Jeroen Bouterse – Blogs, articles, CV

In those days, in those distant days

For 3 Quarks Daily

Under Nanna’s moon – a girl under Nanna’s moon, alone I lie

Under Nanna’s moon drifting over the pure mountains alone I lie,

Under the mountains of the cedars where sleeps Mullil alone I lie.

“It would be nice to go back to caring about the moon”, writes Omar El Akkad in 2025. He can’t, because “no description of the moon […] reflects as much beauty back into the world as a missile obliterating a family in their home takes out of it.” Bertold Brecht wrote in the 1930s that in his time, talking about trees was almost a crime, because it implied silence about so many wrongs.

Brecht’s words are addressed To those born after, those who “will emerge from the flood that engulfed us”. They are asked to judge mildly: “when you speak of our weaknesses, remember too the dark time from which you escaped.” El Akkad’s book is titled One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. For him, the passing of time will allow us to settle down in comfortable and hypocritical narratives about our own innocence, and teach us nothing.

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Echte progressieven

(voor Over de Muur)

Maarten Boudry’s nieuwe boek, Het verraad aan de verlichting, gaat over hoe progressieven in onze tijd de waarden en idealen van de Verlichting verloochenen. Postmodernisme en westerse zelfhaat zitten volgens hem een betere toekomst in de weg. Zijn kritiek mist echter vaak doel.

Met Verlichting bedoelt Boudry een houding van vertrouwen in wetenschap, technologie en vooruitgang. Het eerste hoofdstuk is dan ook een veeg uit de pan naar postmoderne relativisten die in de tweede helft van de vorige eeuw het geloof in waarheid, rationaliteit en rechtvaardigheid hebben ondermijnd. Foucault, Derrida, en Bruno Latour bijvoorbeeld. Zij ontzeggen ons de mogelijkheid te appelleren aan een gedeelde werkelijkheid. Zo kreeg Latour nooit de zin over zijn lippen dat klimaatopwarming gewoon een ‘objectief feit’ is, merkt Boudry op.

Dat is een klassiek bezwaar tegen postmodernisme, dat teruggaat op de science wars van de jaren ’90. Mijn vraag is wel waar al die relativisten intussen gebleven zijn. Progressieven hebben heden ten dage geen enkele moeite met woorden als ‘facts’, ‘science’ en ‘justice’. Boudry is dat niet ontgaan, en zijn uitleg is dat mensen selectief dingen deconstrueren waar ze toch al van af wilden; relativisme over klimaatwetenschap hoeven we van linkse academici (met uitzondering dus van Latour) in de regel niet te verwachten.

Relativeert dat niet het gevaar van relativisme als geheel? Niet volgens Boudry; reactionaire krachten hebben de kunst van het twijfel-zaaien namelijk met succes afgekeken, zodat we rechtse klimaatscepsis indirect te danken hebben aan linkse sociologen. Als dat klopt is het een aardig staaltje historische ironie, maar blijft onduidelijk wat progressieven nu nog te verwijten valt. De daders die Boudry aanklaagt zijn in elk geval reeds overleden.

Onderschat het liberalisme niet

In NRC van afgelopen zaterdag stelt Shivant Jhagroe de schaduwzijde van het westerse liberalisme aan de kaak. Hij trekt daarbij een lange historische lijn. Zoals VVD’ers nu een biertje drinken op het terras terwijl elders ecosystemen worden vernietigd, dronken witte mannen in de tijd van de Verlichting koffie en thee die door dwangarbeiders werden geoogst.

Die kritiek – comfort en ‘vrijheid’ hier, leed elders – resoneert met de aanklachten van Verlichtingsdenkers zelf. Voltaire voert in Candide (1759)een Surinaamse plantagewerker op, die vertelt hoe een Hollandse slavendrijver zijn hand en been heeft afgehakt. “Het is de prijs die wij betalen voor de suiker die u in Europa eet.”

The System, the Rebels, and the People

(For 3 Quarks Daily)

I have been re-reading Paradise Lost, prompted by the battle between Immortals and demons in the movie Ne Zha 2. The film, if you have not seen it, depicts a ruling party turned into a vehicle for the personal ambitions of its leader. If you ask me, that is; consider yourself warned that I am rather strongly disposed these days to connect everything to contemporary politics.

Whether the poem explores forms of resistance after the battle to depose a ruthless dictator has been lost, or whether Satan is an opportunistic agitator, campaigning on draining the swamp but in fact only out to be worshipped himself – or both – modern analogies easily suggest themselves. William Empson compared Milton’s God to Joseph Stalin.[1] If I don’t name names, it is out of respect both for you the reader and for the heroes in Milton’s poem, which are more eloquent, less petty, and show more depth than their counterparts in present-day anti-democratic politics.

What Game Are We Playing?

