Cassandra Voices

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  • LONG READ: The Sleep of Reason II

    Editor’s Note: This is the second part of an extended essay by Irish artist Terence O’Connell but can be read as a stand alone piece.

    Rationalism is a psychosis; a dissociation of intellect and feeling; the suppression of our intuitive, emotional, and sensual being (the heart’s domain). Enlightenment thinkers wished to replace the credulity of religious compliance with reason. They put their faith in human progress and an expansive intellect – and some, it should be said, in a deeper and more natural spirituality.

    They thought they could reform society, but radical social reform has rarely, if ever, been generated by external pressure. It arises when an established worldview reaches the limit of its credibility and its possibilities.

    For all the fine words and egalitarian instincts, what emerged was a restricted and abstracted rationality, blinkered by the narrow focus of scientific empiricism: a civilization devoid of core significance that was to become a kind of megalomania. Mathematical abstraction, reductionist precision and the crushing urgency of capital  accumulation could never have generated a benign culture.

    Without consent to meaning and an imaginative response to the innate feelings that evoke a deeper sense of being, Western civilization will continue its fragmentation and decline until it succumbs to incompetence, overreach, and inner contradiction.

    At this point, Goya’s Capricho 43 comes to mind once more. There he sits, Goya himself, slumped over a table, looking like he has the whole world on his shoulders and wishing it would all go away.

    However, the words on the panel are stark: “The sleep of reason produces  monsters”. And the owls, bats and lynx are generally presumed to symbolize a resurgent irrationality always watching for reason to lower its guard – a clear expression of Enlightenment values. It is balanced somewhat by the caption for the print: “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders”.

    This is fine so far as it goes, but it ultimately amounts to the same thing. It implies that you can’t trust imagination without reason to almost police it. But in art – so in life generally – the imaginative impulse is primary. It is not going to lead you down the road to ruin as in some Victorian morality tale.

    Imagination is the indispensable quality, a benign compulsion in an unfolding life. A creative leap, the capacity to conceive the new, is essential if life is to evolve rather than merely repeat.

    Even mathematics, the very rock on which the rational world is built, is itself a brilliant act of imagination; an original, symbolic system, independent of life as lived, and that may in turn be applied to our practical engagement with its process.

    Reason elaborates the idea in a kind of inner dialectic that bridges the gap between inspiration and cultural expression, between the imaginative realm and the everyday. In practice, this is an indivisible, spontaneous process – not linear and mechanical – and its accomplishment is a sensitive art.

    However, we can’t really be sure what Goya meant. He was unhealthy, overworked and disillusioned. But the sleep of reason is not loss of control; the sleep of reason is rationalism, reason without heart.

    Looking at Capricho 43 with the Covid pandemic at its height, the bats were insistent. Their association with the new disease was a topic of speculation. A global panic was underway; the threat index was rising, and we were at war with a virus. The response to this “existential” threat (yet another) was employing the standard rhetoric of the war machine. Civil liberties were suspended; a crusade was launched; “trust the science” was on the banners; and facts and figures were deployed like heavy artillery.

    If your attitude to the world is purely rational, your actions – both the action itself and the manner of its effect – will reflect the sense of separability and isolation that characterizes it.

    Notwithstanding the fact that we humans have co-evolved with viruses, that their presence is vital, even if some are potentially harmful, a program of total suppression was begun. At least until a vaccine (a “magic bullet” that would stop Covid dead in its tracks) could be developed, we were told.

    Since the time of Edward Jenner in the late eighteenth century it has been known that a small piece of a virus or bacterium can stimulate an immune response. The technique has been used to prevent many common diseases ever since.

    A corona virus tends to generate variants liberally and is not so susceptible to a traditional vaccine. For the biotech industry, which had struggled after the financial expectations of The Human Genome Project were not realized, and the difficulty of meeting regulatory requirements, its moment had come. They were now cast as world saviours and the whole force of a global pandemic was behind them.

    To put it very simply, gene-based vaccines cause your own cells to produce a spike protein – essentially a piece of the virus – which, like a traditional vaccine should then provoke an immune response. All very well if you “trust the science”.

    In this case it meant trusting a pharmaceutical industry with a long record of disregard, deception and harm and allowing them to manipulate, or ‘program,’ your own cells.

    But no scientist can assure the outcome of speculative interference in the elusive and dynamic process at the heart of, and common to, every living system. A cell is a cell: nucleus, cytoplasm, membrane, and the tiny world within continuously generating growth. All cells share the same structure; all life is cellular; and all life is interconnected. What could possibly go wrong?

    Just to add that claims for efficacy went all the way from “magic bullet” to balm and Covid is still with us, vaccinated or not. And, I almost forgot, a few more billionaires now grace the earth.

    The publication of Los Caprichos marks the opening of the nineteenth century. In Spain, the war with France and years of political upheaval would follow. Goya reflects the disorder in his strikingly expressive work of those years until his death in exile in 1828.

    By this time Europe and North America were on the verge of a world that would seem very familiar to us now. Both electrification and the internal combustion engine arrived in the 1880’s, and the subsequent years are known as La Belle Epoque in Europe and The Gilded Age in America.

    The conspicuous affluence these terms betray rested on a period of intense industrialization and exploitation, during which the British Empire was the great world power. By the year of Goya’s death economic liberalism was about to reveal its most brutal aspect.

    In Britain the new poor laws were enacted to starve masses of the underclass into wage slavery. Without support millions more were plunged into sea of destitution. Included in this purgatory of despair were tens of thousands of women and girls forced into prostitution and an early grave. This was the social catastrophe confronted by Charles Dickens and Karl Marx.

    Across the seas, India and China (and countries in between), two ancient and distinct civilizations – their history, social structures and trading patterns rent – were forcibly conscripted into a global trading and financial system to their utter detriment, and to the enrichment of an elite group of financiers, industrialists and Western powers who controlled it.

    Further south, the scramble for Africa would soon open the gates to yet another prolonged exhibition of colonial barbarity.

    One appalling outcome: the instability and structural disintegration wrought by this interference in traditional systems of land use, production and trade left them unable to deal with the consequences of a prolonged drought in the 1880’s. (A phenomenon not unknown and provided for by tradition). As in Ireland a few decades earlier, famine ensued. It is estimated that between Asia and Africa perhaps as many as fifty million may have died.

    The unspeakable horror of all this is chronicled in detail in Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis, in so far as words or even pictures can convey the terrible suffering of fellow human beings on such an immense scale. Its full effect requires an imaginative capacity typically repressed in the cultivated mind by the assumption of superiority.

    In the words of Mike Davis, ‘What seemed from a metropolitan perspective the nineteenth century’s final blaze of imperial glory was, from an Asian or African viewpoint, only the hideous light of a giant funeral pyre.’[i]

    For all the achievements of Western civilization in science and the arts the dark side of our history is actual. Moreover, it still resonates around the world in conflict, poverty, migration, and debt.

    It is critical that we should acknowledge our defects now that, so we are told, we are once again standing at the edge of fundamental change. The transition to a post-carbon future will not forestall dire predictions without a radical shift in perspective and it remains ‘business as usual’.

    Unrestrained capital accumulation, open-ended economic growth, finance capitalism and the rigged marketplace are entrenched. Bacon’s slogan “knowledge is power” still drives and validates the scientific ideology that underlies it all. Together they perpetuate a toxic system to which the question of how it is fuelled is almost incidental.

    In addition, the corporate sector now has the ‘sustainable’ technology supposed to save us firmly in its grip; ‘saving the planet’ is a heaven-sent marketing strategy; and the promise of a ‘just transition’ has become a sickly green joke.

    A cursory analysis of the crisis we are facing would reveal the dynamic driving it. That it has done so for almost half a millennium is why the crisis is so acute and why its cause should be so obvious.

    That there are limits to growth is axiomatic. And it should also be apparent that renewable technologies could never equal the energy potential of fossil fuels. The dispersed energy of wind and solar and the second-hand energy of biofuels, even without the problem of intermittence, could only possibly match the concentrated energy of fossil fuels – discounting the growth imperative – by an expansion of its technologies on such a scale that this factor alone would be problematic.

    In any case, highly complex renewable systems present their own difficulties. Every method of energy production requires energy to support it: for mining coal, pumping oil, or the massive resource extraction demand by renewables and the ‘smart’ technology that enables it. This requirement has initiated yet another round of colonial exploitation and despoilation.

    Also, known reserves of many essential minerals are deficient. And resource scarcity is insurmountable; what doesn’t occur cannot be conjured into existence. A finite world has bio-physical limits: as its resources are subject to exhaustion, so our ambitions are subject to restraint. Our centuries long escapade is being constricted and the problems of over-development and over-complexity cannot be solved by more of the same – more regulations, more laws, plans, targets, goals, reproof, and penalties.

    Image: Aleksandar Pasaric

    What use is a carbon-free future if our rapacious civilization continues as is? Biodiversity loss, degradation of soils, deforestation, plunder of the oceans, toxic  pollution of every kind: all these are just as malignant, if not more so. Degradation and degeneracy cannot be ameliorated by new technologies. And it is delusional to hope that ‘sustainability’ can somehow allow us to defy some of the most fundamental realities of being.

    All this prowess we’ve engineered over time seems to have convinced too many of us that men are gods. And challenging the Gods never ends well. Hubris is followed by nemesis – inexorably if we can’t break through the bounds of scientific rationalism. And the stimulus for such a profound shift in consciousness cannot be prescribed; it can only arise organically. Whether from disillusionment, decline, crisis, chaos, or common sense remains to be seen.

    The ground of this dilemma was prepared during that long period of transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world: when the dominance of capital was extended, scientific inquiry established the mechanical worldview, and the hegemony of humanity over nature began its destructive course in earnest. If only Galileo could have seen the future through his telescope.

    It was at that time of change, about the year 1605 – just five years after Giordano Bruno was tied to the stake and the breadth of his perception went up in flames with him – that Don Quixote first set forth. Caught between these worlds, his adventure in a sense exemplifies dilemma. The changing conditions were presenting a choice: between faith and belief – and the new belief; between metaphor and fact; between self-realization and passivity; between the individual subject and the social object; and for Don Quixote himself perhaps – depending how you read it – between the way of a (wise?) fool and the way of conviction.

    Adventure is a disorder, a disruption of the everyday. The quest is, in part, a dissatisfaction in the everyday, a compulsion to discover its deeper reality. In the mediaeval epic the hero and the epic plane are coincident, so to speak. “The men of Homer belong to the same world as their desires”, to quote Jose Ortega y Gasset.[ii]

    But Don Quixote is at odds with his world. In this he is probably the first hero of the modern age – an anti-hero, if you will – not borne by the established manner of a chivalric tale, but impelled by his own will, along “the trackless way”, in Joseph Campbell’s words,[iii] of his unfolding life; and creating in his wake his own ‘mythology’, by his own heroic self-realization in a world at variance with his inner being and feeling – as individual integrity will be in an abstract world of facts and figures.

