old Europe is dead

A hollow European culture is writ large in Amsterdam

Alain de Botton's homilies in the Rijksmuseum are proof positive that old Europe is dead

Nick Cohen

You have to pay attention at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum to realise it is inviting the public to witness the death of old Europe. The Dutch don't know it. They have spent €370m refurbishing its 19th-century halls and the museum now shines as one of the world's great cultural centres. Nor do funereal sentiments greet the millions of visitors. They are welcomed instead by two over-confident English philosophers, who have splattered their thoughts over gallery walls like middle-brow graffiti artists.

It is as if the culture ministry of a totalitarian state has taken control. The curators allow Alain de Botton and his collaborator, John Armstrong, to boom that art is a therapy that can make you a better person from 150 signs, designed as super-size Post-it notes. Slogans and instructions blare at the visitor in every room. You are told how art can heal and ennoble, if and only if, you look at it in the right way.

The critics have been unrelenting. In the Dutch press, Bianca Stigter put it best when she said the Rijksmuseum was presenting art as cod liver oil: the nastier it tasted the more good it did you. Her colleague Wieteke van Zeil made the essential argument that the job of a gallery was to give people the space to think, not to tell them what to think.

The British press has been no less condemnatory. I am not disagreeing. The moral exhortations and cautionary tales the Rijksmuseum offers are historically ignorant, visually illiterate and brazenly propagandistic.

From Michael Gove to radical feminists, the old dream persists that if only you censor everything from the history curriculum to classical texts, you can produce a new model citizenry.

The late Robert Hughes had the best reply. He gave the purveyors of moral uplift of his day the story of Sigismondo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini. Malatesta was without doubt a prince of exquisite taste, who patronised the finest artists of Renaissance Italy.

Art did not exalt him, however, for he was so famed for his cruelty that the Catholic church made him for a time the only man apart from Judas Iscariot officially listed as being in hell – "a distinction he earned by trussing up a papal emissary, the 15-year-old bishop of Fano, and publicly sodomising him before his applauding army in the main square of Rimini".

Yet despite the justifiable criticism, the Rijksmuseum still performs a public service. It is presenting a recognisable moral philosophy: the philosophy of the Protestant middle class, which for all its setbacks and changes, has dominated northern Europe for centuries. Here is its sermon, condensed for reasons of space – and because I find a little of Mr de Botton goes a long way.

There is nothing wrong with being rich, as long as you are just, wise and generous. You should value your friends – this next to Rembrandt'sThe Night Watch – because they bring out the best in you. Don't worry if you are not beautiful or distinguished – this appears by Rembrandt'sThe Jewish Bride, a portrait of a not particularly good-looking couple holding each other with great tenderness. If only one person loves you, you can ignore the rest of the world.

A 17th-century still life of a succulent lobster surrounded by fruit and pies prompts the thought that modern consumerism has dulled our senses because it gives us luxuries on the cheap. We no longer enjoy a feast as our 17th-century ancestors did, because our greed is too easily satisfied and we take high living for granted. A picture of the worthy men who sat on the board of Amsterdam's women's prison in the 1690s brings forth the lesson that we should not be cynics. If you assume the worst of people in power, you will get the worst people taking power.

Warnings are dotted through the museum like slow down signs near a busy junction. You should not give way to rage and despair whatever troubles life brings. You should not let familiarity with your partner breed contempt and be grateful that he or she loves you. You should not celebrate artists or rock stars but demand portraits of "accountants, tram drivers and IT managers" in order to recognise the importance of their efforts to keep society functioning.

Think what you will about the quality of the writing, but there is much to be said for taking pleasure in what you have and who you are with. Better to be modest and realistic than to lust after unattainable dreams. In Britain, we assume that this old morality still holds; that north Europeans are prudent and thrifty. We think of them valuing education and manufacturing, unlike we Americanised Brits with our funny-money men, celebrity obsessions and desire to have it all and have it now.

We haven't noticed the death of that Europe. The Dutch have borrowed to an extent that would make the most greed-driven Anglo-Saxon shudder. They have more debt than the Portuguese, the Irish or Greeks and much more than the British. Only the Danes from supposedly sensible Scandinavia can compete with their average household debt of 240% of disposable income.

The property market they threw money at has been stagnant since 2008 and no one knows what to do. Once the solid men and women who staff the Dutch state might have been able to help their fellow citizens. Holland's national debt is modest and it has a current account surplus. But it has joined the euro and has given away control of the economic tools that might help it in a crisis. There's little a supposedly democratic society can do to take charge of its destiny.

As the old order fails, new forces replace it. Optimists say that Geert Wilders will perform poorly when Holland's European election results come in today. He went too far even for the Dutch far right when he cried to a crowd in the Hague : "In this city and in the Netherlands, do you want more or fewer Moroccans?"

"Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!" the mob roared.

"Then we'll arrange that."

But however he fares, elsewhere in Europe the far right and far left are prospering because, in the name of federalism, the descendants of those moderate and cautious burghers whose stern portraits hang in the Rijksmuseum went wild and let their countries take part in a disastrous economic experiment.

I don't know what art will come from the new Europe, but I am certain that pat philosophers will not be able to tell comforting children's stories about it.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/24/death-of-culture-writ-large-at-rijksmuseum