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.
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.
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