Saturday, June 16, 2012

Post-1974: Deconstructing Greece


Poster for multi-child families. Today, the average Greek woman has only 1.3 children.

Although the Colonels failed to turn back the clock, they did slow it down. When they lost power, Greece was still fulfilling its mission of perpetuating the Greek people. In 1975, the fertility rate was 2.4 children per woman, in contrast to 1.45 in Germany, 1.8 in England, and 1.93 in France. Immigration was only just beginning, whereas Western Europe already had large immigrant populations.

Greece has since caught up to the West. Fertility has plummeted to 1.3 children per woman—one of the lowest rates in the world. As Steyn (2011) notes: “In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren—i.e., the family tree is upside down.” Meanwhile, the country has taken in a foreign-born population that is as large, proportionately, as those of Great Britain and France. These trends may certainly change, but one need not extrapolate far into the future to see where they might lead …

How did things change so fast? First, the short answer. The Colonels left in disgrace, thus discrediting their nationalist ideology and creating a climate of indifference to the nation-state. But why, then, did things turn out so similarly in Spain? Its old regime died a quiet death, much like Generalissimo Franco himself, yet post-nationalism has triumphed there just as thoroughly as it has in Greece.

All right. Now the long answer. All of southern Europe had regimes that made patriotism their raison d’être. In short, nationalism had been nationalized. And these regimes used the schools, the media, and other norm-creating structures to instill love of country. In time, however, the structures succumbed to dry rot. The messengers no longer believed their message, and once a new regime came to power, for whatever reason, few were left to make the case for preserving the nation-state.

Another reason was the relative weakness of civil society. Since the State had little counterbalance to its power, whoever controlled it had much more freedom to control the direction of society. This was less true in the United States, for instance. Although university-educated Americans had massively converted to post-nationalism back in the 1940s, conversion proceeded much more slowly beyond this beachhead. Decades passed before the many pockets of resistance were finally overcome and mopped up.

Post-1974 Greece: the ideological motor for change


With the Colonels gone, change was not just moving faster. It was also becoming more deliberate. In the 1960s, it had been driven largely by young people who just wanted to do their own thing. After 1974, the new movers and shakers were more keenly aware of what they were doing … and the long-term consequences.

To some extent, they were merely following a narrative that the West had embraced earlier, after the Second World War. In its soft form, this narrative accepted that nationalism had helped create larger and more open societies. But the time had now come for the next stage: the formation of a “United States of Europe” and, eventually, an international superstate where everyone would be a citizen of the world.

This narrative had a harder version, as follows. Nationalism isn’t just outdated. It’s also evil, having caused the two world wars and the destruction of Europe’s Jewish community. To prevent an eventual third cataclysm, the nation-state should be progressively dismantled and its citizens reeducated.

Even before 1974, this post-national consensus had already been spreading into Greece. It was in the air, and only a totalitarian society could have kept it out. But things did accelerate when the Colonels left the scene. In 1975, Greece reratified the European Convention on Human Rights. That same year, the new constitution affirmed that such conventions “shall be an integral part of domestic Greek law and shall prevail over any contrary provision of the law” (Pollis, 1992). In the early 1990s, Greece embarked on a second round of efforts to comply with the norms of the European Community, which later became the European Union.

Although this process has been called “Europeanization,” a better term would be denationalization. “Europe” had become a transnational space where collective ethnic rights would be much weaker and individual rights much stronger. And such a space would eventually extend well beyond Europe. Turkey was touted as a prospective member, even though most of its land mass lay in the Middle East.

Europeanization was thus presented as a way to empower the individual at the expense of collective identities. Such empowerment would also bring material benefits: a higher standard of living and greater respect for personal freedom. Indeed, just as Greeks had earlier credited nationalism for the West’s success, a conviction now grew that post-nationalism was responsible.

This conviction held sway from the Right to the Left of the political spectrum, though for different reasons. The Right no longer saw institutions like the family, the church, and the ethnos as pre-conditions for economic success. Under the influence of libertarianism, it now viewed them as obstacles to competitive markets and economies of scale. By liquidating these collective restraints on the individual, Greece would replicate the same conditions that had earlier allowed the West to take off economically.

Meanwhile, the Left, under the influence of autonomy theory, saw unchosen collective identities, like gender and ethnos, as obstacles to self-realization. Since people do not choose to be men or women or to belong to an ethnic group, their freedom is diminished. They cannot realize their full potential.

Such thinking differed radically from what Greek nationalists had thought. For them, the secret of the West’s success was the nation-state: a community where one tended to treat fellow citizens with the same trust and deference as one would one’s own family. It was this secure, high-trust environment that made wealth creation so much easier.

The link between personal autonomy and prosperity is therefore neither direct nor causal. Rather, both are made possible by certain internalized restraints on behavior, namely a greater willingness to settle disputes peacefully and a stronger sense of empathy. In short, the “emotional space” of the family is extended to the entire nation. This behavioral evolution has been described with respect to England by Clark (2007, 2009), who sees other changes, such as increased thrift, sobriety, and impulse control, as being just as crucial to the rise of a market economy.

So personal autonomy alone isn’t the secret of economic success. It can in fact ruin a country if there are no internalized restraints on behavior.

Deconstructing Greece


Post-1974, few Greeks were arguing the above points. And those who did were usually Orthodox priests who spoke in the language of another age. Debate thus focused not on post-nationalism itself, but rather on the obstacles to implementing it. These obstacles were summarized by Pollis (1993): 

Historically, the dominant ideology in Greece considered the basic social unit to be the extended family, not the autonomous individual. In such a society, rights and obligations are reciprocal, hierarchical, and differentiated; they are not attributes of individuals possessed equally by all. As such, while equal individual rights were absent, the “family” was responsible for the material well-being of all. With the rise of Greek nationalism—the articulation of a nationalist ideology by the newly formed modern Greek state—, traditional culture and its value system persisted albeit in modified form.

[…] Such an organic conception of society, in which individual autonomy is irrelevant, obviously does not provide fertile soil for the flourishing of individual civil or political rights.

