Social necrophilia

As a cover for rampant antisocial egophilia.

An obsessive evocation of "history".

A fake history composed of petrified misconceptions, preconceptions and concoctions.

Error transmogrified by tradition into sacred Fact.

Always in search of relics of the Martyrs.

A pervasive smell of death.

A celebration of supposed martyrdom.

The dead rule.

But only the dead of our confession.

The dead of the others do not exist.

Or they actually deserved their extermination.

A theological danse of cadavers sucking every drop of blood from the bosom of today.

There is no today.

Forced optimism

In case they bother to read the thoughts recorded in these journals, some will say that they are the outpourings of a carmudgeon embittered by endless years of disillusionment and failure. And they will undoubtedly be right. But this cannot be the end of the matter. For independently of the qualities, experiences or intentions of the author the question is still open whether what he claims is true or not. This is entirely up to the reader to decide. In any case I promise this, that once I have purged my system of the bile accumulated over the decades since I made the fateful decision to return here, I will begin to express only the sunniest of sentiments and rosiest of anticipations about this society and especially the personnel inhabiting the hubs of power and determining its prospects.

At any event this is a trend beginning to take shape nowadays. Leading opinion makers are currently pushing the exculpatory line that despite everything we have achieved remarkably much over the last two centuries and, besides, the well-known black spots are the same dysfunctions afflicting more or less all advanced democracies in the West. Charitably speaking this is a whole lot of bunk dressed up for the most part in the fancy nonsense of postmodernist "cultural studies".

With respect to the first claim, there has been indeed a genuine achievement. This was the organization of a system of public education that tried to integrate the membra disjecta of a lacerated society under a common national purpose. Grecia fatta, bisogna fare Greci: it was a common and ineluctable task of nation-making throughout Europe in the 19th century. Inevitably this system was, thus, strongly marked by nationalist declamation and authoritarian methods of teaching. It was also politically manipulated to serve the needs of the ruling elite at each juncture. Nevertheless, it did impart a minimal but functional level of literacy. And, above all, it did preserve a vital link with the classical legacy, despite the variety of distorting lenses through which it was diffused. In this manner, an implicit commitment to the cultural aspirations of the Neohellenic Enlightenment was maintained, despite the fact that its political demands were passed over in silence. And through this the essential belonging of Greece to a vague but potent European identity with Hellenic roots was also affirmed.

The reaction against this system of education was both inevitable and salutary. It began with the Demoticist movement. But, as is the rule in the public life of this society, it soon took extremist forms. Instead of advocating the abrogation of the dominant teaching methods, namely the philological formalism of Byzantine provenance and the authoritarianism of imposed meanings on the selected fragments of texts that the students were exposed to, it demanded the ejection of the entire intellectual and moral content of the system.

Instead of pushing for a framework of free critical discussion on the basis of the thorough acquaintance of the sources, in order to bring out the rich variety of worldviews, ethical and political standpoints that stamps the Hellenic heritage, they basically demanded its substitution by some undefined course in "social awareness". The latter was in fact whatever political ideology happened to be in vogue at a given time, thus leading to the complete subjugation of academic and cultural life in general to party-political goals. The cultural process of the country was thus placed under the Diktat of boorish and ignorant functionaries.

This dissolution of Paideia and its institutions as known in the civilized world was completed in the period after 1974, when secondary schools and universities were placed under the control of left-wing apparatschiks masquerading as professors and students, and turned into training grounds for "the revolution". To trash university buildings, to abuse and attack professors, to arbitrarily prevent classes being held and to dissolve conferences whose ideological content did not pass "revolutionary" muster were then declared democratic conquests of "the popular movement".

The graduates of such establishments went on to assume leading functions in the media, state institutions and the universities themselves. And in this fashion the vicious circle of ignoramuses teaching ignoramuses to be worse ignoramuses than themselves became more and more vicious as time went on. These people moulded the public mind about what democracy and education is. Hence the high proportion of supposedly free citizens supporting terrorism, party control of public institutions, cheering 9/11, appaluding the butschery of Serb generals, lamenting the fall of the Berlin Wall etc. etc. This is the situation we are still in.

It is certainly tedious to read and to write these things, for they have been read and written countless times. But, believe me, it was not at all tedious to live them year in and year out. To normal people from civilized countries they are outright incomprehensible, but to us they were simply quotidian normality. And as long as they cxontinue to dominate our life it is worth writing about them again and again.

