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.

Bazaar of Athens

BAZAAR OF ATHENS

The year is drawing to a close and Greece is imploding.

After almost five years of extreme economic rigor which crushed the low and middle classes that fell outside the protective umbrella of the ruling kleptocracy, complete and final bankruptcy is once again looming ahead.

Our laughably incompetent government switched into militant anti-European mode back in May. They began trumpeting the exit from the EU-IMF program, peddling the lie that they had fulfilled all its requirements. In fact they had carried out none of the structural reforms they had signed on to. The public sector is as corrupt as ever and the economy is still in the hands of the scandalously privileged unions and various private business mafias that have the political personnel in their pay.

The only thing the government have managed is to balance the budget by a) not paying the state's debt to private individuals and b) by taxing to death small businesses and the average wage-earner. So, when they tried to once again draw financing from the international markets they received a drubbing, and the rates of return on Greek government bonds skyrocketed back in October. Ever since they have been "negotiating" with the EU-IMF about not fulfilling commitments they agreed to and wrote into law back in 2012. No wonder that the talks ground to a screeching halt.

Meanwhile, the inability to elect a new President of the republic in the present parliament makes an early election highly probable by next spring. So, come the new year the country is threatened with the perfect storm: no international financial protection program, hence no liquidity to the Greek banks from Frankfurt, no legitimate head of state, a government at the end of its tether and the general chaos that ordinarily ensues during election time and which nearly drove the country out of the EU in 2012.

Except that this time the consequences of a Greek exit are much more manageable for Europe. We are rapidly sliding back to our age-old Balkan malaise, if not straight into a fourth-world vegetative state.

In all this the "radical left" opposition is touting its own magic potion: if they gain power they will demand of the EU to forgive most of the country's colossal debt (primarily owed at this point to governments, i.e. to the European tax-payer) and if they refuse Greece will default on its obligations. What they will do if the international community slams the door in their face they don't say. Also, they will provide thousands of new public sector jobs, and increase drastically the minimum wage as well as public works spending. All this out of non-existent financial resources.

When they presented this farcical concoction to international lenders in London a couple of weeks ago, they were laughed out of the room. If they mean all this balderdash (and it seems that they do), Greece is out of the Euro overnight and, given that the country imports everything it needs, shortages and monster inflation will result. They are then going to be chased down the streets by stone-throwing crowds, the very same ones that are now cheering them on convinced by them that it rains pennies from heaven.

So all in all, both government and opposition are locked in embrace as they lead the country dancing down the cliff. They keep hurling obscenities at each other, to be sure, as they are wrestling for power. But to have power for themselves alone is their only aim -and their only difference. Apart from that they are in profound agreement that the mafia-ridden system of nationalist-Stalinist statism that ruined the country was just about perfect and that it was the "evil foreigners" that swooped down on us uninvited to disturb our bliss. This is the mentality that also grips the people at large, beaten into their brains by the mass media, themselves prime beneficiaries of the rotten system. As long as these conditions prevail there is no salvation, however you finesse the economic figures here and there.

The ship of fools

It's the oldest truth about politics, but still as valid as ever. And from time to time one is given the chance to test its validity for oneself. Through a strange twist of fate I was also given the opportunity to do just that. My decision to enter the political arena was thrust upon me. It was entirely unpremeditated, actually the thing furthest from my mind about three months ago. But then I was convinced by trusted friends that there was a possibility for a new beginning and that I owed it to myself to pitch in.

It's such a truism by now that the Greek political system is in a state of putrescence -I have been writing about this monotonously for the past four years or so. But then two different conclusions follow from this premise: either you sit still and bear the consequences helplessly, or you try to do something about it. Something like packing up and leaving this place (thousands, especially young people, are actually doing so), or joining some political initiative with an outside chance to help stem the rot. I wagered the latter. A new political group was formed with the express aim of fighting the attitudes and practices that bankrupted the country. It scored respectably (6.6%) in the recent elections for the European Parliament. I was not elected of course, but that's neither here nor there. The depressing point, as I see it, is rather that these elections did not signal even a faint awareness in the people at large that there ought to be a radical re-assessment of policies and a renewal of personnel, if the direction of the ship (or rather the pitiful raft that is left of it) is to be reversed. Even in the midst of generalized despair and outrage the public still favored, both in the government and opposition camps, the easy and empty slogans and the failed personalities that only promised to continue the blithe and blind course to further ruin.

The chief cause for this is the stranglehold over public life exercised by the media. The campaign was fought on the television screens -nothing remarkable about that, you might say, it's the same in all democratic countries. Except that the media here do not possess even the modicum of impartiality and independence that might justify their role as chief arbiters in the political debate. They are fully in cahoots with the corrupt politicos -the media actually put them in power in the first place in order subsequently to to claim unbelievable rewards that make a mockery of the rule of law and basic equality. The relative integrity of constitutional provisions that elsewhere provide some redress for abuses of power and privilege are absent here. Laws and institutions are mere tools in the hands of private interests for the purpose of bilking the commonweal.

And the most dispiriting thing of all is that the majority of the people consider this a normal state of affairs and are incapable of visualizing -and therefore wanting- an alternative. Each and every one is pining for "his own" to grab the helm, in order to exploit the public wealth for the benefit of the followers of this or that political party. The sound and fury of television panels debating the issues signified precisely nothing. Ignorant and/or plainly self-interested figures engaged in shrill altercations, in which the rudest and most shameless usually "won". "The worst are full of passionate intensity": God, how many times need we to be reminded of Yeats' great insight! It is no surprise that the individuals that collected  the most votes in all parties were those that excelled in this theater of ostentatious nothingness -TV personalities, footballers, actors and sundry demagogues spooning out the cant of the "wronged nation".

This was a "European" election in which Europe was absent. Or it was mentioned only to be bashed as the source of all evils that have befallen this most perfect of all lands. A general desire was abroad for a return to the "blessed" condition before the fall (of 2010), in which Europe would continue to ladle out the billions to be spent for the obscene enrichment of privileged castes, with some crumbs falling off the table for the rest of us. This is a vicious circle that I hate to say cannot be broken in the foreseeable future.

So what was the ancient truth that was thus re-learned? That democracy is not viable without a demos that is informed, cultured and of independent judgement, and hence capable of making a sharp distinction between cheap rhetoric and rational discourse aiming at the common good. But this presupposes an educational system cultivating critical thinking, rather that ideological indoctrination -something which is missing here, because it was deliberately destroyed by those wishing to put the television evangelism of hatred and obfuscation in its place. A people whose mind is shaped in this way is none other that the ἄγριον θρέμμα described by Plato, ready to pounce upon those counseling for the common interest (such as poor Nicias) as enemies of the nation. This is a people perverted by its very enemies to regard anyone truly equipped to guide it to a better condition as "μετεωροσκόπον τε καὶ ἀδολέσχην καὶ ἄχρηστον" (Rep. 488e).

But at least in Plato's Ship of Fools those who through impudence and violence have seized the helm of government still somehow keep the vessel floating albeit in random and aimless course: "τοὺς μὲν άλλους ἢ ἀποκτιννύντας ἢ ἐκβάλλοντας ἐκ τῆς νεώς, τὸν δὲ γενναῖον ναύκληρον μανδραγόρᾳ ἢ μέθῃ ἢ τινι ἄλλῳ ξυμποδίσαντας τῆς νεὼς ἄρχειν χρωμένους τοῖς ἐνοῦσι, καὶ πίνοντάς τε καὶ εὐωχουμένους πλεῖν ὡς τὸ εἰκὸς τοὺς τοιούτους..." The same in Hieronymus Bosch's great painting: the debauched occupants of the vessel are still gorging themselves, and puking into the sea, while their boat is heading to nowhere with a roast chicken strapped to its mast. Of course the rocks are visible in the distance, but the hour of reckoning has not yet arrived.

