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.