The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins: A Study in the Theory of Multiple Modernities [1st ed.] 978-3-030-13588-1;978-3-030-13589-8

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxx
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
An Analytic Model of Culture and Power (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 3-37
The Greek Self in Social Analysis (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 39-80
Clientelistic Social Structures and Cultural Orientations (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 81-108
Religion and Collective Representations of Communitas (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 109-152
Civil Religions of a Secular Communitas (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 153-164
The Metapolitefsis Civil Religion (1974–1989) (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 165-200
The Discourses of the Second Metapolitefsis and of the Deep Crisis (1989–2015) (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 201-252
Front Matter ....Pages 253-254
Data and Methods (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 255-260
Constitutive Goods (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 261-283
Internalized Code Orientations (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 285-299
The Patterned Orders of Ethics (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 301-316
The Ethics of the Collectivist Self and Conclusions of Part II (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 317-328
Front Matter ....Pages 329-333
Analysis of the ‘Democratic Self’ (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 335-366
Analysis of the ‘Democratic Relations’ (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 367-399
Civil-Liberal and Populist-Collectivist Democratic Institutions (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 401-417
The Semantic Map of the Greek Political Culture and Conclusions of Part III (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 419-425
Conclusions: Greek Political Culture and the Theory of Multiple Modernities (Manussos Marangudakis)....Pages 427-439
Back Matter ....Pages 441-460

Citation preview

CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY

The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins A Study in the Theory of Multiple Modernities Manussos Marangudakis with contributions by

Theodore Chadjipadelis

Cultural Sociology Series Editors Jeffrey C. Alexander Center for Cultural Sociology Yale University New Haven, CT, USA Ron Eyerman Center for Cultural Sociology Yale University New Haven, CT, USA David Inglis Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology University of Exeter Exeter, Devon, UK Philip Smith Center for Cultural Sociology Yale University New Haven, CT, USA

Cultural sociology is widely acknowledged as one of the most vibrant areas of inquiry in the social sciences across the world today. The Palgrave Macmillan Series in Cultural Sociology is dedicated to the proposition that deep meanings make a profound difference in social life. Culture is not simply the glue that holds society together, a crutch for the weak, or a mystifying ideology that conceals power. Nor is it just practical ­knowledge, dry schemas, or know how. The series demonstrates how shared and ­circulating patterns of meaning actively and inescapably penetrate the social. Through codes and myths, narratives and icons, rituals and ­representations, these culture structures drive human action, inspire social movements, direct and build institutions, and so come to shape history. The series takes its lead from the cultural turn in the humanities, but insists on rigorous social science methods and aims at empirical explanations. Contributions engage in thick interpretations but also account for behavioral outcomes. They develop cultural theory but also deploy ­ middle-­range tools to challenge reductionist understandings of how the world actually works. In so doing, the books in this series embody the spirit of cultural sociology as an intellectual enterprise. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14945

Manussos Marangudakis

The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins A Study in the Theory of Multiple Modernities

With contributions by Theodore Chadjipadelis

Manussos Marangudakis University of the Aegean Mytilene, Lesvos, Greece With contributions by Theodore Chadjipadelis Department of Political Science Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Thessaloniki, Greece

Cultural Sociology ISBN 978-3-030-13588-1    ISBN 978-3-030-13589-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13589-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019935521 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover image by Norman Posselt This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To the Memory of Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt (1923–2010)