The take-home message, however, was not that post-nationalism is unworkable and should be shelved. Rather, it was the organic conception of society that had to go: 

[…]  Greece’s sovereignty will inevitably erode and its presumed “insularity” will fade as it is expected to conform to and be judged in terms of “European” standards, including those on individual rights, and not in terms of its claimed distinctiveness as an integral ethnos.

[…] While the visible changes are, and will be, in specific areas—the legal sphere, economic structures and policies, monetary policy, product standards, and control over borders—the cumulative impact will challenge and dilute Greek national identity as that identity has been conceptualized from the time of the founding of the modern state. (Pollis, 1992)

For post-nationalists, another obstacle was the school system, specifically the textbooks and their exclusion of the “Other”:

[…] “the Other” is different, for he was Muslim and not Orthodox like the Greek. With a solid and imperious spirit, the young pupil learned to move away from all those who tried to be like him by themselves, from all those who can only be humbler than him because, among other things, “the Greek national group has endowed itself with literary, theatrical, musical, and sculptural expressions that are different from those of the Others who surround it.” (Angelopoulos, 2007)

This rejection of the Other was seen as being inherent to the pre-1974 school system:

[…] beyond the awareness of being different, it is love of Country that helps strengthen the difference between the “Us” and the “Others”: “… in this case not only the language but also Greek education as a whole are elements of identity that distinguished Greeks from the “Others.”

[…] two areas of concern to this common education were particularly emphasized: the language of the ancestors and love of Country, a notion indirectly related to that […] of belonging to the same family […] to the extent that the Country is an entity whose substance is consubstantially maternal/paternal […], for it transfers […] the warm virtues of family relations among people belonging to the same household.” (Angelopoulos, 2007)

People outside this “family”—the Other—were to be viewed with mistrust and as sources of possible future domination or internal conflict (Angelopoulos, 2007). Thus, to bring about a post-national world, a new narrative would be needed:

[…] after the Colonels’ dictatorship, Greek historiography and particularly the national education planners and, consequently, the authors of school manuals, turned away from the nationalist cleavage [between Greeks and non-Greeks] and turned toward organizing a historical narrative that aims to manufacture citizens who are without hate for their neighbors of different origin, language, religion, and upbringing. (Angelopoulos, 2007)

The new narrative would achieve this goal by presenting the Other more respectfully, by showing that he seeks neither to dominate Greece nor to create disorder. In practice, however, this goal clashed with one of the primary duties of education: telling historical truth. The Other had dominated the Greek people, and that domination had been far from idyllic. The new narrative was thus no less prone to mythmaking than the old one. It tended to create a Big Other for whom one should feel only respect, deference, and … subservience.

A new balance might have been eventually struck between respect and truth-telling, either in Greece or in the West as a whole. As things turned out, however, there would not be enough time. No sooner had the Greeks learned deference to the Other than the Other began coming … in droves. 

References


Angelopoulos, C. (2007). Le contenu des manuels grecs d’histoire avant et après les Colonels, in M. Verdelhan-Bourgade, B. Bakhouche, R. Étienne, & P. Boutan (eds). Les manuels scholaires, miroirs de la nation ? (pp. 41-54), Paris: L’Harmatten.

Clark, G. (2009). The domestication of Man: The social implications of Darwin. ArtefaCTos, 2(1), 64-80.

Clark, G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Georgiadis, K. (2010).Guardians of the nation: pronatalism, fertility politics and the multi-child family movement in Greece, British Society for Population Studies Annual Conference, September 2010, University of Exeter, England.

Pollis, A. (1992). Greek national identity: religious minorities, rights, and European norms, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 10, 171-196.

Steyn, M. (2011). Mark Steyn: An upside-down family tree, The Orange County Register, December 23








39 comments:

Chris Crawford said...

This is fascinating, Peter! The inference I'm drawing is that the extension of trust outside the family is probably best done in stages, each one extending trust to a larger circle of people. This process takes a long time. The colonels tried to rush it, but they achieved only partial success. Now conditions require the Greeks to expand their trust even further, and they're still not sure they trust other Greeks. Thus, the Greek ability to trust those far outside its family is being pushed too hard.

That, at least, is my inference from this post.

This raises lots of problems for other countries. Is it possible to make the jump from familial loyalty to global loyalty? Can it be done in one mighty leap, or must it be done in small steps?

The African nations will someday reach the point where this question has real significance. But the Greeks are caught changing horses in mid-stream.

Anonymous said...

“Europe” had become a transnational space where collective ethnic rights would be much weaker and individual rights much stronger.....Europeanization was thus presented as a way to empower the individual at the expense of collective identities.

Of course this violates the most fundamental "human" or individual right of all: freedom of association.

It doesn't "empower" or free the individual so much as force him to be an appendage or drone of a larger eusocial, collective entity. He is less of an individual and more like a sterile drone helping other germlines. Having a choice between Pepsi or Coke doesn't make him an individual.

Chris Crawford said...

Anonymous, ethnic groups are not voluntary associations; no expression of volition is required to be Hungarian, Serb, or Greek. Therefore, there is no act of association involved here.

Perhaps you don't grasp the point that Peter was making. Consider Americans: they do not primarily identify themselves by the state of their residence or birth. You seldom hear an American self-identify as an Idahoan or a Nevadan or a Pennsylvanian. They instead self-identify as Americans. They have selected as their primary form of group affiliation the large nation of over 330 million rather than the smaller states.

The European Union has roughly the same population as the USA. Are Americans 'sterile drones helping other germlines'?

Anonymous said...

I don't think the situations in Europe and the U.S. are really comparable. We are recent transplants from all over the world, by and large. And there isn't the same match-up between region and ethnicity here in the U.S. Yeah, certain groups settled certain areas, but to be a Bostonian is not to be an Irishman the way to be a Dubliner is to be an Irishman.

I do think we miss out for lacking the thousands of years of history that Europeans have and the sense of common identity that living in an ethnostate can produce. I've heard convincing arguments that a lot of the silliness you get in the U.S. over New Agey Wicca crap is an acting out of an underdeveloped, spiritual need for that sort of ethnic communion which some people crave, but which they are forestalled from pursuing under the current regime of political correctness. So it takes warped, ridiculous forms.

