The cultural quagmire

It has been fun over the last few weeks teaching my graduate students a few things about medieval Greek political and intellectual history. They had never heard of Procopius' Historia Arcana for instance -they are graduate students of political science mind you, some of them holding diplomas from departments of philology. They were equally ignorant of the circumstances of Photius' assumption of the patriarchal office in the 9th century or of the exegetical controversies surrounding Constantine VII Porphyrogennitus' De thematibus. I don't blame them and I must say that their response has been rather encouraging: many of them are open to looking at these things through different glasses. But the obstacles are formidable.

Throughout their schooling they have been taught that "Byzantium" (the Eastern Roman Empire) was an ethnically, culturally and politically Greek state in the "national" sense that the official ideology of the 19th century defined it -minus the considerable subtlety that even the national historiography of the time (e.g. Paparrigopoulos) displayed. To the average modern Greek person Constantine, Theodosius and Justinian were great Greek leaders, in exactly the same way that Pericles, Alexander, the last Palaeologue, Kosmas the Aetolian, Kolokotronis and Venizelos were. If you ask them to explain the "greatness" of Justinian the embarrased silence is well nigh universal -with the possible exception of some garbled noises referring to his military conquests in the west and the building of Hagia Sophia.

In this ludicrous tale the military dimension in is always pre-eminent. For the chief idea underpinning it is that once "we" were κοσμοκράτορες: "we had" the whole world which was then wrested from us by succesive onslaughts of the "bad guys", i.e. the Romans, the Franks, the Turks, all the way to the present with the role of the ravenous wolf feasting on the entrails of God's chosen race currently played by the "troika" in collusion with the inevitable Americans. On this reading the history of the world over the last two millenia has been stamped by a gigantic anti-Greek conspiracy. Of Roman law and its despotic slant, of Justinian's oppressive and anti-Hellenic religious policies and the ruinous internal consequences of his military and edificatory megalomania not the slightest awareness.

So it is always very enjoyable for me to read to them from ch. 8 of the Historia Arcana the passages describing the dullness (ὄνος νωθρός), meanness and rapaciousness of this ruler that rained material and spiritual destitution on his subjects thus preparing the eventual dismemberment of his realm. But of course it is a veritable riot to cite from ch. 9 the sexual exploits of his consort Theodora. One has to tread very thin ice here in trying to avoid becoming pornographic.

The serious challenge, however, in all this is still to explain the "greatness", i.e. the overarching historical significance, of this emperor in particular, as well as the crucial value for European civilization in general of the Hellenic language and culture saturating the apex of East Roman society -all the while eschewing nationalist trash. I am saying this because among academic circles (especially the faction of the "Lacanian left" which has controlled manu militari Greek academia over the last couple of decades) the anti-national spirit has been indeed pronounced. But this stance has been underpinned by the arcana of post-structuralist balderdash. Their entanglement in a web of pure theory (that only they themselves understand) derives from and in turn enhances a monstrous ignorance of actual history, camouflaged by their elevation of "history itself" to the chief theoretical category. The aim of this project has been to demolish, along with the nationalist myth, the notion of Europeanism, of civilization, of rationality itself, culminating with a strident denunciation of the very concept of meaning in life and in discourse.

If you do it this way, then myth, arbitrarily constructed world-views, mystical flights of fancy, the spasms of emotionality and even biological animality itself are ensconced in the very heart of intellectual and political endeavor. This is not the defeat of nationalist ideology, but its triumph.

Under this view everything (all theories, values, ideals) are mere self-validating ideologies. And in this case nationalism (along with Nazism, Stalinism, Polpot-ism, Ayn Rand and Tea Party lunacy) becomes a legitimate choice. The post-structuralist current of thought usually styles itself as "Marxist". But in Marx ideology (as false consciousness) is defined as the opposite of scientific meaning and truth: the concept has validity only in the frame of this antithesis. If you abolish this contrast, then all consciousness is false (or true) at the same time -i.e. we are now talking nonsense. Then each individual or group is at complete liberty to define as axiomatically true its own ideology and to blast as false all the others. The procedure is completely arbitrary and beyond all logical, moral or social control. The only means of adjudicating among all these theoretic Machtsprueche is the possession of raw power.

And thus the militaristic spirit, the most deleterious ingredient of nationalism, becomes the condition of existence and "historical success" for all ideologies. The adulation of violence, open or disguised, has been the bitterest fruit of this malignant line of thought. It is no accident, then, that our "Lacanian leftists" have been the most dogged proponents of political violence. Behind their fake anti-nationalism they have been weaving a gauze of "historical" legitimacy around the most apalling acts of arson, vandalism and even murder that have plagued Greece for the past three years.

