Christopher Hitchens In Memoriam

The death yesterday of Christopher Hitchens is indeed, as he himself noted in the remarkable Jeremy Paxman interview a year ago, a terrible waste. And so is, as he himself again added, the premature death of any individual who still has a lot to offer to his friends or maybe the world at large as well. The way he faced death has been remarkable. He was calm and humble before it, but in a supremely heroic way, not deigning to give an inch with respect to his atheism. I believe that this is a lasting and valuable legacy, whatever one may have to say about the substance of his various convictions and stances. There was an exemplary quality about him as a human being, especially towards the end. He may have declared in that interview that he does not particularly fancy the word "mellow". But I do think that he had mellowed indeed, primarily in relation to himself, without of course repudiating any of his polemical positions or his doggedly adversarial method.

Hitchens was immensely talented in the oratorical arts and his various turns of phrase on diverse matters are legendary (and mostly apt). A flood of words came out of him, most of the time in a brilliant, albeit somewhat overloaded, order. He had mastered perfectly the technique of eristics, out some kind of instinct it seems to me, although this did not preclude his attachment to principle. As a controversialist he dazzled, although it has to be said that he did it in the cocksure way that is the stamp of Oxford and which can be very annoying sometimes. For the problem with Hitchens was that he was absolutely convinced that he was right in all the positions that he took over the years -despite the fact that those of recent vintage simply butt heads with many of the earlier ones.

He was fundamentally misguided in his support of the invasion of Iraq. This was a miserable failure of judgment which he did not at all hedge or revise until the end. It constitutes a blemish that will now unfortunately never be erased. He subsequent friendship with unsavory neo-con characters such as Wolfowitz signified a further corruption of his moral mettle, upon which he himself placed so much value. His notion that the appalling civilian casualties subsequent to the invasion -casualties due to the arrogant sloppiness of that imperialist venture- do not go on the account of Bush and Co. is simply ludicrous. And so is his denial that the emergence and widening influence of Al Qaida in Iraq is again a result of American military and political brutishness-cum-incompetence in the matter. If one adds the mockery of international legality by the Bushies (do you remember Colin Powell lying through his teeth before the security council in February, 2003?), as well as the immense increase in the Iranian Ayatollahs' influence over Iraqi affairs, one can gage the blindness of the Hitchens position. Bush's murderous Iraq sideshow did immense damage to America and its people, a country that Hitchens rightly loved and defended with such vehemence.

In the matter of God, now, we will never know to what extent his mother's tragic end in Athens, as well as his dabbling in Greek Orthodoxy after his marriage to his Greek first wife is causally connected to the subsequent ferocity of his atheism. I suspect that it is, but I cannot prove it because it requires factual as well as psychoanalytic validation.

Let me summarize my opinion of his views in this department: firstly, he was absolutely right in his scathing demolition of the claims of churches, divines etc. to be custodians of the "word of God" and in his denunciation of the evil consequences that have historically flowed from these ecclesiastical conspiracies; secondly, he was absolutely wrong in thinking that these undeniable facts have any bearing whatsoever on the question of the existence of God or that they constitute grounds for impeaching the intellectual and/or moral quality of believers, today or in ages past.

Many people have been taken aback, and offended, by Hitchens' invective against Theresa of Calcutta, for instance. His language was tasteless in a vile way (that she was Albanian and extremely short -a "dwarf" in his expression- is just racist excrement with no bearing on the substance of the question). But, the core of his indictment of her is self-evidently true. This would have been obvious to a much wider public had he not chosen the despicable language that he used to express it.

He was also absolutely right in denying any kind of immunity to the Koran from the humanist and rationalist condemnation meted out against the pseudo-divine books of the other religions. Muslims, fundamentalists or moderates, in their own countries or in the West, are not entitled to any kind of deference on the part of free-thinking intellects (eastern or western) with respect to the absurdities comprised in their own "holy" fairy tale. We should be eternally grateful to Hitchens for trumpeting this very simple truth. This does not give license gratuitously to offend people's religious sensibilities, Christian or Muslim or Hebrew. It would, for instance be intolerable tyranny to force devout Muslims to imbibe alcohol or Jews to eat pork etc. -let alone to destroy their houses of worship or burn their books. But this is one thing, and another thing altogether to put a ban on criticism of the precepts enunciated in the Koran or the social norms prevalent in Muslim life (e.g. those pertaining to women) because those who believe in these things would be offended. This is totalitarian obscurantism -with murderous implications as was shown in the case of Hitchens' friend, the writer Salman Rushdie.

Hitchens was also right on the mark when he explained that Muslim fundamentalists (and I would add fundamentalists of all stripes, really) hate Western civilization not on account of the faults in it diagnosed by Western liberals and leftists. The hate the West on account of its positive and progressive traits, which Western liberals and leftists cherish and defend (or ought to, anyway), namely individual rights, the legal equality of the sexes, the freedom of conscience and speech and the separation of religion and the state. That is why the implicit and explicit ideological cover provided to Islamic fundamentalism by certain "anti-imperialist" elements in Western academia in particular is such a moral monstrosity. The glee with which these people and their flock greeted the destruction of the Twin Towers was an abomination that should never be forgotten. One half-excuses (but not quite) Hitchens for his ideological pirouettes post 9/11 if one understands them against such a background.

Having said all this, I must repeat that nothing that Hitchens, or his friend R. Dawkins, has said on the matter of God's existence per se, or on the status of religious faith in conscious life and the behavioral consequences from it has any value whatsoever. An atheist is just as likely as a theist to be moral or immoral, peaceful or violent, rational or irrational. Evil is not the exclusive preserve of the religious. Religion is not the central problem of our times. Politics is, including a politics stamped by a perverse construal of religiosity. Hitchens' carping mortally wounds the theologians, the ecclesiastical hierarchies and the theocrats of all religions. But it leaves unscathed those for whom religious feeling is an inner vocation and an existential commitment. To call these persons names (ignorant, anti-science, mindless, dupes etc.) just shows the paucity -precisely- of rational discourse that might somehow impinge upon their choices. It is mere bullying. Hitchens and Dawkins are not smarter than the sincere believer simply because they graduated from Oxbridge and they know their genetics. There is an insufferable kind of pompousness in this.

I may respect and need science, I may accept it as the truth about natural processes. But I may still find my existence immensely enriched by standing before Michelangelo's Sistine vision, and by living as if there were something behind it. Science cannot and may not outlaw poetic intuition. It has been the ambition of some hard-core scientism since the 17th century to do just that. It has not happened, simply because it cannot.

The cardinal value of the Enlightenment was tolerance of individual choice. The kind of crusading, hectoring Enlightenment that Hitchens and Dawkins represent at their worst is simply a self-defeating ideology, an extra infusion of hatred into the hate-filled cultural climate of our times.

Christian hubris, superbia, temeritas: on having to teach Augustine again

It was just the other day that I vented my anger at having to put up with Platonic rigmarole masquerading as "proof" of anything in particular. So it is only fitting that having taken it out on grandfather Plato that I should now turn to someone infinitely pettier and less arresting.

So here it is: why on earth do we still read or teach Augustine? His pseudo-explanation of the sack of Rome in 410 and of the the disintegration of the world of antiquity has exactly the same value as the explanation of AIDS as God's punishment for the degeneracy of the homosexuals -that is, exactly nil. Whereas his pretended unpacking of the various metaphysical conundrums regarding theodicy and the the liberum arbitrium amounts to nothing more than "God knows" and we do not deserve nor are we able to fathom his will. His entire thought can be summed up in one sentence: Christ is savior (I do not believe he would quarrel with this). Everything else is an interminable repetition of the exact same idea in different guises, i.e. a tediously belabored tautology. His notion that this unlocks all riddles of human existence is a very tall order for any normal individual. But maybe Augustine was not normal (for how can you characterize as moderately sane a person who believes that newborn infants deserve to burn in hell?).

So whence the ferocity of his religious passion? It is simply that for reasons that concern him personally, and are not in the least obligatory for anybody else, all other sources of meaning in his life dried up so he threw himself entirely into the Christian promise. He could no longer be fulfilled through love, friendship, service to the community or the life of reason or the imagination. So feeling that all these outlets of self-justification had been disgraced he cut himself off from ordinary humanity (and humaneness) and in a monstrous act of self-aggrandizement hitched himself to the wagon of Christ for a pretended soaring to heaven barred to the rest of us mortals. Augustine smiles maliciously as he wheezes past us and as he sees us shrink into imperceptibility in his glorious ascent. Why he felt betrayed by all the means of self-fulfillment that nature (and hence God, if you believe that God is the author of nature) places at human disposal is an interesting question. It may have to do with his own psychological peculiarities, or with the difficulties of an age out of joint or both. But it is certainly not of earth-shattering significance, i.e. a crisis of metaphysical dimensions that is revelatory of the deepest ontological essence of Being. That he may believe so is perhaps understandable, if not excusable. The we too ought to concur with this assessment of his is just laughable.