For what it's worth, I think more people than not would prefer to live in an ethnostate, deep down. I'm in my thirties, and it wasn't until recently when my circle of friends became suddenly very Italian-American by some really chance connections that I realized how safe and empowering it can feel to associate with your own kind. It's kind of a weird feedback loop, where the more time I spend with Italians, the more conscious I am of being Italian, and the prouder I become. I never thought that I would think along those lines, but I do.

On the other hand, I've lived in some very diverse regions of the country (Baltimore and D.C.). I found it atomizing and disorienting. Even in those regions, I sought out tribal affiliations of a sort, like going to an almost exclusively gay gym, just to have some social commonality to hold onto. Though I didn't realize I was doing this at the time.

Chris Crawford said...

You're quite right: there just isn't the same match-up between region and ethnicity here in the US. But wouldn't it be great if the USA were like Europe, with Bosnians and Corsicans and Sardinians and Luxembourgers and Danes and all sorts of other people who can't get along? Wouldn't it be just peachy-keen if Iowans hated Kentuckians and Alabamans hated Alaskans and Californians hated Arizonans -- with 50 different states, we could have over two thousand different animosity pairings! Think of all the ways we could learn to speak different languages, use different standards of measurement, drive on different sides of the road, have 50 different legal systems with 50 different sets of law, NONE of the compatible! Wouldn't the USA be SO much better if it were just like Europe?

Or perhaps, would Europe be better if it were like the USA, with just one government, one culture, one object of loyalty, one legal system...?

Those convincing arguments you've heard about the silliness we get with the New Agey Wicca crap -- all true, but those arguments apply much more broadly than to just New Agey Wicca crap -- they apply to all religious crap: Christian, Muslim, whatever. Those convincing arguments are really excellent arguments for atheism. Still convinced?

Yes, it feels good to be part of a special group. We all like to be among those like us. In the early days of our species, we kept within our own little special groups and maintained constant warfare with all the other special groups that all the other people felt special among.

Once we starting getting civilized, our tribes got larger, but we still felt good being a resident of one city or another, so good that we took special pleasure in slaughtering the residents of other cities, so we did it all the time.

But humanity progressed even further and started forming big nation-states, with people feeling special because they were a citizen of a particular country. Then the citizens of one ethnostate could express their love of country by slaughtering the citizens of other ethnostates, something we did we great enthusiasm.

Even today, we have more than a billion Chinese who aren't part of our ethnostate, so many Americans are thinking that we should fight a war with the Chinese. Why? Because they're not part of our ethnostate. The Chinese are no less patriotic, and they figure they'll have to fight us someday, too. Why? Because we're not part of their ethnostate.

And then there are Russians, Iranians, Venezuelans, North Koreans -- so MANY people from different ethnostates who just aren't part of our proud ethnostate. It'll take us a long time, but we'll get around to fighting every one of them, won't we?

Aren't ethnostates just wonderful?

W.LindsayWheeler said...

First off, I want to discuss this paragraph:

"This narrative had a harder version, as follows. Nationalism isn’t just outdated. It’s also evil, having caused the two world wars and the destruction of Europe’s Jewish community. To prevent an eventual third cataclysm, the nation-state should be progressively dismantled and its citizens reeducated."

"Nationalism is evil". Nationalism is not evil. This mantra of "Nationalism is evil" is Jewish ideology. It is ensconsed in Marxism, Fabian socialism, both are part of International Socialism. Rosa Luxemburg, a German Jew, and Karl Kautsky, an Austrian Jew, both wrote books called "The Nationalities Question". The modern world is wrapped around, created around this very paradigm. This idea is not happenstance, but a planned, organized, mentality purposely created to bring about a certain environment. "Nationalism is evil" is a mantra created specifically to (as the paragraph ends) to "re-educate". We live in a Marxist culture, and its purpose is to bring about a desired goal.

That "nationalism caused the two world wars" is superficial. WWI was specifically caused by Leftist Anarchists for the express purpose of causing a war! The whole point of the anarchists was to attack the remnant of the Old Order, which is the Monarchy. That is the cause of WWI.

In order to understand the modern world, one must understand the supposedly "Renaissance". The Renaissance was not really a "renaissance". For the Renaissance included a program of subterfuge and sabotage. This engineered by Machiavelli and Lorenzo Valla way back in the 16th century. For what did the two of them propose?

A form of government called "Republicanism" defined around this definition, "Any Government without a King".

Why?

Destroy the King, you destroy the Race!

It is that simple.

Then, why did Woodrow Wilson demand the abdiction and destruction of the German monarchies and principalities and the Habsburg Empire? What did that have to do with Woodrow Wilson, and Why demand that? Why the continuous thread throughout the historical timeline of this "hatred of monarchy"? From Machiavelli, to the English Civil Wars and the killing of their king, to the French Revolution and the killing of their king, to the Serbian anarchists that killed the hier to the Habsburg Empire, to Woodrow Wilson demanding their abdiction across the board?

And the principle advisor to Woodrow Wilson (and Franklin Roosevelt) was Bernard Baruch.

The first program of deracination, to denationalism is the destruction of Monarchy. WWI was about destroying the last of the Monarchies. Three Monarchies were destroyed. And what was the action that connects the dots to prove this is Woodrow Wilson setting up the League of Nations.

The Serbian Anarchists were a product of the French Revolution and the French Revolution was the product of the American Revolution which was the successful continuation of the English Civil Wars.

And WWII was a continuation of WWII.

All of this is to set up Marxian International Socialism. This "Nationalism is evil" meme is Marxist. It is not a default position, but a craftily prepared purposeful propaganda device.

Yes, WWII and the Holocaust have been spinned in order to have people think that nationalism must be destroyed. It is all part of a 500 year process to bring about One Desired Goal.

W.LindsayWheeler said...

Resistance to the Colonels came from the Universities and colleges in Greece.

I have no proof exactly, I have no means to research this but it is my supposition that in the parallel between Spain and Greece, and the failure of both to maintain a traditionalist society is that Franco and the Colonels both never controlled the Universities and colleges.

From Wikipedia:
"This antagonised many but especially the intelligentsia whose primary exponents were the students. The students at the Law School in Athens, for example, demonstrated multiple times against the dictatorship prior to the events at the Polytechneion."

