Tag: history

Connecting to the Land: finding the stories

A while back I shared that I felt my Country was reclaiming me. One part of that process was reconnecting with Nature. Feeling in touch with and being welcomed by my re-discovered natural environment gave me a feeling of coming home I hadn’t expect to find.

But there is more to this process. There are the stories hidden in the land I am reconnecting to.

For decades I lived in Australia. One of the comments my European relatives and friends frequently made when visiting was that Australia has great natural beauty, but is lacking in history. They see it as a young country, lacking in monumental buildings, historic towns and the occasional ruins of past civilisations. On the surface they are not completely wrong. Compared to other continents, the evidence of long-term human occupation of the land is far less visible. The actual human history of Australia, however, runs much deeper than most of the monuments and archeological sites visited by tourists elsewhere in the world.

How deep that history goes only becomes apparent when one discovers the oral history, art, music and dances performed by Australia’s indigenous people. They tell stories that are 10s of thousands of years old. Their art contains knowledge and insights that has been passed on for hundreds of generations. And, interestingly, instead of being connected to man-made monuments, most of those ancient stories, songs and artworks are intimately connected with the land itself. Every natural feature has its story, it seems, and is, through that story, connected to many other places in the continent. To an indigenous Australian, walking through Country is never just a walk from place A to B; it is simultaneously a walk through the history of their people, a revisiting of landmarks they see as their ancestors, and a re-activation of all the knowledge and learning of the generations that went before. Every step they take is securely anchoring them to Country, telling them in no uncertain terms that this is where they belong.

I came back to The Netherlands thinking I would find plenty of visible history but little of the non-tangible story kind. As it turns out, I was wrong.

Sure, the visible stuff is easier to find. It is in all the travel guides, after all. But the land here is full of stories, too, if you know where to look for them. They are just buried much deeper than in Australia, where there are still people actively keeping them alive.

There is a little lake near our house. It is man-made. Not because people wanted to have a lake, but because they were digging out the peat they needed for fuel to warm their houses. The landscape is dotted with small lakes and waterways, speaking of people burning the soil because there weren’t trees enough around to harvest for firewood.

Some of the lakes are almost perfectly circular, which gives them an even more artificial appearance. But those lakes, called pingos, are actually a natural phenomena, caused by ice and meltwater during the ice ages that covered all of the land here. Put together, the land speaks of the slow forces of erosion and the much faster forces of surface mining, both creating and recreating a very unique landscape.

There are some ancient monuments here, too, from the time people here were hunter-gatherers. Huge boulders are grouped together and capped with even bigger ones to form hill-graves we call “Hunebedden” (dolmen), literally meaning “beds of giants”. Built long before the later farmers of this land arrived from the East, they were incorporated into local legends about the giants that roamed the land in ancient days. Some of those legends became fairy tales, others got incorporated into local lore, and some made it into religious tales of saints and demons battling it out amongst the giant stones.

It is till possible, with some research and a lot of patience, to piece together a tapestry of half-forgotten, half-misremembered storylines that were once the way our ancestors here gave meaning to the landscape around them. Doing so, I find, is another way in which this Country is reclaiming me and weaving me into its very being. The more I stumble across the ancient stories, the easier it becomes for me to not feel strange, separate and alienated but part of everything around me. The more I retell and reconstruct those old narratives while exploring the land, the more I feel I am becoming a participant and caretaker, not just a curious tourist passing through.

On Petulant Kings and Childish Tyrants

I often wonder about humanity’s tendency to choose and follow petulant kings and childish tyrants; not just allowing them to rise to power, but enabling them to commit abhorrent crimes against humanity and destroying whole civilisations, not seldom including their own.

You would think that a tendency to choose bad rulers would, over time, be bred out of our genes. What evolutionary benefit can there be in this penchant for leaders that do more damage than good? Yet, we fall for the same types again and again.

Why? What mechanisms are at play here that not only let those types rise to power but help them grow their power to ridiculous heights, even when their childish and destructive behaviour is clearly visible to any discerning adult?

Since this pattern is so common across civilisations, I suspect it must be encoded deep in our DNA. I can only speculate – since we don’t really know how our DNA encodes our behaviours – that petulant kings and childish tyrants rely on the misapplication of otherwise healthy and necessary instincts.

Humans have deeply ingrained parental instincts, for example, that lead us to want to protect and care for helpless infants. Maybe infantile tyrants trigger that same instinct, in an exaggerated and dysfunctional way, like oversized and unnaturally brightly coloured eggs trigger a fanatical breeding impulse in birds. This could make us want to protect and even cherish an overtly childish and irresponsible leader.