    Capital and the new science were breaking the world apart. The organism was torn from its environment, but the soul craves reconciliation and unity. The pathology of progress – distraction, addiction, obsession, emotional disorder, and mental distress to the point of psychosis – all those cries of pain and anguish resound because the world is no longer whole.

    And when the prevailing culture is a secular, socio-economic state and no more, to which art and philosophy are peripheral (and largely commodified), it cannot set the terms for a necessary transformation.

    To be convinced – whether by religious or scientific dogma makes no difference – is to set yourself at naught and passive in a world always active and renewed. Self-realization, the search for meaning within a prison of abstraction and global assent is, in consequence, only possible in the individual psyche and through the daily heroism of each one of us.

    The reign of Gods, Goddesses and our own Christian God was over, or coming to an end. If, on the other hand, the cosmic mystery is implicit in every individual existence – plant, animal, or human – then the poetic imagination, art in its broadest sense, out of which the mythic realm was born and which gave form to its cultural expression, could turn its gaze to the metaphysics – indeed the miracle – of being in every one of us.

    And would it be too much to hope that it could then transform everyday life through the reconciliation of the spheres of night and day, of the timeless, or momentous, process of creation and its manifestation in time – and so of reason and authority, the heart, and the head.

    Don Quixote and Sancho Panza Equestrian Statues in Madrid, Spain.

    But now the giants are on the march again; thousands of them ranged across land and sea. Transformed into windmills, not now by the necromancer, Freston, as Don Quixote once suspected, but by vicissitude and the main chance. Aloof, pristine, impertinent, enormous, their alien presence and baleful monotony is an affront to the vibrant landscape – each one a great counter calculating a return. For every turn another dollar.

    The old gods would be in turmoil: the wind harnessed to the strategic avarice of a corporate machine. For what? To ‘save’ a world that the Megamachine (to borrow Fabian Scheidler’s term) has itself constructed and put at risk?

    And so also the sun: once raised variously to the status of God or Goddess, powerful mythological symbol, the vivid nucleus of a living cycle that would every dawn dispel the dark. It, too, is to be committed to the same end. That their potential falls short I have already discussed; that even the most critical demands of our current over-consumption can be met is doubtful. But it must now also power the banal syllabus of cyber mania.

    Socially destructive global monopolies are eager for every megawatt to propel their program of corporate dominance. The digitalization of the world is an imperial project of unprecedented ambition. A counterfeit world is being prepared. Uniformity of thought, action, experience, and expectation is promoted – autonomy would disturb the shallow manner of digital exchange.

    The pioneers of science would be amazed. After all their hard work the earth is becoming flat again. The individual is fading away. Apparently, our lives are to be run by corporate favour and AI. Wow! Our common heritage, from the production of food to our very biology, is to be appropriated by an affected concern and handed over to ‘experts’.

    Thankfully, an authentic humanity will not easily be overcome by technocratic pedantry, and we should all have enough experience of bureaucratic and executive stupidity to expect the project is delusional and self-defeating. After all, if they kill the goose, what then?

    Unfortunately, it has the potential to further the cause of technocratic governance by a coterie of corporate behemoths who have made no secret of their anti-democratic and anti-social resolve, even as they cloak it in the sweet-sounding words of beneficial intent. And there appears to be no limit to their field of operation, or the level of enforcement through sophisticated systems of surveillance and control.

    Image: This is Engineering.

    The intemperate pushing of AI omnipotence has some of the characteristics of mania about it. With any luck it may be destined for the same fate as other notable examples of this recurrent phenomenon. In the meantime, let’s be clear: artificial intelligence is what it says on the tin. It is fake in the same way that artificial flowers are fake. In other words, it is no more than an imitation of intelligence; or rather it purports to be since its proponents have a much- reduced understanding of intelligence in the first place.

    The only way a digital system could seem analogous to intelligence is if human beings have been persuaded that they themselves are analogous to machines.

    For all the accomplishments of computer science, computers still lack resolve. No computer can make an autonomous decision and no idea can arise unbidden in its electronic circuitry. The data it contains has been handed to it and its operative rules are pre-programmed in algorithms and codes. So-called ‘generative’ AI, so far as I understand it, is simply an intensification of the basic on-off electronics and the yes-no, if not this-that, and, or, both, neither, binary mathematics of existing systems.

    To assert that the voluntary and boundless nature of mind and intelligence can be fully represented by a symbolic mathematical system of 1’s and 0’s is absurd – to any thoughtful person. But, of course, if in the first instance you define ‘intelligence’ by what can be contained in its restrictive code then you have AI.

    The computer is an ingenious machine, without doubt, a remarkable tool as it stands, but for some reason its potential has been dressed in vainglorious exaggeration from the outset. The haughty claims for AI are no different today than fifty years ago, although confident prophecies of omnipotence still await fulfilment.

    That more and more aspects of living and our thought processes can be formulated digitally, and that the programs (the preset rules of the game) are run at breakneck speed is what makes it so impressive. But whereas endless variation and repetition are possible, and answers (largely based on past conclusions) can appear as if by magic, without a non-material imagination, new ideas cannot emerge from old data.

    There has been much excitement over the ‘existential’ threat of AI. Indeed, in the hands of the corporate sector, it is busy constructing its own reality with the callous logic of the machine. But there is nothing new here either: apocalyptic alarms have always been associated with the disruption of custom and loss of confidence. If it comes to it, wild forecasts of digital conquest can be countered by simply pulling the plug. The real worry is what on earth has humanity come to that it can so easily imagine subordination to its own technology, to the extent of its own obsolescence – that some would even welcome its approach.

    That it is already secondary, to some extent, has nothing to do with the superiority of AI, but is entirely due to our significant distance from the profound coherence of being.

    But with so much money at play, the industry is oblivious to either temporal limits or harm. And the next step in the construction of an omniscient computer system – always a goal – follows sensibly enough in the reasoning of scientific materialism.

    If the mind has been reduced to the brain, and the brain itself is analogous to a data-processing, memory storage device, then why not build a ‘cognitive’ system that exceeds the intellectual capacity of any human; that would, in turn, design a new improved machine and so on. An “intelligence explosion”, until hey presto! the Singularity is reached – ultra intelligence, omniscience, omnipotence, virtual Godhood!

    As fantastical as all this might seem to anyone with their feet still on the ground, there’s more. The geeks among us don’t rest easy. If you’re interested in fantasy, it’s all gathered under the acronym Tescreal. Just be aware that the principal actors here are over-exalted, self-regarding white males in the main, and a forceful eugenicist agenda (a ‘more enlightened eugenics’ apparently) runs through it.

    Image: Pixabay.

    If partisans of AI infallibility were left to stew in the juice of these absurdities within the techno-utopian compound of Silicon Valley, and certain university departments, they needn’t trouble the lives of ordinary decent people. But unfortunately, they command limitless capital and the insatiable dreams of monopolists. Ah, but their intent is to save the world. It’s more likely that an unholy pairing with messianic pretensions will pave the road to hell.

    And not only do they appear to be living on another planet, they actually think we can. In this respect, it is a point worth making that no man ever set foot on the moon, and no man or woman ever will, unless they want to bring their life to a painful conclusion. Man reached the moon by bringing his earth environment with him in a spacecraft. An ingenious accomplishment, undoubtedly, but a miss is as good as a mile. And because what is contained in the spacesuit, spacecraft, or space colony for that matter, is clearly partial rather than whole, prolonged existence in it is simply impossible, either physically or psychologically – unless, of course, you’re a machine, or a posthuman!

    Given the wonder of existence in the first place, the greatest marvels of being are mind and consciousness, memory and ideas. Any degree of self-awareness should open us to the profound mystery from which they arise. That anyone could make of this ineffable experience nothing more than a mechanical process to be downloaded into a plastic ‘chrysalis’ full of semi-conductors, switches, and silicon chips; and to then emerge as a kind of super-intelligent, posthuman immortal shows just how far from any real sense of our creative presence some of us have drifted.

    Image: Tomas Ryant.

    Every day now, it seems, we are subject to reproof. Signs of crisis are insistent and portents of doom pressure us in a seemingly chaotic world. This essay has attempted to set a wider context; to highlight the critical issues; and to point to the  obvious fact that if the corporate/political/ideological covenant responsible for our present state is being relied upon to provide solutions we are going nowhere.

    For all its achievements to date, it is now becoming clear that scientific materialism and the single-minded logic of its methodology is reaching the limits of its efficacy; even as materialist anticipation is reaching for its apotheosis in the extravagant representations of AI – the ultimate expression of its reductionist worldview.

    And it is possible to see on the wildest shores of this ‘promised land’ a kind of hysteria in the face of diminishing returns, and the desperate resuscitation of a fading ideology.

    But the piling on of the past will not work. With increasing complexity every solution begets more problems. It’s a vicious circle, such that at this point many of us might be beginning to feel Sancho Panza’s reproach – windmills in the head is right! How to step off the treadmill is the crux of the problem, although it is also all too clearly the solution. And in the absence of another world to step on to we are hooked by a kind of compulsion neurosis.

    A more benign world will require a new morality in its broadest sense; it will not arrive ‘off the peg’, so to speak. ‘Smart’, ‘sustainable’, ‘clean’, ‘green’, the defining terms of our post-carbon future, are a cruel deception if their only purpose is to keep the machine in gear.

    Strangely, the very ideology that defines the world will not recognize its material constraint. It still relies on the illusion of superabundance and the invocation of  technological superiority in a world struggling for breath.

    And where – is it ever asked – is our humanity in this brave new world? The whole drama of a single life, a sort of flourish upon the oceanic well of time and creation; and the billions of us marooned in an abstract world of facts and figures. How do we dignify our lives in a world in which fire has been quenched?

    Corbusier’s ‘machine to live in’ is realized in the technological dependence and the spick and span aspect of the all-electric house. But there was a time when the hearth was symbolic of the Navel of the Earth; when fire, the Goddess of the hearth, symbolized the presence of the divine. The hearth and its home were explicit symbols of implicit unity: the invisible or immaterial realm made visible in the material culture.

    Such sensibilities are long gone, of course, and unity and meaning must be sought in the human heart – as they should be at this stage of our cultural evolution. But what if the heart itself is cold?  What if the material culture is destructive or merely bland?

    We now live in a manner without discernment or reserve, informed by opinion and  the ubiquity of the market. Jesus drove the moneylenders from the temple; a second coming would be welcome in the face of an ill-considered, commercial culture of unprecedented shallowness. Its dominance and its demands, and its impression  upon all is turning hearts to stone and our world into a wasteland.

    It is true that most people’s lives are enriched and gain meaning in the ordinary communion of family, friends and community; and perhaps in the practicalities of daily life. But there is a wider world, and in the minds of capitalists the end always justifies the means. In their calculations you don’t count – the phenomenon of your being, that is, not your efficiency in the economy of capital accumulation.

