Bi-Polar World

George Orwell’s super-states came to mind as another paragraph on the Greek bailout was penned yesterday. Europe’s negotiators broke off talks with the Greeks. The story in the New York Times this morning reported this Greek reaction: “Greece, meanwhile, has suggested that it could turn to Russia or China for help if its talks on debt relief and a rollback of austerity measures break down.” The Russians and Chinese might review Virgil’s famous saying, but with a slight edit: Beware of Greeks even when they’re seeking gifts….

European Unity

Events in Greece in recent days—the election of Alexis Tsipras as Prime Minister followed by his party’s immediate actions to lift the policies of austerity still in place a week ago in Greece—reminded me of a trip I once took to Luxembourg to visit the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1956. I was in the U.S. Army in Europe then; the circumstances for this visit are lost. What does remains sharply imprinted on my memory were the presentations and graphics shown us in briefings. I saw projected there the first picture of a united Europe. That was roughly 58 years ago. The ECSC—made up of France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands—was indeed the original of the European Union; the whole of it, as it eventually emerged, was already clearly visible to ECSC’s founders. The idea surprised me. I’d only been gone from Europe then some five years; now I was back. And the concept of a United States of Europe was right there, projected on a screen in Luxembourg.

The current news and related comments swirling around Greece are not exactly encouraging. Tsipras appears to think that the European Union will continue to bail out Greece in order to save the Eurozone. As for that, we shall see. The problem with the union is that it is only a fragile and partial unity, as I’ve argued on LaMarotte three years ago (link). Part of me inclines in a negative direction, meaning that Greece may be expelled; in most ways we are now living in an era of political decentralization , at least within the old Christendom. A part of me is still there in Luxembourg marveling at the vision of a greater collective. The ECSC was known, back in my time, as the Montanunion. Montan means “montane,” thus referring to mountains. The word in practice then referred to the industries of the mountain, namely the mining of metal ores and coal. Mountains don’t fall apart, but they can erode.

One of the most notable aspects of voluntary unions of nations is that they tend to hold together only while a very dominant state, in Europe’s case that is Germany, retains the effective clout (but without sovereign power over other members) to hold things together. When that power fails—whether from within or through counter-pressure from without—pieces start to fall off. How long will Chancellor Merkel be able to hold on?

Grown Ups

My grasp of democratic politics is virtually nil, and of such politics in Greece and Italy even weaker. But from a kind of child’s perspective and at a great distance, the changes at the top in these two countries, formalized in Greece, close to accomplished in Italy, look very interesting.

In Greece Lucas Papademos has become Prime Minister. Serious business; the NYT signals that by showing high clergymen in traditional Greek Orthodox garments administering the oath of office. Interesting figure. Papademos has degrees in physics, in electrical engineering, and a doctorate in economics all earned at MIT. He spent a decade teaching economics at Columbia University. He worked for the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston. He was also a visiting professor at the Kennedy School of Government and at Harvard. Thus far his career in the United States alone. In Europe he was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Financial Studies at the University of Frankfurt. Next he rose from a position as chief economist at the Bank of Greece to become its governor a decade later. He went on from there to the European Central Bank as vice president. Last year he left that position to become an advisor to Prime Minister George Papandreou. Last, not least, he is a member of the Trilateral Commission. This is a high-level discussion group founded by David Rockefeller and organized (along with others) by Zbigniew Brzezinski. The “three” in that trilateral arrangement are the United States, Europe, and Japan.

Let me turn next to Mario Monti, most likely to become the new leader of Italy. Monti has degrees in economics and management from Bocconi University in Milan. He completed his graduate studies at Yale University under James Tobin, Nobel Prize winner in Economics (1981). (Tobin himself was on the Council of Economic Advisors and a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.) Monti began an academic career at the University of Turin. After five years there he returned to Bocconi University as a rector and then became its president. He is also first chairman of Bruegel, a Brussels-based economics think tank and is the European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission. He has served two terms as a member of the European Commission.