This hour has come and gone for the modern Greek ship of fools. There is no roast chicken to be seen anywhere anymore, and just a few broken planks remain. And yet most cling to them fantasizing that the feast is about to resume, trusting the same vile priests and dunces that brought them to this ruin.

The new as old as it gets

The whole of Europe is laughing: Greece is at the helm of the EU. The country is at a terminal stage of decomposition and yet its leaders talk pompously about setting goals for "more Europe" and such trash. They have to find approximately 10-15 billion euros for 2014 to plug the holes of their management and still they declare success in leading the country out of the crisis.

It's clear that our strangulation has still further to go. For the budget surplus that they are declaring, to the extend that it is real, has been achieved only through the vicious extortion of their last remaining penny of those who have no way to dodge the tax office, namely the small people with some meager savings amassed by perfectly legitimate means. Their procedures have been so ruthless, that all constitutional protections have been swept away. Revolutions have broken out in the past for much milder oppression that that. Meanwhile, the fat cats who have been robbing us blind for a generation are still partying.

Since 2010 the only thing that successive governments have done in order to convince the European overseers that they are complying with the obligations undertaken in return for the loans that kept the country afloat is tax to death the small portion of the population that could not hide its income at the same time that they slashed their salaries and pensions. What a triumph. Everything else that they promised they failed to carry out, above all the closing of countless government bodies performing no work at all and existing only for providing fat recompense for the party hacks running them. There are, for instance, four different state-run institutes for doing the same thing, namely study international legal relations, all funded out of our pockets. And that's just a minor example. Oh, and there is another ingenious trick: it's called "amalgamation." A number of these bodies are terminated on paper, but instead of being dissolved they actually continue to exist as before under the roof of a new single public entity. The latter acquires an independent bureaucracy of its own, superimposed upon the previous ones. So out of the seeming termination of, say, three preexisting boards or institutes or what have you you end up having four! This is what is called here reducing the size of the state sector.

In one of my very first posts I predicted what has come to pass, namely that all the solemn commitments made after endless debates in parliament (and not least the repeated burning of Athens by crazed "revolutionary" gangs) were going to be violated by the authorities. It took no particular wisdom to do that, just having endured the vileness of the local governing class. The hydrocephalic monster that crony government has created over the past generations has at this point just about consumed the flesh of society at large and it is beginning to devour its own.

This is the last stage before the implosion, in which a final explosion of generalized greed masquerading as militant socialism will reduce everything to ashes. And it is only in mythology that new life spontaneously springs out of such desolation. The European elections in May will strip the sitting government of all legitimacy, and deservedly so. For they came to power promising a liberal administration that would clean out the Augean stables of statist corruption, and instead they delivered an intensification of Soviet-style control by minorities entrenched in the public sector ruthlessly defending their private interest at the expense of the commonweal -and all that under the flaming red banner of leftism.

The most charitable thing that can be said about our current rulers is that they were not in a position to subdue the hydra that they themselves brought into being. Nor did they wish to, however, for after all it was flesh of their flesh.

One last reminder. Well-meaning people abroad should not be deceived by the legal prosecution of the neo-nazis that has dominated the headlines over the past few months. For one thing, it was carried out in violation of key constitutional provisions: you cannot fight fascism by fascist means. But maybe this is the least of ills, for the constitution in modern Greece has since her very inception been just a facade to bamboozle credulous foreigners thinking that they were dealing with a civilized country -and an heir to the glories of Hellas no less. Fat chance. The more relevant, and damning, consideration is that despite the aforementioned legal show the ideology and the methodology of the extreme right is still triumphant, penetrating all political factions and coloring the thinking and the emotions of the average person at large. The nationalistic hatred of sundry "foreigners,"the glorification of the "chosen race" under attack by international Jewry, usually called "capital," the readiness to use violence to silence liberal thought and to shake off the "yoke" of the west -all these are the staple of public discourse and are hysterically propagated by the media (the chief perpetrators of public corruption over the decades). A recent offer by the Soros foundation to heat all schools in a northern district during the winter was vehemently rejected by the local education council. They did not deign to stoop before the nefarious designs of such an evil agent of Jewish imperialism. They preferred to have their children freezing between four stone walls.

Happy new year.  

Adorno on jazz

He blasted Heidegger's "jargon of authenticity" and he was right on target. I am not sure many dared blast his own "jargon of negativity", as stupefyingly turgid as any of Heidegger's verbal contortions. He was after all  shielded by the Tarnhelm of leftism. Except Popper of course, who himself had been schooled in dialectical obfuscation but was soon enough able to see through the sham. It is so revealing to juxtapose the utter clarity of Popper's prose with the phony "depth" of Adorno's mumblings, as for example in that famous confrontation of the two on positivism in sociology. I said Adorno's mental gyrations are unfathomable, but on second thought the core idea is extremely simple: whatever I approve of is good, and whatever I reject is evil. And, of course, evil here is tantamount to western, and especially American, culture. This is dubbed "late capitalism" as if one is holding the watch of history on the palm of his hand, hence possessing divine insight into its cycles, its ends and its beginnings.

There is something uniquely obnoxious when somebody builds up his/her own personal predilections into a universal law. Adorno was, rightly, struck by the ghastliness of Nazism, but he attributed it to a non-existent cause. Nazism was supposed to be the culmination of "instrumental reason" that was the "essence" of western culture since the beginning of time really (he, together with Horkheimer, unearthed it even in the Bible). That Nazism had nothing to do with rationality, and that instrumentalism can be the core attribute of any ideology trying to impose itself violently, he simply brushes aside. At any event when he sought haven in America he must have felt, in accordance to this "theory", that instead of escaping evil he was in fact entering the very belly of the beast. That you need terribly impaired mental eyesight to conclude this is today obvious. This tendency to equate advanced western culture with incipient, latent, or even full-fledged fascism is rampant today in the midst of post-modernist leftism, whose rejection of reason quite naturally motivates it to seek Redemption in the mists of irrational fideism of all stripes. I am reminded of a Greek star of "creative" Marxism, Poulantzas, whose main plank was that fascism was the preordained culmination of advanced capitalism. He was writing this at the very moment when the dictatorships of Southern Europe, that he was ostensibly lambasting, were being swept away, with South America soon to follow suit. A couple of decades later the murderous autocracies of Eastern Europe were also toppled, but Poulantzas did not live to see this because by that time he had committed suicide.

By the way, this "late capitalism" line of thought egregiously equated western democracies with the Stalinist regimes, on the ludicrous grounds that they both practiced "instrumental reason" that worshipped economic efficiency and social regimentation. At a distance of forty years or so, one is aghast that this simplistic "sociology" had such a sweeping appeal among the educated youth of the time. Or then again it is not surprising at all, for what these quacks of liberation were peddling through murky verbiage were paradisial visions calculated to inflame emotion (including the libidinal urge, if you throw into the mix the subtext of unrestrained eroticism which accounts for so much of their appeal). No wonder that young people, like ourselves at the time, were captured by the lure of this cloud-cuckoo-land whose mystique was all the more intensified the less we understood about what these gurus were talking about.

So, Adorno was unable to fit in or to understand popular and democratic America. He declared sociology as his profession, and when Lazarsfeld put him to work actually practicing what sociology is about (namely observation of the social process, and not spinning out abstruse theory to be imposed upon reality) he obviously chafed at the "tyranny" of facts, contemptuously dubbed "positivism". That at least something intelligible like the F-scale came out of that sojourn in the galleys is a gain, probably due to Lazarsfeld's unflinching superintendence. In any case, the motive of "pure" theory soon took its revenge, when upon his return to West Germany, which lavished all sorts of academic privileges on him, he was back in full "negative dialectics" mode.