    In the everyday language of economics. the economy appears to be an almost perfect mathematical system independent of human history – an abstraction isolated from reality as a whole. In the extremism of neo-liberalism its jurisdiction has neither moral, social, or cultural bounds and it now regulates the global like a detached and senseless Victorian viceroy. To the extent that our lives are decided by it, the social context will be inhumane, and inadequate to our potential and imaginative capacity.

    Life in the shallows of economic determinism soon exhausts itself. There is an emptiness at the heart of contemporary culture that will not be filled by the ‘green agenda’. The post-carbon future, as currently outlined, exemplifies the metaphor of the machine no less than its antecedent. Technological solutions will only perpetuate our insulation from the vibrant process of creation. And ‘smart’ technology, let us be clear, does not run on fresh air. On the contrary the magnitude of its energy demand may be unprecedented in industrial history.

    The real world arises organically as a self-organizing system, whole and complete at every step of its evolution. That is to say, it is incomparable – it’s what it is and what we are – and may be benign or destructive as we might inhabit it. A bio-physical system is ‘limited’ by the very interdependence of its diverse elements, such that individual behaviour is always governed by a superior context.

    Scientific materialism and the pathology of dissociation have led us astray. “For there is in the universe neither centre nor circumference”, wrote Giordano Bruno, “but if you will, the whole is central, and every point may also be regarded as part of a circumference in respect to some other central point”.

    Each one of us, then, is centre; each one of us manifests the whole, to put it another way. It follows that every identity is ‘I’; and in this sense there is no ‘you’, no other.

    In the face of this reality, capitalism rewards one at the expense of another, the few at the expense of the many. In the interest of accumulation, it externalizes costs – to the individual, society, and the environment. It is dehumanizing, anti-social, toxic,  ultimately self-destructive, and now global.

    We are preoccupied with solutions; but the critical choice is not between fossil fuels and renewables, but between a narrow rationalism and an expanded consciousness, between the sleep of reason and integrity. The crisis we are facing is not, in the first instance, a problem to be solved, but a failure to clearly perceive its cause.

    In the words of Jose Ortega y Gasset, “we do not know what is happening to us, and that is precisely the thing that is happening to us – the fact of not knowing what is happening to us”.[iv]

    [i] Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, Verso, London, 2001, p 8

    [ii] Jose Ortega y Gasset. Meditations on Don Quixote, quoted in Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, Penguin, London, 1976

    [iii]op. cit.

    [iv] Jose Ortega y Gasset, Man and Crisis, Norton, New York, 1962, p.119

  • LONG READ: The Sleep of Reason I

    It is a notable feature of the prevailing world order that citizens of Western states, in particular, are significantly ill-informed and mis-informed of the past and present contexts of either their disadvantage or their comfort. For centuries the corporate/political/church covenant (imperialism) has sucked the earth of its bounty, dissipated its coherence, shattered communities and brought it to the edge of ruin. It accomplished this through the exploitation, enslavement, dispossession, degradation, starvation and murder of countless millions of fellow human beings.

    Upon this base history and its persistence rest our affluence and our inequalities, the persuasive delusions of Western civilization (“our values”), its obtrusive superiority and an unrestrained financial sector that through the extension of rentier/monopoly/surveillance capitalism has all but established a global imperium.

    Moreover, this supranational dominance has a forceful ally in its dis-integration of the world in the mis-conceived dogma of scientific materialism that reduces life to matter, minds to brains, whole self-organizing organisms to constituent parts; that effects the enclosure of everything spontaneous, primary, vital, and has generated a bio-tech industry determined to exploit the common process of becoming as if it was just another thing.

    During a period of lockdown, I reopened a book on Goya[i] that I hadn’t read for many years.  Any study of Goya is likely to reproduce his etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. This was intended as the frontispiece of Los Caprichos, a series of 80 etchings published in 1799 that were a cutting satire of Spanish society at the time.

    What gave rise, at fifty-eight years of age to the sudden disillusionment of the successful court painter has long been a matter of speculation. A serious illness in 1792 had left him permanently deaf and he was overworked, trapped by too many commissions. Burdened by demands, constrained by compromise and impelled by a maturing self-realization, creativity and assertiveness, his social position was becoming precarious and the conflict was perhaps too much to bear. Thankfully, he still had thirty years ahead of him and these years freed him enough to become the artist so admired today.

    The usual reading of this striking work (published as Capricho 43 and replaced on the title page by a self-portrait) is that without reason we are susceptible to the naivety, superstitions and ignorance of our irrational impulses. It is a common theme of Enlightenment thinking, central to its comforting tale of intellectual and cultural progression, and it underpins the white-supremacist ideology of Western imperialism, as we shall see.

    And fair enough, the reforms of Charles III notwithstanding, Spain at the time was   the Spain that endured for so long – stuck in its ways, morally enervated and restrained by the barbarity of the Spanish Inquisition. That Goya was eventually appalled at the indolence and hypocrisy of Spanish high society and the regressive influence of a hidebound clergy is not surprising.

    However, it is also a simplistic narrative which I’ll return to later, but to be clear, no one can be sure exactly what Goya was trying to express when he conceived the image. In any case, the purpose of this essay is not to put Goya on the couch, so to speak, but to explain why I found Capricho 43 such an arresting image at the height of the COVID panic and to pursue the train of thought that it provoked.

    It is not the least of the failings of much social and political commentary these days, especially in the mainstream media, that history begins with the latest headline; that, as it has been said, “it is all text and no context”. To this end we need to go back in time.

    Almost exactly two hundred years before Goya published Los Caprichos, Don Quixote de la Mancha rode out like an epic hero of old to confront “at least thirty outrageous giants” that ranged before him and his squire, Sancho Panza, on the plain of Montiel. Impelled only by his own will and disregarding his squire’s assurances that they were windmills, Don Quixote spurred on his horse till he came before his foe. Then, “covering himself with his shield and couching his lance,” he charged, plunged it into the unrelenting sail…..and was tossed aside by the great machine.

    “Mercy on me, cried Sancho…did I not tell you they were windmills, and that nobody could think otherwise, unless he had also windmills in his head”. To no avail.

    Don Quixote by Honoré Daumier (1868).

    Tilting at Windmills

    And so his adventures proceed. This celebrated episode, though it only takes up a couple of pages near the beginning of a book of approximately 750 pages sets the tone for the rest – by part tragic, comic, ironic.

    Deluded clown, romantic idealist, assertive self-hood: all this and more have been read into the character of the famous knight-errant. That Cervantes intended it as, in some sense, a parody of the chivalric tale seems to be so. But, perhaps most importantly, as the diverse interpretations of the work themselves might indicate, it is a compelling portrait of an individual caught between two worlds.

    It was written at a time when the long transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world was reaching a conclusion. The trappings of the centralised state: bureaucracy, social control, militarism and an economy favouring capital accumulation – all so familiar to us now – were being established at this time.

    The sixteenth century opened with death, destruction and unparalleled savagery in Central and South America. It was accompanied at home by large land enclosures and dispossession. And witch trials, actually an occasional occurrence in the Medieval Period, proliferated throughout Europe.

    The seventeenth century continued the pattern with a huge growth of standing armies; the Thirty Years War that decimated Central Europe; genocide in South and Central America repeated in the North; the transatlantic slave trade; and, crucially, the establishment of the world’s first joint-stock company (forerunner of the modern corporation) in Amsterdam.

    As Fabian Scheidler argues in his succinct history of our capitalist civilization,[ii] European economies had developed into what was essentially a circular war economy. European states borrowed enormous amounts of money to finance wars  at home and exploitation abroad. The riches they acquired were largely used to  repay banks, who, in turn, lent more money and so on.

    It was a system that made “entrepreneurs”, war-profiteers, and banks extremely rich, but shattered communities and beggared populations at large. The physical power of the state was indispensable to the project, but the state’s role, it is important to note,  was not in the first instance to extend its power, but to facilitate capital accumulation by a privileged few.

    This, then, was the social environment in which that other pillar of the modern world arose. The development of science is portrayed as the triumph of rationality over irrationality, verifiable knowledge over superstition, and more. But the actual science that developed resulted from an evolving sense of individual autonomy and mathematical clarity and, for reasons to be discussed, it generated an ideology favoured by the forcible socio-economic power structures of the day.

    Furthermore, this type of science did not so much replace religion as the ideological basis of society as extend its dualistic thinking to the relationship between humanity and the natural world – from God versus man to man versus nature.

    To be clear, the problem is not with science per se, but with the reductionist worldview that underlies it and the vested interests that support it. That we should look at the world without pre-conceived ideas or doctrinal certainties and let it speak for itself is fine. And it would be ridiculous to disavow astonishing discoveries in  every field and technological achievements in engineering, medicine and so much more. While the many social advances that would eventually arrive in the wake of modernity can hardly be disregarded – although we in the West are mostly indifferent to the exploitation on which our complacency rests.

    And it might be added that the values of justice, freedom and equality which are the hallmarks of a liberal democracy are routinely circumscribed by class. Laws may be inscribed, but bias is ingrained.

    This is not intended to establish some imagined pre-modern, universal state of nature, but the mutual emergence in this period of a strict rationality in both science and a system of market economics, whereby the intrinsic, or use-value, of material necessity and nourishment is subordinated to its exchange-value in the capitalist marketplace, was problematic from the outset.

    Since the introduction of double-entry bookkeeping in the fourteenth century, income and expenditure could be formulated mathematically and profit or loss calculated accurately. Increasingly, the focus of trade became profit: to repay lenders if finance had been required and to accumulate money.

    Ted Dace has described the outcome of this process clearly: ‘As the basis of economics becomes the trade itself and not the tangible thing exchanged, money is transformed into an all-consuming monster. No longer bound up with the limitations of actual land, people and resources, it springs to life, an abstraction with a will of its own.’[iii]

    By now it is our most pressing need and its acquisition has become an urgent necessity for the many, superfluous wealth for the few; it delineates the structural hierarchy of class and serves as a measure of human worth generally. But, as Ted Dace cautions, ‘sooner or later abstraction runs up against reality.’

    Meanwhile, the real economy of everyday life has been all but consumed by the predation of finance capitalism and corporate monopoly. And the basic needs of a sustainable life for so many people have become subservient to a parasitic imperative of making money out of money, out of you.

    Nicolaus Copernicus.

    Like Clockwork

    When Copernicus turned cosmology on its head in 1543 he began a process, unimaginable then, that would in time overwhelm God himself. The mathematical precision that astronomy seemed to reveal encouraged the idea that all physical interactions on earth could be so understood.

    Thus, Johannes Kepler wrote in 1605: “My aim is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to clockwork ….. Moreover, I show how this physical conception is to be presented through calculation and geometry”.

    A few years later Galileo was unequivocal: “When God produces the world, he produces a thoroughly mathematical structure that obeys the laws of number, geometrical figure and quantitative function, Nature is an embodied mathematical system.” And even more emphatically: “Reality is that which can be described mathematically. Everything else is illusion.”