Now a corallary to this is the Vietnam War. I watched it all on TV and was well read on it when I was kid. The War was won! The Viet Cong at the end of the Tet Offensive were destroyed for the most part. What won the war---for the North Vietnamese and the Communists, was the American College Student!

You laugh, but the mayor of Oakland, if I remember rightly, 10 years after the event commendated the Faculty of California Colleges and Universities for ending the Vietnam War. It was the Marxist professors at the American Colleges that won the Vietnam War and made America leave and then, thru the Boland Agreement, tied American hands and forbade them helping the South Vietnamese!

I watched this first hand. I know this is exactly what happened as well in Greece and in Spain; Marxist professors instil this "democracy" and "Freedom" into their students, and these code words do the rest. Students are radicals, they are young, dumb, and full of cum. They are berift of wisdom and easily decieved.

From Wikipedia: "The tradition of student protest was always strong in Greece, even before the dictatorship. Papadopoulos tried hard to suppress and discredit the student movement during his tenure at the helm of the junta. But the liberalisation process he undertook allowed the students to organise more freely and this gave the opportunity to the students at the Athens Polytechnic to organise a demonstration that grew increasingly larger and more effective. The political momentum was on the side of the students. Sensing this the Papadopoulos junta panicked and reacted violently."

Didn't I just see that on real time in 1970s America watching the National News? Kent State anybody?

Culture is held by the Teachers. If the Teachers are Marxist, the culture will be Marxist. The seat of rebellion and the Marxist infiltration of both Greece and Spain is thru the Marxist professors that sit at colleges and universities.

Chris Crawford said...

Mr. Wheeler, you have truly gone off the deep end. Your weird comments about Jews, Marxists, Anarchists, and college professors place you beyond the ken of reasoned discourse.

W.LindsayWheeler said...

I should have proofread my first comment.

I wrote this "The Serbian Anarchists were a product of the French Revolution and the French Revolution was the product of the American Revolution which was the successful continuation of the English Civil Wars." but needed to continue it as and the English Civil Wars were brought on by Machiavelli's and Valla's redefinition of the term "republic". The revolution in language begun in the Renaissance bore fruit in action.

I meant to say that "WWII was a continuation of WWI". WWI was the further elimination of three monarchies which is the first step to deracination and WWII was expressly ordained and manufactured to discredit nationalism, the second step. And this is all about "REDIRECTING" and "CREATING" the narrative that drives all things today.

You laugh, but then what drives Socialism is Hegelian dialectic and the Socialist intelligentsia all know this. WWII was a war between Socialisms of the International and the National. The International Socialists, imbibed with Hegel, knew that there was going to be a Nationalist reaction against them. WWII was a war between Socialists, America being Fabian Socialist. In the Hegelian dialectic, Nationalism had to arise, than then they had to set about to destroy it and discredit it. For all change ever, always has a Formal and Final Cause. And all modern history is towards a Final Cause, which is Globalization, and One World.

W.LindsayWheeler said...

From the Marxist website (marxist.com) "Only after the fall of the Colonels was the KKE legalised again."

Student rebellion is necessary and was manufactured in order to bring about the freedom and the legalization of the Greek Communist Party.

"Although this process has been called “Europeanization,” a better term would be denationalization. “Europe” had become a transnational space where collective ethnic rights would be much weaker and individual rights much stronger."

Denationalization

That is the goal of Marxism. Please read the book One World by John Kiang. And the whole of the so-called Enlightenment is about creating this "individual". It is about atomizing men and women in order to decontruct Group dynamics and institutions such as Family and Race.

"Europeanization was thus presented as a way to empower the individual at the expense of collective identities."

"Empower the individual". That is the whole point. The individual is weak by nature. It is by atomizing him that he becomes useless and easily manipulated and led. It is the breakdown of society.

This is Marxism redux. The Communist Party of Greece is about Marxizing Greek culture and denationalizing it. Democracy is socialism.

Europeanization is Marxism.

W.LindsayWheeler said...

Here is a quote from an article today that is very apropo on what I am talking about: "Obama admits in “Dreams From My Father” that, during college, he was attracted to the “Marxist professors.” Indeed, the Marxist student leader at Occidental College at the time, John Drew, says Obama was far more radical than even Drew was, actually believing that Marx’s prophesied proletariat revolution to overthrow capitalism was imminent in the United States. Today Drew, who has long since repudiated his former radicalism, says that even in his Marxist days he attempted to rein in Obama by trying to persuade him to work within America’s political system to bring about the Marxist transformation they all desired."

From America's Marxist Picnic

What is education for? Passing on the culture---or transforming culture?

W.LindsayWheeler said...

In response to Mr. Crawford about things being weird, I point to Rosa Luxemburg's The Nationalities Question. Which I read. Why would someone want to end nations for? Why is there something titled The Nationalities Question? I didn't get the memo! Nations have been a given since the dawn of man, why is there a "Question" about nationalities? That is wierd.

John C. Kiang traces this movement to socialism:
"As far as world unity is concerned, Marx and Engels were the pioneers who expounded that modern industry had furnished a real foundation for a world unity, and declared not only that 'working men have no country,...' "
but also that
"Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationalities. [4] "In this declaration Marx and Engels claimed that the struggle of the workers was international in essence. National differences, they pointed out, were being wiped out by the development of free trade, by the growth of a world market, and by the increasing uniformity of industrial and social conditions. The workers in particular were being denationalized by modern industry, and had no fatherland."

What Rosa Luxemburg really laid out was that Marxism is a genocidal ideology. It was from the very beginning and this genocidal ideology was planned in the Renaissance with the slogan, "A republic is any government without a king". No king would subjugate himself to a world body---so kings had to be gotten away with. Kings are the shepards of their racial groups. Get rid of the kings, and the race dissipates.

This Marxist ideology has its roots in the Old Testament where the kings of the earth are to be done away with and all the nations of the earth will be ruled by the Hebrews.

What I say is wierd? I have done the research and have read the books. I don't know why people have not read Rosa Luxemburg and people have not seen that inherent within Marxism lies a genocidal ideology. What I say seems wierd because most people accept "The Narrative" and have not done the research.