I was thinking intensely of all this as I was listening to John Coltrane over the past few days. Adorno's hatred of jazz is well-known. Again, that somebody may be so wrong-headed defies belief. All the more so if this somebody happens to be a renowned philosopher of art! It would have sufficed if he simply had said, I do not like that kind of music. That would have been honest. It would also render superfluous the thousands of pages of convoluted theorizing built upon that simple expression of a personal preference. But, no. Adorno, like the paradigmatic dogmatist -to put it mildly- that he is, wants to make you also hate what he hates. He feels he has an esoteric insight into art in itself. He possesses the template of aesthetic value that like a metaphysical cookie-cutter must be forced upon the worthless dough of diverse aesthetic endeavor, in order to eliminate everything that does not fit his apriori ideas of what alone counts as art. This template is, of course, an abstract expressionism of sorts together with atonal music. This alone, according to him, can bring out "social contradiction" in "late" modernity.

What escapes him utterly is that jazz itself is the most glaring example of modernist expressionism, a type of musical diction that grew out of the extremest conditions of social oppression. In jazz this tormented social reality has pride of place in the form of an exquisitely wrought symbol. That in America this highly subversive and critical mode of aesthetic expression became integral to the country's mass culture is in fact a token of the essential democratic pulse that underlies that culture, even though it might be hidden and counteracted by other social and political tendencies. Just try fitting "Strange Fruit" into Adorno's perverse evaluations.

Jazz is in itself a prime example of the modernist fragmentation of holistic form which was the distinguishing mark of traditionalist aesthetics (the aesthetics of the "ruling classes"). It is an idiom that overturns expectations of formal completion, one that leaves everything open for future experimentation. That is why improvisation is so central to it. But for Adorno improvisation is a "bourgeois" category, one that prioritizes individual sensitivity over the "grand rhythms" of a social process that he himself is only privy to. To put it simply, though, jazz is the sound of social liberation, a phrase that just "don't mean a thing" unless it is predicated upon creative individuals breaking out of the constraints of social rule and convention to "do it their way" without political or philosophical authority watching over their shoulder and trying to bend their work to fit "holistic" ends as some master defines them.

Another social fact entirely missed by our wise sociologist is that in the whole ferment of jazz as it spread out of the confines of the South to engulf Chicago and New York we had the first living example of the equality of the races, at the time when racial segregation and oppression were rampant in America. Jazz was the way that black society showed it mettle, in a way that transgressed social and racial barriers. It was the cultural preparation for that epic struggle for civil rights that exploded in the fifties and the sixties. That someone like Adorno is constitutionally blind to these aesthetic and social realities is just enough to indict his sociology and theory of art.

Another thing that Adorno is incapable of grasping is that there is no inherent contradiction between the aesthetic of expressionism and jazz, unless one wants to erect a totalitarian elitism. Art is by definition an open concept and open experience. It is a universe without pre-ordained goals and structures, in which an endless plurality of inventions coexist. Mass modes of artistic production are integral to it, to the same extent as remote forms of aristocratic feeling catering to select individuals or groups.

The Frankfurt school's disdain for popular culture is really a disdain for democracy (for "bourgeois" democracy as they disparage it in the standard mode of that kind of discourse, which of course does not bother to define in any intelligible terms what other kind of democracy they have in mind). There is nothing theoretically wrong with mass entertainment, unless one hypothesizes that the whole of our waking time must be taken up with worrying and wondering about the evils of this world and how we may put them aright. The latter is indeed an option either for psychologically disturbed types or for those subsidized by the "bourgeois" state (like Adorno himself) to engage in ceaseless ideological rumination.

There is obviously a down-side to democratic art, namely the reduction to the least common denominator and the pandering to "common" feelings and "common-sense" morality. But we do not need Adorno to awaken us to this dimension of democratic society: we have Tocqueville for it, thank you, and without the sinister condemnation of democracy itself that goes together with Adorno's "high" aesthetics to boot. We have known from the beginning that the trite and the superficial are inseparable ingredients of mass culture. But from this it does not at all follow that "common" feeling and common-sense in general are to be despised. In favor of what? In favor of the privileged intuitions of some wise man, perhaps? From today's perspective this is impermissible.

Ordinariness is no ontological drawback. Ordinary people who cannot fathom deliberately jumbled "philosophy" are not idiots or stooges. Nor are those who ever cried watching Love Story -despite the obvious kitch, especially with the hindsight of a generation. Whoever claims this is an insufferable bigot, however dense his prose. Condemnation of the empirical, of the ordinary, of the commonplace is already a program for the elimination of that segment of reality that does not conform to our "theoretical" requirements. It is a program for the elimination of humanity as is, in favor of a fantastic prototype that exists only in the agitated minds of certain narcissists.

Anyone who knows something about the epistemology of the Frankfurt school is aware that for them common sense thinking is a swear word, just like factuality. This is Hegelianism, minus the good aspect of Hegel, namely the insistence that ordinary logic and empiricism are still valid, even though "subsumed". For Adorno, however, they are simply to be bypassed, and their proponents, like Popper, denounced, as stooges of the status quo. In this he did not learn from his colleague Walter Benjamin (or was he a colleague?), for whom the mechanic reproduction of the work of art of course strips it of its "aura", of its sacredness as it were, but at the same timet makes it available to the widest possible audience. What is gained and what is lost in this democratic reduction of the aesthetic can only be decided after a meticulous critical assessment. Benjamin, in any case, does not this that it is an unredeemed loss.

All in all, in the place of Adorno's aesthetic theology we need a tolerant and pluralistic art, where enjoyment is predicated upon the effort to commune with all sorts of new and strange objects, forms and languages. Through this it is quite possible, although not obligatory (nothing is obligatory in art, as opposed to ethics for instance), to like both jazz and classical music -in fact attachment to both of these genres is one of the commonest facts. For the rest every individual is entitled to his/her loves and aversions. We grant Adorno his dislike of jazz, and we have no right to complain. But we beg to be spared the silly "philosophy" that he erected upon this uncontroversial but uninteresting personal choice. 

A clever face

Caius

Ceasar

Little-Boot

Did he really deserve such a ravishing portrait in marble? The question is silly, but I will repat it: did he? So much subtlety, so much psychological empathy expended on a figure that has become the byword of tyrannical excess and sheer psychopathic malignity through the ages. For even if only a tiny fragment of the accusations leveled by Suetonius and Dion Cassius are true, the rest being calumnies reflecting the animus harbored against him by the senatorial party, still there is enough of depravity there to make one gasp. This young man insolently tossing his brow, his frightfully penetrating glance, the malicious smile emitted by his pursed lips, all this is (knowing what one does know) the quintessence of beastliness hiding under a highly polished facade. As I was standing before him I felt that one could very easily allow him/herself to be charmed by this eager face. So, again, did he deserve this?

The easy answer is that he did not, but it is a trite one. For the stuff of history consists of the canonization of various personages who just made a mark on memory. This elevation is mostly due to happenstance or privilege, and only in rare cases to ability. But ability which rides the cusp of chance equals happenstance as well; there have been untold millions of supremely gifted individuals simply swollowed by external adversity without a trace. But even those who left a good legacy had as a rule to purchase this through the suffering of myriads whom they used as the instruments of whatever beneficial goal they were working towards. Are they immune to prosecution on account of the end result, even though the mostly unstated and unreported woe of their victims was as brutally real as it gets? Hegel and his motley followers say yes, but I personally beg to differ.

And, then, there is the other circumstance that the alleged benefaction to humanity of these "world-historical" types is usually judged to be such post facto on the instigation of those who uphold and perpetuate its norms and structures. It is pronounced good simply because it was in some sense successful. But this is a terribly dangerous principle. For in the absence of a god of history who guides the outcomes according to a plan guaranteeing the triumph of virtue (whatever that might be), those who did prevail did not do so by necessity, but by mere chance. In which case it is entirely conceivable that their adversaries might have just as easily prevailed given a different conjunction of contingent factors (including ability to judge characters and situations).

