Humanity needs a second pioneer revolution

Tribal communities have migrated to new frontiers for millions of years, until they arrived at all corners of the planet and just could not move further.

Meanwhile, the spirit of pioneering made humans move to new frontiers in social organization and technological innovation as well. That was the first revolution in human pioneering.

In their social organization and technological innovation, however, humans cannot rely on external, physical edges to hold them back anymore. But without such limitations we are heading for structural disaster.

If humans want to survive on this planet, they will have to reorient their pioneering spirit towards learning how to build limitations themselves. But can they build sufficiently strong systems of personal limitation and social restraint in time?

To create this second pioneer revolution is the present-day challenge of humanity. If this revolution will come at all, it is likely to arise bottom-up.

The lost boat from India

Kuttanad has wooden snakes competing in boat races. They are long, narrow ships rowed by dozens of deep dark men wanting to win the Nehru Trophy. They create an unparalleled excitement among the local spectators and increasingly so among foreign tourists.

For me and the Dutch a drinking water engineer, they organized one extra time of that boat race. Yes, they did that. In 1980.

Well, was it really for us two? We were delegated by the Dutch government who had in mind sending millions of guilders for the construction of the three large drinking water projects. We had to find out the soundness of the submitted plans and the social needs of safe drinking water in this South Indian state of Kerala.

Each of us received two miniature snake boats. One, presented by the local engineers who smelled money, was made of black mahogany wood with rowers carved out of white ivory. I received that boat with mixed feelings. The other boat was made of cheap wood and had the text: ‘Presented by the People of Kuttanad’. I took to it immediately.

On our journey back home, it appeared that the mahogany boat fitted well in my suitecase, but the People’s boat was too long. The only available solution was to keep it as hand luggage.

At Kochi Airport I had to explain how I got that long snake boat. Security officers remained busy assessing the danger, worried as they were about the sharp yellow point it had. We found out that point could be removed and I had to put in my main suitcase. Thus the problem was solved and we departed.

In Mumbai I spent a night at the house of my colleague Dr Pillai and his family. Next evening Pillai walked me, through the homeless families that peacefully prepared for the night on the pavement of his street, to a taxi. The taxi took me to Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport.

Once in the Swissair plane above the Indian Ocean I reflected on our mission in Kerala, the bad drinking conditions, the local poverty and the boat race they nevertheless held for us. But, hey, where was my People’s boat? It was lost. Where did I leave it? I could not remember.

It was three years later that I made a stopover in Mumbai again and visited Dr Pillai in his rather well-to-do neighborhood. We discussed life and the world at his balony, with the homeless families peacefully murmuring on the pavement.

Back inside, Pillai went up to a cupboard and came back with something I recognized. It was the Kuttanad boat. It still had ‘Presented by the People of Kuttanad’ painted on it. I was stunned.

‘Yes’, Pillai said, ‘you left the boat by mistake at the back seat of the taxi. The driver was from nearby here, remembered my street, asked around among the pavement dwellers and brought the boat back to me. Some people in India are unreliable, others have a good heart.’

From that journey I brought the boat safe and sound back to Holland and still have it.

Snake Boat Race 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ASLLcLb9LY

The evolutionary stage of constructive action: overcoming muscle power, ignorance and passivity

During most of the evolution, the power holders used their larger physical strength. It was hardly possible to change the difference in physical force between people.

With more education and larger-scale social life, differences in knowledge came to count and knowledge became a tool for power holders to exploit the ignorance of the majority. But that ignorance is on the decline with more education and access to information.

What remains for the power holders is the exploitation of our passivity. Therefore, we are at a stage in the evolution where we are learning by trial and error to use our knowledge, take responsibility and turn emotional behavior into constructive action.

Nappies and better worlds in experimental Amsterdam

She started her day-nursery life in the large office room of a professor. That was sociologist A. den Hollander. He had an authoritarian personality and could not cope with the democratization at the University of Amsterdam in the late 1960s.

He refused to teach anymore and left his office unused. With a group of assistants and students I encroached his room for our infants. Each long morning two parents too care of the children.

The nursery got a permanent status when the professor came to collect a book and found a bunch of undisciplined, shouting infants crawling over and under his desk and smelled some dirty nappies in one of the corners.

But, alas, the remaining authorities at the university wanted to get rid of us. Right in the city center of Amsterdam we found shelter in a monastery of nuns that ran out of nuns and needed some extra income.

The culture gap was not much of a problem. The aging nuns were tolerant and appreciated our attempts to behave. But the noise level produced by our infants became too much for the nuns in the otherwise so silent monastery.

With decency and determination they told us we were out again. That was in the summer of 1972.

One of the mothers knew another group of parents who had run a nursery under the bridge on Vondelpark but were also ousted. As a compensation, the municipality had offered them a place at the workshop of the park, next to a pathway called Kattenlaan. That is where I live now.