What are we seeing here? We’re looking at serious credentials, solid academic and administrative careers ending in executive positions. Independence. Appointed service to high level posts with international bearing in banking, finance, and economics.

When things have really, really ground to a halt, at last the call goes out to the grown ups. But can they sail the boiling oceans of greed, panic, and passion? These men, one feels, will give it the old college try.

A Greek in Rome

Sometimes I feel as once a Greek might have felt in Rome. That thought surfaced sharply when I read Lucio Russo’s The Forgotten Revolution (see this earlier post). The author makes the case there that the Romans had little use for pure science; their consuming interest was power. Yesterday the same thought surfaced when a Japanese student commented on one of my forays into Mathematics on LaMarotte, namely calculation of the log of numbers by hand. My reader sent me notes on how the Japanese calculate square roots by hand. Initially the graphic did not make complete sense to me, hence I attempted to fill in the blanks using Google—and failed on that attempt much as I’d failed earlier on logs. But then came inspiration. I put my question into German and let Google rip again. I instantly had four quite useful answers in that language. Later my Japanese correspondent sent me more materials, not least a link to a Japanese website that—like those in German—took on the question in order to educate its young and (in my case) the venerably old.

Europe and America. Greece and Rome. Genuinely cultivated Romans, to be sure, spoke Greek and valued Greek learning. But Rome, at least until it split in two, was the center of the world. Greek immigrants were everywhere—many of them slaves of course. As Europeans flocked to America—but not as slaves, thank the Lord. Superior culture to one side, superior power to the other. The Greek in Rome must have felt both—and also experienced the ambiguity of that. Odd how an ancient experience now has a modern parallel. And as the United States behaves ever more imperially, the more that feeling intensifies, at least in me. Once the “country of immigrants” made me feel at home; now alienation grows apace—even as I realize that after sixty years of residence I would be quite at a loss in the Old Country unless I quickly mastered Turkish.

Hellenistic Science Rules

The best books come to me as gifts from my children. Michelle gave me The Forgotten Revolution, by Lucio Russo, for my birthday. It is subtitled “How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn.” The original in Italian appeared in 1996, the English version, Springer imprint, in 2004. Russo is an Italian historian of science, a physicist, and a professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.

This is a splendid and decidedly original work. Its thesis is that what we call modern science originated in full during the Hellenistic era and was essentially lost before that era ended thanks to the collision of Greek with Roman culture. The Romans had no interest in science; their focus was exclusively on power and administration. Science was reborn, and largely through the rediscovery of lost documents (many recovered only as Arabic translations from the Greek) beginning in the sixteenth century. One of his (for me) more fascinating observations is that our tendency to speak of the Graeco-Roman civilization as if it was a coherent whole is a coarse and ignorant blending of what were really opposites, an advanced civilization overcome and essentially buried under by a more primitive force.

Hellenism is typically dated from the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC) to the death of Cleopatra (30 BC), thus the onset of the decadent Roman imperial age. Russo thinks that the scientific era that began with Hellenism actually faded earlier, destroyed by Roman expansionism. He dates it to Rome’s conquest of Greece in the Battle of Corinth (146 BC —the same year that also saw Carthage destroyed). That date also roughly coincided with the Egyptian Ptolemy VIII’s rule (a monarch under Roman influence) who began the intense persecution of the Greek community in Alexandria (145-144 BC), a major center of Greek science.

Anybody interested in the history of science will find this book eye-opening. One of its valuable features is that it corrects a deeply rooted current view. It is that the ancients had discovered bits and pieces of science—but it required our genius to do the thing right. Russo’s view is that the Greeks had already done it—right, in other words. We are just now catching up with them. And in some ways some of our greatest (Newton) had still not caught the spirit of the thing and some of our more recent heroes (e.g. Niels Bohr) were again sliding away from the core insights of the Hellenists.