In the Christian intellectual tradition, if it be dignified by that name, we do not in general come across the slightest trace of the humility and the love that its representatives so pretentiously trumpet. In fact the opposite is the case. All we get is a venomous rant dripping with hatred and plain incomprehension of the traditions (especially the Hellenic tradition) they are are keen to damn.

But in Augustine the whole thing takes a particularly annoying turn (there is nothing more reprehensible in a thinker than being annoying).

For what we have here is egomania to the superlative degree, the boast by one individual that his "conversion" to the single and exclusive truth is at the same time paradigmatic of all conversions and declarative of the only truth there is on offer.

He may be an excellent writer of Latin prose: I cannot be the assessor of that. But this is not the palm he was claiming. Hence, we can judge him solely on the basis of what he himself considered his "accomplishments". And on all these the verdict can only be damning.

His legacy is, as we will see, threefold and on all counts deleterious. If we continue to refer to him it ought to be as an example to be avoided, as a kind of thinker that contaminated the European philosophical tradition with odious epistemological and moral stances. From these there flowed all the excesses and abuses both in thought and action that have marred the said tradition, i.e. intolerance, dogmatism, self-conceit, denying to others the very right to exist.
From this perspective all his affectation about "caritas" is just an empty show, just as it was in his great model, Paul. For Augustine does not love God, he loves his own God. And he does not love his neighbor, he loves only the neighbor that loves the same God as he. I do not need to point out all the neat uses that these precepts can be put to, if one is eager to disgrace and eliminate all those that think differently in reference to a canonic set of beliefs (religious, ethical, political, national or what have you).

The first governing thought in Augustine is that of the "illuminated" self. This is no other than his own self as illuminated by a light which that same self axiomatically defined as the divine one, brooking no objection on the matter. This is a closed epistemological circle, amounting to the simple idea that a thought that emerges in my mind is the truth simply because it emerges in my mind in a special way (accompanied by psychological fervor). And it is as vicious as it can get. Augustine impresses us by the emotional tumult in his soul, and by nothing more, for emotional urgency does not lend truth to a belief. All beliefs, true and false, morally right or wrong, can be accompanied by psychological intensity and sincerity. This does not in any way affect their epistemological or moral status.

Of course Augustine also has a text before him: scripture. But this text is asserted to be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, simply on account of Augustine's own conversion. The very same Augustine before the conversion declared that same scripture to be false.

So Just like Saul on the road to Damascus God entered the mind of Augustine, and from then on we are admonished to accept as truth what this particular illuminated individual declares to be such (including the Book). This continues to be no argument and no proof of whatever truth might or might not be found in the holy text. It is just an imposition, a threat, a cajolement, a flattery maybe to make yourself see something as true because Augustine so sees it and without subjecting it to any rational control. This is no wisdom, it is blindness. Faith is alright, and maybe unavoidable -even epistemologically speaking. But Paul's and Augustine's particular faith is alright and unavoidable for them and for them alone. It is not so for others who choose not to share it, who choose to pursue other faiths.

It is no surprise, therefore, that Augustine's newfound wisdom goes together with a rabid condemnation of reason (along with all other natural capacities and inclinations of the human person). His "teaching" amounts to a sustained shrillness, simply deafening you with the grandiloquence of his rhetoric and confounding you with the terror of his imaginings. And if you dare to raise your voice in inquiry concerning the meaning of scriptural pronouncements and the logical coherence of the whole system of "truths" therein, he will immediately cut you down with pitiless ferocity.

For the second guiding thought of his system is that Holy Writ is truth, but in numerous places this truth is "obscure". This means, mind you, not that it lacks meaning in itself, or that it is not well developed. It means that it is obscure to you, the reader, because your mind is weak and overwhelmed and deformed by sin, so that it cannot rise to the truth that is there in the holy word but humans cannot see it.

This is the purest of all pure sophisms. Under this maxim you can transform every nonsensical and/or criminal utterance or injunction into divine truth. If you do not understand the word of God (of the Church, of the Nation, of the Party) it is your fault because you are inherently deficient in spirit and intellectuality and morality for not having subjected yourself to the tutelage of those ontologically supreme entities. Worse still, if you proceed to claim that the obscurity of a given passage is due to the fact that it lacks sense, that it is a mere aggregation of sounds, then you are a convinced enemy of the truth and hence you do not deserve to exist. You are responsible for the obscurity just like you are responsible for all evil. God knows, even if no human does, and he is all-good even if his creation is replete with evil. Do not judge or question the hidden meanings and purposes of God.

What is understandable in scripture is so because God willed it, and what is incomprehensible is so also because God willed it. For He aimed to put human beings through the spiritual labor to eventually discover the hidden truth for themselves (here Augustine declares that he knows what are God's aims). And since ordinary humans will be incapable of so delving to the bottom of true insight, we will have permanent need of a body of illuminated saints and sages (such as Augustine) who will tutor us as to why the sundry stupidities of scripture, theology and ecclesiastical tradition are indeed utter wisdom and also chastise us if we resist this our moral and intellectual debasement. And if even after that there are still passages that cannot be penetrated, then that's that and nothing further can be said about it. God knows why he put them there. Probably to test our presumption to know all things. But if you say this, and Augustine is more than willing to say, you then again claim to know God's mind.

This entire doctrine of divine symbols and signs proceeding from a transcendent God to dumbfound mankind and empower an elite of authoritative and authoritarian guides is arguably the most detestable and the most destructive thought spun by the discombobulated brain of someone like Augustine (among many others) with a purpose of course to place himself in the seat of spiritual auctoritas. In this light the saint's conversion appears as what it truly is, namely as extreme and manic self-indulgence, as the madness of someone wishing to elevate his ego to the status of privileged receptacle of divinity.

Augustine's existential tribulations would be of interest if placed under a radically human sign, namely if presented as as paradigmatic of the haplessness of humanity in the midst of an inscrutable universe in which God is sorely missed and sought but it is doubtful whether he is ever found. For God is voiceless, and it is impossible to understand why he would privilege someone like Augustine to make privy to concerning the root mysteries of existence. But this is what Augustine assumes about himself. His torments are to be read not as human, but as paradigmatic of the way a human person was metamorphosed into a vessel of divinity. This is demanding too much of us poor sinners.

The claim might be somewhat credible if the said person's career subsequent to the supposed metamorphosis reeked of an aroma of meekness, understanding and humility, not least with regard to those resistant to his message: in this he would be truly imitating Jesus who sought the company of whores and tax collectors. But no.

All we get in Augustine is his fulminating denunciation of the lost world of pagan sinfulness, in other words of his own youth. There is not a scintilla of kindness in his utterings, just the imperiousness of someone convinced of having grabbed God by the beard (if not by the genitals) to turn him into his own private sponsor and protector.

Augustine hates himself, and who hates himself cannot love others. And it is this psychologically perverse relation of Augustine's to his pagan environment that brings us to the third governing assumption of his system. This one is also steeped in dishonesty for in it he is hell-bent in denying his own intellectual parents. In his egotistic theology Augustine remained a philosopher, i.e. someone determined to expound in quasi-rational terms the "true" solution to moral and intellectual problems deriving from his theological principles. He puts his mind to work in order to clarify some of the "obscurities" of Christian dogma (the presence of evil, the reality of freedom etc.), thus implicitly justifying the rationality that he has been despising all along. And in doing so he cannot but utilize the resources of Hellenic learning of his time. Augustine the philosopher (who denies being one) is a neo-Platonist as we all know, in that his solutions to the theological puzzles are purloined from that corpus: his illumination is the platonic methexis and/or emanation, his theory of evil is premised upon the principle of privation etc.

All that would be creditable, if he would acknowledge himself as a philosopher (with a theological bent to be sure). But he dissimulates: he abjures and calumniates philosophizing, denying in advance that it can achieve all those things that he himself obsessively employs it to achieve. This is not being straight and clear about what he is doing. What he has plagiarized from the stupendous intellectual labor of those he denounces he does not admit to but wants to claim as his own. In his advice in De doctrina christiana concerning the way the Christian needs to deal with pagan texts he concedes that there is a lot in Hellenic literature that is worth studying, especially moral precepts and a certain awareness of God (he means in the neoplatonic tradition primarily). But, he says, all the rest must be consigned to the fire. As to the above-mentioned premonitions of truth in pagan authors they are not the property of the pagans themselves: "they belong to us Christians". Somehow they must have stolen it from the antecedents of Christian wisdom ("Plato is Moses speaking Greek" was the preposterous canard of earlier Christian intellectuals) and so we are entitled to steal it back. This is deviousness, dishonesty, self-serving disingenuousness of the lowest kind.