To do away with Nations is genocidal. Karl Marx in his writings on Germany called for the dissolution of the family: (Marx's own words, "That the abolition of individual economy is inseparable from the abolition of the family is self-evident."

Race is only Family writ large. Just as Karl Marx wanted to abolish the family, Marxism seeks the abolishment of the Nation, the Family writ large. Marxism is not only anti-family, it is also genocidal. Macrocosm/microcosm; things repeat in all the spheres.

It is ethno-states that are the Natural Order. It is the Novus Ordo of America that is weird.

W.LindsayWheeler said...

I would like to comment on the tone of why the change in the Original Post (OP).

"The Right no longer saw institutions like the family, the church, and the ethnos as pre-conditions for economic success. Under the influence of libertarianism, it now viewed them as obstacles to competitive markets and economies of scale. By liquidating these collective restraints on the individual,..."

***"Economic Success"***

What was the Old Order? It was the warrior cultures, Catholicism and community. The Old Order had for its essence---The Transcendent, the Metaphysical.

What does "Economic Success" entail?

Materialism. Pure, vulgar materialism.

What concerned the Old Order was Salvation. What concerns the Modern Order---Not enough bling. All people's eyes are turned to the material affects of this world. What is most important is ---economics.

What does Mitt Romney care about?

Jobs and the Economy--materialism.

Culture? preserving the WASP character of America? No. Romney is a typical leader--all pure materialism. It's the economy, the chase and grovel for material riches. To hell with culture. Romney is the embodiement of that quote above.

Prof. Frost rightly lays out what drives modern life---Economic success and this materialism drives politics.

And the conclusion?

Greece is dying. Europe is dying. America is dying.

The basic fault really is Spiritual. The problem of modern life is Spiritual.

W.LindsayWheeler said...

And finally, "The Other".

Jesus Christ said, "You can not serve two masters. You will love the one and hate the other---or you will love the other and hate the one".

What Christ was explaining is a Law of Nature, or Natural Law.

You can't serve two masters. It is either or. You can't do both. It is impossible. This is why the Political Leadership of America and Europe are engrossed in helping the immigrant, the foreigner and the other to the detriment of their own kinsmen. They Love The Other and Hate their kinsmen and their policies show that.

I'm sort of a armchair classicist. And classical reading helps to put a lot into context.

Xenophon, a Laconophile, a repeats a form of Spartan wisdom: "...but the wicked man and the coward are traitors to the whole body politic". x, 6

The Good practice Virtue and the wicked practice Vice. They can not help it. The Spartans endeavored to educate their boys into The Good for loyalty is a virtue. Nature abhors a vacuum. If one is not practicing Virtue, one is doing vice. To help the Other in deteriment to one's kinsmen, is a vice. It is not part of the Natural Order of things. From one's nature proceeds one's acts. Evil can not produce virtue and Good can not produce vice.

The breaking of the Natural Order, of attacking the Natural Law, is all rebellion. Nature does not reward rebellion. Nature does not reward vice.

Chris Crawford said...

I'm sort of a armchair classicist.

Indeed, you have a talent for cherry-picking quotes. Would that you had a more catholic grasp of the corpus.

chris said...

Liberals/leftists/marxists are free-riders on the group. Plain and simple.

http://www.anonymousconservative.com/modern.pdf

While I don't necessarily agree with the interpretation of leftists being r and rightists being K, as expounded in the above document, I think that the information provided in that document nonetheless supports the notion I stated above of leftists as free-riders on the group.

chris said...

"While I don't necessarily agree with the interpretation of leftists being r and rightists being K, as expounded in the above document, I think that the information provided in that document nonetheless supports the notion I stated above of leftists as free-riders on the group"

By this I mean I don't necessarily agree with r/K being the ultimate explanation for all the differences in behaviour between leftists and rightists, but I nonetheless think that the information provided in that document supports the notion of leftists as free-riders on the group

W.LindsayWheeler said...

Vox Day ended is weekly column with this:

"Some societies are simply too stupid and shortsighted to survive."

Life is War. And of course, God created this world, the best of all worlds, (as the so-called "Enlightenment" thought) but also this world is deadly---deadly to fools. For not only is this world the best of all worlds, it is also planned in such a way as to take out fools. It is designed as such. Nature takes out the weak. It always has and always will. It is God ordained.

But "weak" in Nature is of two things. In the Animal and plant world it is the physically weak. In the human sphere, weakness is of a different standard. It is the spiritually weak, it is the character weakness that Nature is designed to destroy.

Some societies are simply too stupid and shortsighted to survive."

Greece, Spain, Britain, America, Sweden, Denmark, France are too stupid and shortsighted to survive!

Nature kills off the degenerate. Europeans are going the way of the Dodo bird. If you act like the Dodo bird, you deserve to go the way of the Dodo bird. Nature does not give out guarantees.

Marxism is an evil, foolish, genocidal ideology that brings about the degeneration of people. Nature doesn't operate or give a hoot about man's sophistry. Either you play by Nature's rules---or She kills you! Nature rules.

W.LindsayWheeler said...

"Lop off the head, and the body dies".

You can see this paradigm. The European kings have been killed or have been expunged.

Their societies are dying.

And to kill the king, to deconstruct monarchy, is genocidal. When the Tsarist Russian family was totally wiped out, that was genocide.

Russia? It is mass of environmental pollution, drunks, falling birthrate, economic morass of corruption and ineptitude. Their military might sits rusting in fields and in harbors.

Europe is Monarchy. Just as every cell has a nucleaus, just as every organism has a brain, just as every family has a father, Race also has a nucleaus called the Royal Family. All things in nature have structure and form.

Democracy is against the Natural Order, is against the Natural Law. It is not according to Nature.

So it must die. All democracies die.

This is Peter F said...

Chris,

Making the shift from family loyalty to nation-state loyalty is a major undertaking. And it requires ongoing effort. It's not as if a country can make that shift and then forget about it.

As for making the shift from nation-state loyalty to global loyalty, I'm very skeptical. A person can accept that fellow citizens are kin when they look similar, behave similarly, and share similar values. Without those preconditions, you need intense propaganda to make it work. There's also the little matter of ensuring that those other fellow citizens reciprocate.

