How much diabolical power does the artist have?

What would the world look like if art had had the power that book burners and iconoclasts have attributed to it over the centuries? In the fascinating documentary series 'Our Man with the Taliban', Thomas Erdbrink takes a rather perilous journey through an Afghanistan that has been abandoned by the 'civilised' West. We see a world where book burners and iconoclasts have won.

We also see a society where men are in charge. They have created for themselves a world where the law of the jungle prevails. Traffic has become a libertarian wet dream: no more rules, just go where there is space and make sure you have the biggest one. Rules are gone, so are fines. Allah decides whether you will survive this evening rush hour, or not.

Unique Taliban is not

Erdbrink talks to a Taliban jurist who explains how logical it is that women are never allowed to leave the house again, he talks to women who have to fear for their lives because they are educated. Next week's staggering series is about the ban on music because, as the Taliban maintains with its strict interpretation of the Koran: music is the devil's vehicle. Allowing music means weakening society.

The Taliban is not unique. In certain - thankfully small - Reformed circles in the Netherlands, music is also virtually banned, unless made to the greater glory of Our Lord. Again, in certain Christian and Islamic circles, women are not entitled to paid work or a (paid) position in public life. Abstract art, pop, jazz and atonal music, non-religious books are banned there.

To describe is not to seduce

At the beginning of this century, Peer Wittenbols' play Atalanta was banned and shredded in the Biblebelt because it spoke frivolously about god. And now young poet Pim Lammers has received death threats for describing how a football coach manages to abuse the vulnerability of a teenage boy in a 2015 short story. I have read it, it is a perfect description of the mechanism of adult boundary crossing.

Reading it again makes you understand how carefully you have to pay attention, because the evil of the ruler is stealthy. Through a beautiful play with imagination and recognition, Pim Lammers manages to make very palpable what goes on in so many places. The breeding ground for abuse is not in this story, but in the manipulation he exposes.

That is the power of a story. But the fanatics and even politicians who have not read it attack it because the subject is taboo for them anyway.

Injecting secretly

All this kind of hatred of paint on paper, sound waves in the air and letters in a magazine stems from the haters' apparent fear of images and imagination. In their minds, there is a one-to-one link between describing something and glorifying something, or - even stronger - secretly injecting it.

I use that last word deliberately, because the death threats to the imagination now come from the same toxic combination of religious fanaticism and conspiracy thinking that the pandemic brought to a boiling point. And surely that is where the ground in our country lies very clearly in the strict faith with which much of \nation has grown up.

Almighty Devil

That belief holds that man is inclined to evil and can only be saved from total destruction by God or Allah. And anything that those gods reject, therein lies the Devil, also known as the WEF, Soros or any other anti-Semitic thing you can think of.

In religion, that devil has the role of the bad guy who is actually a bit stronger than the God, even if the latter is called supreme or omnipotent.

The Netherlands is rapidly secularising, and that applies to all major religious movements. That is a good thing, but in the process, the old religious dogma is gaining traction among fanatical supporters. They are driven not by hate, but by mortal fear, and are therefore willing to do anything.

Low self-esteem

Now that they have once again opened the attack on the imagination, this is not something one can be too smiley about. We can only hope for an understanding that human beings are not naturally inclined to evil. That will be difficult because it is the power base of religious leaders, who use physical and mental violence to abuse the low self-esteem, fear and vulnerability of their subjects, exactly as described in that story by Pim Lammers.

The fact that art still exists that can bring you to deep insights about the most unthinkable topics in an unexpected way should be enough to make people realise that human beings are not inclined towards good or evil, but towards survival, preferably with each other.