    In the Medieval period and, as a general rule, most human cultures that ever existed or survived outside the modern age, the world as a whole was organic and alive, to a greater or lesser extent indivisible, and sustained by an animating principle – God, Spirit, Soul, or the many poetic metaphors of world mythology.

    This philosophia perennis, so-called, is an expression of experience rather than ideas. It is a philosophy, or understanding, of our inner nature and the common experience of being. And, perhaps for this reason, the archetypal symbols  generated by it are recognizably similar across many outwardly diverse cultures.

    And considering that the deep reality of being is beyond intellectual grasp, scriptural certainty, and social constraint, it relies on mythopoetic metaphor and the affective power of ritual to express what is essentially ineffable, and to relate it to the cycle of daily life.

    Portrait of Giordano Bruno.

    Giordano Bruno

    The introduction of the heliocentric model by Copernicus, and its determination by others, so stormed the citadel of belief the full weight of The Inquisition bore down on Galileo – who wavered. The recalcitrant Giordano Bruno supported Copernicus, but his philosophy cut much deeper.

    Bruno and others before him had regard for these words from a twelfth century hermetic text, The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers, “God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere”. But if the very idea of centre has no meaning, as this suggests, then the fixed framework, a sort of cosmic theatre of space and time in which the universal process unfolds – and on which a mechanistic science depends – means nothing either. With it goes anything fundamental and we are left, it would seem, with no ultimate principle or recourse.

    Yet Bruno’s view of the universe was far more profound than anything Galileo could ever have observed through his telescope. All Galileo could see was the inflexible authority of a mathematical system – that must definitively exclude the possibility of an evolving cosmos. And vindication would arrive three hundred years later when Einstein established relativity as a scientific principle.

    Nonetheless, we are all here, alive, and conscious of our continuing existence. Being is absolute; our presence is substantial. For all the relativity of physics – and quantum uncertainty – the daylight world of consciousness is whole, it is now, it endures. Life is immanent, some process is generating it, and experience is real.

    This, of course, is a great mystery that wells like a spring within each of us and the world in which we live. At the same time, it is beyond us, beyond apprehension and the linear logic of language. The mystery is us; for which reason we cannot know it objectively.

    Bruno had much else to say about doctrinal matters, the function of a church and its undesirable interference in philosophical or scientific inquiry. Refusing to recant and pursued around Europe, he was eventually cornered in Venice and spent eight years in the dungeons of the Inquisition in Rome. Still obdurate, condemned and consigned to a foretaste of the flames of hell, he spoke these telling words: “You pronounce sentence upon me perhaps with a greater fear than that with which I receive it.”

    In this tumultuous period, the authority of Catholic dogma was losing its grip as science and philosophy advanced, and no amount of bible thumping could secure it. An existent mythology or set of beliefs cannot prevail when there is no consent to meaning. In fact, no established canon can remain consistent with the evolution of experience and understanding. Although the dead weight of its persistence can overwhelm the embodiment of a new sensibility at the heart of an emergent culture.

    Bruno’s pointed accusation largely explains the deranged reaction to his ideas and the science of Galileo and others. The suppressive resolve of the Inquisition was frantic and irrational, but the leading lights of the Reformation clung even more tightly to the Bible. Martin Luther let go of it occasionally to fling his ink pot at the devil but was otherwise unrestrained in his invective against Copernicus and his followers.

    Bruno, for all his profanities, still had God on his side, so to speak, but it couldn’t save him from the intense conviction of The Holy Office of the Inquisition. Neither science, philosophy, nor the evidence of the senses could be permitted to challenge the insistent truths of Holy Scripture and that was final. The authenticity of individual experience was no match for the infallible authority of “revelation”, and another way is intolerable when conduct is prescribed on tablets of stone. Such is the power of The Word as all good book-thumpers, from St. Paul to Chairman Mao, to neo-liberal economists know well.

    But mere obedience to a precept could never be said to awaken the soul to the redemptive power of a mythic or religious tradition. To interpret its symbolism as literal and historic is to profoundly misunderstand its character as an evocation of our inner nature and the mystery of becoming; and to miss entirely the deeper meaning it holds within its poetic folds for the cosmological, sociological, and psychological orders of existence.

    Biblical literalism and Pauline universalism are the solid ground of our presumptive superiority and missionary impulse. For centuries they have been both pretext and apologia for white-supremacist imperialism. Unparalleled in its destructive violence throughout the long history of humankind; and all the more menacing because the espousing nations have managed to persuade the greater part of their populations that its cruelty and its condescension are the precise opposite of this reality. We are really impelled by the best of intentions.

    The only thing to add to this continuing horror story is that, as Fabian Scheidler has emphasised, the missionary zeal of a church, now in decline, has been assumed by the high- priests of globalist organizations such as the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank. And an amoral cabal of investment banks, hedge-funds, corporate raiders, property speculators and sovereign bondholders (to list only the most obvious) feasting on unearned income from monopoly rights, speculative gains, political favour, and predatory credit.

    Furthermore, since 2008 it has been clearer than ever that those who command capital control the world; that the present system secures the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands; and that its beneficiaries have forgotten, if they ever knew, the theme of countless tales and fables the world over – that to have everything is to have nothing.

    The interior of Kaiser Steel mill in Fontana, California.

    The Metaphor of the Machine

    Science, as we know it today, developed in a world in which capitalism was well established, accustomed to quantification and already defined to some extent, therefore, by mathematics and the ‘laws’ of the capitalist marketplace. In other words, a strictly rational tone was already sounding when Kepler and Galileo began their inquiries.

    Under the sway of mathematics everything becomes a number. The world is what can be measured, and measurement defines reality. The moral power and mechanistic bias of science would confirm the imperialist/capitalist dream. Everything, including all that lives and all that sustains life, could be abstracted, quantified, and assigned an exchange value. Whether a bushel of grain, a slave in the fields, or a cog in an industrial machine, all were just so many commodities to be used, abused, bought, and sold.

    Just as our privileged position at the centre of the universe was being usurped by the Copernican revolution and Bruno’s relativism, the organic worldview of tradition was being steamrolled by the metaphor of the machine.

    But if Kepler and Galileo saw an image of the machine and the unerring mathematics of clockwork in the orbits of celestial bodies and in physical processes on earth, Descartes, Hobbes, Newton, and others later extended the metaphor to include living organisms. And the science that developed from this radical epistemological shift would shape both society and human consciousness and establish a scientific orthodoxy that has survived to the present day.

    That authoritarian states and capitalist elites with imperial interests and ambitions would welcome these reductionist assertions and favour the scientific consensus that advanced them is no surprise. Class warfare at home and genocide abroad are less troubling with convictions like these. A machine, after all, is determinable, controllable, and dispensable.

    It should be said that these early mechanists were still devout. But the world was no longer alive. It was now thought of as inanimate matter, designed by God but governed by fixed mathematical principles. In a sense, then, the scientist was extending God’s work on earth, and in such a way the quasi-religious status of science began to emerge.

    For Francis Bacon (1561-1626), in whom the notion of a scientific priesthood was first conceived, the development of Western civilization would be a scientific and engineering project defined by his slogan, “knowledge is power”.

    God would be a bystander, but we were doing his work. With God on our side and the power of science the world would lay itself open and there would be nothing we couldn’t know or conquer – a presumption of omniscience that still prevails in the scientific community.

    It should also be said that dissenting voices were raised. Not all scientists were prepared to degrade life to this extent. But the church itself had mastered its alarm and ceded worldly matters to the domain of science, while it would continue to look after our souls and prepare us all for Paradise.

    That art, science and philosophy were now free to pursue their own interests without having to look over their shoulder at the stern face of one of God’s representatives on earth, or his legion of scriptural zealots, is one of the boons of modernity, unquestionably. That these three branches would in time diverge and simply feed off themselves would become a significant problem. But, meantime, a modus vivendi had become established; and that such an arrangement would be uncontentious is largely due to a shared dualism.

    Religion and science were agreed: the spiritual and material realms were separate and distinct – God above, humanity and the world below.

    Up to this point, three orders of existence were recognized: body, soul, and spirit. Our bodies were connected to the spiritual realm through our souls – the ‘rational soul’ of man, in Christian theology and the equivalent, to all intents and purposes, of the human mind, which was, as yet, regarded as immaterial.

    Mechanistic science may have removed soul from nature but, since human beings (well, cultivated minds at any rate) considered themselves a cut above brute existence they were still thought to have souls (or minds, or free-will) through which they interacted with God and put themselves in line for eternal life. But all the rest, the whole ecology of living, was mechanical, purposeless, and determined. And our disconnection from nature and more holistic modes of understanding sank into the culture with ruinous consequences.

    As dispiriting as this might seem, we could still rely on our God as ideological support, dispeller of doubt and final consolation. But his days were numbered. The convenient accord with the church was never going to survive the rapid progress of science and the no doubt exhilarating sensation that “knowledge is power”. Every advance would endorse the swelling authority of science and install reliable principles such as Newton’s deterministic laws of motion.

    This burgeoning faith in science, reason and human progress is what we know today as The Enlightenment. Edge God aside and it is the prototype of contemporary secular humanism.

    “The Blue Marble” is a photograph of the Earth taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17.

    From ‘Believe in God’ to ‘Trust the Science’

    A machine requires a maker and God made the world we were taught. But the more science discovered about the world-machine the more it became clear that, once set in motion, further divine intervention was unnecessary. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, it was also evident that there was no scientific rationale for God either. Fifty years later conspicuous atheism would provoke no censure and materialism was a firmly established tenet of scientific endeavour.

    In the orthodox view the universe is composed entirely of matter. The energy that activates it is also material, or physical. It operates according to fixed laws that can be observed, measured, and formulated – and it is fully determined by them. Like a machine it is a hierarchy of parts right down to the “ultimate building-blocks” of sub-atomic particles and chemical molecules. Even biology is reducible in this way, and in the end, there need be nothing we cannot know.

    Of course, if these are a priori assumptions then complete knowledge is indeed possible – it’s a foregone conclusion. That actual science has long since swept many of these assumptions aside has not radically removed them from the core belief system of scientific dogma and, crucially, from its day-to-day application.

    As a firmly entrenched belief it has replaced religion as the authoritative voice in contemporary society. The peremptory watchword “believe in God” has been superseded by “trust the science”. Its dogmatic purpose is no different and it was used to effect during the pandemic as a marketing slogan for social compliance and pharmaceutical profit.

    In any case, the injunction to “trust the science” simply points up the conventional morass into which scientific orthodoxy has sunk. Science is supposed to be about open inquiry, not a defence of “the science” as if certain matters were resolved beyond question just like old-style religion.

    Science prides itself on its empiricism and its positivism. Fair enough; it has undoubtedly been an effective strategy and the basis of unprecedented technological development, but all experience must now defer to the “scientific method”.