This approach continues a long-practiced stratagem of the Alexandrian apologists and of the Cappadocians. But it is no less infuriating epistemologically and morally for having that illustrious pedigree. For whence Augustine's presumption to claim as his own by right the intellectual achievements of the Hellenes growing out of a glorious philosophical tradition having no truck with his "truths"? But, he retorts, they employed raw and unaided human reason, hence if they got something right they have no title to it. Christians on the contrary are led by the divinity and their works are the conduit of divine wisdom. Hellenic philosophy smacks of pride.

Well, it is is easy to decide who is full of intolerable and inexcusable pride here. There is no more shabby trick to declare a priori your own thoughts as connected to the divine source and hence true by definition. When Jesus was asked what is truth he remained silent. But our saint here goes one better on his Lord. One thing is striking about all these presumptuous and self-worshiping Christian theologians, namely that they have absolutely nothing to do with Jesus.

Hellenic reason may have failed in many things, but at least it never renounced its humanity. That is why it is still with us. Plato may have failed to scale the heights of divinity or the soul for all he claimed to have done, but he is one of us. We may chide him today, but we still revere him because he tried to take the human faculties as far as they could possibly go. There is a message there for today. Augustine's peregrinations are on the contrary futile and tedious for us. He had a problem with his carnality: so what? This sounds so petty now. Instead of dealing with it, instead of acknowledging that he is human, he thought that he could separate himself from his own substance and make the leap directly into the intelligible world. What self-infatuation, what pride!

On "plaster", "bandaids" and "bazookas"

This is written in white-hot anger, after reading an article in the Handelsblatt. Economics is of course known as the dismal science, and most economically-minded people I know are indeed rather dismal fellows overall. But this mean-spiritedness cannot be accepted as a narcissistic affectation and a game of being wiser than thou (Besserwisserei) regardless of its consequences in the lives of real people and societies. But since the beginning of the crisis two years ago this is precisely the attitude of experts at every turn of events, no matter what the measures introduced by the political leaders or anybody else in Europe. If psychology is in the main what feeds the current downward spiral in the Eurozone, the goal of these wise analysts seems to have been all along to stoke the fires of despondency, systematically dismissing every new attempt at a solution as half-measures. In this way they incited the stampede of the herds in the marketplaces of the world that kept upturning the wagons of the politicians, only triumphantly to proclaim that, alas, the governments were driven by the markets and not the other way around. But this is what these commentators have convinced us that they wanted in the first place.

Yesterday all the major central banks of the globe undertook a series of concerted actions which at least signified a new determination to act decisively to reverse the rot. I cannot evaluate the economic reasoning behind these measures, but psychologically they provided a lift. They were immediately dismissed by all the commentators I read as window-dressing that leaves the core problems intact. Of course, in a sense, they are: for who in his/her right mind thinks at this stage that the core problems can be put away in one blow?!!! This churlishness, this niggardliness, this stinginess, this Schadenfreude is at best a puny little fart of a truism. A truism moreover that they will keep on applying no matter what comes next, on December 9 or any other date. If you do not give to any conceivable proposal the benefit of the doubt with respect to its future efficacy, then it will certainly fail because you are thus inculcating in the general psychology the a priori certainty that it will fail. But then the cause of the failure of the measure is not the ineptness of the measure itself, but rather your determination to bad-mouth it in advance no matter what. Yesterday's actions surely dealt with symptoms of the crisis. But these are critical symptoms, which if left unchecked will precipitate the universal collapse feared. But, oh!, the fact that they took those measures just shows how dire the situation has become, came the retort. So, in this reasoning, they should have done nothing in order not to appear to admit that the situation is desperate! This is so deep, it is way past my philosophy. What is wrong dealing with these symptoms, threatening a universal drying up of credit, first? This world coordination may just be a sign of a new policy beginning in the direction of tackling the core of the matter, which includes forcing Germany to abandon its bloody-mindedness about all sorts of things (as well as forcing Greece to abandon its habitual stupidity on just about everything). How can you exclude this possibility in advance? What lends to your insights such an implacable and indubitable grasp of the future. Extreme adversity is a persuasive teacher, and we may be facing the writing on the wall at this point, concerning the Euro and even the very existence of the European project in all its dimensions. Who can absolutely exclude that in these circumstances the various leaders will (under world pressure) abandon their petty bickering to commit themselves to something truly thoroughgoing? W. Muenchau says in the Financial Times that he is not certain that this law of extremity holds any longer in Europe and he gives just ten days to the Eurozone before it breaks apart. He may be right, but he might also turn out to be a Muenchausen on this one (I have the highest respect for this guy, don't misunderstand me). All I am trying to say is that I am sick and tired (and today positively incensed) after every turning point, great or small, to hear again that familiar carping drone of the experts, the same one from from yesterday and the day before, that "this does not go far enough", "this is merely plaster" etc. etc. If that is the depth of their analysis I am prepared to take up economics late in life for I can do it much better. Gloom-mongering is a secure line of business given the human condition.

There is another aspect to this compulsive nay-saying which is equally misguided. It is also premised on the notion that there are no longer in Europe political leaders "great" enough to rise to the occasion. This is to me plainly silly. Europe is the victim of its success, not its failure. The "great" leaders of the past made a mistake in opening the doors of the European house for all and sundry (including Greece) to enter, before the cement holding it together had solidified. But this was a "great" (meaning noble, great-hearted) mistake. It was also based on a plausible calculation that letting everyone in and forcing a common currency on most would in time blackmail them to adopt common ways of prudence as well as solidarity, besides inexorably pushing in the direction of a complete political union. This may have not been spelled out in so many words from the beginning, so there is indeed an element of dishonesty and deficient democratic legitimation here (as Issing and Sinn and Stark and Weber and other, open or hidden, foes of the Euro have consistently argued). On the other hand, no one can say that nobody suspected or even wished that to be the case. The Brits trumpeted it and stayed out, the Greeks for all their folly equally recognized and enthusiastically welcomed it in their official pronouncements. Well, the time for this radical turn has come. This is the crux of the matter. The decisions demanded are the most weighty possible, fraught with immensely complex consequences. So. what's the wonder that there is hesitation, dithering, backtracking etc.? When so many, great or mediocre no matter, have joined together collective deliberation is onerous and inefficient, but there is no other way -and it is the best way (this incidentally is straight out of Aristotle). When it was just between De Gaulle and Adenauer or even Kohl and Mitterand decisions could be reached in half a day. Today this is no longer possible irrespective of the caliber and worth of the participants. Hence, the complaint that there are no leaders in Europe today is a worthless side-show. The reason that the markets rush ahead of them is simply that this is what markets do in the pursuit of gain from a day to the next. If the politicians began to imitate the behavior of the markets, spasmodically reacting to any fancy or rumor that the economic press spread around in order to pacify the baby, their decisions would be of an immeasurably poorer quality. As it is, they have to balance the need for speed against the need for substance and seriousness -with a view to a political and a cultural future that the markets do not give a fart about. In this contest they may lose out, but if they are to succeed this is the way. And in this I, for whatever it is worth, am an optimist. If even the Greek political class were forced to abandon some of their destructive habits (and there is no more obstinate beast around), then European leaders will eventually find the way, and the glow of the vision will be restored. For nothing succeeds like success, and the markets know that better than anyone.

When ignorance becomes a death wish

Over the weekend of Oct. 28-30 last, just after the momentous decisions -now moot, I am afraid- in favor of Greece had been taken by the European Council in Brussels, I happened to be in Berlin. The German papers had headlines splashed over their front pages declaring that "Europe celebrates the debt cut for Greece". I felt relieved, obviously.

Over the next couple of days I spent glorious and ecstatic hours upon hours in the Museums on the Museumsinsel, including a three hour wait in line (from 7 to 10 in the morning!) to get tickets for the Gesichter der Renaissance exhibition in the Bode Museum. The Altes Museum has an unrivaled classical Greek collection, while in the Neues Museum the face of Nefertiti just takes your breath away.

Walking the streets of Berlin dotted with the Schinkel buildings, and other structures bearing a pronounced Hellenic mark, one cannot help meditating upon the profound influence left by the Greek spirit upon the Prussian capital. And this without even pondering the teaching emanating from the lecture halls of the Humboldt Universitaet or the content of the plays and operas performed upon the various theater stages. Only a person ignorant of the intellectual history of Europe, and Germany in particular, would ever conceive the foolish notion that they are in any way anti-Greek. And yet this has been the dominant conviction here for a long time, one reinforced during the current adversity -in which I ought to add the only reason that we are still alive as a state is the subventions coming our way from northern points of the compass.

As John Major wrote in a widely noted article on Oct. 30, the most effective argument in favor of the admittance of Greece into the Euro area a decade or so ago was the one put forward by the French, and seconded by the Germans, to the effect that "you cannot exclude the land of Plato from a united Europe". It is not as if the economic problems of such a step were not envisioned. But, they simply paled in significance besides the historical and cultural considerations. For the Europeans Greece was then, and still is despite everything, the present day extension of a mighty ideal upon which their own identity is founded. I just wish today's Greeks were equally aware, and cared about, that historical continuity, with all its problematic features, instead of doing everything in their power to erase it. Most of the time the most powerful arguments against the inclusion of today's Greece in the common European project are supplied by the Greeks themselves, especially those in official capacities. The political events of the past couple of weeks have unfortunately reinforced this pattern.

