The feeling that Dutch of all social conditions were part of a common group, whose experience was expressed by a…

Text 5 to answer questions 35 and 36.

1 “Were not those behavior patterns and collective self-
images really the cultural property of an elite, and a small
one at that, superimposed on the majority of the population?
4 [...].

In the sense that the collective ways of seeing
themselves, and the world beyond, that I have classified as
7 habitually Dutch were not a spontaneous generation but a
conscious invention, and that the inventors belonged by and
large to the educated, propertied nation, the objection is
10 valid. Van Beverwijk, Cats, Grotius and many of the other
projectors of the national imagination were not, by any
account, men of the common herd. And it was they who
13 gave shape, perspective and meaning to the rush of
historical experience with which the Netherlanders were
beset. They were, in a sense, the inventors of patriotic
16 inevitability: the notion that a peculiar Dutch destiny lay
immanent, locked in the crust of European history, waiting
for some preordained eruption to blow it free of its ancient
19 and unnatural containment. This was potent mythology, to
be sure. But it would have been ephemeral, had it been just
the self-serving fancy of a few humanist intellectuals and
22 grandees. Its robustness, in fact, lay in the spell of self-
recognition. To be free and to deserve godly succor, the
Dutch were told, they had merely to be themselves and to
25 remain true to themselves.

To a remarkable degree, for its time, Dutch culture
was the property of all sorts and social conditions. An
28 Avercamp winterscape with gentlefolk skating alongside
rustics and sober burghers is an idyll, no doubt, but not so
very far from the truth. It was certainly more than a
31 conspiracy of false consciousness, a series of social fables
devised to legitimate a monopoly of social power by the
possessing classes. Of course, it didn’t do them any harm,
34 either. But in the acid test of allegiance and sacrifice in a
murderous and terrifying war, in the burden of heavy taxes,
and in the perennial alarms and anxieties that hung around
37 Dutch diplomacy, their belief in themselves as a common
38 tribe held firm.”

SCHAMA, Simon. The embarrassment of riches: An interpretation of Dutch culture in the golden age. London: Fontana, 1988, p. 566-567, with adaptations.