    The objective world of facts: length, height, weight, motion, capacity, etc., from the stars to sub-atomic particles, is the real world. A world objectively apparent, but devoid of meaning, purpose, or self-existence. Moreover, it disallows subjective experience (reality for most of us) and diminishes your creative presence to the point of disappearance.

    Excluded from the terms of the world-machine are those elusive qualities of existence that make us feel alive. Whole organisms are more than the sum of their parts and it is this ‘more’ that is forever beyond the materialist’s scope.

    Science can tell you all about life, but it cannot tell you what life is. It can describe the surface of things, but not their substance. The scientist may well stand to one side (in a confusion of subject and object) and probe every inch of you, but life will not be pinned.

    Scientists can’t seem to start with a whole organism in its environment and develop a methodology to understand it in these terms as a living phenomenon, in a way that does not involve objectification and dissection – even though it is instantaneously apparent to direct experience.

    And one viewpoint need not necessarily delegitimize the other. One could accept both as two sides of a coin, but science insists on its “truth” as superior.

    Thomas Jones, The Bard, 1774.

    Romanticism

    The idea that science alone could define our world was challenged with great energy by the Romantic movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It left its mark but was no match for the brutal industrialism and economic liberalism of the Victorian era, that explicated Bacon’s rationale.

    That said, it would be some time before some scientists would dare to insist that manifest qualities of human nature are illusory; that even the sense of our own being is delusional; that nihilism would be celebrated in literature and philosophy and disintegration of form become the measure of art. And it will perhaps be a little more time before ‘intelligence’ is boxed and the scientifically emancipated individual of the Enlightenment will be, finally, almost fully dehumanized.

    But hands up how many of you feel like a machine (as opposed to perhaps being treated like one!). The very idea is clearly nonsensical. In short, a machine is lifeless so how on earth did it ever come be identified with life. It’s hard to imagine even the most ardent materialists can really regard themselves as glorified machines and the world as clockwork, but their science is conducted as if universal existence is material, mechanical, mathematically determined and nothing else.

    For Descartes, humanity was uniquely raised above this perfunctory level by the human mind, or soul, which is immaterial and part of our ‘higher’ or spiritual nature. Today’s materialist can invoke no such redemption since the mind has been reduced to the brain – which marvellous (and perplexing) organ has itself been reduced to a personified data processor and control centre.

    And while on the face of it, religious creationists and scientific materialists seem at opposite extremes, they in fact make common cause, both in their determinism and their appeal to either an external deity or some deus ex machina such as genetic programs, or ‘laws’ of nature.

    Set against both the religious duality of God and humanity, spirit and matter, and the reductive objectivity of scientific analysis and its duality of subject and object (a make-believe world constructed from without) is the immediacy of feeling. The world before our eyes, present to the senses; the sublime plenitude of life, its constancy, its astonishing detail, process within process; a universal accord that could only have evolved as an integrated whole.

    There can be moments in life when we forget ourselves, captured by the intensity of experience. Moments of rapture or clarity, free of distraction or intent, that feel complete, and doubt and endeavour dissolve in the pure sensation of being alive. Typically, these moments are fleeting, not a state of permanent bliss. Nor should they be. The everyday is normal; there is a living to be progressed. But they reveal an immediate reality beyond cold hard facts.

    The philosopher Alan Watts once joked that in sober society, it seemed, normality was the world seen on a wet Monday morning. The daylight world of consciousness  is inescapably the plane on which our daily lives unfold. But science has extended its scepticism to the ‘childhood’ of our religious beliefs to anything beyond its scope. God is not a testable hypothesis, but neither is the very real sensation I’ve just described.

    Image Daniel Idini (c)

    A World of Things

    Science is decisive: the limits of its application define our worldview and determine its commonplace expression. But it generates a world of things, a world without context or meaning. As a consequence, we now live in a forest of facts and can’t see the wood for the trees.

    This objective world of facts and things seems real and obvious, which it is, and most of us aren’t bothered by post-modernist allegations that it’s all just interpretation. But at a deeper level there is no such thing as a thing. Which is simply to say that no-thing can exist as an isolated entity apart from other things.

    A tree, for instance, seems unequivocally present and specific, but it can only arise and endure as a system of transpiration, photosynthesis and more, supported by an underground universe of micro-organisms. In other words, a tree is more properly thought of as a process. A process, what’s more, that is inextricably interdependent with our own continuing existence through the interchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen.

    It follows that every other thing (and this includes us) is also a process that can only exist within the greater process of life as a whole. It is this essential truth of being, not sentiment or scientific necessity that commits us to earth, water, fire, and air. We are nature. Consequently, any de-spoilation of the world or nullification of others is an offence against our selves.

    But the language of science is definitive. It supports a methodology that sets the world apart and fails to see that the objective distinction of things is by convention only: that the everyday world of material culture is real at that level, but that a deeper unity underlies it.

    The stupendous diversity, adaptivity and integrity of our world – our being – evolved without direction or external law. That is to say, “laws of nature” are implicit. What makes life consistent is that, as it appears in the moment and evolves over time, it establishes patterns. And what makes a pattern a pattern is that it repeats (becomes a “law”). More than anything else living organisms are habitual. As they reproduce and grow and reproduce and grow, they follow well-worn paths. And old habits die hard. Apples can’t be oranges. The young cuckoo abandoned in its egg flies south in autumn.

    Habitual behaviour is unconscious. A couple of cells grow into ten trillion. That’s ‘easily’ explained. A ‘genetic program’ underlies it biologists assure us; even though they can barely define a gene and the complexity of cellular development is impossible to fully describe. But a living organism has been formed: one that for the duration of its life is present, constant, adaptive, and purposeful. Try explaining that.

    How genes alone could have the determining power of organic development is a modern mystery. How can genes, chemical molecules in the nucleus of a cell, be purposive while the whole organism is mere machine and fully determined?  The soul, Rupert Sheldrake suggests, has been resurrected in the genome.[iv]

    The expectations of The Human Genome Project have not been realized; in fact, many were confounded. Sure enough, DNA keeps yourself to yourself so to speak, but suddenly everything was ‘genetic’. The cause of all disease and even aberrant human behaviour, not to mention your very appearance (good, bad, or indifferent) was hidden in those helical strands.

    We were to finally uncover “the secret of life”. Just as in physics, the atom, and then sub-atomic particles (hundreds now and counting – if they hang around long enough) were thought to constitute the ultimate building blocks of matter, so human biology could be reduced to the molecular level. Our lives are just a matter of physics and chemistry.

    What was actually discovered was incalculable complexity, so intricate it resists scientific analysis. Mechanical explanations fall far short. Whole organisms can never be explained in terms of their parts (if you could even isolate parts in this case). And yet an industry has been capitalized as if, and has stepped, like a bull in a china shop, into a dynamic, balanced process common to all life with who knows what consequences.

    Furthermore, that such prodigious expansion of interconnected and interdependent life since ‘day one’ could be solely due to the random mutation of genes favoured by  natural selection; that integrity in the whole could be produced and sustained by chance in the particular (as is current mechanistic orthodoxy), is a stroke of luck so far beyond calculation as to make the proposition meaningless.

    It is also at odds with Darwin himself, in whose view it is the organism that adapts to environmental pressure, and those adaptions are then inherited by its progeny.

    The inheritance of acquired characteristics is not easily understood, certainly. But there is no evidence it is genetic. Since genes only exist as integral parts of a whole organism, it is only within a machine theory of life they could be said to determine organic formation or carry that ‘information’ from one generation to the next.

    In other words, evolution is a creative process, not a blind mechanism; a sensual interplay of organism and environment, in a world, not determined but open, and committed to its fulfilment – whatever that might be – only as the seed is committed to flower.

    Feature Image: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Francisco Goya, c.1799, Etching, aquatint, drypoint and burin, Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

    [i] Gwyn A. Williams, Goya and the Impossible Revolution, Penguin Books, England,1976.

    [ii] Fabian Scheidler. The End of the Megamachine, Zero Books, England, 2020.

    [iii] Ted Dace, Escape from Quantopia, Collective Insanity in Science and Society,  Iff Books. UK and USA  2014. p.208.

    [iv] Rupert Sheldrake. The Science Delusion, Coronet, England, 2013.

  • LONG READ: The Degradation of SYRIZA

    SYRIZA’s rise to power in 2015 created shock waves around the world. The international Left celebrated a victory that seemed unfathomable a few years earlier. Its electoral triumph gained even more attention than it otherwise would have, because the stakes surrounding it were exceptionally high.

    The Coalition of the Radical Left, as is the meaning of the acronym, was about to engage in a crucial and tough negotiation with the E.U. and particularly Germany, regarding Greece’s debt. The party had been elected after promising to take a much harder stance in these negotiations. Analysts around the world were warning that this clash could endanger the global economy.

    Nine years later, this once mighty political force that scared the world’s financial establishment, now lies in ruins. Poll after poll shows its electoral support diminishing. Opinion polls consistently show it to be in third place, trailing PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) by a small but steady difference. It is now perilously close to single digits.

    Furthermore, after two recent splits (not counting the one in 2015, which will be mentioned later), and the clear and present possibility of a third one looming, it appears to have fallen into complete disarray internally, as its recent, almost farcical, convention exposed. To fully understand the trajectory of its downfall, however, we need to return to the historical context that created its rise.

    José Manuel Barroso and Kostas Karamanlis in Dublin in 2004.

    There is [plenty of] money…

    In October, 2009, Kostas Karamanlis, president of the right wing Nea Dimokratia, the ruling party at the time, called an early election, after his party lost ground in the European elections in June of that year. In his election campaign the Prime Minister, who had been ruling Greece since 2004, was very open about the necessity of taking significant austerity measures.

    On the opposite side, Giorgos Papandreou, president of the centrist party PASOK, the main opposition at the time, just a month before the election, in September 2009, uttered the phrase that was going to become emblematic in the years that followed: ‘There is [plenty of] money…’

    Naturally, PASOK won in a landslide, taking 44% of the vote, while Nea Dimokratia subsided to a mere 33.5%. It is important to note that SYRIZA was the last party to enter the parliament in this election with only 4.6% of the vote. Soon after his emphatic victory, however, Giorgos Papandreou had to face the grim reality of Greece’s problematic economy within the context of an unraveling global crisis, its perpetually rising debt, as well as a rising deficit, and probably worst of all, the cold determination of key players in the EU to make an example of Greece, as a means of enforcing hard line fiscal discipline across the Union.

    On April 23, 2010, a mere few months after taking office, the PM made an historic announcement, from the picturesque island of Kastelorizo, at the far end of Greece.

    In it, he explained that the real volume of the deficit of 2009 had just been exposed. The previous numbers had been cooked up it was revealed, which led to the coining of the expression ‘Greek statistics.’ He continued to say that his government inherited ‘a ship that is ready to sink’ and that Greece was unable to borrow money from the markets on viable terms.

    Hence, he had to ask for the activation of a support mechanism from the EU, which was the colonial-style loan agreement that became known as the Memorandum. What followed was an almost decade long period of havoc, that saw Greek living standards plummet, the welfare state dismantled, and a great number of strategic national assets being sold off.