We commend, for instance, the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath for bringing about the abolition of feudalism and the establishment of individual rights in Europe. But who is to assert, and on the basis of what secret gnosis, that the same outcome would not have been brought about anyway, without the abhorrent butchery that those "world-historical" events involved? Why do outcomes that the collective consciousness of humanity gradually inclines towards as it processes its historical experience have to be imposed on concrete life from above, namely through the actions of chosen individuals or groups supposedly incarnating a hypostatized universal will (a Weltgeist)? Why not entertain the contrary notion that it is only through the spontaneous confluence of countless particular actions on the ground that the very same outcomes can be securely established, in which case the dazzling theoretical and rhetorical pyrotechnics of those claiming to have read the mind of history's god (Hegel's phrase) is simply de trop? But we have been intellectually cowed by the audacity of those visions, a capitulation which fully serves our natural tendency to leave the strain of thinking to others in favor of sleepwalking through our lives or of mindlessly attaching ourselves to sundry "saviors".

A more interesting, and possibly equally true, answer is that the "bad fellows" do indeed deserve the adulation that art, literature and official history have heaped on them. Firstly, because if one digs deep enough one might discover some benefits that their murderous rampage did proffer to those that survived to enjoy them. After the black death those that were spared enjoyed a much more comfortable life, for vast tracts of lands now lay without master. After the annihilation of the Pontian Greeks ordered by Stalin (an event, by the way, which the staunch Stalinist frame of mind of today's Greece studiously ignores, although one might expect that it would inflame its ingrained nationalism), the populations left behind -or more accurately the segment thereof loyal to the Party- saw their standard of living rising appreciably, as they now appropriated the property of the masses that perished during the treks to central Asia. Stalinist propaganda reels of the time proudly exhibit the stately neoclassical dwellings of the Greeks, built before the revolution, as gifts of the communist regime to the grateful proletariat. And, which is more scary, this is how the surviving proletariat itself both willingly and through brain-washing came to remember them.

As for our friend Caius Little-Boot his sworn enemies inform us that before he had used up the immense treasure that Tiberius bequeathed to him (in the record time of less than a year of his accession to the imperial dignity), he also did accomplish projects that did favor the common weal (aqueducts, baths etc., not to mention public games), δημοκρατικώτατος γὰρ εἶναι τὰ πρῶτα δόξας (Δίων Κάσσιος). That first year was remembered as blissful by the people of Rome, both against the background of the afflictions of Pretorian rule in the city as Tiberius gradually rotted into bestiality in his Capri seclusion and also on account of the memory of the beloved Germanicus, the Boot's father.

And this brings us to the second, and more significant reason, why the malefactors "deserve" their immortality in art: they are weighty symbols. An aside here: Hitler and Stalin did not achieve such immortality for their tyranny also managed to destroy art itself (Eisenstein being a baffling exception). But Caius was full of artisitc pretensions himself to the extent of becoming enamored of dance masters and pining away at their feet on stage: ἐδούλευε δὲ καὶ τοῖς ὀρχησταῖς καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις τοῖς περὶ σκηνὴν ἔχουσιν. And he had the insight to recognize Greek genius and elevate Greek art. He even dabbled in writing poetry in Greek, apart from the fact that he spoke the language fluently. He, thus, had a mighty tool at his disposal which he was far-sighted enough to further. And it served him well. Mussolini can be said to be a true follower of his in this respect. For he also seized on genuine art and gave it free reign, to the extent that the artistic legacy from Fascist times (such as poetic and visual futurism as well as architecture as evinced by the EUR complex for instance) contains a genuine aesthetic kernel that defies the ideological declamation.

So what symbol did Caligula actually become? In his own eyes obviously that of divine rulership, almighty in its deeds that mock all human standards and inclinations. To me, the supreme token of his own sudden lunge into bestliness (allegedly after an unexpected recovery from a severe illness a short time into his reign) is not so much his incestuous relation to his sisters, and especially Drusilla, not even his sadistic rapaciousness with respect to other persons' goods (wives as well as money) -although all these things are nauseating enough. It is not, further, the famous floating bridge from Puteoli to Baeae. That was a jest, a cruel jest surely bankrupting further the public coffers and subjecting to his punishing whim a multitude of unfortunates as he strode about in the breastplate of Alexander, but still a jest, as were his two floating palaces in imitation one supposes of Cleopatra. No, his vilest urge was to ship from Greece all the statues of the gods he could lay his hands on, including the famous one of Zeus from Olympia, to cut off their heads and place his own on their shoulders instead. As I look at his head in Corinth I can very well imagine it being one of those which replaced the divine prototypes upon those mutilated bodies. This delusion of divinity (at least Alexander was faking it all) pinpoints the inner origin of the actual mutilations he inflicted far and wide upon the Roman populace, the sickest one being when he ordered a section of the crowd watching the games to be pushed into the arena to be mauled by the beasts as there were no more convicts to be used that day and there was still time for fun. All this in fulfilment of the prophesy of Tiberius that he was rearing a viper for the people of Rome. But Tiberius also added: "and a star in the firmament for all humanity". And how true he was, in his twisted way. For his adoptive son is indeed one of the darkest angels to grace the annals of human evil-doing.

Caius is the symbol of the depths of degradation that human nature can plumb, in the same way that the statues that he destroyed (he was also said to be planning the destruction of the works of Virgil and Ovid) are the benchmark of the heights of life-fostering creativeness which that same nature can also attain. His most appalling attribute, revealed early on, was according to Suetonius the delight he got from the pain of others: the more excruciating the pain the more orgasmic his transport. This propensity he ably carried forward well into his reign: ἦν δὲ οὐ τὸ πλῆθος τῶν ἀπολλυμένων οὕτω τι δεινόν, καίπερ δεινὸν ὄν, ἀλλ' ὅτι τοῖς φόνοις αὐτῶν ὑπερέχαιρε καὶ τῆς τοῦ αἵματος θέας ἀπλήστως εἶχεν (Δίων Κάσσιος). His special skill lay in construing the statements of his subjects, no matter how laudatory of himself, in such a way that would always support their despoilment and physical annihilation. He was the consummate ἀργυρολόγος, as Dion Cassius also calls him. If someone praised him as the greatest emperor of all time for all his youth, he interpreted that as meaning that he was too young for the office. Hence the speaker was pronounced guilty of sacrilege. So, whether one spoke or remained silent he was equally condemned.

He hated Tiberius, of course, for having  murdered his mother and brothers. He even smothered him on his deathbed as the old brute seemed to be tarrying in giving up the ghost. But when he acceeded to office, he interpreted the denunciations of the defunct emperor that the advent of the son of the beloved Germanicus unleashed as an attack upon that same imperial office, especially if they came from senators. In his attack upon the Senate he brazenly evoked they very admonitions of Tiberius, in order to justify his murderous onslaught: δεῖ καὶ ἐμὲ μηδὲν χρηστὸν παρ' ὑμῶν προσδέχεσθαι, Dion quotes him as declaring. And the biographer continues: τοιαῦτα ἄττα  εἰπὼν αὐτὸν δὴ τὸν Τιβέριον τῶ λόγῳ παρήγαγε, λέγοντά οἱ ὅτι καὶ καλῶς καὶ ἀληθῶς πάντα ταῦτα εἴρηκας, καὶ διὰ τοῦτο μήτε φιλήσῃς τινὰ αὐτῶν μήτε φείσῃ τινός. πάντες τε γὰρ μισοῦσί σε καὶ πάντες ἀποθανεῖν εὔχονται, καὶ φονεύσουσί γε, ἂν δυνηθῶσι. μήτ' οὖν ὅπως τι χαρίσῃ πράξας αὐτοῖς ἐννόει, μήτ' ἂν τι θρυλῶσι φρόντιζε, ἀλλὰ τό τε ἡδὺ καὶ τὸ ἀσφαλὲς τὸ σεαυτοῦ μόνον ὡς καὶ δικαιότατον προσκόπει. οὕτω μὲν γὰρ οὔτε τι πείσῃ κακὸν καὶ πάντων τῶν ἡδίστων ἀπολαύσεις, καὶ προσέτι τιμηθήσῃ ὑπ' αὐτῶν, ἂν τ' ἐθέλωσιν ἂν τὲ μή......οὐδεὶς γὰρ ἀνθρώπων ἑκὼν ἄρχεται, ἀλλ' ἐφόσον μὲν φοβεῖται, θεραπεύει τὸν ἰσχυρότερον, ὅταν δὲ δὴ θαρσήσῃ, τιμωρεῖται τὸν ἀσθενέστερον.