Series Editor Preface

How did the ‘cradle of democracy’ become the ‘basket case of Europe’? The question may be crude and offensive, but it captures the essence of much thinking around the globe in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Something had gone mysteriously wrong. The Greece of Antiquity is admired for the elegance and depth of its culture, the self-discipline, public spiritedness and restraint of a republican citizenry, and the efficiency and legitimacy of a participatory political system. But now the world was looking at a pathetic, sickly Greece. This was a chaotic nation swimming in debt. It had a weak tax base and economy, too many government handouts and subsidies, too many generous early retirement policies, too much unemployment yet too many sinecures, too many factional political parties, and too little stability. The Greeks seemed out of touch with reality. For decades there had been predictions that a day of reckoning would eventually come. Yet nobody had been able to do anything about this. Heads were buried in the sand. Successive governments had struggled half-heartedly and gestured about making reforms, then kicked the can down the road. They borrowed and spent just like the Greek people themselves. Then along came the global crash and with it a return of the law of gravity to this levitation economy. How to explain this particular fiasco as well as the more general and persistent malaise of Greek modernity? Political scientists and economists have pointed to proximate variables relating to fiscal policy, the electoral system, weak institutions, and low levels of trust in the government. Fair enough. But in this book Marangudakis and Chadjipadelis take us several plies further into the analysis, providing a comprehensive and surprising vii

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answer that points to origins for all these in deep culture. The story they tell is convincing. It cannot be dismissed as some kind of orientalist gloss. Whereas orientalism engages in reductive simplification, here we have a cultural and political analysis that adds more complexity, more interpretative sensibility, more internal differentiation, more irony, and more paradox to explanation than we could have suspected. We have in this book a highly original, path-breaking analysis that transcends the usual categories of comparative and historical scholarship, cultural sociology, survey research, or social theory by deploying them all. But this has not been in a half-baked add and stir theoretical synthesis. Rather the various traditions and styles of analysis are each deployed in turn as part of a consistent and comprehensive methodological effort at a complete and convincing explanation. This is an accounting that moves meticulously through levels of generality, abstraction, and specificity (the civilizational complex, the historical epoch, the election result, the survey response) so as to make its case at each level. The aim is to leave no stone unturned, no wiggle room for doubters. In the manner of a Weber or Eisenstadt, Marangudakis and Chadjipadelis show that a civilizational complex rooted in the Greek Orthodox tradition set a queer pathway toward modernity. This was a route that did not fully liberate the Enlightenment forces of reason and universalism as bases for critique and aspiration. The implications of this axial cosmological orientation are shown with a detailed narrative account of Greek politics from the dictatorship and post-dictatorship era through to the more recent financial crisis. Moving away from a purely narrative account on the one hand, or transcendental religious explanations on the other, the authors then reconstruct the binary codes of Greek society. This analytic resource brings Durkheimian sociology and semiotics into a much-needed dialogue with the Weberian tradition. Through them we see that Greece has multiple and fragmented political cultures. Greeks today are unable to agree on fundamental or ultimate values, and even on evaluative criteria for what makes a good society, because they hold such different codes, defining what is sacred and profane in public, political, and indeed personal life. Some of these codes underpin a widespread suspicion of government and appeals to the common good. The result has been the inability to forge political consensus and establish sound policy. With a path-breaking survey methodology that goes well beyond, say, what we expect from the World Values Survey, the project documents the existence and social distribution of multiple worldviews that simply do not line up with each other.

  SERIES EDITOR PREFACE 

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The contemporary ‘west European consensus’ approach to democracy, welfare, and fiscal responsibility with high levels of trust in redistribution, in taxation systems, and in government is a minority position. Filling the void in a context of chronic distrust and uncertainty has been something akin to Banfield’s amoral familism. In a chaotic situation planning for the long term or believing in others can be difficult. It makes good cultural sense to feather one’s own nest and to focus on short term goals, to get through the next year unscathed—whatever it takes. So burying heads and kicking cans were symptoms and not causes of Greece’s misfortune. But to see just why, this book shows inquiry needs to go back to the intellectual basis of the Orthodox tradition, forwards to the often ugly politics of twentieth century political contestation, then goes sideways to abstract out the cultural codes that are in play, and, lastly, maps and documents these with survey research. The result is a unique book that is a remarkably comprehensive exploration of what Marcel Mauss called the ‘total social fact’, of something that is of collective origin and pervasive in Greek life. New Haven, CT December

