A Path Between Hope and Cynicism: Meaningful Illusion

Accompanying letter to the exhibition Meaningful Illusion in the Stevenskerk, the start and end point of the Walk of Wisdom

You sometimes hear otherwise, but I had a positive experience of Catholicism until I was about eighteen years old. For me, it was a great system in which I developed certain values and norms. As teenagers, we discussed the world’s problems with the priest during Lent. Lots of discussion and often a glass of beer afterwards. We believed that the world should become a better and fairer place, that much was certain. Despite alarming reports – the report of the Club of Rome had been published in the meantime – we were convinced that the world could be engineered. Modernism, with its belief in progress as the meaning of existence, endured.

Gradually, I became more politically aware. I outgrew the church, Catholicism. With Christian dogmas and the supernatural, I could no longer move forward, it was too vague. The spell was (unfortunately?) broken. Liberalism didn’t seem to me to be everything either, because it led to a merciless capitalism. Yes, in those days it was black or white. The greys came – literally and figuratively – later.

No, then the ideology of socialists and communists, that would bring world peace. While Christianity continued to focus on the Bible with its centuries-old rituals, the leftists used Marxism and the arts to uplift the people. But whether you spoke of ‘the Kingdom of God’ or the ‘kingdom of man on earth’, an optimistic worldview prevailed. You had to be a great pessimist not to believe in the arts, in political actions, in development aid, in short, in progress.

I liked that kind of belief. It gave direction to my actions. As a social studies teacher, I did everything I could to make the students politically aware. Drawing attention to the evil of the military-industrial complex, I joined the club ‘Is it War Here’ during the Four Days Marches to protest against the presence of the many soldiers and of course I went to Amsterdam and The Hague to protest against the cruise missiles. My banner read: ‘What we want to defend, we destroy with weapons’ (logical text for a young father who had just bought a house).

At the end of the 80s, that optimistic attitude to life gradually came to an end. More than ever, the horrors of the 20th century took hold of me through literature and film. How can we talk about technological and scientific progress when it creates a society that slaughters millions of people in an industrial way? The arts were also incapable of forming a better person. Camp executioners turned out to enjoy classical music after their work. Not only under Hitler but also under Stalin and Mao, millions of innocent people were crushed by the system. And the killing continued: Pol Pot, Vietnam, Hutus and Tutsis, Srebrenica, Afghanistan et cetera.

Those horrors fortunately stayed away from my personal life, but after the breakdown of my marriage, something broke. I found those grand narratives claiming that science, technology, Christianity, Marxism, liberalism, or any other “ism” could bring heaven to earth absolutely unbelievable. The human incapacity was just too great to make a decent world out of it. What haughtiness to think that we, as human beings, can know the world and bend it to our will.

My feelings were very much in line with what is called postmodernism. In it, the knowability of the world is called into question. Everything is doubted: ideologies, the arts, religions, the other and, above all, the truth. Everything is relative. I felt good about this postmodernism. I trusted the seekers and distrusted the knowers. I felt at home with this new zeitgeist. But a problem arose in the practical implementation. I had two energetic sons, and you don’t make strong people out of them if you raise them with insecurity, cynicism, and the idea that an indifferent universe dominates. Moreover, such an attitude was not really stimulating in the development of Intermedi-Art Art (my livelihood).

I decided, more or less, to turn my back on postmodernism. I tinkered with a suitable ‘philosophy’ that was built up with everything I had in terms of genes, knowledge and life experience. That became my ‘meaningful illusion’. Don’t think too much, just keep going and try to make something of life and be meaningful to others. Realize that human cognition is small and human inability is great. Continuing to investigate, doubting, trying and trusting that I and mine will be okay in the end. That’s all there is to it as far as I’m concerned.

During the development of Seasons of Life: A Contemporary Book of Hours, I met Joke Hermsen, who told me about metamodernism. It was remarkable that I had never heard of the founders of that philosophy: Thimotheus Vermeulen (Radboud University Nijmegen) and Robin van den Akker (Erasmus University Rotterdam). Their ideas appeal to me very much and they express the zeitgeist very well. See e.g.: https://www.groene.nl/artikel/een-verlangen-naar- sincerity.

For me, the arts should be just as helpful to its audience in building their own meaningful illusion. The various art forms can do this by providing aesthetic pleasure, asking questions, giving insight, offering comfort, evoking anger, joy or sadness, shocking… But in the end, air must remain, the arts must provide energy with which a person can move forward. I have done my best to contribute to that with this exhibition.

Theo van Stiphout, publisher of Seasons of Life: a contemporary book of hours and pilgrims

The exhibition Meaningful Illusion is freely accessible from 17 July to 21 August. Stevenskerk, Stevenskerkhof 62-64.

Sources:

First image: Last Post II, Sven Hoekstra

Second image: I have no identity, Jan Tregot

Third image: Journey through the Night, Annemarie Petri

Thanks to Joke Hermsen who put me on the trail of Timotheus Vermeulen (Radboud University Nijmegen) who wrote about metamodernism together with Robin van den Akker. See, for example,
https://www.groene.nl/artikel/een-verlangen-naar-oprechtheid