In any case, it has to be remembered, as former PM Constantine Simitis underlined in his recent article in Le Monde, that Greece did not falsify the statistics in order to get into the Euro. The Goldman-Sachs arrangement to minimize the national debt at the time was common practice in EU as well as perfectly legal, while the budget deficit had indeed diminished to slightly above 3% of GDP during the first Simitis administration (1996-2000). The situation deteriorated during the second Simitis administration (2000-2004), and it became outright disastrous during the Karamanlis period (2004-2009) when all semblance of prudence and integrity in public finances was swept away. It was during this time that the figures conveyed to Brussels were systematically falsified. During the same period European oversight over Greek public finances was extremely lax, although there were warnings (more or less hushed up though) that the country was heading for derailment. In a famous speech in Parliament in December 2008 during the discussion of the budget Simitis predicted that the country was headed for receivership under the IMF. But nobody deigned to take note.

It has to be said that during those years the policies of George Papandreou were despicable. He opposed any proposal of fiscal consolidation as basically fascist in alliance with the populist, nationalist and left-corporatist wing of his party. And in the process he threw out of PASOK the modernizing fraction around Simitis, in other words what was best in Greek political life. No wonder that when he became PM his reformist rhetoric rang hollow and was never put into effect anyway. His erstwhile allies meanwhile, as well as the unbelievable dunces that he appointed as government ministers, did their best to wreck the adjustment programs negotiated with the EU since 2010 while he looked away. The ineptness and blindness of the man had thus been clearly indicated, but we kept giving him the benefit of the doubt simply because all the alternatives were so much worse. And yet, nothing had prepared us for the stupidity, mindlessness, dishonesty and self-destructive recklessness of his policies after October 27. In an unguarded moment Sarkozy called him mentally unhinged, and I can vouch for the fact that this was exactly the diagnosis current in Athens as well, not least among circles previously well-disposed towards him. A sign of the unabating inanity of his thinking is the fact that he has been going around ever since defending his disastrous decision, the latest instance being last night in Kiel during the conference of the German Green party.

On the morning of our departure we took a long, invigorating walk in the Tiergarten, admiring the gleaming Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven monument in the early sun. We were under the delusion that we were slowly emerging from a two-year darkness. As our plane touched down in the early hours of the morning of Oct. 31 we felt tired, but relaxed and satisfied after our Berlin sojourn. The Barber of Seville at the Deutsche Oper a couple of nights before had been a triumph. But little did we know that a real-life buffoon in control of our destiny was poised in a few hours' time to take the criminal decision to submit to a plebiscite the agreements so arduously reached in Brussels a few days previously, thus throwing us back into the abyss of existential precariousness from which we thought we had escaped.

By doing that he obviously sealed his political fate -but this is no consolation. All the nefarious consequences of his folly are still with us. He managed to ruin the G20 summit conference in Cannes, to destroy the last shreds of Greek credibility in Europe, to legitimize the option of throwing Greece out of the Euro, to convince the markets of the untenability of the common currency and to well-nigh nullify the pacts of Oct. 27 all in one.

His successor as PM, Lucas Papademos, is a decent and competent individual, but he will be hobbled by the terrible mess he has inherited and the operetta-like government foisted upon him by the political parties who haggled among themselves for four unbearable days trying to avoid taking the only decision that would not immediately ruin the country -namely the very appointment of Papademos.

Meanwhile, the vile gang of "journalists" are whipping up another campaign of "resistance" against the "German occupation" of Europe, at the same time as they are demanding the immediate disbursement of the German billions (of which a significant sum will end up in their pockets).

A seminar with Malcolm Schofield

A breath of fresh air. One might expect that I would comment on the shenanigans of the Greek political class this fall, but they cannot be dignified even by a mere mention.

Last night we met with Prof. Schofield at the philosophical library of the Academy of Athens (it sounds much grander than it actually is) to discuss book II of the Laws of Plato. On the face of it a futile exercise, but in fact a veritable life-saving diversion (we will return to the question of futility later, because it cannot be exorcised that easily).

To begin with, here you had a person of immense knowledge and judgment combined with humility and a democratic dialectical ethos. Having spent a quarter of a century navigating the toxic waters of Greek academia, his presence brought back the idealist eagerness of my student days, when however the passion and the devotion was not accompanied either by intellectual depth or existential adequacy. In any case last night I had to stare in the face all these wasted years of wandering through the moral desert in which a misguided sense of duty had landed me so many years ago. Still, these mere two hours were enough to make me experience the inward soaring that genuine noetic groping and exploration do ignite. Here you had a teacher eager to lift you along the surging motion of conceptual discovery that his own guiding comments instigated, and possibly lift you to an even higher orbit of discourse.

I do envy his current students, one of whom, a thoughtful young Greek researcher, I also met last night. He was complaining that hie employment in England is much less secure than ours here. Poor soul! I tried most emphatically to discourage him from thinking in these terms. What he called our "security" is clearly more like hard labor for life in a dank and stinking pit.

And now for the philosophical crux of the matter. Every time one approaches Plato there is a huge, implacable question mark hanging over the proceedings. Can this person really be in earnest, can his interlocutors really be so timid and shallow, and what is the value for us parsing his lines and trying to tease out some sense that one might argue is profitless to contemplate in today's condition? What Plato takes for granted cannot be taken for granted, and if it were taken for granted then all sorts of distasteful consequences would follow. One cannot stand before Plato today dazed and awed -or before any other philosopher for that matter.

One word that kept coming up last night was "charm". Well, I refuse to be "charmed" any more by the "big thoughts" of some divinely inspired individual, simply because there are no divinely inspired individuals and also because on closer inspection their big thoughts are not as big as all that. They are, rather, simple (sometimes even simplistic) assertions, which however it took an immense amount of insight to enunciate.

I am more than eager to be charmed by the beauty of the language, the daring of the intuition, the harmonious wholeness of the alternative universe that Plato is constructing. But I refuse to be convinced of its truth. Truth is a word that drops very easily from Plato's lips every thirty seconds or so. But on account of that we should not for a moment be drugged or intimidated into assuming that he has "truth" or that he can even rationally explain what he is talking about. He is peddling a vision: a mighty, bright, highly adhesive vision surely, but just a vision nevertheless.

I will go out on a limb here. I wonder when we will finally gather the courage to come out and state that quite a lot (even most) of Plato's so-called argumentation is pure mumbo jumbo. And the point here is not, as with Popper, that he is the proponent of the "closed" society. The closed society can be gotten at from a multitude of rational or intuitive paths, so it is unfair to single Plato out in this regard. It could even be that this self-mutilating longing for closedness and finality is a constitutive trait of human nature itself, an indelible blot on its ontology. It would just be too easy to blame a single great thinker for infecting the human condition with it. The human condition would not be infected unless there were an inherent predisposition in it to fall for these grand speculations.

No, the issue is different. It concerns a much more underhanded, and hence dangerous, stratagem undertaken here, namely the effort to induce belief through the sheer power and polish of the combinations of words deployed against the hearer (no matter what the belief might be). Platonists and anti-Platonists are equally prone to this nefarious enterprise.

All this is not meant to detract from Plato's greatness. This is indeed to be admired. But greatness is not the sole, or the greatest, value in life. Smallness can equally be great.

So, all told does it pay today to engage with Plato? The answer is a definite yes, provided that we understand "pay" in a radical new way compared with the fawning meekness in which it was understood in centuries and decades past. Besides, of course, I can think of no better past-time in today's stunted and mangled Greece.

Impressions from a Hellenic summer

Syracuse: what a sparkling, spacious, airy Hellenic city! The Greek part of Sicily, from Selinus through Acragas and Syracuse to Tauromenium, exhibits an unadulterated historical magic that on pinions of pure feeling carries you back to that superb age of archaic finesse and cruelty which is the root of the European spirit. My visit was a baptism in lofty meditation that -temporarily- cleansed the soul of the muck of pettiness and foreboding that is its fate in the sorry place to which it has since returned.

The sun was sharp as, from the top of Archimedes' fortress, Eurylaeum, I surveyed the plain surrounding that natural wonder which is the port of Syracuse. In the play of hues and shadows in the distance it was as if that sublime confrontation, in which the sea pride of the foolish Athenians was reduced to so much floating timber, was being reenacted for my sake. Nobody else, though, saw what I saw.

When I eventually got to the port there was a big summer fire burning on the other side in the vicinity of the temple of Zeus. Nobody seemed to bother much -simply because, I think, it posed no threat to the landscape and its cultural identity. This is a fearless land, one in which through untold vicissitude and upheaval the brightness of its Hellenism has always managed to shine through. What was more impressive was how aware the locals were of these demons still inhabiting their portion of the earth and how they sought their company.