A chill runs down one's spine listening to this. All the more so because it is a true diagnosis. This is the very genius of death pontificating.This is the discourse of pure might, shorn of any moral adornment. This is the formula of historical action reduced to its elementary components. This is Thucydides looking on from his distance of four centuries or so to witness the verification of his insights (he was the model for Dion Cassius). Machiavelli must have learned a lot from this diatribe.

All subjects hate their rulers and wish them dead. So, the ruler should not show favor to any one of them (especially the most potent among them), and he should not spare any of them. Murder is the indispensable instrument of power. The only thing the ruler must strive to effect is what is pleasant and safe for himself. If he does this he will not suffer anything adverse to his interests and he will enjoy all good things in life. Moreover, if he achieves this he will be honored, willingly or not, by those who secretly wish to destroy him. No man willingly bends to power. They will serve it as long as they are afraid of it. But if they gain in strength, they will put down the weaker party.

The most disheartening piece of this wisdom is the one claiming that the whole society will acquiesce in egregious tyranny, provided the tyrant is resolved to be unflinchingly brutal as long as it takes and he lets all know it. Of course, a conspiracy may lay him low, as it did Caius. But the tyrannicides usually do not aim to do away with tyranny, but only with the tyrant so they can take his place. Cassius Charaea, the killer of Caligula, was an exception in that harking back to his namesake who had asassinated Julius Ceasar, intended to restore the republic by giving power back to the Senate. But the dominant political actors, even though they were opposed to the fallen monster, did not concur. Poor lisping Claudius was cowering in the closet and when the Praetorians found him he thought that he was headed straight for the executioner's block. But they acclaimed him emperor instead and they disembowelled Chaeraea. Empire was the only game in town and the various factions were just vying about who would execute it most consequently. They fully shared the dead boy's horrific doctrine, except that they objected to his manner of dividing the spoils. Society, from its elites down to its last downtrodden member, had been completely gleichgeschaltet. The imperial regime was strengthnened by the murder of the wayward emperor, for that weapon had been employed which is most congenial to its tyrannical nature. Claudius would eventually be felled in the same manner. So the tyranny went on and on, and in the minds of subsequent generations it even acquired the glow of glory and beneficence, manufactured chiefly by orators, poets and historians.

So we are stuck with Caius after all. Can we see through his smirk? Can we decipher the symbolism that his, alas, attractive countenance exudes, brushing aside the mesmerizing aesthetics?

Corinth in the spring sun

A weary sailor dreaming of the priestesses of Aphrodite

A chubby Hellenistic flutist and friends

The fortress of Aphrodite: Acrocorinth

From Corinth or from Syracuse?

A Corinthian capital from Corinth

A goat contemplating the vanity of existence

Apollo and Daphne

That old bloody-mindedness again

Apollo on guard 

The ruins of Corinth are opulent and exquisitely wrought, as was to be expected. But they are not "Greek". They are Roman, or more precisely Greco-Roman, with the exception of that stalwart of quintessential Hellenism, the archaic temple of Apollo. Looking at that long suffering giant, the oldest free standing edifice in Greece, I was instantly reminded of its brother, the temple of Apollo in Syracuse. They are uncannily similar, as they ought to be. The columns of both temples are monolithic. The temple in Ortygia is not in such a prominent spot as that in Corinth, but otherwise the family resemblance is striking. It could not be otherwise: Syracuse was the most illustrious colony of Dorian Corinth.

For the rest what we are looking at here today is Colonia laus Julia Corinthensis, namely the city founded by Julius Ceasar in 44 B.C some time after his victory over Pompey at Pharsala in Thessaly. The Hellenic city had ceased to exist in 146 B.C. when Mummius Achaicus razed it to the ground slaughtering its population, in another feat of glory as understood in those beloved classical times. The new city had a mixed population, consisting of Roman legionaries and their families, Greeks, Jews and others. The Jewish population in particular increased dramatically after the crushing of the Judean revolt by Vespasian and Titus. Vespasian dispatched to Corinth 6000 Jewish slaves, the pitiful remnants of another glorious massacre, in order to participate in the great project of cutting a sea passage across the Isthmus. This had already been dreamed up by Periandros who had to settle with the δίολκος instead, and revived by no other than Caligula. Nero was still enamored of this idea.

These facts are well known and in a sense trite. Nevertheless, they go against the grain of the historical understanding prevalent in modern Greek society and education. If you bring up the Roman dimension, you will most likely get disapproving frowns: how dare you claim that such an unrivalled culture as the Greek was ever mixed together with the crudity of the West which, as we all know, was eating acorns when "we" were building Parthenons? This is the level of imbecilic stupor that learning in general has descended to here, especially during the past generation. The chief assumption behind this moronic notion is, of course, that there has always existed a racially and culturally "pure" nation, which went through various phases of foreign occupation without ever forfeiting its identity. Thus we are taught in school that first there was the Ρωμαιοκρατία, then the Φραγκοκρατία and finally the Τουρκοκρατία. Of course, no mention is made of a Μακεδονοκρατία, although the descent of the Macedonians and their military destruction of political freedom in southern Greece was very much perceived by the southern Poleis as a violent imposition of a foreign regime.

The Romans, then, supposedly came and strangled the freedom of Greece, although there was no politically unified Greece in 146 B.C. In fact it was the Roman conquest that amalgamated the disparate fragments of Hellas, which had been warring among themselves as always, into a unitary province of Achaia, with Corinth as its capital. It pays to be reminded that Rome itself was most probably founded by Hellenic traders sailing from Greek Sicily up the Tiber (the Aenean tale being an Augustan concoction). Besides the Roman elites already at the time of the late Republic had been decisively Hellenized. The upper crust was Greek speaking or at least bilingual. When Ceasar was assassinated his last words were spoken in Greek, and Suetonius presents Caligula for instance speaking in Greek and citing the Greek poets in the original. In another period the official language of the Christian church with Rome as its center was Greek as late as the 4th c. A.D., a whole line of early Popes being Greek-speaking (some of them being celebrated as "saints" by the Orthodox church even to this day). Roman culture had developed under the guidance of Hellenic and Hellenistic prototypes.

Rome's takeover of the Greek mainland was a political event of great significance. But it was no "enslavement" as today's nationalists would portray it, with the fuming patriots huddles in dank underground cells, singing Greek anthems sotto voce and plotting the overthrow of the foreign yoke as the boots of the legionaries pounded the pavement above and the barbarian Latin tongue drowned out the noble sounds of Greek in the marketplaces.The Greek people were not a pariah community under Roman jurusdiction. That is why they never dreamt of revolting (as the Jews repeatedly did). Their language, religion and philosophy had triumphed all along the line and the leading lights of Greek thought (Polybius, Plutarch, Herodes Atticus) were fully integrated into a civilization they considered their own without the least detriment to their robust and proud Hellenism. To them civis romanus sum was in no way an insult, as our "national" baboons would have it. But then they would also condemn Polybius and Plutarch and a host of other late Greeks as traitors and bootlickers of the oppressors of the fatherland. Their atrophic mind is capable of just so much.

It was out of this Roman imperium that the later Byzantine entity, the eastern portion of the Empire, emerged.  Here we observe a remarkable somersault in the nationalist fairy tale. The "Byzantines" were Romans, they called themselves Romans, and they claimed for themselves the entire heritage of the former world empire through Constantine's translatio imperii. Magically, though, in nationalist hands the Byzantines spring out of the box once again Greeks, the descendants of that pure race that the Roman conquest had enslaved. In every schoolchild's mind today, and for the wider society too, it is a firm truth that Constantine, Theodosius and Justinian were Greeks, i.e. the same in all respects as today's Greeks, as Greek as Kolokotronis and Athanasios Diakos -and Andreas Papandreou, God forbid!

