JL Heldring must have hated me. Columns are not to hit others with your opinion, was his conviction, but to get them thinking. He wrote his analyzes and reflections for this newspaper in his column for 52 years One of these daysuntil a year before his death in 2013.
On the contrary, I like to beat you with my opinion every week, I even see that as my core task. I write with the motto the concluding sentence of the House reading from Karel van het Reve: “Once in a while someone has to say something.”
With people who keep “on the one hand…, on the other hand…” babbling along in their writings, I get the urge to grab them by the shoulders and ask them, beg them no, to please say something for once. To put something on the line. To identify with certain ideas, to choose a side.
And as soon as Heldring does that, I immediately find it extremely fascinating. In 1974 he publishes – completely against the times – an article titled ‘Praise of Conservatism’. Last Wednesday, debate center De Balie organized together with The Green Amsterdammer an evening about Heldring’s conservatism, which is not against change, but wants to steer that change in the right direction, out of the constant awareness of human shortcomings, both individual and collective.
Reading the article, and his biography, I realized how much we would now benefit from conservatives of Heldring’s reasonable, sensible, moderate, and utterly boring variety. A necessary anchor of traditions, in the knowledge that a herd almost always goes too far on the chosen path.
Unfortunately, we have to do without it in the Netherlands. The conservatives of our own time are – with one exception – unfortunately not very conservative in their conservatism, they went off the rails and thereby made themselves irrelevant. In addition, our Christian Democratic party is led by characterless managers and, partly because of this, it keeps falling off the anchor.
I am convinced that a firmer and more reasonably conservative representation could have prevented many a crisis. Had we really tackled childcare fraud in such a criminal way? Had we really so ruthlessly killed our farmers with a model for nitrogen emissions in hand? Would we really have agreed to that corona admission ticket that resulted in a marginally higher vaccination rate and an army of dropped out Dutch people? Did we then have officials on mandatory ‘white privilegecourse sent? Had we let the practice of euthanasia get so out of hand, in which we now secretly stir the sedative into the coffee of the vulnerable and incompetent elderly?
The reasonable conservative had said: I am in favor of nature conservation, but that is not how we do this in the Netherlands. I’m for euthanasia but this far and no further. I am for vaccination, but against coercion. I’m angry about racism, but it’s an exaggeration to guilt-trip every good heart. Moderation, reasonableness, common sense.
Also on an individual level, I think that a deeper awareness of human shortcomings could also have meant something for the youngest generation, which now seems to have really fallen into collective desperation and despair. What if they are convinced that not everything is within reach? That they can’t do everything on their own?
Continuing secularization has resulted not only in the loss of the sense of community but also, perhaps more importantly, in the loss of human humility. A generation has grown up with the idea that they, as individuals, can achieve anything they want. So they inevitably face a long journey of disappointments and loneliness. I would like the modern Western European youth to be donned a secular imaginary form of a yarmulke to remind them that they are human too, that there is something greater above or beyond them that is humbling.
And maybe it’s time to read back a few columns of that rock-solid boring Heldring. As conservative reasonable medicine in the unhinged present.
Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of February 25, 2023