Questão 741501

Text 5 to answer questions 35 and 36.

...

1------“Were not those behavior patterns and collective selfimages“Were not those behavior patterns and collective selfimages

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 selfrecognition.

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.

Considering the ideas and the vocabulary presented in the text, mark the following items as right (C) or wrong (E).

The text argues that the artistic expressions associated with Dutch culture would have been a transient phenomenon had it not been embraced by the non-elite Dutch people.