Christianity itself has also been reinterpreted from this angle as a Greek project, chiefly on account of the Hellenistic Koine being the language of the gospels (there is even a nationalist fringe propagating the notion that Jesus himself was Greek). Capitalizing on the rivalry between the eastern and the western church from the 9th c. onwards, the nationalists also eject the "Franks" from the precincts of the "true faith". Correct Christianity now becomes the exclusive property of the only god-anointed race: it is Greek Orthodoxy (mind you this implicitly also excludes the Slavs and Arabs of the Orthodox persuasion, just about everyone in fact who is not of the only allowable ethnic lineage). In this manner the accursed races of Jews and Latins are cleansed away and the annals of world civilization now sparkle with only one jewel of a race to adorn them.

It is entirely superfluous for any sane person (but sanity is in short supply here) to remark that although Paul, for instance, wrote in Greek, he was no Greek at all in the ethnic, cultural, racial or any other sense as the nationalist monstrosity would have it. Although he is indeed someone that, in a broad sense, any truly educated and fair-minded Greek of today in possession of his/her language and a critical historical sense would be rightly proud of. But these Greeks are a tiny minority in the "Greece" of today, which is instead a den of ranting nationalist apemen, under black or red flags regardless. And, thus, as a result of the above violation of just about every canon of right thinking and plain decency, the correlative historical tale of the Φραγκοκρατία emerges. Here again, we have the western beast  springing out of its forests and caves in order to annihilate the only fortress of ethnic purity and religious sanctity in the universe, Greek Constantinople. It would be self-demeaning to comment on this piece of abomination.

A visit to Corinth under the spring sun is refreshing and rejuvenating. The temple of Apollo still stands guard over the slope of the Corinthian Acropolis, the Acrocorinth, towering above and sheltering within its walls the remnants of the renowned temple of Aphrodite with its one thousand-strong crew of dazzlingly beautiful female servants of the Goddess. In the distance the Corinthian gulf sparkles, with the ornate Lechaion road pointing the way to the once bustling port of the same name. That Corinth was filthy rich just stares you in the face, and you don't necessarily need Horace to remind you that penurious nobodies are better advised to stay away. This is the Hellas of the world, an ecumenical city ably moulding with clearly Hellenic tools a universal humanism in which other cultures could also feel at ease. Roman Corinth is in fact a restoration of the universal cultural and political significance of its archaic and classical predecessor. In the marvelous museum you come face to face with the artifacts of this exciting epic: the remnants from the time of Kypselos and Periandros, the delightful pastoral mosaics and the haunting facade of the Phrygian captives which are the flowers of Hellenic art in its Roman reincarnation.

It is here also that you can stare straight into the eyes of Caligula. But more of this anon.

On the uselessness of Christianity

All the above of course applies to the primitive form of Christianity (for lack of a better word), the one emerging from the Gospels, or to be exact from the sayings of Jesus as recorded in these Gospels. Everything else is an accretion (even Jesus' words may have been twisted, come to think of it). And especially the Pauline version which is a rude imposition, lacking completely in the simplicity and the humility we find in the original message. Paul is pure conceit and self-importance masquarading under a fake confession of abjectness in the presence of his redeemer. His ostentatious emotionality is wielded as a weapon of terror. It is an irritating inflation of his own ego, in the exact same manner as his follower Augustine. It is just the rhetoric of power, or more precisely the power that dreams of its eventual elevation to world domination. With Paul the charisma has been already routinized into utter boredom. He is a rule-smith and behind the filigree of his injunctions there already gapes a disheartening void. His command that existing authority must be obeyed unquestioningly by "all souls" (πᾶσα ψυχὴ ἐξουσίαις ὑπερεχούσαις ὑποτασσέσθω) lays the groundwork for the transformation of Christianity itself into a system of authority. It did that by latching on to the existant political structures. This announces the sorry and sordid future. Paul turned Christianity (for lack of a better word) into a church and a theology, that is into a set of cognitive and moral fetters. And by becoming that it ceased to be a living and redeeming faith.

But the the original "good news" was not a dogma, but a kerygma. It was the slave's mode of being, his coming to terms with his unfreedom sub specie libertatis and his attempt to share it with others. His subjection to external authority was not by way of validating it, but an act of inner defiance that sapped its foundations. This slave was a silent rebel, and not a salivating would-be king waiting for the moment when he would bestride the summit of worldly power. This is the valuable and abiding existential core of the Christian world-view, the one salvaged by Kierkegaard in modern times. But it was this that fell by the way as Christianity became an imperial religion and thus embarked upon its own stretch of vile deeds, the first in the series being its brutish assault (on the instigation of newly Christianized kings) upon the standing legacy of the classical spirit, smashing its temples, statuary etc. The acts of Christian rulers in subsequent centuries were just as unyieldingly rational, and as a result criminal, as any of those of Hellenic antiquity. They worshipped the logic of power, just as absolutely as any of the monsters portrayed by Thucydides or Suetonius. That -maybe- they experienced a more complicated inner torment does not mitigate their iniquity. It rather magnifies the signal hypocrisy of their conduct. Against this backdrop, the medieval "mirrors" of the Christian prince can only be read either as a parody or as an indictment.

This triumphant, official Christianity is, compared to Hellenic culture, an enormity and eyesore. Its advent drastically impoverished humanity. It drained it of all cognitive grandeur and moral earnestness. For it could now allegedly count on guaranteed salvation, provided one recited some incoherent mumbo-jumbo, made some funny motions and bribed the absent Father. The believer, you see, had now money in the heavenly bank with guaranteed interest accruing for all eternity. It all became so easy. And predestination made it even easier: for self-righteousness is the commonest of human propensities. Everyone can convince oneself of one's own self-evident goodness. And this is "proof" that one's precious self definitely counts among the "saints". This led to an ethos of passivity loaded with a bogus self-importance. This vulgarly political Christianity killed politics. For it abjured praxis in the world, and placed all creative endeavor in the whim of an alien being. Nothing depends on our initiatives, so we might just lie back and wait for our justification to descend from above. For we are, of course, certain that we have it in our pocket. This is such a convenient laziness.

As for the Christian aesthetic, I have always thought that both its Byzantine repetitive formalism and its Gothic extravagance are shallow and boring. The suffering here is cheap and artificial. It is made to order to induce self-loathing and terror. Its exaggeration just makes one laugh, or retch. This is not art, but just mechanical technique meant to regiment and to cow. It does not even want to know itself as art, so why insult it with a tag that it resents. Art is the refinement of pleasure. And pleasure here is forbidden. In the medieval epics, such as the Chanson de Roland, the Nibelungenlied or El Cid, what is of artistic worth comes through the depiction of brutality and violent emotion, the raw physicality of existence. To the extent that they are genuine works of art they are, for all the pious pretense, anti-Christian. The same goes for the philosophy of the time. To the extent that it exhibits true thinking it works against the grain of the theology. Whatever is of value there is a fresh pantheistic naturalism, its bold heretical gestures. The doctrine of "double truth" is an indictment of official theology, the death knell of Christian smugness. Living thought pines for the return of Hellenism, the return of man.

The theologically based narcisssism promoted by Christianity is far more dangerous than the egomania of an Achilles. For it leads to a murderous free-for-all, in which all clashing parties claim to have the one true God on their side. The Greek gods, on the contrary, were divided among themselves. They were a mirror of fragmented humanity on the highest aesthetic plane. The Greeks, in any case, never fought for Apollo or Athena. They fought for the interests and the ideals (which was the same thing) of their Polis. The "holy wars" of cross-bearing hulks and paupers (and all other such wars derived therefrom) are on the contrary the exemplar of ugliness, of deformity. A figure like Richard Coeur-de-Lion is indeed interesting as a politician and war-lord and the atrocious massacre he perpetrated at Acre just as tragically despicable as the slaughter at Plataea or Melos. But in all this his "Christianity" is beside the point. The unchanging human nature that Thucydides depicts cut through the pointless theological babble of those times or any other, and brings to the fore the the savage beauty of the raw deed, exposing by and bye the superfluousness of the Christian pap. Compared to the sublime pathos of Greek tragedy the myriad of heavy tomes of abstruse Christian theology are not worth a fart. When this finally dawned on Christian "thinkers" they tried to bring Greek reason back in through the back door. But without abandoning their πρώτη πλάνη, namely the claim of epistemological priority for their bizarre "revelation". But this won't do. And Enlightenment criticism readily showed the emptiness of this pretense.