In a country that has barely been touched by modernity, post-modernism is in academic vogue. It feeds into and is cheered on by a repulsive cast of rotten media types and populist dunces faking the politician, all stirring up the most virulent version of the traditional nationalist lie: that of the "immaculate people" expiring in the clutches of their western enemies. If this knot is not untied then all "rescues" of Greece by means of European loans etc. are exercises in futility.

Mirage

Nothing was decided by the elections. In fact the ominous trends prevailing before were reasserted, even if slightly decelerated. If the "radical" left had come first, then Greece would be exiting the Eurozone at this very moment. As it is the inevitable will occur probably around the end of the year.

The supposedly "European" parties that won and formed the tripartite government ran a decisively non-European, if not outright anti-European, campaign. They peddled the barefaced lie that the agreements with the EU concerning deficit reduction and structural reforms were somehow non-operative and subject to complete renegotiation. The Hollande victory in France was the chief circumstance cited in support of this analysis, despite the fact that Hollande himself and everyone else in Europe, whether follower or opponent of the Merkel line, repeatedly declared in crystal clear terms that Greece was under obligation to honor those agreements.

So the position of the collective victors was actually tantamount to that of the "radical" left, minus the shrill tone of voice. After the election they drew up a common programmatic statement that flies in the face of all the commitments undertaken to secure the second bail-out and debt forgiveness of October last. The disgust of European officials was quite plain, but our politicians were busy doing the only thing they are expert at, namely jostling for posts in the new government.

When the governement was actually formed it was composed largely of old-line politicos who had excelled in the crony politics that ruined the country. There was a mix-up with the crucial post of finance minister. The person who was finally selected is indeed a competent and reform-minded individual, a member of the team that guided Greece into the Euro a decade ago. But he is just a lone individual whose presence at this point seems a mere sop to Europe. Given the delusional mood prevalent in the three ruling parties, namely that with Merkel's alleged "defeat" in the latest Brussels summit it is now opportune to renege on Greece's legal commitments with a view to going back to the old regime of kleptocratic corruption paid for out of the pockets of European taxpayers, it is doubtful how much the new minister can accomplish.

So with their lying electoral campaign and government manifesto the current rulers have painted themselves into a corner. They have promised the people to keep the country in the Eurozone without in fact sumbitting to the discipline of sound and honest public finance which has been demonized as a diabolical German invention. They will of course soon run up against the hard facts and be obliged to eat their silly words. If, then, they decide to go for real reform (privatizations, reduction of the bureaucracy and encouragement of private investment), they will lose the support of a public they themselves have educated to consider these things as fiendish "neo-liberal" impositions from abroad. They will also face the crippling sabotage of the entire civil service whose rapacious unions have been a chief cause of the Greek state's ruin. If, alternatively, they decide on confrontation with Europe in order to maintain their internal position, the country will go instantly bankrupt and they themselves will be engulfed by the public rage that this folly will engender.

In either case the beneficiary will be the "radical" left, accusing them as lackeys of the imperialists in the first case or as ineffective leaders of the "fighting nation" in the second. Why do I keep putting radical in inverted commas when I refer to the leftist opposition? Because that party in fact fulfills the very definition of a reactionary political force. Their "ideal" is a nebulous anarcho-soviet utopia, the rags and rubbish of twentieth century history woven together into a comic nullity, while in practical terms they advocate the return to the filthy regime of debauchery by the party elites, the regime that died in 2010.

Still, they can rest assured that he people currently in charge are working for them. They did not win on June 17, but they will certainly win big next time around -unless something cataclysmically good happens. Their triumph will of course be short lived, for they will be managing smoking ruins. They themselves will go under in no time and then their natural and inevitable successors will be the neo-nazis, with whom they share anyway sizable chunks of their totalitarian, anti-European, conspiracy-theory laden ideology.