When she was informed that we came from Greece, our guide at Selinus had earlier simply said: "welcome home". This to me was like a potion of divine youthfulness running through the veins, a precious gift that I will always cherish.

Later on that day we climbed the heights of Neapolis and I spent the afternoon just gazing awestruck at the rungs of the ancient theater opening into the horizon like a giant fan of pure spirit. The white stone pulsated with religious and rational energy. It is merely the face of a cruel quarry, but no matter.

As we were getting there driving through the multiple quarries of Achradina, some gaping ominously in their underground darkness, I thought I caught a glimpse (it was probably self-suggestion) of that other theater that the wretched Athenian captives had hewn in those infernal depths, simply to while away some hours of their living death by the sweet and invincible sounds of Sophocles and Euripides.

Both the victors and the defeated, separated by absolute and pointless hatred, worshiped at the same altar. How odious is human vanity, all the more so as the vain souls are equally giants of taste and desire and capable of scaling the pinnacles of thought. The foolishness of the great deserves so much more contempt. The above-ground faces of the quarries of Achradina were scintillating in the pure sunshine reflected off the calmness of the Ionian sea.

There was one jarring note. Right across from the Paolo Orsi archaeological museum (a true gem) there stands this ugly modernistic catholic church with a pyramidal roof rising to a stupendous height and thus brutally effacing the low-voice beauty of the surroundings. This insolent cement spear can be seen from miles around, another attempt by the Christians to impress their unnatural, perverted sensibility upon a historical and physical plate that simply chokes in their violent embrace.

Medieval morbidness, either of the Western or the Eastern Christian type, has simply no place here, or anywhere else in the Hellenic universe for that matter. It makes a mockery of all that the spirit of the Hellenes strove for, namely the spirituality throbbing at the very core of physical existence and deep within the human body.

But truly there is no more egregious manifestation of this Christian violation of Hellenism than the one seen on the acropolis of Ortygia, the heart of Syracuse. There the temple of Athena, one of the three erected in Sicily to celebrated the Hellenic victory over the Carthaginians in the battle of Himera, has been usurped and defaced in order to serve as the catholic cathedral of the city.

You can see and feel the mighty Doric columns of the archaic edifice, entombed in the superimposed medieval structure, still fighting to break loose from this deadly embrace. This is a spiritual atrocity that makes one gasp (I was the only one gasping). I suppose that the original Byzantine enclosure of the ancient temple would have been insensitive enough. But what intensifies the ugliness of the rape is the addition of that execrable Baroque facade that was erected in the Bourbon 17th century. The empty pomposity of its catholic "saints" in their faux tortuousness simply makes one cringe.

It is fortunate that the temple of Apollo, a few hundred meters up the street, although itself once subjected to the same sad fate of forced Christianization, has managed to get rid of this burden, probably through earthquakes that shook off those sick prostheses. So now its two remaining columns stand proudly alone to proclaim eternally their message of freedom. Athena, however, has not yet been liberated.

The island of Ortygia is a charmed world. An attractive village of Italianate refinement that blends well with the Hellenic aura surrounding it. Its main thoroughfare opens up to the spring of Arethusa and the great port, still populated by the suffering shadows of those Athenians sacrificed in vain.

A predicted debacle

As anticipated the ingenious "political" strategy of Greece's new minister of economics blew up in his face. That his personal standing was thus shattered is a negligible loss -nobody is going to miss the ugly mannequins running the show here for the past forty years when they are finally kicked off the stage.

The more consequential thing is that his attempted blackmail (see the previous post) precisely galvanized all those forces in Europe convinced that the country's place in the EU is plainly untenable. This conviction is now an iron-clad consensus and the only thing remaining is to work out the technicalities of Greece's ejection in such a way as to minimize the horrific consequences for all involved. This may take some time -a couple of weeks at most I reckon.

What may still save us for a little longer (i.e. a couple of months) -as a thoughtful colleague remarked this morning- "is Aristotle" and the fear of uncontrollable chain reactions in case the Rauswurf is clumsily handled. This last possibility has even roused the somnolent Obama people, who are sending their treasury secretary to Poland to participate in the meeting of the European finance ministers at the end of the week.

As for "Aristotle" what the friend meant to evoke is the immense cultural and historical significance of Hellas as a concept in the collective European mind. For those that admitted Greece into the Union back in the 80's and for a still significant segment of current opinion makers in the old continent, Europe is not just an economic arrangement but a wager in civilizational paradigm change, in which a new collective identity is to be built around the values of democracy, social and trans-national solidarity and critical historical thinking. And of course in all this one discovers Hellenic roots and foundations. Europe without Greece, thus, still seems to a lot of Europeans a truncated concept, a "body without limbs" as J. Delors recently expressed it.

For all of educated Europe Greece is a crown of spirituality that adds an eternal glow to the European institutional edifice, despite its having become an economic crown of thorns recently. Hence the last lingering hesitations concerning the (inevitable) exit of this failed state from the consort of serious, civilized countries.

When I say "all of Europe" I must, with heavy heart, exclude from this company the country named "Greece" itself -or, to be precise, its ruling elites and the greatest part of its population in its current numb and brutalized state, for whom the European cultural project as well as the Hellenic idea meaning nothing at all.

It is only the small minority of European Hellenes cowering in their hiding places that perceive the horrendous events unfolding these days as a cultural and moral catastrophe of unparalleled dimensions.

For the rest this society resembles but a ship of fools going merrily to its doom.

An autumn of futility and despair

The weather is still hot and sunny, but the summer with its deliberate forgetfulness is definitely over. More about the remarkable experiences of this summer in future posts, but for now it suffices to note that we are back on the track of collective destruction. Our abject leaders, whom we had gleefully erased from our mental screens for the duration of a few weeks, are back with a vengeance and still bent upon their same old pursuits of dismantling the little that has been left of this place -and this applies to all of them.

The government is paralyzed. After the stressful days of June, when they passed in Parliament the tough measures demanded by the EU in order to continue to keep the country artificially alive, they reverted to their time-honored game of doing absolutely nothing in order to put these measures into effect. The idea is to give to the Europeans what they want on paper, and then to proceed to violate all these verbal commitments in practice.

No wonder that the latest round of negotiations concerning the progress of the (fictional) reforms supposedly implemented by the government collapsed in acrimony. The Europeans departed last Friday in disgust at the tricks of the Greek ministers and bureaucrats trying to evade their legal obligations. The fact is that no one in government, with the exception of one or two individuals, supports the goal of trimming the monstrous public sector, for this means going against their very electoral base.

The strategy of the new economics minister is "political". This amounts to a blackmail of the Europeans, to the effect that they should accept that no structural reforms (opening up the closed-shop professions etc.) will be carried through and that they should be satisfied with the savage reductions of the salaries and pensions of the weakest groups that have been imposed so far. So they should shut up and continue funding the obscene absurdity that is the Greek state sector, for if they refuse the bankruptcy of the country will sweep the whole Euro area away.

This gamble is certainly desperate, but it has to be admitted that it has its own implacable logic. As I have remarked in the past in a very real sense Europe is Greece's captive under the present circumstances. But of course if matters are taken to that extreme, then the "political" -again- reactions of the European political classes and electorates become highly unpredictable. In this climate the attitude may very well prevail that it is preferable to let Greece go to the devil (given that its ruling elites ardently desire it), with Europe then going through a sharp but manageable crisis with highly beneficial consequences for its healthy core in the medium term. Europe will thus be rid of a stone around its neck.

This kind of thinking seems to be gradually winning the day in Germany, despite the protestations of the likes of Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schroeder. What also weighs in its favor is the fact that the other countries of the European periphery are following a course of genuine reform quite the opposite of the sham "corrections" effected here.

It could well be argued that that contagion is a real and present danger as long as an unreconstructed Greece of rotten and stubborn Sovietism remains inside the Euro system. Whereas if this abscess is lanced immediately by letting the country go bankrupt and kicking it out of the European institutions altogether, the healthy core of the European project will soon recover: this would be the Befreiungsschlag as the Germans call it.

I personally dread such an eventuality, for it would forthwith destroy this place as a viable economic and cultural concern. This society would immediately descend into the savagery of a Hobbesian state of nature, a civil carnage much more barbaric than the one we went through back in the 1940's -and then Europe would have another kind of problem in its hands. And yet this is the outcome that our present leaders are blindly steering towards. This seems incredible to the average rational individual observing events from the outside. But for those of us who have lived through the moral and political beastliness of the Greek system of the past few decades it remains, unfortunately, a probable denouement.

Back to the precipice

Back in January 2010 the sum that would have sufficed to bail out Greece amounted to around 28 billion euros, and a rescue plan of that magnitude was being readied as Le Monde reported. Germany torpedoed it. Today the cost, only for Greece, is roughly 200 billion and counting -not to speak of the dizzying sums that are also required to buttress the European southern periphery but also, conceivably, the healthier core of Euroland. But Merkel is still stalling, in full knowledge that another dud of a solution at Thursday's Brussels summit risks igniting a market stampede.