But there was another original sin affecting, this time, all Christianity (for lack of a better word), including its innocent, primitive form. The Christians rightly diagnosed the Hellenic world as immoral. But they misidentified its essential fault. With remarkable single-mindedness they located it in its sexual licentiousness and "perversity" (meaning male love, τὰ παιδικά). They heap a torrent of violent invective upon the religion of antiquity as stemming from and promoting erotic misconduct. The Alexandrian apologists, for instance, have no eye for any other aspect of Greek art or culture, apart from the lewed writhing of its naked bodies. And what a prurient eye it is. Their pornographic imagination gets terribly swollen by this spectacle to which they attribute the collapse of the ancient world. But behind this primness (exemplified by the self-castration of an Origenes, for instance) is in fact hidden an obsession with the biological functions, an intense undercurrent of animal hedonism. This may be sublimated, in the monasteries in paricular, as the love of the Virgin (what an image of supressed but imperative sexuality!), but it also breaks through to the surface with a surfeit of illicit erotic acrobatics. This, in its various forms, including the criminal one, has been an essential ingredient of the Christian experience throughout the centuries. Homoerotic "perversion" is in fact a substantial element of this sustained delinquency. The Christians themselves are the most trenchant accusers of their own doctrines.

It is, hence, exceedingly shameless for them to indict the Greeks with respect to their sexual propensities, and another proof of their intolerable hypocrisy. In truth, the emancipated libido was one of the most valuable, and tragic certainly, features of Hellenic life. In its extreme manifestations it led to grotesque suffering and injustice. When Caligula was murdered he was repeatedly stabbed in the genitals -and he certainly deserved it. But in the pre-Christian world the erotic was out in the open, acnowledged, contemplated, depicted in literature, theorized about, moulded into philosophy, the object of its creative agony. And poetry was at hand to process the matter of obstreperous desire into vivifying images of both suffering and delight. The human image was not at that time mutilated. The Greeks grappled with it in the totality of its powers and inclinations, without shying away from their excesses. This is infinitely more sane and natural, compared to the real perversity that Christian thanatophilia introduced into our culture, with monasticism as its most egregious manifestation. "Saint" Gregory of Nazianus' ode to chastity is, for all its impeccable Greek, a monument of inhuman ferocity. Only an enemy of the human race would pen such a perverted diatribe.

The uses of Christianity

Viciousness as high art : notice the smile on his face (from Delphi)

More of the same 

Hegel says that Christianity was the religion of the slaves. Nietsche concurs, but loads this description with all kinds of negative evaluations. But why? Slaves need their religion, too. Actually it is a form of their liberation, a mental prehension of their turn at playing masters. This primitive Christianity was, thus, -I am reluctant to say- kind of salutary. It boosted the energy of the docile masses. Belief is not innocent; it brings about action. And some of the action that this new-fangled, childish belief brought about was in fact beneficial at the time.

We tend to idolize and idealize the classical era. But this is actually to miss its point and in fact devalue it. Hellenic antiquity was a raw and rough place and time to be. It was full of docile masses, except that they do not raise their heads above the parapet of out adored classical literature. One can catch a glimpse of them, if one wishes to. But we do not ordinarily wish to. Also its heroes are not exactly the avatars of pure humanity that we mythologize them into. To say that Achilles, for instance, was a butcher, the very paradigm of narcissitic fury wreaking destruction all around is not a sacriledge. It is a factual description, a plain truth that one can glean easily from the pages of Homer himself.

We ordinarily refer to some "dialogue" that took place in 416 B.C. between Athenians and Melians. Of course it was no such thing. It was pure savagery, the brutal assertion of might that laid waste an entire human community. One only needs to peel the thin wrapping of rhetoric to perceive the awfulness of it all. Ditto with respect to the Lacedemonian's treatment of the Plataeans in 427 B.C. We have the consummate speeches as concocted by Thucydides. And in the end what? Once again the brutal execution of two hundred Platean captives that gave themselves up as ἱκέται hoping for just and humane treatment. The more one delves into our cherished classicism the more one comes face to face with the very dregs of humanity's motivation and conduct. If we look at the sublime art of that age with a sober eye, i.e. clearing away the brush of mere aesthetics (or rather kallistics), then what are we staring at? Mostly, again, the foulest excesses of brutality; murder most foul (on all sides). Of unspeakable Rome one had better not speak. That Hellenic art was able to transmute these despicable deeds, the treatchery, the assassination, the rape, the disembowelments, the decapitations, the hacking of the enemy's limbs and the rest of it, into exquisite and eternal forms is no absolution of any kind. The reality behind the stupendous facade remains tainted. Simply because it was reality all too human, and for no other reason. The greatness, in fact, of Hellenic antiquity was that it was able to fashion a glorious culture out of such filthy matter.

The foolishness of primitive Christianity was an antidote of sorts to the mayhem engulfing the tormented and fragmented Hellenic world (that it was truly foolishness, μωρία, we have the word of Paul himself). It signified the Aventine secession of the slavish myriads from the works and the wealth of their raging, effete and brilliant masters. This exclusion was real fact inflicted upon the greatest segment of society by those masters themselves. But through the new faith that external fact became internalized as a willed rejection of that famed legacy by those that were never its beneficiaries.

The will of the slave begins to revolt the very moment the slave perceives himself as a slave. At that point he realizes that his slavery is his strength, for it is his unfree labor that props up the master's throne (Hegel). Christianity enabled him to cash in on this awareness, to metabolize his unfreedom as a higher, more potent freedom. The slave, through Chtistianity, began thus to revel in his slavery, which was now theorized into the human condition as such. "We are all slaves", the word went around. Including the cruel masters who are slaves of their passions and also slaves of an omnipotent God whom they do not acknowledge, but who will in good time smite them to smithereens. Slavery is the very definition of being human. We are slaves to physical necessity, slaves to death. Through that prism everything indeed, including the greatest wonders of Hellenic achievement, is just vanity, ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων τὰ πάντα ματαιότης.

We must not blind ourselves to the fact that there is a serious degree of factuality in this assertion. The Christians have harsh physical reality on their side. Modern science is the most persuasive proponent of their worldview: when the sun eventually implodes, we will see then what happens to the brilliance of ages past. To me, that the Parthenon will in the very long run be annihilated in the general breakdown of the present physical set up is a thought that occasions fright. It is enough, almost, to turn one into a Christian.

So it is true to say, and fair to concede, that the hour of Christianity had duly come. It came at the historically appointed time. And it was its great enemy, Hellenism, in its convulsions and its revulsions and its monstrosites, that brought it forth. The Christianization of the Hellenized Oecumene is one of the most baffling historical outcomes. How was it that the elites, eventually, of that supremely sophisticated and sceptical age decided to turn belly up and commence their after-life now as fools? What prompted them to don the madcap? How was it that Greek rhetoric began now to spew forth the garbage of the Christian dogma? How come philosophy degaded itself into puerile mumbling about miracles and saints? The Greeks had their theologies and their mysteries of course. But their gods were the summits of the visible and the sensible. Their mysteries were but the nether regions of physical matter.

