>>> leagues of Bushmen's Land beyond? as behind these carv'd doors and
>>> Gothickal Gates, in the far Penumbrae of sperm tapers, in Loft and
>>> _Voorhuis_, in entryways scour'd by Dusk and blown Sand, these Dutch
>>> carry on as if Judgment be near as the towering Seas and nothing matter
>>> anymore, especially not good behavior, because there's no more time--the
>>> bets are in, ev'ry individual Fate decided, all cries taken by the great
>>> Winds, and 'tis done. Temporally, as geographically, the End of the
>>> World.  The unrelenting Vapor of debauchery here would not merely tempt
>>> a Saint,--Heavens, 'twould tempt an Astronomer.  Yet 'tis difficult, if
>>> not impossible, for these Astronomers to get down to a Chat upon the
>>> Topick of Desire, given Dixon's inability to deny or divert the Gusts
>>> that sweep him, and Mason's frequent failure, in his Melancholy, even to
>>> recognize Desire, let alone to act upon it, tho' it run up calling Ahoy
>>> Charlie. "How could you begin to understand?" Mason sighs. "You've no
>>> concept of Temptation.  You came ashore here _looking_ for occasions to
>>> transgress. Some of us have more Backbone, I suppose. . . ."
>>>       "A bodily Part too often undistinguish'd," Dixon replies, "from a
>>> Ram-Rod up the Arse."
>
>
>D O U G  M I L L I S O N ||||||||||| millison at online-journalist.com
>


D O U G  M I L L I S O N ||||||||||| millison at online-journalist.com
     Today in history (8 July 97):  951. Paris was founded.