Lindsay,

I was a Marxist in high school, and our principal was convinced that I was a front person for outside subversives. Yet I didn't know anyone outside the school. I had friends who did (mainly for buying drugs) but their politics was vaguely leftwing at most. As for me, my Marxism was self-taught. I was curious and I read up on it, all by myself.

I don't deny that conspiracies happen, but they don't account for most of what takes place historically. And they often have unexpected results. We know, for instance, that the German imperial government played a key role in engineering the Bolshevik revolution as a way to get Russia out of World War I. But they still lost the war. And communism survived for long after.

W.LindsayWheeler said...

Thank you for your response Prof. Frost. I agree with your post.

As an armchair philo-sophos, yes, I agree that conspiracies happen but I see something in ideology that may look like a conspiracy.

In the beginning of computers, there was a basic software program above the bios called "DOS". It organized information. The "DOS" program formulated information, garbage in, garbage out.

Ideology is like a "DOS" program for people. It is the basic "software" program that organizes and formulates, and then interprets info generally for the human. Give the human some basic premises, true or false, and then this "software program", (ideology, sophistry, etc) gives the premises in order to interpret the given facts or situations that people are involved in.

As Aristotle remarks, people are herd animals. And the majority think like herd animals. Let's say Thomas Jefferson's "All men are created equal". The Bible and the Natural Law doesn't teach that. Masonry does. (TJ being a Mason.) The so-called "Enlightenment" (I put scare quotes "_" around the word, because the majority were atheists, and atheists can't have enlightenment {which in essense is spiritual}) So, this all men are equal and the idea of equality is like a parameter in a DOS program. Teach people this and they will act like the DOS program tells them. They interpret reality according to this Ideological premise of equality and equality in all spheres and when all these people act in concert---it looks like a conspiracy.

When you give the code words "Freedom" and "Equality", (Liberte, Equalite, Fraternite) these are major premises that act like a DOS program for humans. And then these humans grade, judge, act upon these premises, thus the mass of individuals accomplishing the same goals.

The same thing upon hate. Hatred of the Roman Catholic Church motivated many people of different races and creeds to act in concert. Fundamentalist Protestants, Atheists and Jews made common cause together in the Enlightenment and beyond to bring about the destruction of Christendom. Why? "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". It wasn't a true conspiracy, but these disparate groups acted in concert because their theme across the board was hatred.

There are conspiracies and then there are these two other things, ideology (as DOS program) and motivational emotions that make people act together for a common cause.

I see this throughout history. Common sentiments, or as you phrase it "The Narrative", drive human judgements and in turn these judgements are the basis of action toward specific goals.

Chris Crawford said...

Peter, here's an interesting thought: let's consider the size of the "typical" social unit (that is, the largest unit that enjoyed significant loyalty from its people) as a function of population.

We start with the tribal unit of hunter-gatherer tribes, estimated at about 150 people. That stays constant right up until the development of cities; urbanites would show loyalty up to a few thousand people.

Somewhat later we began to see some kind of loyalty to larger units. Hebrews, Egyptians, Assyrians, and so forth. Of course, we're not talking about much in the way of loyalty; the typical dogface in these societies didn't have much choice in the matter.

But we definitely saw something like larger group solidarity with the Achaeans who attacked Troy and similar marauding groups. Perhaps theirs was the solidarity of robbers,

Certainly the classical Greeks demonstrated strong loyalty to their city-states, with populations in the tens of thousands.

Then came the Romans, who started off with just the basic city-state loyalty. As Rome grew, group solidarity expanded to larger numbers, but by the late Republic, it was clear that the polity was larger than the embrace of group loyalty; the coming of the Empire was made inevitable by the growth of the Roman state. Still, the Romans pushed the size of the social unit that commanded loyalty well into the hundreds of thousands.

In the Dark Ages, everything went to hell and social units shrank in size. It's difficult to identify any large polity that enjoyed strong loyalty from its members. The Church certainly commanded respect, but loyalty? I don't think so.

It really wasn't until the advent of nationalism in the late 18th century that we see loyalties embracing larger social units. American made the difficult transition from state-loyalty to national-loyalty, shifting loyalty to social units in the millions. France embraced nationalism and national loyalty suddenly, and the Napoleonic Empire was the direct result.

Since then we have seen national loyalties extend out to polities as large as a billion (China and India), but numerous problems (language, culture, trade, distance) erect an obstacle that will prove very difficult to overcome. It seems likely that international loyalty is a long way off.

Still, it's interesting to compare the development of loyalty to larger social units to the increase in size of humanity. It seems as if homo sapiens developed larger group identities as the range of human interaction (primarily economic) embraced more and more people. But has it kept up? Population has exploded in size, but group loyalty doesn't seem to have gone very far.

Does this bode ill for our future?

Sean said...

The overview in these posts has shown Greece enthusiastically adopting the dominant ideologies of the time, and being slow to relinquish them.

I think nation states are motivated to stick with globalism because, for all the post national rhetoric, they still worry about their power and status relative to each other.

The competition has moved from outright war to economic growth. Just as states formerly had to fight costly wars to maintain their position in the world, now they are forced to compete for econnomic growth in a globalised market. Like war the globalised economic system does a great deal of damage to their long term viability, but there is no alternative. Hobbs said it best: "Continually to be out-gone, is misery. Continually to out-go the next before, is felicity. And to forsake the course, is to die"

Chris Crawford said...

Sean, how is it that nations that are pursuing economic growth are damaging their long-term viability? Are you referring to the environmental consequences of unregulated growth?

Jprezy87 said...

Well folks , the Greek election results are in, looks like the pro-austerity (slashing spending) New Democracy Party has taken the reins. Peter and Chris.. what are your takes on this??

W.LindsayWheeler said...

I want to piggyback on what Crawford was pointing to, "the typical size of a social unit".

Well, it depends on environment, history, time, culture.

As an armchair classicist, (one should be well-rounded, knowledgeable about all phases of Western Culture), one runs into a very salient ancient Greek term that had a lot of pull for the ancient Greeks and that is "autarchia"--self-suffiency.