Philip Smith

Preface

This book is the result of a long process that started in earnest in 2011, when I received a research grant from the Hellenic Observatory of the London School of Economics to examine aspects of the Greek political culture. It was the opportunity to test thoughts and hypotheses I was delving in since 2007 when I was invited by Shmuel Eisenstadt and Robert Bellah to the Max Weber College in Erfurt to participate in a round table discussion of Axial civilizations. It was during the discussions when it occurred to me that the basic theoretical premises of Shmuel Eisenstadt, Charles Taylor, and Robert Bellah (all present there) were not only compatible, but their combination could actually lead to a solid framework of empirical research on the way civilizational orientations, and particularly so religious, or religious-like moral-symbolic imperatives, affect the civil conscience of a country. My discussions with Shmuel Eisenstadt on the subject and our close correspondence in the following years, up until his death, left me with the strong conviction that his theory of multiple modernities was actually underestimated and that it could be utilized as a general structural framework to very specific comparative and case-studies to make sense of the very peculiar cultural-organizational paths both extensive civilizations and specific national societies follow. An opportunity to test my hypothesis arrived when the ongoing economic crisis erupted in Greece in 2010, only to become a full-blown social crisis a year later. Following with increased worry the escalation of the events, more and more violent, and more and more polarized, it became easy to notice that the heated economic debates were in fact deeply moral: villains, victims, sufferers, justice, unfairness, and dark ­conspiracies were in xi

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the center of public and private debates. People were using very different moral perspectives to make sense of a crisis which, supposedly, was economic and thus a matter of objective calculations. Indeed, facts and figures, reports, and projections presented by politicians, bureaucrats, and economists were lost in an ocean of accusations based on a handful of moral statements. The debate was not about economic strategy but about morality. The country was exposing its inner convictions, fears, desires, and aspirations in a surprisingly frank and agonizing way. As a sociologist and a Greek I felt that the best thing I could do to help end this agony is to offer a detailed account of the crisis according to the model I was working on and perhaps to offer some advice on how never to repeat the mistakes that brought us here. The grant I received from the Hellenic Observatory of the London School of Economics in 2012 allowed me and my associates, Kostas Rontos and Maria Xenitidou, to probe to the issue of the Greek political culture and to test in this respect the hypothesis that religion affects the political culture of the country decisively. The results were promising, and they gave me the opportunity to contact Jeffrey Alexander, co-director of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale, and I asked his opinion of the study. His response was encouraging and he invited me to the Center for further discussions. A Fulbright Scholarship gave me the opportunity to do so, and for three months (September–November 2014) I immersed myself in an academic environment of immense intellectual capital. Participation in Jeffrey Alexander’s research seminars, and the Supper Culture Club seminars with Phillip Smith (accompanied with a steady flow of pizzas), made me realize that the problems Eisenstadt’s theory encountered when applied in a case study would be solved if a strong dose of ‘cultural pragmatics’ was infused into it. I hope the book does justice to Alexander’s cultural theory, and even more to Shmuel Eisenstadt’s theory of multiple modernities. Joining forces with Theodore Chadjipadelis during the same time period, a first rate political scientist and statistician, gave the project a new and unexpected dimension. I like to call it ‘semiotic quantitative analysis’. Theodore’s methodology allows us to examine selective affinities among statements and to bring to life symbolic patterns never seen before—not to my knowledge. The second and third part of the book would not have been possible without him. Mytilene, Greece April 2018