Historically this transformation is not fully explicable. But philosophically it is clear as the sun. In Platonic terms, it was the revolt of the ἐπιθυμητικὸν and the θυμοειδὲς against the λογιστικόν. Reason, having reached the peak of its self-unfolding, now doubled on itself. Yes, it imploded under the weight of its stupendous achievement. The supreme flower of its development was scepticism, the doubting of its very own being. The sweep of this doubt was so powerful, that it laid low the cognitive and moral certainties of former times. And rulers, such as Alexander, freed now from the weight of these constraints began to identify themselves as gods. Their wordly action was still supremely rational: to rule the Egyptians one had to become Egyptian himself in mind and in habit. But this signified the emancipation of Egyptian (Oriental, generally) sensibility from any Hellenic pretenses. When everything is doubtful the only certain thing is faith. This, and the cruelty of the deeds of the masters.

Believing in the Gods

The smirk of the one who knows

Is it possible in our day and age to believe in the Gods of the Hellenic pantheon? Nothing is more effortless. This is a simple act of sound sense and in total accord with our cognitive faculties. I do not mean by this to subscribe to the whole set of devotional practices and underlying popular superstition (which in any case mars every other faith that we know of). This historical and experiential crust must be scraped off. We must yet retain the mythology that informs it, certainly not as a body of factually true occurrences. For it is neither true in that sense not internally consistent by far. But it does not need to be either the one or the other. The mythological core is essential for its unsurpassed aesthetic power and as a set of symbols cryptically containing the gist of psychological and social existence. It is a set of pregnant riddles. Even the inconsistency of the versions and accounts is of prime significance, for inner dissonance and self-strife is the very stuff of being a human self in an impenetrable cosmos.

After we have thus cleansed the edifice of the expendable superveniences, what is left is a core of linguistic descriptions (and artistic renditions thereof) fully corresponding to the perceptible outlines of our natural experience. W. Burkert has already shown that in trenchant detail, but it does no harm to recall this penetrating insight. There is no inherent antithesis between religious faith and the course of the physical world, in fact the former trails the necessities of the latter. Zeus is the power of the sky: where is the dificulty believing in that? "Zeus" is a name, a sign containing as its meaning the imperious dominion, for good or ill, of a given set of natural exigencies. It stands for the turning of the seasons, the consuming power of time, the helplessness of humanity (even of fully matured scientific humanity like ours) in the face of cosmic constants that it cannot counteract or countermand and which will eventually annihilate it. Poseidon is the power of the sea: where is the difficulty believing in that? From the battles of Odysseus with the wrath of the watery main, to the Mary Rose and the Gustav Vasa and other countless ship wrecks, to the disappearing Pacific islands under global warming and the recent tidal wave that devastated Japan there is no more everpresent fact if one cares to reflect on it. Aphrodite stands for the devastating blows of desire: where is the difficulty believing in that? We have all been knocked helpless and unconscious by its pitilessness at one time or another.

It was good old Euripides that laid all that bare for us a long time ago. He was accused of cheapening the mystery: that was wicked jab as far as I am concerned. The mystery becomes all the more intense and threatening once you locate it inside the soul. Once transcendence is suppressed then you are left face to face with your self as the inscrutable demon par excellence. You can no longer blame external forces. That was the convenience of traditional religion. But there is nothing convenient in true faith. For it does not prove anything; instead it forces you to come to blows with what cannot be proven and thus assimilate it into the very nucleous of your inner being. Euripides is terrible, ludicrously terrible indeed at times. But isn't this what being-in-the world is all about? The terror springs from inside, it is the realization of our nullity which has to be made good by a countervailing greatness that we must conjure for ourselves with the meager tools that nature, our nature, provides. One must be able to laugh with that presumption. One must be able to deride one's own pretensions, for it is in this self-willed put-down that one might find the strength to fly over the chasm of our insignificance, nay our non-existence. One has to be a great optimist, a great narcissist even, to attempt something  as vain and doomed as that. But this is the leap of faith. It does not settle anything, but without it nothing is settled either. So in a sense you are forced to undertake it, if only you begin to contemplate. For contemplation is the wheel that mows you down, once you allow it -as you must- to commence its turning.

No, Euripides did not kill faith in the gods. He clothed it in a new kind of beauty, a beauty that is present and at hand, a beauty that is made -if at all- out of our own deeds and failures, i.e. of our mere words, our flatus vocis. Euripides shows that this doomed accident called man is indeed omnipotent, that he is the god. The spark of divinity he can manufacture for himself by striking with the hardest edge of his being upon the absoluteness of the world. This is the proverbial irresistible force colliding with an immovable object. Out of this (logically and empirically, but not aesthetically) impossible encounter anything might flow. Euripides believes as an atheist, and this is the most sublime and menacing form of faith -provided that it is transmuted into a world of incandescent forms. And he did this (something that, for instance, Adorno -another believing atheist- singularly failed to achieve).

But divinity is not only benign -as the Greeks very well knew. God succours, nurtures, but he also smites and pulversizes. The gods are envious and oppressive. They are vengeful and certainly far from fair. It was only the fancy of some odd idelaists, such as Hesiod and Solon, who wanted to see in god the guarantor of a cosmic order of justice. Plato follows suit, but he is wide of the mark in his churlish tirades against the "immorality" of the mythological accounts. Take away this immorality and you denude them of their truth. Then you have a hypothetical, artificial religion that is at odds with the physicality of life. But even Plato in his sane moments fully acknowledged that the concept of god is entirely coterminous with that of the natural universe. Certainly physical pleasure is at the heart of his pursuit of virtue as well.

Rain fructifies the fields, but it also floods and drowns indiscriminately. The first rain that inseminated mother earth was the blood from the genitals of Uranus cut off by the admantine sicle of his son. There is terror and beauty wrapped in one in this anbhorrent image. To be in the throes of faith means to gasp for breath in the coils of contradiction. And the divine deeds of man are equally double-faced, as Sophocles was eager to declare. Knowledge heals, but it also kills. Self-knowledge in particular -and this with regard to the very self engendering it in the first place. We must not beautify god. Apollo is also ἀπολλύων, the destroyer. He is both male and female. He is the killer of the snake, as well as the snake itself. He is the slayer of the Danaans (ἑκηβόλος), the bringer of death. Neither must we idealize the civilization that brought forth and worshipped such a god. The Greek era is awash with the atrocious deeds of the deities as well men striving to deify themselves. Ἄτη herself is a goddess and we know all too well the evil fruits of her exertions. But it is in the midst of such dark toil that humanity rises to the greatness that it demands from itself and knows that it is capable of. And it is upon this greatness (ephemeral, indeed) that we are still feeding.

Light can only grow from darkness. This is the wisdom of Greek religion. And it is the only one that man qua man is capable and worthy of. For it does not demand the superssession of human reality, and it does not posit a fantastic land of unalloyed goodness, as the cult of a later God-Man purported. This latter myth (for which the man who others stamped as the Christ was not responsible for) is a debilitating one. It revels in the nothingness of humanity, without seizing the entrails of this nullity to rise above it. It abides breathless and impotent in the feeling of non-being. Hellenic faith on the contrary is not reductionistic. It equates human consciousness with nature, but it does not level it to the latter's base automatism. The rythm of the world becomes the very pulse that the ignited self perceives within. And this awareness of oneness with external nature becomes an active strength to deflect whatever necessity has in store for us. We know ab initio how this rebellion is fated to end. Achilles knows that if he stays in the Troad he is going to die. But he stays, he dies and he becomes Achilles. If he had lived he would have become a nonentity, scratched from the tablets of our faith and knowledge. Destiny is there to be acknowledged certainly, but one does not prostrate himself before it. Our being fuses with nature, but only to become second nature (φύσις δευτέρα) within it. The task is to rise as high as one feels like or dares to rise. It's not as if there is no deep melancholy here. The Greeks know how to rue and mourn. It's best not to be born, mutters Sophocles, second best to die young. But since we were not granted non-existence, we must prosper with the (poisoned) boon that came our way. They know full well as I said above, how ephemeral all this is. But they do not feel free to be daunted by this knowledge, for thus they would abjure their freedom. The freedom to make the most of the mystery that we come face to face with looking in the mirror.