JTH is absolutely correct on this - I lived in Holland for 5 years. the country can sometimes be a bit of a mysterious conundrum in that they have a hugely liberal society soft drugs are permiited, young teenage sex, prosititution is legal etc and on the other hand you have a strong conservative society with the strict Calvanism where everything shuts down on Sunday, only book read is the Bible etc, extreme financial prudence etc - you see this very evident in the countryside even today.
A Dutch friend brilliantly explained this to me as "we are a nation of 16 million floating islands that occasionally bump into each other. If our islands are not touching, then we are not bothered what goes on." So a different version of our "out of sight, out of mind."