One final thought: personalities count. For all the European facade put up by the current ruling team (which has not even started ruling yet, due to various medical accidents!), the leaders of the tripartite bloc have been instrumental in whipping up the anti-European, populist and nationalist frenzy that has vitiated public life here for the past generation. The new prime minister has distinguished himself as a leader of the nationalist primitivism, especially in respect of Macedonia, that errupted after the breakup of Yugoslavia. Also from 2009 to 2011 he was a rabid opponent of the first bailout pact with Europe, thus empowering the fascist-nationalist wing of his own party and indirectly the neo-nazis. The leader of the rump Pasok party is also a prominent populist, a virtuoso practitioner of crony politics, whose first ingenious act after he became finance minister in June 2011 was to throw out the foreign negotiators demanding what he is also demanding now, namely the annulment of all standing agreements. This led to the near bankruptsy of the country then. As for the third leader, in charge of a "moderate" left party, he is simply a old-style leftist unable to shake off the benighted collectivism of his ilk, except that he expresses all this in a mild manner.

We all hope certainly to be pleasantly surprised, especially by the new finance minister if and when he takes up his office and he begins to put his ideas into effect. But it is a hopelessly tall order.

Foolishness and Shame

In today's Greece the worst case scenaria always materialize, and I was silly to forget this capital truth on the eve of last Sunday's election which put the tombstone on the country's prospects as a member of the European family of nations. As I have repeatedly argued and explained here and elsewhere its European identity was a big lie anyway, and lies do not last. But I allowed myself to be carried away by the vain hope that the the majority of the people would rationally assess nothing more than their personal material interest before casting their ballots.

In the event they did nothing of the kind and instead they followed loud-mouthed charlatans who offered them the pie-in-the-sky of a return to the parasitic bliss of former times through the unilateral renunciation of the economic discipline agreed with the European Union. They also convinced them that the Europeans and the rest of the world would meekly bow to this reversal and would continue to shell out the billions needed to fund the thousands of fake pensions and other outrageous privileges awarded in the past to the clientele of our political parties. The repeated warnings from abroad that reneging on the obligations formally undertaken by the Greek state would result in the cessation of the foreign subventions and hence the sudden financial death of the country were denounced as "blackmail" by foreign enemies -the very same "enemies" who borrow on the international markets at 5 and 6 percent in order to lend Greece at 3,5.

The result was a mindless insurrection of "national pride", a choice for outright penury, destitution and starvation. It appeared to them preferable, instead of forfeiting a quarter, let's say, of your income for five years with a prospect of a gradual recovery afterwards, to lose all of it for good. Instead of submitting to painful cautery they elected to kill the doctor. They will soon enough taste the bitter fruit of their self-destructive choice -not later than the end of the year I reckon. But of course the calamity will by then be irreversible. The country has already lost all the international sympathy it could count on throughout this ordeal. It has presented itself in the ugliest light, what with a political elite consisting of ignorant and delusional demagogues and a public opinion thoroughly corrupted by decades of vulgar brain-washing by the brutish (and shamelessly thieving) media moguls and manniquins. It will be abandoned to its miserable fate, not least because that fate will have been self-chosen.

It is a sad, but rather remarkable, fact requiring thorough investigation by experts in psychosocial pathology that the competence for elemental rational thinking has vanished in this society over the last generation or so. The demise of education, as I have repeatedly argued, is the prime cause of this human disaster: the school as a hive of critical thought was the first target and victim of the party mafias that have ruled this country for so long, hiding their merciless plunder of the commonweal under "socialist" and "communist" slogans. Now we have come to the end of the road. The emperor is wearing no clothes and his body is unbearably ugly. This is not the end of the post-junta period (μεταπολίτευση) as many people say, but rather the despicable triumph of its worst features and tendencies.

So much for the stupidity in the latest developments. But there is also the shame. And this is the powerful presence of the neo-nazis in the new parliament. Of course one hears a lot of hypocritical cries of consternation about this, but they come mostly from people whose mentality and political behavior is identical, apart from the external trimmings, with those of the humanoid apes of Golden Dawn. The legitimization of lawlessness, political hatred, violence and -not least- antisemitism is widespread among various groups and through them among the populace at large. It was just a matter of time that its neo-nazi variant would profit from this general climate. Still, this is a new abhorrent peak in our political evolution that we have reached. The parliamentary presence of the neo-nazis has thus obliterated the last vestiges of this country's image as a nation of civility and civilization. From now on the course is pre-determined. We are tumbling into an abyss of social misery and civil strife, while the authors of this descent to hell are full of glee at their triumph. The only thing that people of good will around the world can offer us now is prayer.

Past midnight

If I did not have a personal stake in the matter, involving the very future of my children, I would suggest the following solution to the present impasse in Greece's relation to the Eurozone.

At this point in time the country is a lost cause. In all its basic structures and functions the state has just rotted away -as the horrific events of last Sunday showed with irrevocable finality. The average citizen is at the mercy of any and every criminal who might decide to strike against his/her life and livelihood.