During the so-called "Enlightenment" of atheists, their concept of the natural law was atoms or more precisely atomization. This was big in so many ways. This was the sophistical foundation for the growth of the idea of individualism, that we are all individuals and the height of all reality and human experience was the "Individual".

Well, their concept of the Natural Law was very flawed. Extremely deficient.

I ask, Is the Individual "autarchia", self-sufficent? One glaring natural occurence bespeaks of the total dependency of an individual and that is in Reproduction. No Individual can reproduce himself. He "NEEDS" another. In the design of the Natural Order, or Cosmos, Man needs a woman in order to reproduce himself. So the Family is the first social unit. Family is necessary to reproduce. No family, no reproduction, the individual dies.

See, Autarchia is the basis of finality, of completeness. No individual is complete. He is fundamentally a "Part of a Whole". That is the Natural Law. All things are in combination.

Now is the family self-sufficient? No. The family does not have self-sufficiency in the matters of defense and of economics. Aristotle goes through this process in his Politics. The "polis" has "autarchia". It has self-sufficiency in defense and in economics. For in War, the individual can not stand alone, he needs others. In economics, the individual needs others.

So the criteria of a "good social unit" is Autarkia, self-sufficiency.

It goes like this: Family, Tribe (Clan), City-State, Nation. There is no other thing above nation.

Why?

All things in the Cosmos, revolve and rest on the Natural Law. All Good, Beauty and Truth exist in the Golden Mean. The Golden Mean drives many things in the Universe from the Christian Godhead on down. Life exists in the Golden Mean and death exists in the extremes.

The Golden Mean is the mean between the extremes of deficiency and excess. Since the individual is deficient in matters such as in reproduction, defense and economics, individualism is an evil. It is an extreme, an extreme of deficiency. On the opposite side of the spectrum is One World Government. That is an excess. Race and Nation is the Golden Mean between the deficiency of individualism and the excess of One Worldism. In the extremes, all things become dysfunctional, inefficient and denigrate, thus death. Globalism will never work.

Furthermore, I point to the Biblical story of Genesis where God destroyed the Tower of Babel as an evil. These two witnesses, divine revelation and the Natural Law agree, Globalization is an evil. Life exists in the Golden Mean.

What drives the mechanics of a good social unit is Autarchia and the Golden Mean. What is necessary for defense and the acquisition of goods and it is the right proportion. Furthermore, Life is NOT about economics, but Life itself. It is about Culture and Society. A society of community of shared life experiences which is culture. That is what should drive human life. Shared community. You can't have that with One World Government.

One size does not fit all! As the Russian proverb goes, "What is good for a Russian, is deadly for a German". (Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn)

Chris Crawford said...

Jprezy87, about the only reaction I have to the Greek results is relief that they've avoided an immediate catastrophe.

I accept Keynesian recommendations, so the austerity being imposed upon them is a mistake, IMO. The fact that they were irresponsible in the past does not mean that they should be punished in the future.

I think that the only viable solution gets them back on a growth path for now, but has them repaying debt for decades. This will ultimately require EU coverage for their debts (probably Eurobonds) plus a significant sacrifice of their sovereignty. It would be rather like a bankruptcy court appointing a trustee to manage an insolvent business.

This is politically impossible just now: the Greeks will not accept such a huge intrusion on their sovereignty, and the Germans will refuse to give them more money until they accept such an intrusion.

The Greek body politic simply cannot accept the reality of their situation; many Greeks believe that they can have their fiscal cake and eat it, too. Some folks just can't see the train bearing down on them until it's right in front of their noses. My impression is that the fragile compromise strategy that Germany and France have reluctantly accepted is to keep pushing Greece to the edge of the precipice, forcing them to take another step in the right direction.

The problem with this strategy is that each push towards the precipice unnerves the bond markets even more, pushing up Greek bond interest rates and making their fiscal situation even worse.

A Greek exit from the euro remains a very real possibility. The Economist had a great headline for its story on this: "My Big Fat Greek Divorce".

Sean said...

I think the reaction by Greece to 'Macedonia' makes clear that questions of national status are still very much on the minds of leaders in the EU countries. An older example was the unification of Germany, Thatcher and Mitterrand were both opposed Here

Chris, It is very misleading to portray Germany as wanting to increase its power over Greece. Haven't you bothered reading the statements of Merkel I gave?; they make it clear Germany's objective is to bind itself into an EU political union. Germany's leadership want Germany's own sovereignty to be dissolved and disappear, along with Greece's and the other EU countries'.

In a POLITICAL UNION Germany will be unable to take independent initiatives. Germans are prisoners of the past who are committed to a strategy of full political & economic union where Germany will be secure and their business will benefit from the single currency. German taxpayers will be the losers, and they are reluctant to take on the costs of the project, but the policy is set.

Syriza the left wing party that lost the election was NOT campaigning on a promise to default or leave the eurozone, they just wanted a renegotiation of the terms of the bailout. The new government will get some concessions on the bailout and everyone will be happy, except German taxpayers who are correct in their suspicion that Greece will do the same thing again.

Chris Crawford said...

Sean, you completely misunderstood my comment vis a vis Germany. They don't want to have direct control over Greece, they want Greece to submit to stricter financial controls, which will infringe upon Greek sovereignty.

I also think you overstate the German desire for full political union. Yes, that seems to be a long-term ideal, but most of the German commentary I have seen treats it as something far in the future, something to be aimed for in the ideal but not necessarily something that can ever be made to work.

You're quite right the Syriza wasn't advocating a departure from the euro -- but they were strongly suggesting that a tough Greek stance in the negotiations would yield better terms. Right now, Greece is a supplicant, its only bargaining chip being that the damage to the EU as a whole if Greece exited the euro would be almost as great as the damage to Greece.

Sean said...

Read more. The German leadership elite are on record in the last fortnight talking about going ahead, with just an inner core group if neccessary. Merkel statements don't suggest to you they are deadly serious about political union as soon as possible? I see the debt crisis as the schwerpunkt of an all out effort to attain their objective.

