Thank you for your sharp, humorous depictions of our lives. I recognize it as deeply mine, even though I don’t quite like it!

As for those older generations, they might have been (seemingly) unbending, but they were also rational—which is to say that they understood that children and adults do not share the same intellectual/imaginative world(s). The very phrase, “age of reason,” bespeaks this understanding. Nowadays, this notion has been translated, like everything else, into an infantile slogan: Because I’m the mommy (daddy). What that means is, you may not understand why you need to do, or can’t do, this particular thing, but it doesn’t matter, life is hard, and then you grow up. Or, put another (contemporary) way: tough love.

And speaking of tough love, I want to respond to this notion of “celebrating” Greece. First of all, I learned a long time ago (I was 16 and a group of colonels had just abolished democracy in “the country of its birth”) that patriotism is not the last but the first refuge of scoundrels. In any case, I think I speak for my partner, Stelios Vasilakis, when I say that we did not create greekworks.com to “celebrate” Greece. Quite the opposite, from the very beginning—which you can confirm by going to our Website’s archives—our point in this venture was to contest any number of what we considered to be erroneous, ridiculous, dangerous, and/or actively damaging ideas about what Greece is or isn’t, and about what “Greekness” is or isn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe in “love of country”—at least in the sense that I respect it (and in regard to any country, and all countries), just as I respect someone’s religious beliefs. It’s just that I don’t have to share, let alone ratify, those beliefs. I also don’t equate love of country with pledges of allegiance or folkloric or mythological fabrications of nationhood. Finally, as far as “things that are actually good here” are concerned, there are plenty (millions?) of people (and organizations) hoeing that particular field, regardless of how meager a crop it will ever bring in.

So another point I must bring up, and my apologies if I am being to direct here, but I do find it more than a bit interesting that you run a publish company that in one way or another celebrates or at very least promotes Greeks and Greece. Hence the name of your publishing company. However, your blog is highly critical, both of modern Greeks and the state. I am wondering how you reconcile this? After all, I think it’s pretty clear that your writing from a pretty personal place, and that your mostly frustrated with the state of the country.

So, I am just going to put this out there, as my opinion, and as I said earlier, I apologize if I have gone too far. If you speak with expats, or Greeks from the diaspora who have returned, read any expat blogs, or english edition of the Greek newspapers, all you hear are complaints and criticism of Greece and Greeks. Of course, Greeks do it too and certainly some of the criticism is well founded. But I think a person in your position,and what I mean here is someone who is well read, and working in a communicative profession, could do something constructive, and furthermore because you have access to Greece’s history and culture, you could shed light on things that are actually good here.

Just a little something to think about…

Sincerely
edc

So the main difference between my fellow student and me (well, apart from his being a good guy and gorgeous) lay in our differing methods for grasping reality. Or at least that was my tentative formulation. For him cognition meant taking a look to see what there is and once you discover that, you have truth. You have grasped reality. Or at least you have what appears to be the best available grasp of reality. And that in turn means you have certainty. It may be worth pointing out, as an aside, that cognitive and especially religious certainty has been associated with some historical persons, ideas and enterprises that have not won universal approbation for their intelligence or morality.

Unlike my fellow student of yesteryear, for me getting a proper grasp of reality has a lot to do with asking questions. Right from the day we are born, almost, we start asking questions. We don’t ask them out loud right away, but we are curious about this new and not always satisfying environment into which we have been born. The questions we ask become increasingly complex and varied as life progresses, and some “fortunate” people get to a point where they stop asking questions. Some get tired of learning, others get bored. Some think they don’t need to do any more asking. Still others go on asking questions about reality till the day they die and they eventually are able to distinguish between the wrong questions and the right ones.

Those who ask only the right questions, even though they know that truth is always somewhere around the next corner and even if they entertain no sense of certainty, probably enjoy a firmer grasp of reality and are closer to truth than those who feel no need to ask any questions (right or wrong) because they are certain of possessing the truth already.