This criminality may or may not be politically motivated, but it doesn't make any difference anymore. The average criminal has by now absorbed the lesson that if you plead a left-wing political motive this is tantamount to putting on the fabled ring of Gyges: you are straightaway rendered invisible. Common crime (and I am talking about heavily armed gangs) and political extremism are two contiguous worlds in fruitful mutual exchange and understanding. As Athens was going up in flames numerous "indignant" protesters surrounded the fire engines and prevented them from reaching the burning buildings. Similarly others egged on the masked hoodlums and cheered them when they petrol-bombed stores. They did not represent the majority of the demonstrators. But they were the dominant element in the demonstrations, the ideologically and politically hegemonic group. The Stalinist left stuck to their time-honored hypocrisy: it was the police, the CIA etc. who were behind the arsonists. Then they piled on their mendacious rhetoric about the "foreigners" trying to subjugate Greece, the "4th Reich" taking over etc. They were assisted in this Neanderthal propaganda by such individuals as an internationally known composer, who during the past decade has mutated into the chief spokesman for empty-headed nationalism and antisemitism. Yesterday, the president of the republic himself joined the idiotic chorus of anti-German taunts, whose immediate effect is to seal the country's doom as a member of the European family of nations.

All these are symptoms of a radical collapse of all moral and social bonds. Under a pretext of left radicalism a social regime was built in Greece since the fall of the colonels, whose chief characteristic has been the rapacity of politically connected groups and individuals. The commonweal has been bled dry by these militant "leftists" in an orgy of anti-social egotism. This extreme right-wing reality, i.e. the absolute prevalence of selfish interest at the expense of the common good, was camouflaged by anti-imperialist and frankly Stalinist cant stoked by a healthy dose of gross nationalist declamation. The young generation has been molded by this dominant mentality. systematically inculcated in the schools and trumpeted by the media. All social processes and functions were thus subjected to these ideological purposes. Judges, if we can call them that, refused, for instance, to impound the bank accounts of known and self-admitted bank robbers (accounts containing he proceeds from the robberies) when the latter declared that they were "anarchists" expropriating the oppressive system. Cabinet ministers were often witnesses for the defense in the trial of terrorists (including a late internationally known actress). These are of course things that a normal person coming from planet civilization finds impossible to even contemplate, let alone believe: and yet this is the poisoned air we have been breathing all these years.

The situation is not reversible. There is not a single institution left intact and still able to play its role as the defender of the public interest. This does not mean that the people as a whole has lost its mind and its conscience. There is a silent majority disgusted and appalled by all this. They are not represented by the demonstrations, because the demonstrations are by those defending the scandalous privileges of the corrupt minorities under the ancien regime. The majority is cowed and helpless. If anyone stands up for reason and decency (to say for instance that our collapse is not the fault of the Germans, but of those who have ruled us for a generation and also those who voted for them), he/she is going to be fiercely slandered and persecuted. So, there is no hope. The measures that Parliament approved last Sunday amidst the orgy of brutality will not be implemented, because the entire state apparatus will sabotage them. By doing this they will, of course, be digging their own graves, but in their brutishness they are simply past simple logic even if it counsels what is in their material interest.

And so I come to my (horrible) solution. Greek society has been taken over by a suicidal impulse, which should be allowed to take its course. In the long run (i.e. when we are all dead) this is going to prove salutary, i.e a creative destruction. For, experiencing the real consequences of their collective folly (i.e. economic destitution and isolation from the rest of the world) they will be forced to abandon the delusions that are currently preventing them from thinking and feeling. In concrete terms, Greece must be allowed to default and return to the drachma. It will thus rapidly regress to the condition of Enver Hoxha's Albania. It will proudly become the North Korea of Europe that its dominant intellectuals are lusting for. The population will starve and vegetate in slavery under the leadership of the "revolutionaries" of Sunday last. But only thus will the public mind here will (in the long run, I repeat) be disabused of the lies that it has been systematically burdened with for a generation, its hatred of Europe and of the West, its hatred of freedom and of individuality. Right now they are still laboring under the illusion that had the Stalinists won the civil war back in the forties, the country would have become paradise on earth. I know: only a demented person would believe this; but it was this collective dementia that was inculcated as "the truth" by the ruling elites. So let them try it, so that they might eventually by purged by bitter experience of this insanity.