Another pattern I suspect is our instinctual longing for the superhuman parent we lost when we grew up and saw our parents exposed for the frail and flawed human beings we never thought they were. There is something deeply comforting in the belief that our parents are all-knowing and all-powerful. It allows us to be the innocent child, powerless but safe under the protection of beings far superior to us.

Maybe we all still long to be that child, bowing in awe to the will of our superhuman parent. That could explain why we are drawn to individuals that openly and defiantly break laws, rules and social conventions. It would make irresponsible, boastful and arrogant leaders strangely attractive to the inner child we lost in early childhood. It would also explain why kings and tyrants through the ages have always been portrayed as larger-than-life, close to God or Gods, and possessed with magical and mystical powers.

David Graeber and Marshall Shalins in their book “On Kings” argue that we don’t want our kings and rulers to obey the law but to stand above it. A king that is constitutionally limited lacks that superhuman, even supernatural appeal that a ruler that answers to nothing and no-one seems to have. If I see what tyrants historically got away with, and often still do, it could be because of their followers’ need for someone who is truly above all human laws. That could be an echo of what the powerless child saw in its parents before they fell from grace.

The paradoxical combination those two instincts – the drive to protect and cherish our children, triggered by adults that behave like over-sized toddlers and the need for superhuman parent figures, triggered by ruthless individuals openly flaunting laws and conventions – can explain the fanatical devotion and protectiveness paired with unquestioning obedience you so often see destructive tyrants and misbehaving kings surrounded with.

If my suspicions are true, humanity is constantly at risk of being tricked by some of our deepest instincts into admiring, enabling and obeying deeply flawed, psychopathic and destructive individuals. Not because we consciously choose to do so, but because our instincts drive us to it.

So, what can we do about it? Are we doomed to fall for infantile bosses and ridiculous rulers forever?

I certainly hope not. I believe we are more than our instincts. I believe we can train our self-awareness and self-control to recognise and self-correct when our instincts trick us and are being used against us. I also believe we can shape our culture – the shared assumptions, behaviours and stories that our society lays on top of our instincts – to protect us from such abuse and trickery. It does mean we cannot let our culture be dictated by those who want to take advantage of such manipulation. We must, collective, choose to steel ourselves against the abuse of our vulnerable instincts, so we are less inclined to run blindly after rulers that lead us astray.

What’s the Deal? – On Contracts and Agreements

For a few weeks, we had a rental car on loan while waiting for our lease car to be repaired. The rental car was organised by the dealer, not, as I expected, by the lease company.

Several people reacted to my story about the lease company’s reluctance to keep us mobile after our car malfunctioned. A common assumption was that a lease contract is a DAAS (Driving as a Service) agreement. The car shouldn’t matter, what should matter is that we would stay mobile.

To be honest, that was also my assumption when I signed the lease contract. Or, to be more precise, when I signed the lease agreement, which was a shortened version of the full contract. The full contract was available on the lease company’s website. I remember looking through it at the time but not taking the time to read the whole thing, as it was many pages long and written in the kind of small-print legalise that makes your eyes water and your head hurt.

As it turns out, my understanding of the agreement I made with the lease company doesn’t quite match their understanding of what we agreed on. The basic contract is little more than a financing deal, with some additional services thrown in around maintenance, insurance and a financially attractive way to switch to a new car after a few years. Whereas the lease company’s website and informal communications are full of promises around ‘driving without the hassle’, ‘carefree driving’, ‘removing the burden of ownership’, etc. the actual contract has been carefully constructed to outline quite a few conditions, exceptions and caveats that undermine those promises. Had I taken the time and trouble to study the full contract before signing the agreement, I might have negotiated a different agreement, or go to a different lease company.

What we are left with is a mismatch between my understanding of the deal and that of the lease company. Whose fault is that? Mine or theirs?

Legally speaking the fault is mine, of course. Though not included in the paperwork the lease company sent me, the full contract with all its clauses and attachments was available online. I should have studied that before signing the agreement.

Ethically speaking the answer may not be that straightforward. The lease company didn’t exactly advertise the fact there was a long and complicated contract behind the simple agreement form I signed, for instance. It was only hinted at in a footnote, printed in super-fine print, at the bottom of the (mostly empty) page. Obscured by their logo and some irrelevant company information. Almost as if they tried to keep me from reading it. And the contract itself required close-reading and a higher-education level understanding of English to fully make sense of what it stipulated. Some very smart lawyers must have heaps of fun finding creative ways of denying essential services while seemingly making them available.

I believe that a customer-focused company, one that really cares about the well-being and satisfaction of their customers should feel responsible for making sure their customers understand the deal they are signing up for, especially when that deal is complex and prone to assumptions and misunderstandings. In such cases moral considerations should inform their duty of care, not legal arguments fuel their tendency to not care a damn.