    The worst shock for the citizens of Greece was in the beginning, which gave rise to massive popular protest movements, fierce clashes between demonstrators and police and a broadly acquired culture of disdain towards the political establishment. In this turbulent political climate, where governments formed and dissolved  repeatedly, the two traditional big parties kept losing ground and PASOK in particular, saw its electoral base being gradually dissolved. SYRIZA, led by the young and charismatic Alexis Tsipras started gaining momentum.

    Alexis Tsipras in 2008.

    Leftwards

    The disillusioned and desperate voters of PASOK were increasingly turning to the Left, where an up-and-coming new leader was promising another way out of the crisis, with better terms and more dignity. In the elections of May 2012, Nea Dimokratia won a Pyrrhic victory with a meager 18.8% of the vote. SYRIZA breached the traditional two-party system by coming in a close second on 16.8%, and PASOK dropped into third place with 13.2%. This was also the first time the unashamedly Nazi Golden Dawn party entered the parliament with 7%.

    These results didn’t allow for the formation of a government, so a second election was swiftly called. In June 2012, Nea Dimokratia won the election again, this time with 29.6% of the vote. SYRIZA came a close second again with 26.9%, and PASOK dropped a bit further down to 12.3%. Nea Dimokratia was then able to form a coalition government with PASOK and another smaller party, but the old two-party system was thoroughly broken, and SYRIZA had by now cemented its place as the main opposition party. As the Memorandum policies tore apart Greek livelihoods, it seemed only a matter of time before the Left would win the next election.

    That time arrived two and a half years later. In January 2015, after relentlessly campaigning against the Memorandum Agreements (there were three by now), Alexis Tsipras became the first Prime Minister to come from the traditional Left in Greek history. SYRIZA won the election with 36.3% of the vote and formed a coalition government with an ‘anti-Memorandum’ populist right wing party. Meanwhile, PASOK’s share collapsed to 4.7%.

    Negotiations with the Troika

    The rest is history as we say in these cases, implying that most people remember at least the gist of what happened. SYRIZA went on to try and renegotiate the Memorandum with the so-called ‘Troika’ (European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund). This effort was spearheaded by the eccentric economy professor Yanis Varoufakis, but stumbled upon the unrelenting determination of people such as Germany’s Minister of Economy at the time, Wolfgang Schäuble, to create an emphatic cautionary tale, by steamrolling Greece and even pursuing its expulsion from the Euro currency, a scenario which became known as “Grexit” at the time.

    After six months of futile negotiations, on June 27, Alexis Tsipras decided to call a referendum on the agreement proposal presented by Jean-Claude Juncker on behalf of the ‘Institutions’ – which was simply a new label used for the Troika, a shift in semantics, arguably, of very little substance.

    This referendum was never meant to be about Greece leaving the Eurozone and technically the question was not that, but it was widely presented as such, inside and outside Greece. It was perceived that if the Greeks voted ‘NO,’ that would lead to a head on collision with the EU, which would in turn end up in Grexit. This might have been the case indeed, if the SYRIZA government had held its hard line to the end.

    On July 5, 2015, Greek voters overwhelmingly rejected the Troika proposal, with NO getting 61.3% of the vote, while YES received 38.7%. The next day, Yanis Varoufakis, who was a proponent of the hard line, filed his resignation from the Economic Ministry, as requested by Alexis Tsipras. This was meant to be seen as a token of good will towards the Institutions, but was mostly interpreted as a first step towards capitulation.

    On July 12, after seventeen hours of negotiations, Greece came to an agreement with the Institutions, effectively signing a new Memorandum, with similarly harsh terms to the ones rejected in the Referendum, leaving many in Greece, and around the world, to wonder, to this day, what was the point of it. Essentially, the SYRIZA government and Alexis Tsipras had completely capitulated.

    To be fair, this was done under immense pressure from the Institutions, particularly the EU ones, whose stance during the final stage of the negotiations amounted to a threat of total economic war. On the other hand, however, that stance was entirely foreseeable.

    Yanis Varoufakis.

    The First Split

    After the capitulation came SYRIZA’s first split. On July 15, the first part of the new Memorandum was voted into law by the Parliament, thanks to the votes of opposition MPs, after 32 of SYRIZA’s MPs voted against it, including three Ministers. Others had already resigned.

    Alexis Tsipras was then compelled to call an early election, which was held on September 20. He managed to win this election again with 35.5% of the vote, and form a coalition government with the same right wing populist party. Importantly, a new party formed by the dissidents from SYRIZA, who voted against the memorandum, didn’t manage to get more than 3% of the vote and was left without parliamentary representation.

    SYRIZA was able to snatch victory in that second election of 2015, as the wrath of the public against the old political establishment was still warm, but also after getting rid of its ‘far-’Left faction, which was more open to examining Grexit scenarios. Thus, the party had effectively made its first pivot towards the political centre, notably retaining the bulk of the former PASOK voters that brought it into government.

    At the same time, however, the glass had cracked, as the popular Greek expression goes. The party had received a massive dent to its credibility, which had not matured sufficiently to find expression in those very early elections. The path forward though, was going be one of gradual, albeit constant attrition.

    Thereafter, SYRIZA’s rule was full of challenges, imposed by the memorandum, which finally reached a point of completion in 2018, although many (Yanis Varoufakis for instance) would argue that there are still commitments in place that bind Greece for decades to come. Regardless, Alexis Tsipras celebrated what he proclaimed to be the end of the memorandum era and tried to present that as a successful outcome from his administration. His time in office, however, was heavily tainted by the terrible tragedy in Mati, on July 23, 2018, where a wildfire claimed the lives of 102 citizens, in what was seen as a gigantic failure of crisis management by the State.

    On July 7, 2019, SYRIZA lost the election, but not as badly as many had anticipated. Nea Dimokratia won decisively with 39.8% of the vote, and was able to form a single-party government, but SYRIZA came in second with 31.5%, thus maintaining the status quo of it being the other major party in the new two-party system. At the same time though, PASOK had managed to regain some ground, coming in third place with 8.1%.

    After the defeat, Tsipras announced there would be a reorganization of the party, with more involvement, and also an increase in membership. He therefore presented plans that would make the party more inclusive, which also meant politically more inclusive, so that it would represent the whole spectrum of the Left to Centre-Left and would be appealing to the middle class, which had been heavily taxed during his administration. This was met with some resistance and begrudgery from a big section of the rank and file, namely the old guard of the traditional New Left.

    The leader of Nea Dimokratia, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, became the new Prime Minister, continuing a Greek tradition of dynastic families dominating politics, as his father had been Prime Minister in the early nineties. His administration was riddled with numerous scandals and fiascoes and was also seen as autocratic, with brazen disregard for the Rule of Law. Many would argue that it is the most radical right wing administration the counrty has witnessed since the military dictatorship (1967-1974).

    It was also tainted by a terrible tragedy, the train collision at Tempi, which claimed the lives of fifty-seven citizens, mostly young people. Therefore, it came as a massive surprise, including to the politicians and voters of Nea Dimokratia, that in the recent elections they won by an unprecedented landslide, while SYRIZA as the main opposition suffered one of the most comprehensive defeats in the history of the Greek parliament. Twice!

    On May 21, 2023, Nea Dimokratia won the elections with 40.8% of the vote, a 1% increase on 2019, crushing SYRIZA with a double score, as they came in second with 20.1%. PASOK regained some more ground, establishing itself in third place by raising its share to 11.5%, and has since been considered to be back in the game. These elections could not easily produce a government, as they were held by the ‘simple proportional’ system, that was voted into law by SYRIZA during its rule.

    According to many pundits, this was one of SYRIZA’s most critical failures. They legislated for the simple proportional system – a long-standing demand of the Left – but they were unable to navigate its consequences. This system doesn’t give any extra seats to the first party, so it makes it almost mandatory to form a coalition government with other parties.

    SYRIZA was unable to convince the electorate that they would be able to secure such a coalition agreement, as they confronted the stern refusal of PASOK to leave that window open, as well as the Varoufakis party and the Communist party. The right-wing populist party that had been their partner in government before, didn’t even exist by then. So, isolated by the rest of the Left, they ended up falling victim to their own law, while at the same time creating the impression that such left-wing ideas sound more democratic in theory, but are dysfunctional in practice.

    Nea Dimokratia wanted to achieve a single party government and seeing this was entirely within their reach, they instantly opted for a repeat election, which would be held with the old system which provides an up to fifty seat bonus to the party in first place. Nea Dimokratia had already voted this ‘boosted proportional’ system back into law in 2020, but when the election system changes, it comes into effect after the next election.

    The campaign period was very short. The repeat elections were to be held over just a month. The results of the May elections had taken absolutely everyone by surprise. No polling was able to predict this. In fact, it was the first time anyone could remember in a long where the polling was not seriously favouring the right wing faction.

    The shock was numbing for SYRIZA politicians and supporters. There was very little time and very low morale to be able to make any drastic changes for a more effective campaign. A second electoral humiliation seemed inevitable, and the main sentiment was fear that the second defeat would be even worse. And it was.

    On June 25, 2023, Nea Dimokratia won with 40.6% of the vote, and formed a single party government, while SYRIZA lost even more ground, getting 17.8%. PASOK made very little gains, coming in third with 11.8%, but found itself closer to second place, affirming its comeback, after sinking into near oblivion eight years earlier.

    President Joe Biden greets Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Monday, May 16, 2022, in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

    Resignation of Alexis Tsipiras

    After such an unmitigated disaster, it was inevitable that Alexis Tsipras should resign. He didn’t do so immediately, but a few days later, fueling conspiracy theories down the line.

    Many supporters and colleagues tried to dissuade him, as it seemed unthinkable to replace him. He was the leader who drove the party from barely entering the parliament, to governing the country in the space of a few years. There was almost a cult of personality around him, which persists to this day among a broad section of left-wing voters. But no leader, no matter how historic, could bear the weight of what had just happened. So, on June 29, after being president of SYRIZA for fifteen years, Alexis Tsipras resigned, leaving the party in even further disarray.

    An internal election was called to elect a new president. In July, four candidacies were submitted to the party Central Committee. These candidates represented different fractions within SYRIZA and the different approaches within the reorganization and the political direction of the party in the future.

    Efklidis Tsakalotos, a former minister of the economy, was the candidate representing the old guard of the New Left, the generation that broke away from the Communist Party after the split of 1968. They had been pushing back for years against the agenda of pivoting further to the centre.

    Representing the aforementioned centrist agenda was Nikos Papas, the former right-hand man to Alexis Tsipras, a former Minister for State, as well as Minister of Digital Policy, Telecommunications and Media. He is probably the most Machiavellian figure to emerge out of the Greek Left in several decades.

    Between the two, politically, was a female politician that had risen to prominence within SYRIZA’s rank and file. Well-educated, rather moderate, but still representing the Left, Effie Achtsioglou is a former Minister of Labor, Social Security and Social Solidarity. She became the clear favorite to win the race.