In the medium term such a suicide by Greece will also be extremely beneficial for the rest of Europe. They will be rid of an obstreperous entity that does not share their ideals, institutions and goals. And thus their chances to overcome the current crisis will be drastically increased. More and more governments and institutions in Europe have already been coming (unfortunately for us)to such a conclusion. But, if a country does not want to be saved from ruin; and if the more they try to save it the more it hates those that are still willing to come to its aid, I cannot see any outcome other than its self-inflicted death.

I do not want this outcome. I, in fact, dread it. It will destroy the future of our children. I pray that we may still escape from this impending hell. Not least because this solution is unjust. It is unjust towards the hard-working and -despite everything- right thinking majority of the Greek people who have been subjected to the humiliation of being ruled by incompetent beasts and fools. It is true that this healthy core was seduced by the demagogy of their ruthless leaders. But all peoples are prone to succumb to demagogues as history shows. They do not deserve to be extinguished for this mistake, endemic especially in democracies. My reason tells me that we are past the point of no return. My heart still urges me to hope.

Dixi et salvavi animam meam.

A conference in Athens

The European society for the history of political thought just held its second international conference in Athens. This was a signal event. With the world coming crashing down around us, not a sound was to be heard in the lecture hall. Or, to put it in another way, the sounds were transmuted into the ringing silence of intense thought concerning that dissolving reality. And this signifies a hope that something can be after all be salvaged from the ruins.

It has to be noted that all the Greek participants exhibited a high level of sophisticated reflection on a par with the best of their foreign colleagues. And this is meant not as a silly "national" boast, but as a token of the great tragedy that is the trashing of this country by its ruling elites.

The topic of the conference was citizenship and rulership in the light of ancient Athenian insights and practices. And in the course of the discussion it became so strikingly evident that the European historical and intellectual experience revolves around the matrix of concepts erected by classical thought. What struck me in a particular way was the invocation even by the Polish Schlachta (that self-destructive feudal elite) of Aristotle's definition of the citizen from the Politics in order to justify its trampling upon the rights and well-being of the mass of society. If to be a citizen means to participate in the exercise of authority, then they and they alone -having usurped and monopolized that participation through arbitrary means- were allegedly entitled to that honorific and profitable title. So, they even entitled their oppressive rule a "res publica", a "politeia". This is of course to use Aristotle's concepts against Aristotle's purposes, in order to legitimize a concrete historical situation.

So history from this angle could be viewed not as the realization, but rather as the deformation and even nullification of abstract discourse, about justice, equality etc. This was also exemplified during the radical phase of the French Revolution, when the Parisian mob surrounds the Convention and demands the expulsion (amounting to a sentence of death) of the Girondin deputies, all the while appealing to the ideal of "democracy". Thus, an assembly elected by democratic means (as democratic as you could get in those times) is strangled and eventually drowned in its own blood by a section of "the people" claiming that only it is entitled to represent the general will. The idea of democracy here is violated in the opposite direction as compared to the Polish situation, but the principle of action is exactly the same: whoever wields raw power effectively elevates himself to the status of "true" humanity, condemning the rest of humans not fitting into his self-idealization to abject and pitiless death.

In this context, we must concede that Plato was exactly right when he claimed in the Laws that the root of all evil is the blind and unquestioning love of self that darkens people's minds turning them into inhuman monsters. This after all was the great issue of tragic poetry. Whether you can cure this situation by eradicating all self-feeling in the human breast (as Plato and later Rousseau would propose under the spell of Lacaedemon)is another question. Aristotle opposed this type of psychological surgery, and he was again exactly right. But, certainly, the problem with his approach is how to set up the criteria of differentiation between legitimate and illegitimate modes of self-feeling (between amour de soi and amour-propre as Rousseau termed them).

And so it seems that whatever course you adopt in actual life (whether you take the theological as it were route of chastising and mortifying the flesh through ascetic discipline or whether you adopt the way of pragmatic ἐπιείκεια giving leeway to the self-seeking urges) you end up paying a huge in all cases price. The decision cannot be made a priori, and no theory offers the guidelines for such a thing. It can only be taken by appraising the material and moral conditions of each case, albeit guided all the while by an idea of justice, namely a concern for the the flourishing of the community and the individual within it. An idea of justice, though, that you cannot be certain won't be defeated by the truculence of the real and its refusal to be guided by the ideal. This is the tragedy of social life (Tragedie im Sittlichen) that Hegel was able to discern -even though he too fell victim (like so many great minds) to the delusion that he could "overcome" it.

Christopher Hitchens In Memoriam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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