The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

84 chapter 3means “sea land” claimed from and bravely facing the waves. The imagereminded self-critical Calvinists of overwhelmed dikes every ten yearsor so, now here, now there, with gigantic regional disasters rememberedfor generations every century or so, Saint Elizabeth’s Day in 1421, forexample, seventy-two villages in Zeeland abruptly engulfed in a night,over 100,000 people drowned; or latterly, January 31, 1953. A famous modernpoem speaks of de stem van het water met zijn eeuwige rampen / gevreesd engehoord, “the sound of the water, with its eternal disasters, is feared andheard.” Flooding of water figures repeatedly in worries about an over-floodof riches.Material abundance seems like such a force of nature, crushing all. Nothingis more abundant than the sea. To be deprived by overflooding riches ofthe necessity to work was bad, not good, because these were bourgeois,work-admiring people. Dutch has a terrifying word, kwelwater, the waterthat quietly seeps under an apparently sound dike. It is related in folketymology to kwellen, “to torment, to torture.” A Calvinist, at any rate therigorist predikant who after 1619 claimed precedence in religious affairs inthe Republic, would readily extend it to the seeping corruptions of the soul.The Netherlanders’“fear of drowning in destitution and terror [from water]was exactly counterbalanced by their fear of drowning in luxury and sin[from wealth].” 15 The Dutch stole the land from the sea, and worried aboutthe counterclaim of nature, or of human nature. “Let us clean our stoops,and our souls,” they repeated uneasily as they worked.But is the moral effort especially Dutch? Ik denk het niet. I don’t think theDutch moralized their riches and other bourgeois do not.The American bourgeoisie, for example, moralizes its riches as just rewardsfor cowboy courage, or as a gospel of philanthropy of the Carnegie/Mellontype, or as a democratic creed of opportunity seized. The Hindu bourgeoisiemoralizes its riches as the favor of Ganesha or the expression of spiritualworth from a previous reincarnation or as provisioning for those peskycousins. As behavior, of course, a sheer materialism without sincere referenceto the transcendent is common enough in all societies, bourgeois or not. Butit is the official theory of none. Official theories are about the transcendent, abeyond. Every human yearns for it.Schama does not compare enough with other countries to make his casefor Dutch exceptionalism. The same problem is seen among historians ofthe United States trying with exclusively American evidence to make a case