We bottled 8 gallons of mead last night, which seems more relevant to our times than honey for tea. The bees must wonder if it was all worth their trouble. One bee gathers enough nectar for 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey over their whole life, flying 500 miles, visiting tens of thousands of flowers. This is about the output (and the itinerary!) of the average writer, professor or pastor. They contribute to the strength of the human hive in tiny increments that are even less predictable than the bee which probably didn’t intend the mead. The human system lives on ideas that prove to be good and bad over time as they help or hurt our need to adapt to reality It is hard to tell with ideas.
“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.” The internet attributes this to Ilya Prigogine, but it is hard to tell where even the best ideas originate. Of course, every writer thinks their 1/12th teaspoon of typing is that crucial small island of coherence as soon as it is typed. It actually takes a couple decades for a thought to stick and then another dozen for the speck of coherence to join many others to make even a small island.
One of my own idea-specks was the about strengths of congregations in Deeply Woven Roots written at The Carter Center in 1997. It was useful enough to be used in many seminaries. Twenty one years later they found their way into the National Academies of Sciences workshop on how those strengths contribute to community health. We’ll see if that small island of coherence survives the cultural storm tides now raging.
A slight plurality of citizens turned the ideas in their gut to elect someone certain to knock our systems even further from equilibrium than they ever. Some of them like Bannon think they are the new island but I think not. We’ll see. The week after the voting I happened to be on an actual island built on granite and ideas now called New York. TC and I were tending to the grandsons as their mom gave birth to yet another play this one about the ultimate New Yorker, Billie Jean King. Lauren rarely passes an unscripted morning, so we trundled through the streets of the Lower East Side to the Tenement Museum—a living archive of the many waves of immigrants that became us.
I picked up a copy of The Island at the Center of the World, by Russell Shorto, which flipped my history-major mind upside down. He dives deeply into the revolutionary scholarship of Charles Gehring who translated thousands of pages of 17th century Dutch records of the New Netherlands to find us—the Americans. His main point buried under two centuries of self-serving English mythology is that New York is New Amsterdam and our core culture and politics Dutch, not English. The English colonial built their “city on a hill” filled with the spit and venom of Christian nationalism. The Dutch had a different idea: us.
The Dutch didn’t mean to plant us; but they put a trading depot on the tip of Manathans (Manhattan) in 1608. The company director launched a stupid war against the Native Americans in spite of the counsel of the settlers which set off a battle of ideas still underway. One of the settlers, Adriaen Van der Donk, was the the sole lawyer who wrote their petition to the West Indian Company and eventually carried the battle right to Amsterdam. He was deeply influenced by the new Dutch idea of “natural law”—which overruled royalty and the rich. They also adopted the odd Dutch idea of religious and ethnic tolerance—which was the absolute opposite of the English and pretty much everyone else in the world, at the time. “Something was happening that was quite unlike the unfolding of society at the two English colonies to their north, where rigid Puritans…and even more rigid Pilgrims maintained, in their wide-brimmed piety, monocultures in the wild.” (p61). Bannon and his tribe know the narrow-minded city they mean to build on our hill—Plymouth, not Amsterdam. It was bad history and worse two centuries later.
This Dutch embrace of human complexity is the foundation of what became the United States. That idea has always seemed vulnerable to fear baiting. It is the taproot that feeds our radically adaptive capacity to find the next new way which we need urgently. The test of our adaptive ideas is not on TV but in the real reality of our ecosystem, the slowing of the Gulf Stream and a 3 foot rise of New York Harbor. We need the best of intelligence, spirit, gut and grit, not just the fragile brittle ideas of Christian nationalism. It’s really Puritan nationalism which failed, as all brittle ideas do. The Dutch one thrived and we will, too.
A good idea doesn’t stay on an island. The revolutionary Dutch ended up infecting the English, Welsh, Scots and South Africans just as they did New Amsterdam. There are a few pretend kings around today tolerated for amusement like poodles. The rich who admire their pomp have missed the tale of time confusing work and show.
When TC and I are in Glasgow or Cape Town people wonder what happened to the Americans. They ask “when did you become mean and narrow?” I didn’t know what to say, as I barely recognized my people.
Adriaen Van der Donk knew that there is no such thing as an American, Dutch, Scot, or African. We live on the same tiny blue island of coherence built on ideas that proved worthy of their times and may yet again.