The leadership in France is set on political union, now the parlamentary elections are over it will go ahead with the project. German taxpayers will get to pay for the lifesyle and benefits of France too. Only the UK is really reluctant, mainly it because the capitalist conspiracy calling itself the 'conservative' party wants to retain London's advantage in financial services, and the other EU contries want to regulate them.

Chris Crawford said...

Sean, your conspiracy theories aren't convincing. The German leadership is not hell-bent on screwing the German people.

Anonymous said...

The German leadership is not hell-bent on screwing the German people.

There is often a lot of self-deception and hypocrisy among elites. Along with just plain old ignorance and stupidity. Elites don't tend to believe that their rule is bad for the people, even if it is. They think they're right, that they're doing the people a favor, etc.

Chris Crawford said...

Anonymous, you have absolutely nothing in the way of evidence to support your paranoid claim. It is idle speculation.

Sean said...

My conspiracy theories! You think Palin could become VP.

"'More than anything, we need a political union,' she said. 'That means that we must, step by step through the process, give up more powers to Europe as well and allow Europe oversight possibilities.'

Merkel is carefully preparing the public for the possibility that great changes are coming and that established certainties are no longer valid. Her message is that Europe only has a future when the Germans too give up large portions of their national sovereignty."

This is Peter F said...

The Greek people have decided to kick the can down the road. The austerity package will go through, with a few cosmetic changes to sweeten the deal.

How long can this situation be kept going? I don't know. For the past two decades, the Japanese have been keeping their economy going with a massive debt load. But that debt is largely internal, and the Japanese still have a strong nation-state. Neither factor holds true for present-day Greece. Its current elite has been pushing individualism and postnationalism at the expense of the nation-state.

Keep in mind that the debt crisis is symptomatic of a more fundamental problem. Greece is trying to maintain a First World standard of living without the resources to back it up. Like most of the West, Greece is caught up in a 2-way process. On the one hand, industries are relocating to countries where labor costs are cheaper. On the other hand, low-wage labor is coming in and displacing Greeks from those jobs that cannot be relocated.

What is happening to Greece now is just a harbinger of what will happen to the rest of us. The only difference is that the Greeks are (1) less able to borrow money to pay for current needs and (2) geographically more exposed to these forces of globalization.

Anonymous said...

Is it possible to make the jump from familial loyalty to global loyalty? Can it be done in one mighty leap, or must it be done in small steps?

"Global loyalty" would probably require a common global enemy such as hostile aliens from outer space who wanted to invade earth and kill all people.

I'm not sure if a certain group loyalty or identity is ever really established without a common enemy or a different or opposition group at that level. If there is no such enemy, the group loyalty or identity probably breaks down into smaller groups that now do have enemies and opposing groups at the smaller level.

In the US, the presence of blacks probably helped facilitate a wider or more general white identity.

Grey said...

"the extension of trust outside the family is probably best done in stages, each one extending trust to a larger circle of people. This process takes a long time. The colonels tried to rush it, but they achieved only partial success....or must it be done in small steps?"

I think that's the nub of it (and i imagine the process can be reversed so Greeks may have had a wider circle of trust in the past than today).

I think you can try and jump-start the process by imposing cultural elements from populations that have a wider trust-circle, but eventually you need the people themselves to adjust - and that of course depends on knowing what made higher-trust populations the way they are.

W.LindsayWheeler said...

Prof. Frost. I hear you.

It's all going to hell in a handbasket.

Recently a book and a movie came out predicting our future called "The Road". Our future will be the combination of "Mad Max" and this movie "The Road". "The Road" is where humans are hunting other humans for food. It is so nihilistic its terrifying. They know what is coming and they are putting concepts in people's heads. It is utterly disgusting. This is our future.

All evil commits suicide. The human race with its unrepentant original sin is trying hard to thoroughly kill itself. All evil seek death.

Just go to Drudge and find the video of the grandmother bus monitor being heckled by the riders of the bus! This is what the liberal world created! A bunch of animals. America is the new Sodom and Gomarrah. Just a sewer pit of vulgar, barbarian children.

There is no more any virtue. The crass materialism has created a country of monsters. Greece may be the first to fall, but America is right behind.

W.LindsayWheeler said...

Living in unreality.

The Debt Crisis? Caused by people who don't live in reality. Greece? The government of California is 16 billion in the hole. It was reported that collectively, the states have a 1 Trillion dollar deficit in their Pension plans. I used to attend government meetings and complain about 2% hikes every year in government pay roles; complain about HUD passing out money to the cities; etc. No use. Everybody is on the government tit and no one wants to pay for anything.

Alan Caruba wrote an article: "Why Liberals are like zombies". He observes:
"I hope Barack Obama lives to a very old age. I want him to look back at the wreckage of the Democratic Party and the senility of Liberalism that has wreaked such havoc on the world stage. To me, Liberalism is a zombie philosophy, devoid of any connection with reality, but still able to cause great harm."

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn referenced a famous incident involving Hegel:
"This recalls Hegel's reaction to a student's observation that the facts contradicted his theory. Hegel looked at the man severely over his spectacles and said, "All the worse for the facts".

This is called Contempt for Reality.

Hegel is one of communism's favorite sophists for Hegel said that man creates his own reality. This is just fodder for the ideologue. It feeds his ego that he can create reality. Beneath the Debt Crist is this "Contempt for reality". What drove the Debt is the socialist demands for workers regardless of economic science, early retirement, small work week, hefty retirement packages, etc.

Unions are Socialist organizations. They purposely drive up the price of labor and then their socialist compadres in Corporate and in Politics push free trade. Union demands is what has caused businesses to leave Michigan. I know my city is full of empty business that have fled Union labor! Not only that the major 500 Fortune Corporation that is housed here is Globalist. It sent a 2500 man factory to Mexico! Like Mexicans eat cereal and wheat and corn are abundant in Northern Mexico deserts!

To hire a union man is about $75 an hour! If businesses can't afford union demands---what makes you think government can? Who can pay pensions to millions of firefighters, policemen, city workers, teachers and all their administrators?

These people live in Lulu land. The crys of the Greeks and the demands of the far left to forgo the austerity package just smacks of hubris! huge amounts of hubris.

There is no sense of reality in the Left. They are infantile.