Manussos Marangudakis

Introduction

The year 2010 was when Greece was struck by the global economic crisis in earnest. Global as it might have been, only in Greece the crisis first destabilized and then shattered the whole social system—the social structures, the party system, the economic behaviors, the ideological certainties, and the habits that were Greece. The bewildering fall of the Greek society into uncertainty and despair took a new turn when in the January 2015 general elections, the radical left party Syriza came in power. Though its electoral victory was anything but a landslide, it was enough, under a system of proportional representation, for the ‘first time leftist government’ in Greece (and in the EU), to come to office. This victory was only the latest act of a series of frantically shifting electorate preferences, which in three emergency general elections (2009, 2012, and 2015) brought into power five ad hoc governmental schemes that invariantly felt victim of mounting social pressure, countless paralyzing rallies, and violent street riots. Short-lived governments and a vengeful radical left government in power today are only the most visible parts of a society desperately trying to find solutions to its crisis. Surely, Greece is not the only EU country to suffer from the economic crisis: Portugal, Ireland, Spain, and Cyprus also found themselves in dire straits and were forced to follow austerity measures in order to save their economies from perpetual depression. The EU and the IMF aided their efforts, and thanks to bailout loans on the one hand, and economic reforms on the other, they managed to escape the death trap of economic bust. Today all four of them are back on track with positive rates of annual growth, not Greece. In spite of consecutive massive bailout loans and

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deficit haircuts, a series of moderate conservative and social-democratic governments failed to deliver economic reforms that were supposed to liberalize the statist Greek economy. Paradoxically, the electorate reasoned that where the moderate parties failed, the neo-­communists will succeed. Mad as the preference might be, there is logic to it. The economic loss is stupendous. Greece lost 40% of its wealth, unemployment sky-rocketed to 26%, poverty became a regular rather than an exceptional condition, and more than half a million Greeks, mostly young and educated, emigrated in Europe and elsewhere seeking a better life. And yet, the collapse was not only economic and political, partially it was moral as well. ‘Partially’ because while there is a tremendous philanthropic effort by both institutions and individual citizens to aid the ones that suffer the most, the unemployed, the elders, and the downtrodden, human relations deteriorated. People became rude and abrupt to each other, niceties disappeared from everyday encounters, public debates (both on social and on mass media) became aggressive, friendships and family ties were ruptured under the pressures of political rivalries and economic hardship, urban centers deteriorated both aesthetically and functionally, and suspicion became a constant in social interaction. Many Greeks wonder if the country can manage to exit this spiral of despair and if Greece is a ‘failed state’. Obviously, such a deep crisis triggered a heated, multifaceted, and bitter public debate on the causes of the crisis and on the inability of the country to recover. The debate quickly became polarized between those who believe that the country has been led intentionally into the crisis by its European allies-turned-­debtors and their cronies and those who believe that it was Greece’s fault for allowing the crisis to happen in the first place, and among the latter, between those who believe that the crisis is caused by the way political power is structured, and those who believe that it is deep cultural factors that keep Greek attitudes premodern and unable to deal with the challenges of modernity. Apparently, both myself and Theodore belong to the camp that considers failure to be the effect of internal causes, and we stand somewhere in the middle concerning the role of political institutions vis-à-vis cultural determinants as possible causes of the crisis. This is also where the book stands: it sheds light on this issue by demarcating and delineating the role culture plays in shaping social attitudes, political aspirations, moral judgments, and electoral preferences. As the term ‘role’ implies, I consider the impact of culture to be limited: The fact that the Greek Republic of Cyprus managed to exit its own economic crisis in due time practically suggests