    Finally, a fourth candidate entered the fray as a dark horse – the seventy-seven-year-old Stefanos Tzoumakas, a former minister from the old PASOK administration of the 1980s, which had been much more left-leaning in policies than the PASOK of the mid-1990.

    This internal election was scheduled to take place in September, meaning most of the campaigning would take place in the summer. Given that timing, on top of the destroyed morale from the preceding national election, the trajectory of the campaign seemed very idle and ultimately grim. There was no hype, no discussions, no passionate political argumentation, no media coverage, and not much interest if truth be told.

    It felt as if hardly anyone cared about this election and there was serious concern that the whole process would take place very quietly, with Effie Achtsioglou being elected after an embarrassingly low turn-out, undermining her position from the beginning. Her victory was considered a certainty, as polling showed her to be very far ahead of the other three candidates.

    Stefanos Kasselakis.

    A Twist in the Tale

    Then out of the blue in late August, a massive twist in the tale occurred. It took most people by surprise, but there had been assiduous preparations going on under the radar during SYRIZA’s idle summer of wound licking. A young, rich and handsome, gay Greek businessman who had been a resident of the USA since adolescence –previously working for Goldman Sachs and being a ship owner – who had only very, very recently joined the party, started getting a lot of traction on social media in the last days of August, making TikTok-like videos with political statements.

    Rumors started spreading among SYRIZA supporters that an almost messianic figure had come from America to save the party. It escalated very quickly until finally, on August 29, ten days before the internal elections were scheduled to take place, Stefanos Kasselakis announced his candidacy to the Greek people by means of a viral video (and also with much less fanfare a few days later, through the official party process).

     

    The stagnant waters of the internal election suddenly turned into a full-blown tempest and took the spotlight of media coverage, even monopolizing the headlines for many days. This guy who had seemingly appeared out of nowhere, was exclaiming that he was the one who could beat Mitsotakis, and appeared to pose the only credible threat to Efi Achtsiolou after the resignation of Alexis Tsipras.

    Most of the party cadre were taken aback, especially as, despite his enormous clout, he didn’t seem to have the support of any of the party’s prominent MP’s. Except one that is. Pavlos Polakis has been a very particular character within SYRIZA. Known for his abrupt manners, coarse rhetoric and polemic stance against the Mitsotakis administration, he was passionately loved by a significant section of the party’s supporters and fiercely hated by his political opponents. Often labeled ‘toxic’ by his opponents, a label which may have even appealed to some of his own supporters.

    Polakis had previously disagreed with the decisions around the process of succession back in July, and, although he was widely expected to, had not submit a candidacy for the internal election. Now it seemed that he had figured out another plan altogether.

    Other than their common Cretan ancestry, the somewhat aristocratic Kasselakis and Polakis seemed a very odd couple. And yet, from the beginning, Kasselakis was being labeled ‘the Polakis candidate.’ Among the thirty members of the central committee that signed endorsements for Kasselakis’ submission of candidacy, there was only two current and six former MPs. Except Polakis, most of them were largely unknown to the general public.

    The rank and file of the party was instantly rather suspicious of the American-bred newcomer, his dramatic entrance and his precipitous rise in popularity. The other candidates and their supporters within the party also quickly expressed their reservations. Except Nikos Pappas.

    In retrospect, it’s tempting to think that he never seemed as fazed as everyone else. For one thing, Kasselakis soon made it clear that he represented the ‘pivot to the Center, so we can govern again’ line, with a twist of American modernity. He spoke about ‘the Greek dream,’ the ‘modern, patriotic Left,’ ‘healthy entrepreneurship’ and other rather centrist-sounding rhetoric. Indeed, he had already written an article back in July, calling for SYRIZA to become a Greek version of the Democratic Party of the USA. But his wildest statements were yet to come.

    After the initial shock, and the realization that this guy was not a joke, but was in fact, getting significant traction among the desperate and disillusioned SYRIZA voters, the criticism began, and got gradually harsher.

    The old guard, the remaining left wing of the (increasingly less) left-wing party, was the first and loudest to react. Tsakalotos and his supporters labeled him ‘a phenomenon of meta-politics,’ ‘TikTok politician’ and accused him of wanting to abolish the left-wing character of the party.

    Meanwhile, various revelations about Kasselakis’ past started circulating, fueling resentment against him among the traditional Left. Articles and speeches by him were uncovered from no more than a decade before, where he expressed openly neoliberal views, even praising Mitsotakis specifically.

    Stefanos Tzoumakas completely unloaded against him with raging rhetoric, but he had very little influence, as he was nothing more than a cult figure in the race. Effie Achtsioglou was more reserved in expressing her doubts around his suitability, albeit she eventually did. Nikos Pappas on the other hand, merely welcomed him in the race, saying that new candidacies would bring more attention to the race.

    He got that right for sure. This election had hardly even making it into the news, but after Kasselakis’ appearance, his candidacy became a primary focus of the news media. This was only interrupted by the catastrophic flooding in Thessalia, which was also a reason to delay the first round of the election by one week, to September 17, thus giving Kasselakis more time to unfold his communication strategy.

    Effie Achtsioglou.

    Social Media

    What played a critical and rather shady role in this whole affair was social media. It had been mostly word of mouth and social media rumours among members throughout the summer, that many prominent party cadre and MPs had been undermining Tsipras in various ways and had invested in his defeat in order to replace him, cancel his plans for broadening the political framework of the party towards the centre and take back control of the party. This was especially directed at the traditional Left faction, coming mostly, but not exclusively, from former PASOK supporters that had joined the party at the time of the Memorandum.

    There was also, however, apart from the informal channels, a certain digital tabloid media outlet, called Periodista, that consistently peddled that precise narrative, sometimes even boasting ‘you’re not going to read this anywhere else.’ The owner and chief editor of Periodista, Dimitris Bekiaris, is widely considered to be a stooge of Nikos Pappas, who had, among other things, given him an enviable position in the public service under his Ministry, back in 2015.

    In September 2023, these rumors and conspiracy theories spiraled out of control on social media, with very well known and prolific SYRIZA twitter accounts raging against the ‘nomenclature’ in favor of Kasselakis. Many people with inside knowledge of the party’s higher echelons, would swear, mostly in private, that the informal communication apparatus of SYRIZA in social media had always been controlled by Nikos Pappas.

    This rumor mill peaked just a few hours before the first round of the election.
    On Saturday, midnight, September 16, Nikos Manesiotis, a journalist largely unknown to most people until that point, but highly controversial since then, published an article, where he claimed that Efi Achtsioglou sent an sms to Alexis Tsipras the night of the second defeat pushing him to resign.

    Very quick to reproduce that article was Dimitris Bekiaris, through his tabloid. So quick in fact, that either by a typing error or some dubious miracle, the article appears until today to have been reproduced before it was published in the original Manesiotis outlet. The aforementioned SYRIZA twitter accounts picked it up and waved it like a pitchfork. The news spread like wildfire and became the headline of the day. The day of the election that is.
    Kasselakis won the first round with 44.9%, gaining a serious advantage for the second round against Achtsioglou who got 36.2%. At the lower end of the same clash, Tsakalotos came in third with 8.8%, followed closely by Pappas who got 8.6%. Tzoumakas got 1.3%.

    The next day Pappas got behind Kasselakis and Tsakalotos behind Achtsioglou.
    The two camps were set for the second round that would come after one week.
    On September 19, one of the closest associates of Alexis Tsipras, Thanasis Karteros, wrote an article in Avgi, the official SYRIZA newspaper, where he completely dispelled the sms conspiracy theory, using notably scathing language. describing: ‘Lies, provocations, revelations from the intestines about malicious sms, that neither the receiver, nor anyone else was aware of, until we were enlightened by the rats of the internet.’

    But it was too late. The election campaign was muddied and any notion of the truth had been relativised by the proliferation of incessant trolling polemic in social media.

    Kasselakis Victorious

    On Sunday, September 24, Stefanos Kasselakis won the second round with 56.7% of the vote, against 43.3% for Efi Achtsioglou and a new day dawned for the Greek Left. A pretty grim day so far. To be fair, Kasselakis appeared to make an effort to reconcile the different factions of the party, but the chasm was too deep. He immediately offered Achtsioglou any position she might want in the new reality of the party. Achtsioglou declined claiming she was ‘too exhausted’ to take on big responsibilities, which, admittedly sounded disingenuous, given she was contesting for the leadership of the party until the day before.

    But the most acrimony kept coming from the Tsakalotos faction of the old guard. They were particularly triggered by Kasselakis’s speech on October 10 at SEV, the Union of Greek Industrialists, where he introduced himself as a left-wing businessman and made remarks hardly distinguishable from a ‘trickle down’ narrative. He stated that ‘SYRIZA is passing to the next stage of its historical trajectory, where it does not demonize the word ‘capital,’ but sees it as a useful tool for prosperity.’ Going even further, he suggested that they should offer stock options to employees, something already previously proposed by Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

    From that day on, it was a mere countdown before the first split. Or rather, the first stage of a two-stage split. A month later, on November 12, the Tsakalotos faction, including the majority of the prominent historical cadre of the old guard, announced its departure from SYRIZA with a strongly worded text of resignation. Two MPs and 45 members of the Central Committee left the party.

    This had seemed inevitable for some time, and the supporters of the president didn’t appear very worried about it. It was seen by many of them, and definitely by the raging trolls on social media, as a politically hygienic purge, that would liberate the party from a burden holding it back. At the end of the day, they didn’t have enough MPs, or popular support, to create another party that could be competitive. The assumption was that they would soon be all but forgotten as a relic of the past. This had happened before and could be the case again, but the splitting was not complete yet.

    Kasselakis and his entourage were hoping that they would merely get rid of the annoying, ideological old geezers, but keep the predominantly forty-something Achtsioglou faction within the party. But that was not how things turned out.

    After his victory, Kasselakis became increasingly aggressive with those who he considered to be questioning his authority and were not keeping in line with his vision for the transformation of SYRIZA. He maintained a harder stance towards the Tsakalotos faction, which was expected to leave anyway, but his somewhat authoritarian style created discontent that spilled far beyond the old guard.

    On November 23, 9 MPs and a total of fifty-seven party cadre from the Achtsioglou faction announced their departure from SYRIZA, stating in their text that ‘Stefanos Kasselakis was elected democratically. But his course is undemocratic.’

    The nine MPs declared themselves independent, and as had been speculated over the days before, they joined the other two MPs from the Tsakalotos faction, so that they could reach the minimum threshold of ten MPs necessary in the Greek Parliament to form a ‘parliamentary group,’ and enjoy institutional status and representation.

    Thus, the two-stage split was completed and a new party was founded, called Nea Aristera (New Left). Its name was meant to point at its historical ideological origins, but also project the idea of a new beginning. The new political force found itself with little time to build an apparatus before the European elections, but with a ready-to-go parliamentary group.