With respect to the second claim, it is easy. Of course corruption, subversion of democratic institutions by private interests etc. are present in all civilized countries. But, at the same time there exist powerful countervailing forces, within the institutions themselves and more importantly in society at large. Here, everybody assumes that the violation of the laws and regulations of decent living is just OK, unless you happen to be the victim of such transgression. If you get the chance to break the law in your own interest, you will not hesitate it to do it, even though you have ostentatiously protested before about similar actions of other that happened to hurt you personally. This is the condition of a society in a state of putrescence.

As you see, I am trying hard to exhaust my quota of negativism, so that I can begin to serve you -as I promised- with glowing vistas of future bliss.

Too far gone

When Byron first encountered Greece in the opening years of the 19th century he wrote a famous but chilling poem, in which he described the physical beauty of the place as the sublime serenity of a fresh corpse before decomposition has robbed it of the harmonious features it possessed when it was still alive. Since that time the political independence of the country was restored in a general insurrection that seemed to indicate, not least to Byron himself, that some spark of soul had been preserved in the depths of depravity and demoralization that was both the cause and the effect of its centuries long disappearance into a darkness of oppression.

The protagonists of that movement made declarations that swore allegiance to the values of civilized Europe and established institutions that seemed to reflect that commitment. The constitution which they voted was republican with strong elements of democratic decentralization and popular enfranchisement. But as the most discerning of the historians of that time noted, this institutional democracy of the revolutionary period reflected the fact that the society was fragmented into a multitude of factions which could not singly impose their absolute rule on the rest. Democracy and the rule of law was simply a facade to cover up these internecine hatreds that, on the ground, amounted to an unstable equalibrium of local despotisms and politicals cabals.

Soon enough the newly established kingdom reverted to authoritarianism, which attempted to homogenize this anarchy of particularistic interests into some form of functional statehood by using despotism from above. The initial flush of Enlightenment aspirations was spent. And, although the political superstructure still incorporated the principles of liberalism (especially after the revolution of 1843 and the change of dynasty in 1861), the society danced to a different tune of religiously spiked nationalism. That liberalism survived on paper was indeed something of a valuable achievement and some exceptional minds still aimed to make it work in practice. But the storm of wars that overtook the country from the end of the 19th century through the 20th made this impossible both on the cultural and the social level. Their legacy was a slew of closed and intolerant ideologies that have flooded, and corrupted, every department of public life (the schools, the press and the political class).

Today, thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, fully half of the electorate is committed to some form of Stalinism. And most of the rest do not really know what exactly is flapping around between their ears. Two hundred years or so after Byron wrote that blood-curdling piece of verse the physical face of the country has been viciously deformed by the most egregious form of building "development", largely destroying both the rustic and the neoclassical aesthetic of previous decades. And as for democracy it is still the facade behind which the absolutist pursuits of private economic and political interest are hiding. It is true that the constitutional forms have been preserved so far, and this I repeat is an achievement. But at the end of the day, what good are the mere wrappings around an empty box.......

Five years later

Five years later

The descent to hell. Ἡ εἰς Ἅδου κάθοδος. We made it back again just barely -but certainly not unscathed. Old habits of thought have not changed. The public sphere still colonized by the worst and the stupidest. A society stuck in its past; in the worst sides of all its pasts that is. Isocrates once said that Atrhenians were not at all minded to to pay attention to reasoned advice, but were always carried off their feet by those raving from the speaker's platform (τοὺς ἀπὸ τοῦ βήματος μαινομένους). It is still like that. The shriller the raving, the most thorough its effect. We are still lost in a maze of silly theologies. People are still fighting the battles of seventy-five years ago. The future is indeed happening, because the future cannot not happen. But it is happening as a hurricane blowing in from unknown horizons, threatening to uproot evertything because everyone is looking back. They keep celebrating anniversaries, but they do not know what they are celebrating and why. Especially the young and younger people. Everyone is obsessed with history, but in a completely non-historical way. Because their history is a concoction from various ideological scraps haphazardly strung together, and everyone has their own fictive history to bang one another on the head with. It is true that the threat to be booted out of Europe did galvanize a segment of opinion that fought very hard against that prospect. We lost all the political battles (the referendum, the elections), but we won the war -despite ourselves and out of the kindness of strangers (for Europe as a culture is indeed a stranger to the great majority). The one sad consolation has been the sorry state of British and American politics nowadays.