Wet

Abstract

Wet Nils van Beek (bio) I admit it—it is a striking image. The novel Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates published by Mary Mapes Dodge in 1865 contains a story called "The Hero of Haarlem" in which an anonymous boy plugs his finger into a hole in a dike, thereby preventing the hole from growing, the dike from collapsing, and the neighboring city from disaster. The book was adapted into several films and plays. In the Netherlands a few statues have been erected to honor this fictional character and to offer American tourists a photo opportunity. The author never visited our country, and even the legends on which her story is presumably based aren't of Dutch origin. My fellow countrymen, however, do identify themselves with the metaphor of a country conquered from the sea, which is in a continuous battle with the water and which is inhabited by people who, no matter what their social status might be, are joining forces to build ingenious constructions to keep the water out. It's very effective for populists here to stretch this metaphor to the influx of immigrants who should remain behind a wall; a fence; or in our case, a dike. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Woerdersluis Monument in Spaarndam—the symbol of the fight against the water—in bronze, with a polished freestone base. Another legend comes to mind, probably relatively unknown beyond [End Page 240] our dikes. In 1621 the acclaimed jurist Hugo Grotius (Hugo de Groot) escaped from his prison in a book chest and fled to Paris, after having become involved in a theological dispute and in a climate of bigotry. With his treaty Mare Liberum, Grotius made an invaluable contribution to the topic of the sea in Western thought. In 1493 Pope Alexander VI wrote in a papal bull that the oceans of the world should be divided between the two countries that then explored the seas (registered later in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494). Spain would acquire all the territories west of the Tordesillas meridian (480 kilometers west of the Cape Verdes archipelago); Portugal, the parts east of it. Grotius argued that the open seas cannot be anyone's property. At open sea, he insisted, no borders can be drawn. The water is intangible and, from those times' perspective, inexhaustible. This viewpoint, which became dominant since the seventeenth century, allowed for the bourgeois and predominantly protestant nation of the Dutch Republic to cross the seas freely; to fish for haring close to Scotland; and, paradoxically, to monopolize many trades and build up a colonial empire for themselves. In his marvelous geophilosophical book Water: Een geofilosofische geschiedenis (2014), René ten Bos, a prominent Dutch philosopher, shows how the cultural meaning of water has developed in the Western world. In ancient Greek philosophy, water had a positive connotation, even though it was the domain of unpredictable gods. Thales of Miletus stated that water is the principal element of things—all is water. The motto panta rhei ("everything flows") is attributed to Heraclitus, who uses water as a dominant metaphor to understand our position in place and time. The Greeks used three terms for the sea: thalassa, the sea as a mother from which, for instance, Venus was born; pelagos, the sea as distance; and pontos, the sea as a bridge, as provider of connectivity. Since then, ten Bos explains, thinkers have taken on a process of distancing themselves from the seas. Plato disrespected fishermen, for they wouldn't give the fish a fair chance in opposition to the way hunters treat their game. Harbors came to be seen as the lower, unesteemed areas of towns. In ten Bos's view, Grotius's Mare Liberum is one of the pillars of modern capitalism. By denying anyone the possession of nonterritorial waters, the seas created some of the basic conditions for capitalism to flourish, including the possibility of being able to connect to the whole world, for instance. More importantly, capitalism needed the sea as a place where no limitations or prohibitions would inhibit [End Page 241] free trade and competition. And most importantly, capitalism can only function at the expense of...