Why is she persisting with this wrong-headed approach? It could well be the dogmatism of the famed "Swabian housewife" which she is in thrall to, a fundamentalist protestantism of economic surpluses of the kind immortalized by Max Weber's great book with a generous dollop of memory of the runaway inflation of the 1920's thrown in.

But a true statesman cannot remain indebted to the past in this slavish fashion, for then he/she risks sacrificing the future of the substantial progress of European unity achieved so far. Whatever the truth concerning Helmut Kohl's reported thrashing of Merkel's policies as undermining Europe (and there is no smoke without fire, despite the obligatory denials) the real effect of her stubbornness seems to be exactly that. So much so that it gives rise to the suspicion that she has actually charted a non-European course for her country. This is the frustration reflected in Sarkozy's comments, reported yesterday in Le canard enchaîné, even though -again- the report may have been exaggerated.

For once the Greek leadership seems to be in the right in the current juncture: the Greek government has adopted all the harsh measures asked of it and at great political cost (they are not going to survive the next election, if things continue as they are today). It is now Europe's turn to devise a drastic and definitive solution to the debt crisis. It is simply unfair and also suicidal to keep harping on the deficiencies of the Greek tax-collecting apparatus as well as on the endemic populism of the worthless politicians here.

These things are true, they are the facts of life. But the whole thing turns on whether one will simply bow to the inevitability of their wreaking havoc with the European idea, or whether Europe will rise above them -even if this means in a sense rewarding the vileness of the Greek establishment (the proverbial "moral hazard"). At this point it might very well be that the price that Europe must pay to save itself is precisely taking upon itself the costs of the profligacy of the Greek establishment.

This is indeed morally outrageous and politically very hard to sell to the northern European electorates. But what if punishing the Greek kleptocracy with all the harshness that it deserves also involves the demise of the European project as a whole? Would the satisfaction of seeing the incorrigible Greeks stewing in their own juice (for they plainly do not want to be saved) be reward enough for the world-wide havoc that will ensue when both the Euro and the European union unravel? Only a fundamentalist madman would answer in the affirmative.

It is clear in retrospect that admitting Greece into the European union, and especially into the Eurozone, was a monumental mistake. But the clock cannot be turned back. And besides at that time nobody could have foreseen the utter degradation of Greek society following that admission -least of all thousands of people, such as myself, who abandoned careers abroad to join what we saw as the project of building a new society of justice and welfare here. All we can say now is that we were all victims of a noble illusion that soon enough turned into ashes.

On the other hand, the original architects of European integration plainly had in mind a process of political as well as economic unification as they laid out their plans. This vision was informed with the lessons of recent history, lessons much greater than the episode of astronomic inter-war German inflation that currently mesmerizes the ruling coalition in Germany. The goal was political and cultural and not just economic -and Germany herself declared as much when she incorporated her eastern territories at crippling economic cost.

It was clear from the outset that -to put it bluntly- if Germany were to mitigate somewhat the shame of her recent past she would have to pay through the nose. She would indeed have to become the paymaster of a united Europe with a European Germany in its core, which meant jettisoning the dangerous aspiration of a German Europe. As I wrote back in May 2010 Madame Merkel would simply have to shut up and pay up, if she still was interested in the European vision of Schmid and Kohl. The political implication of this was a move towards federalism or con-federalism on the institutional plane. The common currency was the opening gambit in such an evolution, and it is simply disingenuous to argue otherwise. If the Euro is seen as the end of an economic, rather than the beginning of a political, process it has no future.

Germany is, fortunately, strong enough to undertake this journey, however unpopular it may to the readership of Bild. It is powerful economically, politically and culturally. In a curious way Merkel's prevarications evince a pusillanimity at adds with the immense energy and drive at the core of the society that she represents. Her incessant to and fro is, thus, a betrayal of the best in the German spirit.

The Guardian taken down the garden path

The London Guardian is one of the worthiest left-leaning newspapers around, but in the matter of the present Greek crisis it is patently ill-informed and ill-advised. It is fed information and analysis by people (including apparently certain "radical" circles in the LSE) whose ideas and practices do not offer a way out, but are rather the chief cause of the country's present predicament.

Its editorial today is partially right in stressing the tremendous burden imposed upon the average citizen by the latest slew of austerity measures. But it is entirely wrong in attributing this to a certain rigid mindset of international institutions, a kind of sledge-hammer conspiracy meant to bleed the people dry. In fact, these measures, and the ones first adopted in May 2010, were a (hasty and improvised) response to a situation due entirely to the outright criminal behavior of the local elites, who also managed to bamboozle the people into a hallucinatory state of "socialist" euphoria financed by the sweat of the German and French taxpayer.

And if this repulsive regime did indeed possess any actual features of legal and social equality, one might be able to defend it on some ideological grounds. But in fact it possessed none at all. It was simply a racket involving a tiny minority of party politicos, civil service unionists and owners of the main mass media here, whose purpose was to despoil the commonweal and suck out of it mythical riches for themselves and their henchmen. In this system the people were systematically fed ideological clap-trap, including a tremendous dose of anti-western and specifically anti-European venom, that exploited and reignited the political traumas of two generations ago, for the purpose of legitimizing their organized loot of state coffers.

This loot left all essential services in shambles: education was trashed, the health service degenerated into a major threat to anyone's health (biological, psychological and financial) who was unfortunate enough to become enmeshed in its coils, and all other public functions (tax collecting, building permits etc. etc.) mutated into gangs of blood-thirsty extortionists. European structural funds and mindless public borrowing at, then, cheap rates were used to fund the conspicuous consumption of the upper layers of civil servants and the functionaries of fictitious agricultural co-operatives, while everybody else was taxed to death in order to close the yawning budget gaps of state administration. In this manner Greece became the chief export market for the Porsche brand....

Under this ferocious assault of private interest against the common good (masquerading under hard-line leftism!) the natural environment, among other things, was terminally spoiled. Greece became a thoroughly ugly urban space with its entire cultural history effaced. This was an unprecedented act of cultural vandalism that went perfectly well together with the new mentality instilled in the average person, to the effect that "correct" ideological posturing and the right connections offered the best chance to participate in the thieving orgy.

It is this horrific system of rapacious hooliganism that collapsed with a sound heard around the globe. It is impossible for a well-meaning foreigner trying to make sense of the Greek situation from the outside and with the use of the the tools of rational political theory (of any hue) to conceptualize the devilish welter of corruption and the utter denial of any normal human value that was the "Greek system" over the past generation. It is still, I suppose, unbelievable to any sane civilized person that such things occurred. But to those of us who actually lived through this generalized psychopathology of feral grabbing it has been an unbearable everyday experience.

Hence the Greek case, although it affects Europe vitally, has absolutely nothing to do with the dysfunctions of global capitalism that caused the turbulence in the rest of the peripheral countries. Greece did not belong in Europe to begin with, not simply because of its defective economy (a kind of Brezhnevism under a pseudo-democratic facade), but also because of the mentality of its ruling elites, which saw the European project simply a a source of cheap money in their pockets and also as a tool for asserting their stupid nationalistic claims in their immediate neighborhood.

And this mentality, needless to repeat, was systematically inculcated in the mass mind, through the lying propaganda of paid agents of the corrupt system posing as journalists. Greece will be eventually ejected from Europe, because it has never wanted to be in Europe in the first place.

Given all this, it is easy to see how tendentious is another article in today's Guardian by a Greek journalist serving as the newspaper's current correspondent in Athens. Describing yesterday's odious scenes in Syntagma square she emotes about the beginnings of "revolution" in an "advanced democracy". This is just laughable.

Greek democracy has been a Potemkin village during the past generation. It was just a profusion of lying cant to cover up the plunder of the mafias in control of the state apparatus. Law and the institutions of legality have long ceased to have any practical meaning here, and everybody -high or low- is contemptuous of them.

This has been so since the beginning of the modern Greek state, but the past thirty years have brought this situation to its predictable conclusion, viz. the breakdown of the elementary preconditions for common life. We are currently going through the last, violent phase of this terminal anomie. This amounts to no "revolution" in any meaningful, rational sense. This society is slowly reverting to a Hobbesian state of nature. It is feeding off its own entrails, it is imbued with an irrational death wish, a fantasy of general conflagration out of which the raging mobs tearing up the center of Athens imagine that some nebulous "salvation" will emerge.

This is the ideology of certain apocalyptic sects that we know from past history. It is a bid for a full plunge back into the darkness of medieval fanaticism. The peoples of Europe have nothing whatsoever to learn or to hope from the current ructions in a place ironically called Greece. In organizing their worthy fight against the excesses of capitalism gone mad they ought to capitalize upon their valuable traditions of rational discourse,collective action and compromise for the general good which have long ceased to have any purchase in the political life of this country.

