The Netherlands, Irony, and the VKS

It seems like irony drips off the pages of Buruma's book Murder in Amsterdam.

Re-reading the chapters for this assignment, which focused on Muslim communities and "Submission," one gets the impression that they are reading Catch-22 rather than a discourse of life in Amsterdam during the last half-decade. The degree to which actions have unintended and/or opposite consequences, parties flip perspectives, and situations are generally fouled up by, well, themselves is staggering and heartbreaking.

Most significant in my mind is the assertion on page 121 about the rates of schizophrenia among Muslim men in the Netherlands. "A young male of the second generation was ten times more likely to be schizophrenic than a native Dutchman from a similar economic background," Buruma reports. That in itself is terrifying: that the shared experience of a single group of people can have such a damaging effect, and not socially or economically but psychologically. And then you start reading into the inferred causes of such a split, that deep disconnect with both their family's culture and the new place that they've been transplanted to, and it just seems all the worse and more hopeless. And then the liberal factions ask themselves why these kids turn to extremism...

It just goes round and round: The immigrants come to this place, bringing with them very different ideas of how to live, of what to believe; different social structures and expectations, and with very few inroads into the society that they are entering. In the name of tolerance, the natives balk at what they see as backwards or regressive social tendencies, and this in turn pushes the immigrants even further to the outskirts, unhinges their social orders. The natives see this and in turn ostracize them further. And so on. And so on.

The case of the second generation is particularly sad, raised in an environment that doesn't jive with the ways that they are taught to live by their families and cultures. There was a passage about how the fact that they speak the native language while their parents usually don't means that they have to negotiate through governmental bureaucracies on their parents behalf. This often undermines their faith in their parents, shaking the base of the family unit, stranding these kids in a world that their parents don't understand. And the irony lies in the fact that the lack of access to the society, the lack of social services and roads to integration, further alienates them from the society, and the society from them. The need to deal with a culture that doesn't accept them and that is, in many ways, contrary to the belief system that they have inherited can be psychically crippling.

Am I repeating myself? I feel like I'm repeating myself.

Anyways, Theo van Gogh's approach to irony ended up being his downfall. The whole of Dutch society in Buruma's world seems to be filled with people who want to let their words speak for them so they don't have to act, and once action happens its effects are devastating. I was really intrigued by van Gogh's work on Najib and Julia. The work seemed surprisingly frank and sincere in the way that Buruma described it, and actually concerned with portraying and engaging Dutch Muslims. It makes his blatant offense seem mostly like a game, like there was some world view buried under his bristly public persona that he did want to express. In light of that work (granted, I haven't seen it or anything else he has done, besides Submission - we should work on correcting that), at least in the way Buruma describes it, irony seems sadly and ultimately fatally self-defeating.

Admittedly, I'm having a difficult time drawing a conceptual link between these conversations and Wouter's article on the VKS. I did have a question though: One of the primary assertions in the intro to the article says taht "working in these new information environments, researchers should become more productive and better able to cope with interdisciplinary problems." Now, the productivity I can understand: the aim is to link researchers working on similar projects across distances in digital environments. But how does that necessarily relate to interdisciplinarity? Is it just the fact that large collections of information and data can be aggregated and shared, or is there something else?

I like the view that the work at VKS is inherently interventionist, and my pithy comment to tie this to Buruma is that some intervention is needed in Amsterdam on behalf of the immigrants there. I can understand the Dutch being leery of Muslim customs, and I believe that it is possible for the groups to engage each other openly and sincerely to foster understanding. However, this isn't likely to happen until immigrants are given the opportunity to join the culture, and encouraged to do so. I talked about the cycle of ostracization before, and it seems like fostering integration is the best way to break it.