    Quite belligerently, Kasselakis labeled the Achtsioglou faction and the new party ‘defectors,’ and raged against them for not surrendering their seats back to SYRIZA. Their usual response was that the SYRIZA they were elected to didn’t exist any longer, and the new ‘Kasselakis party,’ as they labeled it, was hardly even left-wing any more.

    Suitability for Prime Minister?

    As time passed, the consequences of the acrimonious split started registering in the opinion polls. After the Christmas break and the new year, poll after poll was showing SYRIZA’s electoral influence waning and PASOK making gradual gains, until several of them started showing SYRIZA in third place with a tendency to reach single digits. At the same time, Kasselakis performance in the question of ‘suitability for Prime Minister,’ was staggeringly low, reaching just 4% in one poll.

    This became yet another cause of friction and nagging within the party, as a shimmering question arose in everyone’s mind: What happens if SYRIZA performs as miserably as the polls suggest in the European -elections? There was a lingering murmur that Kasselakis would have to resign in that eventuality.It was in that climate that the party was heading towards its convention in late February.

    On February 17, five days before the convention which was set to take place February 22-25, Kasselakis took an initiative that created yet more turmoil. Completely circumventing every party organ, he used his personal social media to ask members to log in to the digital platform SYRIZA, in order to fill in a questionnaire, with a rather provocative content.

    Questions included whether SYRIZA should change its name and symbol and as whether it should identify as Left or Center-Left. The remaining rank and file of the party went ballistic over this and called for an immediate meeting of the political bureau, where Kasselakis was expected to explain his actions.

    Kasselakis did not, however, attend the meeting on February 19, as he was in London. Instead, he sent a letter which left the assembly of the political bureau unimpressed, and which was characterized as patronizing. Party cadre who had supported him in the internal elections were now openly expressing their discontent about his behavior and even mentioning the possibility of replacing him.

    Notably, Pavlos Polakis and Nikos Pappas both expressed criticism during that meeting. After the fallout of a two-fold split, the new president was once again being doubted and his leadership questioned. In response to that he made an unequivocal statement in London, during an event in LSE, that same evening, three days before the convention. After being asked if he would consider resigning if he lost in the European elections by more than twenty percentage points, he answered with a simple, unequivocal ‘No.’

    The following day, Kasselakis returned to Athens and attended the second meeting of the political bureau, giving the members an ultimatum. He refused to be judged by the results of the European elections in June and asked the attendees to commit that they would not challenge his leadership for the next three years – all the way to the next national elections – regardless of how the party performed in June. Otherwise, he would call for another internal election. According to reports the response he got was that nobody can receive such a blank check and that this was an unprecedented request.

    The next day, on the eve of the convention, some in the media described the meeting of the political bureau as a defeat for the new president, as he didn’t get the commitment he had asked for (only three members supported that request) and had to walk back his threat of an internal election. In any case there seemed to be some kind of compromise reached that members hoped would make the convention less contentious than it was projected to be with that last minute escalation. But another massive plot twist was about to take everyone aback and light a fire under the convention.

    Dramatic Intervention

    February 22, was the first day of the convention. It was set to begin at 6pm, with Stefanos Kasselakis giving his introductory speech at 7pm. At 4.48pm, Alexis Tsipras broke several months of silence and neutrality with an emphatic intervention that he posted on social media. In it, he passed critical judgment on almost all the protagonists.

    Regarding those who had left to form Nea Aristera he wrote: ‘The defeated of the internal elections already left the party, because they lost the fight for its leadership. Not concerned with this fragmentation, the one who wins is our political opponent.’ Of Kasselakis he said: ‘The winner is reportedly asking for a three year blank check, regardless of the result of the European elections. Thus projecting an anticipation of electoral failure and also not caring about its consequences.’ Finally, towards unnamed plotters, he said: ‘While others disagree behind the scenes, but are quietly waiting for the electoral failure to come, so they can pin it on him. Not caring about what that would mean for the party and the country.’

    Most importantly though, he brought back the internal election scenario, saying that Kasselakis was right to bring up the issue of his leadership being questioned, but advised him ‘to seek a vote of confidence, not from the political bureau, but from those who made him president.’ Despite the omni-directional criticism, Tsipras’ intervention was mostly interpreted by media pundits as an attack on Kasselakis. Not just in terms of what he said, but also given the timing. The text was posted without prior notice, just over two hours before Kasselakis’ opening speech. One can only imagine the panic and frenzy of his speechwriters, having to adapt to that at the very last minute.

    The new president picked up the glove thrown by the former president and delivered a fiery opening speech at the convention. His passionate p0erformance was likened by some commentators to a television evangelist sermon. He spoke away from the podium, using a teleprompter, often addressing the crowd directly, which was overwhelmingly on his side. He finished his speech shouting ‘Find me an opponent and let’s go!’ proclaiming an internal election for president, seemingly ignoring that it wasn’t his decision to make, and he could only submit it as a proposal for the convention to ratify. Which it didn’t.

    But there was quite a roller-coaster before getting to that point. The first evening of the convention was promising more heated confrontation, and definitely a lot of behind-the-scenes commotion. Late into that same night there was, reportedly, a meeting between eight prominent SYRIZA cadre, to discuss the rapid developments. Nikos Pappas was one of the people present.

    The main topic of this dinner meeting was which candidate would stand against Kasselakis, after his flamboyant challenge. The meeting decided to call on Olga Gerovasili, a former minister, government spokesperson, vice-president of the parliament and a very close associate of Alexis Tsipras, to be the new president’s opponent. This stand-off, however, would be seen as a proxy clash between Kasselakis and Tsipras, something that would be likely to tear the party completely apart.

    The next day, Olga Gerovasili had a series of meetings with many key figures among the rank and file. Her name was already all over the media until finally on February 24, the third day of the convention she announced her candidacy, before loud booing from the crowd, that forced the facilitator of the convention and even Kasselakis himself to intervene to stop the heckling.

    What ensued was an unprecedented back and forth, impromptu debate between Kasselakis and Gerovasili, that continued the following morning – the final day of the convention. There was a strong disagreement about the procedure and the date of the proposed election that heated the atmosphere even further, as two different proposals were submitted by the two opposing sides.

    As more and more of the people attending were agonizingly realizing that there is a clear and present danger of yet another split, perhaps even more acrimonious than the previous ones, Kasselakis and Gerovasili started calling on each other to stand down, in a bizarre blame game that seemed to reach an impasse.

    The future of the party was hanging on a thread, until the final plot twist occurred that provided a way out by means of vague compromise. Three prominent SYRIZA cadre submitted a carefully worded proposal to the convention. Its main point was to reject the proclamation of an internal election, confirm confidence to the president and go forth united to the battles ahead ‘the first one being that of the European elections.’

    The effort was led by Sokratis Famelos, the leader of SYRIZA’s parliamentary group and one of the few remaining people who enjoy widespread respect within the party. Along with him was Giorgos Tsipras (a cousin of Alexis Tsipras), who had supported Kasselakis in the previous internal elections. The third one was Nikos Pappas.

    If this proposal were to be voted on, the other two would automatically become redundant. It gained enormous traction very quickly and easily passed by a large majority among the 5.000 representatives that were present. There was a general sense of relief, mixed with a realization of damage sustained, as if everyone had managed to run out of a crumbling building during an earthquake. The next day was not going to be easy, but the worst outcome had been averted, although the party had (barely) survived.

    Olga Gerovasili.

    Winners and Losers?

    There was a lot of discussion in the media after the convention, about who were the winners and losers. As much as there were different interpretations to that, the common denominator was SYRIZA had lost overall. Some pundits described it as a lose-lose situation for everyone involved. The only one who came out unscathed, as the one who, almost literally, saved the day, was Sokratis Famelos.

    Kasselakis and his team tried hard to present it as a victory for their side, but the fact of the matter is that they didn’t get any guarantee that the president will remain in his place regardless of the outcome of the European elections. Also, his proposal, which he insisted on until the last moment was ultimately rejected by the convention in favor of the Famelos one. Furthermore, his rather erratic behavior at many points during the convention might have received a lot of applause from the attendees, but these people are not representative of the population at large. His overall image among the broader public definitely sustained damage.

    Olga Gerovasili also had her image tainted, as she was repeatedly booed by members of her own party on prime time national television. Furthermore, she appeared rather weak, after preferring to avoid the head on collision with Kasselakis. As for Alexis Tsipras, he also undoubtedly had his status wrinkled, as his own proposal was also rejected by the convention and his intervention was seen by many as making things worse. Many pundits describe him as the main loser of this whole debacle. Some other pundits, however, speculate that his main purpose was to distance himself from Kasselakis for future reference.

    All these plights of the Greek Left, make one wonder to what extent SYRIZA ever really stood a chance. Its rise to power was a product of a very specific and very turbulent historical context when for a moment, everything that was solid was melting into air. They saw a massive void in the previously galvanized political establishment and jumped excitedly in to fill it. They grabbed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but ultimately left the impression that they didn’t really know what they were getting into.

    Their administration was suffocated and chastised by all the main powers of the Western world as soon as they got into office. They fought against them half-heartedly, without ever convincing anyone that they would be prepared for an ultimate showdown. And thus they had to succumb. All the back and forth and pointless drama made them look like amateurs who were hopelessly improvising. And once the fervor and turmoil that brought them into power subsided and became a bygone era, they struggled to find a road map to become a sustainable force for the long term.

    Eventually, a majority of them internalized the idea that the party wouldn’t be able to govern again as itself and had to change its appearance and even its political identity. The tragic irony is that this had already been happening, little by little over the previous years. But it seems they needed a more definitive and somewhat ceremonial manner to make a point that this is not any more the old SYRIZA of the 2015-2019 administration. No longer the Coalition of the Radical Left
    that bites far more than it can chew, but a modern, moderate and patriotic party of professional politicians that know what they’re doing and can play the contemporary communication game just as well as the Mitsotakis gang.

    Truth be told, that’s not been going too well either. However, while this article was being written SYRIZA has seen a slight recovery in the polls, which, coupled with the simultaneous stagnation or even small drop of PASOK in the same polls, has brought it back into second place, but still below their last national election results. But even if Kasselakis manages to overcome his very bad start and gain more ground in the polls, or even get a positive result in the European elections, SYRIZA as we knew it is gone.

    In any case, the road ahead is a very difficult one for the Greek Left. Polling consistently shows the unchallenged domination of Nea Dimokratia under Mitsotakis. It seems extremely unlikely that any single party could defeat them, especially in a national election. A completely fragmented political spectrum of the centre-left is heading towards the European elections without any prospect of cooperation whatsoever. The assumption is that every force wants to maximize its electoral influence in June. Then, after the dust settles and there is a certain hierarchy established, there will be a gradual process of political fermentation (as we say in Greek) in order to form an anti-Mitsotakis front. But right now, this prospect seems light years away.

    Feature Image: Syriza party chairman and former Prime Minister of Greece Alexis Tsipras in 2012.