I wonder where educated modern Greeks, sons and daughters of Byzantine civilization and culture, would fit into this scheme of things (as I remind myself that what I have presented here is, after all, just a “scheme,” unproved and untried – by this time I should have got it whipped into a nice cognitive theory, but alas, no). Perhaps modern Greeks hold on to the notion that they are in possession of something called the truth and they will allow others, including their children, to share in it. That’s why they have schools. Perhaps they tend to discourage, in themselves and others and in their young, all the procedures involved in critical thinking, creative analysis, investigation, research or anything else that might lead to notions incompatible with their beliefs (they do not distinguish between beliefs and knowledge.) Why bother with critical, rational thinking if you are searching for truth and trying to understand how the universe works? Just approach those of us who have the truth and we will give it to you. Truth is something to be bestowed and not something to be forged or attained. You don’t need the freedom of questioning the status quo because it should not be questioned. My fellow student from way back then definitely believed thusly. Whaddaya mean this kind of outlook can lead to prejudice, racism or homophobia or a bunch of other dispositions and attitudes that make progress difficult and retrogression likely?

If I should eventually be persuaded that contemporary educated Greeks are effectively not asking the right questions and therefore have a flawed grasp of reality, I would not be basing my view on a single grad student. On my many trips to Greece I make it a point, always, to sustain conversations with Greeks. When these conversations are in Greek, my friends are kind and gentle with me. They are all good guys and girls. But when the talk gets beyond the stage of “This mousaka is delicious,” or “It’s going to rain tomorrow,” they agree with almost nothing of what I say.

They cannot accept, for example, the notion of raising the theoretical level of the discussion because one of us has just introduced a piece of data that simply does not fit into the theoretical framework in which we have been operating. So the new information doesn’t get accommodated. It just gets rejected or forgotten. Anything in the name of peace.

On the other hand, it may be that modern educated Greeks believe, as I do, that grasping reality is actually a matter of asking the right questions. They know that what we consider true today easily could and probably will change tomorrow.

(Will continue later, if anyone is interested)

Regarding the Greek “soul,” I have no idea what that is. I don’t believe in national “souls,” in any case, only in (better or worse) functioning institutions, which, then, might or might not help in creating that notoriously artificial, vague, and malleable process called national “identity.” As for how “big” anarchism is in Greece, I wouldn’t believe everything I read or hear in the media. I’m no expert on the subject—actually, I don’t know anything about it—but my personal smell test tells me that if there were more than a thousand full-time anarchists (is “full-time anarchist” an oxymoron?) in the country, I’d be shocked. Indeed, given its penchant for libertarianism, posse comitatus laws and legends, home-schooling, and back-to-the-landism (Montana for the right, Vermont for the left), I’d venture to say that there are a lot more spiritual heirs to Bakunin in the US than there are in Greece.

And please do (he said beseechingly) keep blogging.

Regards,
Blake More

1. I don’t understand the first one;

2. I’m too stupid to answer the second one; and

3. The John Gray to whom I referred is the author of False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern, and, most recently, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, among over twenty other works. Until he retired last year, he was professor of European thought at the London School of Economics.

The side of Rousseau’s thought that arouses nostaligia for nature came to the United States early on, in the life and writings of Thoreau. Recently, joined to many other movements, it came to full flower and found a wide public. Anarchism in one form or another is an expression of this longing, which arises as soon a politics and laws are understood to be repressions, perhaps necessary, but nonetheless repressions of our inclinations rather than perfections of them or modes of satisfying them.

But I still do not understand why something like anarchism should be so “big” in a place like Greece (?) Could it be that the Greek soul needs and seeks out a strongman to lead the country, keeping in mind that that is in fact an oriental tendency and could be operating at some psycho-spiritual level even while the political system is a liberal democracy informed by Enlightenment principles. This is all very confusing.

Regards,
Blake More

Don’t recent political developments in his country bleed some relevance from Mike Davis’s thought?

Doesn’t James Lovelock have more in common with Catherine of Siena and the dialectic of love than with Hegel and his followers and their use of dialectic to reach, via sublation, a state similar to the mystical? Or do I misread all three of them? This is possible.

Are you talking about the Mars-and-Venus John Gray we all patted on the back before we knew better?

Regards,
Blake More