It ought to be stressed that a significant minority here is in full cognizance of the facts and the situations that I describe above. It would serve the Guardian well to seek them out for their insight.

Silence and shame

A couple of hours ago we barely avoided a headlong dash for the cliff -for the time being. But the lemmings are known to be stubborn little devils, and this society contains a sizable portion of them, a group moreover that is fired up by extraordinary destructive energy, so much so that they do provide whatever vitality is left in the dead limbs of its body politic. This is of course a negative vivaciousness, an urge for death, a brutal impatience for disintegration. To that extent it is a typical expression of the spirit of theological mysticism, which scorns the concreteness of the present, disdains the task of knowing it and reforming it, and instead delivers itself to a dark fantasy of otherworldly salvation presupposing the conflagration of the real, a colossal auto da fe.

This inflamed delusional state of consciousness is the bitter fruit of the cultural, political and economic regime imposed (in the name of radical democracy) by a small coterie of charlatans, dupes and demagogues, all of them in thrall to a mafia of brutal exploiters who proceeded to suck the very marrow out of the commoweal. It is these groups that are out in the streets protesting against the harsh measures needed in order to save the country from the consequences of their lying, looting and plundering.

There is no doubt that these measures are going to hit the hardest precisely those that had the least participation in the blood-sucking orgy of the privileged minorities. And the reason for this is that the representatives of the old order, inside and outside the government, fought tooth and nail in the past year in order precisely to frustrate the implementation of any structural reform.

Still, the masses of the people (crushed indeed by the one-sided attempt to rein in financial debauchery without touching the outrageous privileges of the mafias nurtured by statist collectivism) are silently watching the spectacle of self-immolation unfolding on the world's screens with the heartfelt wish for the defeat of these vipers currently parading under the pretense of "direct democracy". This is a sociopolitical fact that I trust will assert itself in the medium run given a modicum of sanity by all those in positions of power (however undeserved these positions). But of course there is also the possibility that precisely this modicum is lacking.

There are three distinct methods of approach to "truth" in physical and sociohistorical matters (each with a number of internal differentiations to be sure). The first is empiricism: one attempts to garner as inclusive a body of empirical facts and observations, concerning the matter at hand, as humanly possible. One then extrapolates from these evidences to the most likely generalization that can be erected on their basis. The second one is rationalism: one begins with certain rationally self-evident assumptions and then proceeds to deduce by means of correct logical procedure whatever other propositions follow from the initial posits. Both of these methods are ignored, violated, scorned and rejected by the vast majority of public players in the current Greek situation (not to speak of the populace subjected to their nefarious influence).

With respect to factual evidence, all opinion leaders here are complete ignoramuses in the fields that they are arrogantly pontificating about. They know nothing about cultural and political history, including the history of Greece itself, and they do not give a damn about it either. Engels said back in 1890 that historical materialism was simply an excuse for the "Marxists" of the time not to study history. This is absolutely true of this country today: the various ideologies that are passionately broadcast by the roaming bands of political vandals are simply covers for the most apalling ignorance of reality, an ignorance moreover that has been exalted to a positive virtue. The Marxists of all hues are devoid of knowledge of history, social structure and development, political ideas and methods -not to speak of economics. And the nationalists are equally heedless concerning nations, the Greek nation and their historical conditions and itineraries.

Rational argumentationa and logical coherence is also egregiously lacking on all sides. Let us assume that the prime concern at this juncture is to protect the people from utter impoverishment (as the representatives of the public sector mafias and their tools in the press claim). Then, how does this aim square with their demand that we should simply defy our creditors (who have been paying for their bloated bellies for so long), refuse to pay them back in any way, or adopt any measures of restructuring, with the result of being ejected from Europe and the euro? In what way would the people's welfare be secured with Greece tumbling to the level of, say, Zimbabwe? With a return to the drachma (touted by many, including Marxist "economists" as a patriotic goal) we would not be able to heat our homes come December.

Their "ideal" is, thus, a reversion to a subsistence economy of exchange in kind, a primitive communism of general destitution (one of Marx's worst nightmares). That real, living individuals would be thus forced to endure an actual hell with no foreseeable escape is, to these enthusiasts, neither here or there. For their real committment is not to people, but to their ridiculous "visions", the flights of their diseased imaginations.

And this brings us to the third way to "truth" alluded to above, which is the preferred one by these raving maenads of "revolution". And this is simply the "method" of mystical intuition, the revelation of higher, absolute truth by the supreme being that controls the unfolding of history, a divine authority that somehow speaks through their stunted and crude minds. What they believe is true a priori, even though it violates both the principles of logic and experience, simply by virtue of their claim that it derives from a secret source unavailable to common mortals.

This is the good old mentality of religious fanaticism, which (as I have explained before) has thoroughly corrupted the modern Greek collective consciousness since late medieval times (since the triumph of the Hesychastic heresy in the Orthodox church). This mental abomination continues to poison it, even though the content nowdays of religious belief is party politics rather than bona fide theism. And the cause for this iron grip of irrationalism is of course the fact that this society never went through the cathartic experience of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment.

In base Byzantinism all social and political questions were reduced to theological ones and the uneducated masses were brought out into the streets spurred by the eschatological ravings of uncouth monks: ζῆλος λήψεται λαὸν ἀπαίδευτον καὶ νῦν πῦρ τοὺς ὑπεναντίους ἕδεται as the church still boasts even today. Not a single day has passed, it seems, since those calamitous times, in which even the destruction of the Greek Byzantine state was preferrable for these lunatics to an alliance with the "heretical" west.

We are living through the same public dementia today. Europe will eventually eject this fake "Greece", not least because she yearns to be so ejected. The public mind here has drastically veered off any European, or even civilized, consensus as to basic values. The great crime of the regime that has so pitifully collapsed is precisely that it managed to excise any awareness of public duty from the mind of the average person. And all this, oh shame of shames, in the name of a hard core leftism!

"The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity": Yeats' immortal lines are constantly on my mind these days. With an amendment: it is not so much that the best lack convictions, but rather that they are totally demoralized as to the possibility of these convictions making the slightest dent in this torrent of mystical lunacy that seems to impell a whole society towards its own doom. The only thing left is to look on in silence and shame.

Guardians of the temple

The glorious promontory still stands. The comings and goings of the foolish tribes of men (and women) have surely affected it, but they have not brought it down. For those who have eyes to see it is still sending out its signals. At this time of year it is in wild blossom, clad in the anonymity of its multifarious shrubbery as it cascades seawards. In the recesses of these bushes the grouse are nesting. Whole platoons of them walking up and down among the ruins, showing contempt for the camera-wielding hordes, climbing on top of broken columns, looking out to sea towards Salamis. They are the guardian spirits of this place. Being here one rises above the landscape and it modern scars. It puts you in the mood of forgetting; you do not want to know what you are going back to. The sea path is straight from here all the way south to the lair of the Minotaur. One feels like the aged king in his fatal watch, soon to die due to a mere inadvertence. He died but his name lives in these waters.

I wrote recently of the oracle of Apollo at Abae. The Thessalians destroyed it as they led the Persian host towards Delphi after Thermopylae. There was long-standing enmity between them and the Phocians defending their sanctuary. Herodotus relates that they offered rather generous terms of surrender to the defenders, including the promise to forget about the bad blood of old. The Phocians replied that they were not willing to "betray Greece". But the old fox from Halicarnassus is too shrewd to fall for the pious mendacity of the political orator. I am of the opinion, he comments, that had the Thessalians been on the side of the Greeks the Phocians would readily declare for the Persians, for their chief goal was to oppose Thessaly under all circumstances. Recently I wrote an article for the Athens Review of Books arguing that ancient Greek society does not in any way fit the nationalist stereotype of a homogeneous nation striving for a common historical destiny against its sundry racial foes. I could have used the above example as well to illustrate the point. The thought is a banal commonplace of course for someone who has the slightest awareness of the history and culture of the times. But it has caused offense here....

After the Thessalians had laid waste to the sanctuary and the towns of the Phocians, they marched on to Delphi that was their main target. That place was known to be stuffed with gold up to the gills, and Xerxes wanted to lay his hands on it. But Delphi was saved. Herodotus offers a tall tale to account for this outcome. The inhabitants of Delphi, hearing of the Persian advance, wanted to bury the treasures in secret places, but the God forbade them saying that he "can take care of his own". As a result the Delphians left and only a few priests remained in place. As the Persian contingent, led by Thessalians, appeared at the sanctuary of Athena Pronaea a number of miraculous appearances scared the pants off the invaders. To top it all there was severe thunder on the peaks above the temple of Apollo and huge boulders tumbled down the mountainside scattering the barbarian formations, which turned tail and sped away.