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

I know teachers who imagine the tune is what they have on repeat in hell, but I myself am strongly pro-Kahoot. If (like me) you were born too early to have your own school experience center around a large screen, and (unlike me) you have one of those boring non-teaching jobs, a brief explanation is in order. Kahoot is an app that lets you ask multiple-choice questions on your class screen, and have students answer them on their own devices to earn points. With its bright colors and some other bells and whistles, it hits a sweet spot in the teenage brain that magically makes it care about getting mathematical terminology right. It’s the best thing.

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‘Don’t worry; somebody will stop me’

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

In 2023, I wrote what I reckon was a calm, analytical column for this website, about how my country had talked itself into giving the xenophobic, far-right ‘Freedom Party’ a strong plurality of seats in Parliament. An equally level-headed update seems warranted, as its leader Geert Wilders has since maneuvered his party into leading the Netherlands’ coalition government, which we have now been able to observe in action for six months.

I spent a healthy share of that time, possibly even more than that, yelling at the daily news. Here we see the beauty of the written word, however: the process of creating a text provides an excellent opportunity to take a step back and find a broader, more generous perspective on things. Thanks to the alchemy of prose composition, my temperament and my primary emotional responses do not need to prevent me from giving you, the deserving reader, a balanced and distilled account of the state of politics in the Netherlands, and of the nihilistic bastards that currently dominate it. Indeed, I would hate for this to be just a longer version of the rants I post on unfashionable social media platforms, for the benefit of fewer and fewer friends. Be assured, then, that sublimated ideas and broadly applicable wisdom lie ahead, and not just expressions of rage and frustration. I am almost certain of it.

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Otto Neurath and the things that unite us

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

In 1919, Otto Neurath was on trial for high treason, for his role in the short-lived Munich soviet republic. One of the witnesses for the defense was the famous scholar Max Weber.

Neurath was a capable scholar with good ideas, a newspaper recorded Weber as saying; but recently he seemed to have somewhat lost his grip on reality. That judgment would refer to Neurath’s economic thinking. In particular, his belief that a planned economy was viable, to an extent that the entire money economy could be abolished. This conviction, the seeds of which were planted by the economic thought of his father, and which was strengthened by his study and experience of war economies during the 1910s, would in fact be lifelong; Neurath would always be thinking of concrete ways to make co-operation and planning a reality.

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Becoming Liberal

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

Even after discussing Daniel Chandler’s inspiring application of John Rawls in my previous column, I remain on the lookout for a book that delivers a sweeping, original and sound vision for the future of the liberal and democratic world, saves it from its social problems through policy proposals that are simultaneously transformative and unthreatening (enough for all interested parties to accept and implement them immediately), and provides a sure and painless path to undercutting popular support for illiberal and authoritarian politics. Ideally, it also solves climate change and ends factory farming, and does not require me personally to change too much. Disappointingly, Alexandre Lefebvre’s new book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, only achieves some of these things.

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Liberalism for the future

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

In 2015, political scientist Larry Diamond warned against defeatism in the face of what he called the democratic recession. “It is vital that democrats in the established democracies not lose faith. […] If the current modest recession of democracy spirals into a depression, it will be because those of us in the established democracies were our own worst enemies.” A few years later, as the world’s most powerful democracy had decided to play out that darker option, Diamond wrote with more urgency about how to protect liberal democracy worldwide. In Ill winds, he emphasized the need to provide not only a rejection of alternatives, but a positive vision. “Democracy must demonstrate that it is a just and fair political system that advances humane values and the common good.”

Daniel Chandler places his book Free and Equal (2023) in this same context: for fifteen years in a row, more countries have experienced democratic backsliding than improvement, and the threatened state of democracy worldwide makes it “tempting to go on the defensive”. However, just playing defense is not enough; an ambitious vision for improvement is necessary. “In a moment that calls for creativity and boldness, all too often we find timidity or, worse, scepticism and cynicism”. Chandler believes he has found a recipe for combining the values of liberalism with the spirit of progress and reform.

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The Proper N

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

“You are aware”, I ask a pair of students celebrating their fourth successful die roll in a row, “that you are ruining this experiment?” They laugh obligingly. In four pairs, a small group of students is spending a few minutes rolling dice, awarding themselves 12 euros for every 5 or 6 and ‘losing’ 3 euros for every other outcome. I’m trying to set them up for the concept of expected value, first reminding them how to calculate their average winnings over several rounds, and then moving on to show how we calculate the expected average without recourse to experiment. It would be nice, of course, for their experimental average to be recognizably close to this number. Not least since this particular lesson is being observed by the Berlin board of education, and the outcome will determine whether or not I can get a teaching permit as a foreigner.

In case they are reading this, I would like to emphasize that I plan all my lessons with care and forethought; but for this particular one, you can bet I prepared especially well and left nothing to chance. Except for the part I left to chance, that is. To be precise: I had neglected to calculate in advance how likely it was for the experimental average over roughly 80 games to diverge from the expected value by a potentially confusing amount. I relied on my intuition, which informed me that 80 is a large number.

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