Isegoria

Roger Scruton reiterates the importance of culture:

I first visited Greece 50 years ago, hitchhiking with a school friend from England, in search of the glorious world of Homer, Plato, and Thucydides. Of course, we didn’t find that world. But we found something almost as remarkable, which was a place where the church and the priesthood dominated rural life, where villages were self-contained communities, where local saints enjoyed their festivals and where the old dances were still danced in the village squares, men in groups, and women in groups, dressed in the costumes that survived from Ottoman days, and rehearsing the old drama of the sexes with marriage as its eternal dénouement. It was a country that had yet to enter the modern world. Its rhythms were those of the village, where debts and duties were local, and where sun, sleep, and surrender managed the day. It was inconceivable to a young Anglo-Saxon visitor that such a country could be judged in the same terms as Germany or France, or that it could play a comparable role in an economy that included all three countries as equal partners.

At one point, running out of money, I joined the queue at a hospital in Athens, where you could give blood and be paid in drachmas. The presiding doctor leaped up to welcome the tall red-haired youth, and turned away the two small men who preceded me, judging their blood to be useless. The names of my unsuccessful rivals were Heracles and Dionysus. It was the only sign offered to me during that first visit that these people were descended from the Greeks to whom our civilization is owed.

I have no desire to return to Greece, dreading what the tourists and the property speculators have done to it. But I know that, whatever the changes, it is inconceivable that Greece should have developed in the same way and with the same rhythm as France or Germany. Of course the country has been modernized. Roads have been built and towns expanded. The tourist trade has wiped out the gentle manners of the villagers. Sexual intercourse has begun — somewhat later than 1963, which is when Philip Larkin famously dated it, but nevertheless with the same devastating effect on marriage and the family. No doubt the old modes of the folk songs have been forgotten, and no doubt the multinational brands have slapped their logos on shop fronts across the land. But for sure the culture of local obligation has remained. For sure people still regard leisure as more important than work, and debts as less important, the further away the creditor lies in the network of human relations. If you don’t know this from visiting Greece, you could learn it easily enough from reading Kazantzakis, Ritzos, Seferis, or any other of the writers in that great moment of literary flourishing which succeeded the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. You could even get it from Louis de Bernières and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Anybody with his eyes open and his heart in place would know that Greece is the product of a distinctive culture, and that this culture, however it develops, will always take the country in a direction and at a speed of its own.

Yet the architects of the euro did not know this. If they had known it, they would have known also that the effect of imposing a single currency on Greece and Germany would be to encourage Greece to transfer its debts to Germany, on the understanding that the further away the creditor the less the obligation to repay. They would have known that if the Greek political class can use sovereign debt to pay family, friends, and dependents, and to buy the votes needed to stay in office, that that is what the political class will do. They would have recognized that laws, obligations, and sovereignty don’t have quite the same meaning in the Mediterranean as they do on the Baltic, and that in a society used to kleptocratic government the fairest way out of an economic crisis is by devaluation — in other words, by stealing equally from everybody.

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