Now, is this the same Herodotus who made the hard-headed comment about the Phocians above? Can he possibly believe that it was divine intervention that saved the navel of the earth from the threatened sacking? Who can tell? The point is that in a cultural environment "saturated with myth" (as Paul Cartledge puts it), myth moreover that is taken as reality and probably has some roots in it, it is a major enigma how genuine historical writing could have arisen. But, maybe, Herodotus is justly considered the "father" of history precisely because he straddles the divide between the mythic and the political age; precisely because he succeeds in reaching beyond the mythical foundation of his consciousness in order to grasp the political foundation of human action and/or the political significance of mythic belief. In any case, wrapped in a hoary garment, factuality does rear its head in the Herodotean account. Herodotus is not lying, and the discoveries at Abae bear out his accounts. Maybe what we learn from Herodotus is how to reach the core of truth in myth.

The temples are still blooming

It may just be that there is life after death. Or even that there is no death at all. What dies is what has been dead all along anyway. But what is left behind is that which is untouched by corruption. The eternal is all around us, except that we do not know how to see it.

What has passed for "Greece" up to now is dead, shriveling away into complete non-being. But the reason for it is that it was dead matter to begin with. Its institutions were a sham, a Potemkin-facade of public rationality, whereas in fact they were there to serve the most feral private greed. No public structure corresponded to its name or its concept. The more high-sounding the appellation, the baser the reality hiding behind it. Economy meant the plundering of the commonweal. Education meant the stunting of the critical faculty. Culture meant empty verbiage and the posturing of clowns. Politics meant the systematic rape of the res publica, of the common ousia, of the δημόσιον πρᾶγμα. Politics, especially, the highest of arts, was perverted into an obscene show of ideological obsession of all stripes, whereby various groups of self-intoxicated nonentities posed as saviors of humankind and in the process had no compunction to destroy everything standing (including real lives) in order to uphold their bizarre "visions". At the moment of writing they are still at it.

In trying to explain this outcome there is a long-term and a medium-term view. The latter is tedious, for it involves recounting the follies and crimes of various public actors over the last hundred and fifty years or so, which all conspired from diverse points of departure to render impossible a community of life in this land. Merely to think of them sullies and deadens the spirit. And in dutifully trying to single out the exceptions of intellectual and practical virtue (i.e. devotion to the common good) makes the whole enterprise even more unbearable. For it simply underlines the fact that the genius of this modern "Greek" system was always in trampling underfoot every manifestation of free and universal thinking.

The long-term view is more enlightening, for it deals with the grand historical forces that swept over this land tearing the heart out of its ancient culture and substituting a life-hating mysticism buttressed by the iron hand of despotism for the exhilarating, open-vista naturalism of the Hellenic era. This was of course the deed of imperial and theological Christianity -a Christianity, be it said, that had nothing to do with Jesus himself or even the message of the gospels. This radical rejection of classical Hellenism was of course prepared during the Hellenistic era, which under a veneer of Hellenization of the orient was in true fact a process of orientalizing Hellenism, i.e. imbuing it with the fanaticism of irrationality and the divinization of political authority. "Orthodox" Christianity was a child of this spasm of otherwordliness that electrified a decaying Oecumene. Constantine's victory at the Milvian bridge was thus the death blow against the difficult, tormented, inwardly torn but still magnificent freedom of the Hellenic spirit.

The Christian empire in the west was in time smashed by the Germanic barbarians -and that was a very good thing. A blast of frigid air came in from the dark forests of the north. The adopted religion of these Teutonic tribes was Arianism, a heretical form of Christianity which the surviving imperial authority was trying violently to root out in the Roman east. Arianism was a last-ditch attempt to preserve a modicum of rational sanity even within the context of the theological hysteria of Alexandrine apologetics. At any event, out of the Roman ruins in the west there would eventually emerge a new European culture of intellectual and ethical freedom premised, among other things, upon a rediscovery of the suppressed Hellenic values. The crucial fact here was that the monarchic claims of the "Catholic" church were energetically challenged by newfangled political communities giving precedence to their secular interests and objectives. The struggle between papacy and empire in the west was the beginning of a movement that would eventually eject theological intolerance from the steering booth of worldly governance. This was not meant to be in the Roman east.

There the unholy alliance, in fact fusion, between imperial despotism and a Christianity of hatred continued undisturbed through long centuries of moral decline punctuated by brief episodes of recovery. Social life was totally theologized, and the random sparks of rationality fueled by some remnants of Platonism were quickly extinguished. John Italos and Michael Psellos were persecuted as heretics in the 11th century. And soon thereafter the hatred towards Jews and other unbelievers, in addition to the internal heretical enemy (endemic from the beginning to official Christianity as a whole) was extended in the Roman east to the western Christians as well. The loathing became mutual of course and was underpinned by intense economic and political rivalry. It led to the massacre of the Latins in Constantinople in 1182 and the plunder of the same city by the crusaders in 1204.

In the rump of the eastern empire during its drawn out death throes the complete victory of monkish barbarity was sealed through the victory of the hesychastic movement in the 14th century. This cut off Greek-speaking Christianity from the emerging humanist movement in Italy. The opposition was significant among the educated and political elite of Constantinople, but the monks could mobilize the brutalized masses against the best in their society. The Palaeologian dynasty was western oriented as was natural for the pupils of the great Platonist and Hellenizer Plethon who had kindled in the scholars and rulers of Florence the enthusiasm for Hellenic learning. But the monasteries won, making thus sure that the country would be overrun by the Ottomans. The enlightened elements fled, and the obscurantists sealed their triumph by offering allegiance to the Sultan, and in so doing drastically extending their authority over all the Orthodox Christians of the Turkish realm. Plethon was duly anathematized.

The Ottoman regime was a Muslim theocracy, in all its fundamental principles a worthy continuation of debased Byzantinism. It rule was tyrannical and frequently violent. But the theological rulers of the suffering Christians could explain and justify that by the reference to the "sins" of the Greeks that brought about the fall of the Christian Empire. The greatest of those "sins" was precisely the effort to unite with Roman Catholicism. So slavery had to be put up with under a new despot who was in any case legitimate, having been given his authority over Christians by God. The ecclesiastical rulers adopted the title "despot" for themselves, a word that still today refers to the office of bishop.

The benumbed and benighted masses would henceforth bow and pray under the mantle of ecclesiastical despotism, now functioning as an official branch of the Sultan's government. Many among them would undoubtedly dream of the restoration of the east Roman theocracy. But the chief task now was survival. And thus the memory of Hellenism was completely buried, including that of the fitful Hellenic revivals during Byzantine times that constituted the doomed and transient glory of that era. The fake spirituality of the hesychasts now assumed even more beastly forms of superstition. This was the perfect counterpart of the murderous fanaticism of their Muslim dynasts. To the extent that the Orthodox populations yearned for liberation that meant that they simply wanted to be Turks in the place of the Turks.

Hellenism among Greek-speaking Christians revived during the 18th c. under the leadership of westernized intellectuals (many of the from the lower clergy). But this current of Enlightenment had no roots among the peasant populations. At the time of the Greek Revolution it furnished a political elite that spoke a western language of rationality and freedom thus legitimizing the uprising in the eyes of the fully Hellenized societies of western Europe. This caused the establishment of the modern Greek state. But soon afterwards, after its political use had been exhausted, it simply disappeared as a cultural force in the new kingdom. Popular politics quite naturally continued to flow within the age-hallowed riverbed of theological mysticism and fanatical hatred under a thin veneer of impotent constitutionalism and a national culture that was just empty rhetoric above the people's head.

In the twentieth century the newest import of Enlightenment ideology, itself pioneered by diaspora intellectuals, i.e. Marxism, inevitably enough mutated into a ruthless and murderous theology. And it was in this guise that it triumphed in the collective consciousness by century's end, incorporating in the process the essence of obscurantist nationalism that it had supposedly vanquished. It is this abhorrent hybrid of national stalinism that has ruled the country over the past generation and predictably enough brought about its moral and material ruin.

So now the matter is historically closed. The modern "Greek" state no longer exists as a going concern. It will of course continue as a facon de parler, a mode of political expression -but with no substance. And the only thing left to do, beyond basic survival which is becoming more problematic by the day, is simply an archaeology of memory and feeling -for those at least that are still concerned to preserve a modicum of their violated humanity. Layer upon layer of historical detritus has buried deep the shards and fragments of Hellenism in the land of its birth. Some of them are embedded in the language, itself wantonly defaced by the ride of the ethnostalinist Valkyries. (At least the Christians spoke good Greek -that much has to be conceded to them). Other remnants are hidden in the earth, some of them luckily protruding above them. And all these are still active, like seeds. Visit the temples and you will see: they are in glorious bloom. This must mean something. The soil is still being dug and that amazing past is still bringing forth its life-sustaining riches. The German Archaeological School has over the past couple of years brought to light the oracle at Abae in Phokis. This is a good omen. We do need an uplifting chresmos from the peaks of civilization. Not that anyone here has taken any notice, of course. But that is neither here nor there. Herodotos has been once again proven right. I have been reading him intently. He, if anyone, will help us somehow to survive.