What is the biggest problem of our time? An intriguing question and starting point for a fascinating meeting between journalist Nathalie Huigsloot and Minister of State Herman Tjeenk Willink, emeritus professor of history Maarten van Rossem and biologist-writer Midas Dekkers in the holiday number by HP/The Time.
For Van Rossem, the biggest problem is: “Our government that is not doing what it should be doing and that is tormented by a series of problems that it has caused itself.” For Tjeenk Willink: “The dominant economic thinking of the past forty years and its consequences.” He adds further on: “The balances have been broken, and we are increasingly moving in an authoritarian direction, in which citizens are subordinated to systems and the law of the strongest prevails.”
Midas Dekkers thinks that his interlocutors talk too much about ‘people’. “All other populations can suffocate the kill, own species first. I think that’s where a lot of the problems come from: if you just do your best to settle things fairly for the people, you’re selling out a lot of other organisms in this world. (…) We have to get rid of economic growth. That is point one.”
Will it still be ok? Van Rossem and Tjeenk Willink still have hope, Dekkers no longer believes in it: “Mankind is coming to an end. I don’t think there’s any in-between. That seems like one to me fact accompli. (…) I can assure you one thing, nature always wins in the long run, so you better start talking about birth control.”
Tjeenk Willink only wants to be optimistic “provided we really do our best to come to our senses and say: how did we come up with that system of democracy and law in the Netherlands?” Surprisingly enough, Van Rossem, the born skeptic, is the only one who dares to be completely optimistic. “We will not stay within that one and a half degrees of warming, but I am convinced that we will come up with something technological against the climate problem.”
This type of conversation was very familiar to me. Sooner or later in the evening such themes come up and, if asked, you make a choice between optimism and pessimism. In my case it depends on my mood, but most of the time I tend to end up with optimism. This is also because in my younger years I was influenced by the essay ‘Can time give signs?’ from 1967 by Willem Frederik Hermans. In it he convincingly wipes the floor with the cultural pessimism of the philosopher Bolland and the historian Huizinga. As early as 1921, Bolland saw a “cancerized” civilization come to an end. An important symptom for Bolland was the bicycle ‘as a vibrating and shocking destroyer, especially of the female underbelly’.
Hermans combated the tendency of Bolland and Huizinga to measure the decay in society in part by technical developments, such as modern means of communication. “I do not believe that anyone can foresee the signs of the times if he despises inventions and leaves them aside,” wrote Hermans.
It is the confidence in technology that Van Rossem also shows. But what if that technology falls into the wrong hands – which is already the case here and there? What then? I’ll stop before I get to pessimism.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on July 7, 2023.