Their group was too small. They merged with us and we settled at the workshop for a long summer. In the construction shed on wheels we could keep some stuff and find shelter during rain showers. A large pile of white sand was the children’s paradise.

After bringing our children to the improvised nursery, many of us met again at the terrace of Groot Melkhuis café. We had horror conversations about stinking nappies and dream conversations about better worlds.

We even stayed at the terrace until it was time to pick up the kids again. Some returned to the terrace to let the children play in the bordering playground until tiredness turned into crying and it was time to go home.

In the evenings we had hippy-styled barbecues in the park, with the children running around in the grass and weeds clouds hanging in the bushes. At home we held meetings to brainstorm about new ways to raise children, communicate among parents and change wider society.

I loved the experimental, creative mood but was too pragmatic about organizational and financial matters for some. Friction between the goals of solidarity and idealism arose.

One of the fathers said he came from Yugoslavia and wanted to go there with a group of parents. I was to be the anthropologist explaining the Yugoslavian collective enterprises that had been started. But the father appeared to come from Amsterdam and the expedition was called off.

By the end of the summer the Vondelpark manager had enough of our nursery. For our daughter we found the nursery in the wooden barracks of the Theosophical Society, in the garden behind their former temple. There we stayed until our daughter reached pre-school age.

I don’t think she was much aware of the societal upheaval of those days. But from the nurseries she kept two girls as friends, likely because the parents got along quite well and agreed on a certain balance between dreams and nappies.

Her dreams of travel coming true in others

Her dreams and what she learned about the outside world fed her intelligence and kept here alive under restricted circumstances. As most housewives, she had to manage with the modest income her husband earned.

She worked very hard in order to bring up her seven children in style. And she inspired them with ideas about the wider world that she found tremendously fascinating.

The information had started to spread in the middle of the nineteenth century already. Newspapers and books appeared, and photos, and stories by the rich who could travel by train. In the twentieth century movies and radio increased the flow of news from far away.

She felt it became within reach for common people to go out and discover the planet. Her eldest daughter, my mother, got infected by her travel fever and did what her mother could not have done.

In the 1920s she and her girlfriend boarded a train to a completely different country. It was Germany. Back home she found an eager ear in her mother who wanted to learn about what happened abroad. It was more than that. My mother extended the life of her mother into foreign lands.

Next summer the two young women took a train to Belgium and in another year to Echternach in Luxembourg. In the 1930s they crossed the North Sea on a steamboat to London and proceeded by train to the beach resort Torquay. Next year, at a London hotel, she met the Dutch man who became my father.

‘You have a karmic link with your grandmother,’ a perceptive person once told me. The thirsty drinking in of knowledge and the wanting to understand the wide world is certainly mine too.

Black Pete: Dutch Norm of Equality Conceals Practice of Inequality

Why do most Dutch people do not see a problem in the traditional figure of Black Pete? Surely, there is a lot of racism in my country. Stereotyping, overgeneralizing, fearing the foreign, job discrimination, verbal insults, physical attacks and support to extremely rightwing politicians are all over.

But also the sensible, broad-minded, decent people keep defending the blackness of Pete, the servant of a white master. How can they do that? The answer may be found in the accepted gap between norm and reality. In Holland we have the opinion that, disregarding inequal positions, we should feel equal and behave acccordingly. The expression goes that you should not stick your head above ground level and ‘be normal.’

If you have a high position or much wealth it should not go to your head. That the prime minister comes biking to his office, contributes to his popularity.

If you have a low position or no money, you should not feel inferieur. You have to stand up for yourself and be frank. 'If your skin is dark, don’t mind. Be assertive!' With the accessibility and safety of social media, the assertiveness now even turns into widespread rudeness.

But frankness or not, our biking ministers take measures that increase inequality in society. And many feel, justified or not, superior or inferior. In reality and like elsewhere, Dutch society has many inequalities.

Perhaps there is the fear that if we acknowledge those inequalities as they are, we will accept them, give up opposing to them and bury our frankness. In order to avoid that risk, it can be tempting to keep seeing the ideal as the reality:

‘Don’t see the heads that stick up high above ground level. Don’t see the people pushed underground. Don’t see the blackness of Pete as a sign of inferiority. We are all equal. We love Black Pete. We wish him the very best.’

In reality the blackness of Pete contributes to inequality. Small children, black and white, see the white bishop Saint Nicholas high on his horse with black servants walking at the pavement and doing the menial jobs. In this way, children receive and store the image that white people are superior and colored people are inferior. As they they take that skewed image with them later in life and into wider world, it generates racism. 

And don’t be mistaken, also in Holland racism brings expressed and unexpressed suffering. But whereas in reality a black skin can create pain, the norm is to ignore that blackness. In this way, racism becomes a black spot in Dutch perception. The emperor is quite naked.

Saint Nicholas and two Black Petes

Prime Minister Mark Rutte