Letter from Amsterdam

Amsterdam demands dreaming. Snug along canals, in warm brick and flickering light, the otherness of the place compels it. The rooflines were pitched in the 17th century and remain, and it takes no surplus of imagination to close your eyes and see the city as it was: romantics dream of assignations; historians of the golden age of maritime trade.

I project on the city too. Dream of an ordered, reasonable, fair society. Locate that dream on a map: it is Amsterdam.

I could never put my finger on the appeal of Amsterdam during my previous trips here. But contrasting it to London—walking the streets of both cities at nearly the same time I was finally sure of it: I love Amsterdam because it is a fair and reasonable place, keyed towards deep human satisfactions and everyday needs. The authoritarian subtexts of London and New York are missing; the shrill grasping, the implicit viciousness.

Tonia naturally put it all together. On our first day walking through the Centrum, she was astonished at the public spaces: the full cafes, the teeming squares, the exciting hustle of people coursing their way between shop and street. People mingle in Amsterdam. And they do it in free environments, streets and squares that have developed organically, that do not shut anyone out, that are not patrolled by cops, that are not monitored by surveillance cameras.

America has almost no free public spaces left. The mall, the very essence of the controlled corporate environment, with its singular consumer purpose, its heavy security, and its restrictive practices of entry, has replaced the public space, the place where you can meet anyone, and where anything can happen. In London, it’s worse. There are surveillance cameras everywhere, an Orwellian web knit about the entire city. But America and Britain have to control their public spaces because they can quite easily run out of control. In Amsterdam, there’s no need to control the public, because the public controls itself.

I don’t think such self-control comes from any special quality of the Dutch. What they’ve done is make good on the social contract. No one starves in Amsterdam. We saw no homeless sleeping in the street (a sharp contrast to London, where the homeless, Dickensian, sleep and beg everywhere). Health care is readily available to whoever needs it. The unemployed are supported, as are the aged and infirm. Crime is low, with the exception of the Amsterdam tradition of bicycle theft. Drug addicts are not warehoused in prison; criminals are not murdered by the state, put down like rabid dogs. Universal public education is an absolute, and obvious: it never fails to surprise how many languages the Dutch speak.

The payoff to such a perfectly reasonable order of things is found in the streets of Amsterdam. Because the Dutch social contract provides a foundation below which not even the most despised can fall, there is a degree of contentment and happiness that makes the streets safe. The Dutch have no reason to riot.

All of which flies in the face of the conventional Anglo-American wisdom, which is busy dismantling the social contract in the name of greater economic efficiency and increased productivity. As though these goals were in and of themselves virtuous, and as though they could be acquired better through a harsh and unremitting work discipline than through social empowerment. But there is consensus among the elite of New York and London that the best way to progress is through fear: every homeless person the secretary or clerk steps over on his or her way to work sends the message that you could be here. Keep your mouth shut and do what you’re told. In the Anglo-American world, this is preferable to building a community where comfort and security are the rewards of hard work.

The Dutch do the unthinkable. They tie social questions to economics; they calculate prosperity in terms of values rather than mere profits. Economic efficiency for what end? Increased productivity for whom? In Amsterdam, reasonable answers: economic efficiency for the greatest good of the greatest number; increased productivity so that everyone can work according to his or her ability for his or her need. That these answers came first from Londoners Jeremy Bentham and Karl Marx illustrates how much the Anglo-American world has turned its back on its best traditions.

There is, after all, a common tradition to America, Britain and the Netherlands. Protestantism and entrepreneurship gave birth to these nations, and chartered liberties and incipient capitalism nurtured them. So why, three centuries later, do only the Dutch retain that mix of Christian restraint (now secularized) and self interest that Adam Smith recommended in The Wealth of Nations? Why, three centuries later, do only the Dutch express the democratic self-control and temperate government sanctioned in the Federalist Papers?

My guess is that the Dutch failure to build empire saved them. The Netherlands lost out early in the imperial sweepstakes, their navies defeated by Blake and the English in the mid-17th century. Britain and America went forward in history with their appetites unfettered and focused on force and power and all the other anti-democratic and excessive attitudes necessary for empire. In the meantime the Dutch, in their small country besieged by the North Sea, concentrated on their assets: fair trade and cooperation and reasonable government. They stayed true to the roots of their history and culture. Amsterdam is the visible expression of their connection to the past. A city that looks much as it did during its golden age, the Platonic manifestation of a host of rational ideals missing in modern New Amsterdam and London. Out of place with the present. And to me, perfectly reasonable and congenial. Still…

In Brussels, we saw a headline in a French newspaper that accused the Dutch of "Americanizing" Europe, the argument being, in typical Gallic fashion, that the predominance of the English language in Holland was a sure sign of imminent disaster. But the French have it entirely wrong. It is the Dutch who are imperiled by America. Because the imperial attitude has to expand constantly or collapse. And because Amsterdam exists, and exists in such a way as to pose a standing reproach to the order of things in New York and London, the governors of those cities must destroy it. And they will, sooner or later, under the guise of making Amsterdam more "efficient," under the guise of bringing Amsterdam into the "new global economy." Already the multinationals have set up their steel and glass citadels outside Amsterdam, near Schipol airport, ready to lay siege to the city.

Given the good sense of the Dutch, I think it will take a few decades to destroy Amsterdam, to introduce homelessness, economic privation, intolerance and desperation to its quiet canals. Until then, it’s a refuge. It has narrow streets and rickety bicycles that clatter across cobblestones. Where people still take long meals by candlelight and talk with one another. A city filled with bookstores, with owners who live in small apartments above the storefront. A place where bells toll the hours and you can still hear birds.

On the day we left, the train took us west, through a part of Amsterdam I do not know well. The sun was rising and it was a clear, cold day. The Jordaan, my favorite part of the Centrum, passed quickly. The train turned and we were in the suburbs, where the streets are wide with cars, the buildings are not made of brick, and the view of the canals is obscured. And I said goodbye to Amsterdam, to that small, happy city.