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that culture cannot be solely accused of holding Greece back. Actually, there is plenty of evidence that the rigid and counter-productive structure of the political and economic milieu is directly responsible for the crisis. Yet, Greek culture is not innocent of blood either. Instead, the ways the crisis was comprehended by the majority of the population, the raison d’être of social action that emerged during the crisis, and the moral imperatives that were voiced by political parties, public personae, and social and mass media do suggest certain widespread cultural patterns of constructing friend and foe, salvation and damnation, and the sacred and the profane that were far from constructive or from renewing the public sphere. In fact, they are responsible for the deepening of the crisis in ways and scope that were not necessary. It is the aim of the book to analyze these cultural patterns, examine the symbolic assumptions and moral visions behind them, and place them in a wider civilizational framework offering an answer to the perennial, even existential, question of whether Greece is condemned to ‘belong to the East’ or it ‘belongs to the West’ and as such a modernizing recovery is at hand. In a nutshell, the book goes beyond the confines of other explorations of the causes of the instability of modern Greek democracy; in fact, it aspires to get to the bottom of the issue and thus to present a total social fact. To this purpose, a comprehensive Analytic Model of social action and social structure has been constructed, a model which allows for all the available evidence and facts to fall in a series of comprehensive ideal-typical patterns. It is these patterns which allow us to crosscheck the descriptive analysis with the quantitative analysis and validate the significance of the overall study. The Model itself follows Shmuel Eisenstadt’s principles of cultural sociology (1995) which a few years later he incorporated in his civilizational theory of multiple modernities (Eisenstadt 2003, 2005, 1–30). This, essentially Weberian, theoretical scheme is crucially infused with Jeffrey Alexander’s ‘cultural pragmatics’ which emphasizes the role of performances in creating and perpetuating moral convictions and social solidarities (Alexander 2003, 2004). Based upon this model, Part I of the book presents all the major components and processes of the dominant Greek cultural patterns and orientations from the inception of the modern Greek state in 1830 to today. Part II/III provides a quantitative analysis of the cultural components the Analytic Model exposes. Using an experimental questionnaire constructed for this purpose, Chadjipadelis’ original Geometric Data Analysis exposes the actual relations of the components, thus allowing us to visualize in

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quantitative terms and spatial ways the descriptive analysis and to reveal specific symbolic configurations with great precision and clarity. Overall, our cultural-civilizational analysis follows a bottom-up approach. Instead of assuming the presence of a distinct civilization to be analyzed from top-down as a set of principles or zones of prestige (Collins 2004) and then examining its particularities as a proof of civilizational principles, we examine in detail the various genealogies and processes which shape the dominant cultural contours of the country in the midst of modernity, and only then we take a step back and reflect on how modernity, as a distinct cultural program, has been incorporated in this configuration and its effects thereof, as civilization. Thus, the discussion and concomitant reflections concerning how the Greek case can inform the theory of multiple modernities are to be found in the Conclusions— only after the descriptive and quantitative analysis has been completed.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy. Sociological Theory 22 (4): 527–573. Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Phillip Smith. 2003. The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology: Towards a Structural Hermeneutics. In The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, 11–26. New York: Oxford University Press. Collins, Randall. 2004. Civilizations as Zones of Prestige and Social Contact. In Rethinking Civilizational Analysis, edited by  Arjomand, Said, and Εdward Tiryakian, 132–147. London: Sage. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 1995. Power, Trust, and Meaning: Essays in Sociological Theory and Analysis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 2003. Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2005. Multiple Modernities. In Multiple Modernities, ed. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, 1–30. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Contents

Part I A Historical Analysis of the Greek Political Culture   1 1 An Analytic Model of Culture and Power  3 1.1 Cosmological and Ontological Principles  6 1.2 Discourses, Code Orientations, and Organizational Ground Rules  9 1.3 Methodical Ways of Life and Substantive Rationality 11 1.4 The Binary Codification of Morality 15 1.5 Collective Effervescence 17 1.6 Demarcating Between Power and Meaning 24 1.7 Conclusions and Concomitant Suppositions 33 Bibliography 36 2 The Greek Self in Social Analysis 39 2.1 The Anarchic Individualism of the Greek Self 42 2.2 Amoral Familism and the Moral Content of Collectivism 46 2.3 Mythical Collectivism: The Modernization of Collectivism 57 2.4 From Amoral Familism to Anarchic Individualism 62 2.5 Conclusions 71 Bibliography 77

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3 Clientelistic Social Structures and Cultural Orientations 81 3.1 State Formation and Clientelism in Greece 82 3.2 Social Power and Clientelism 87 3.3 Culture and Generalized Clientelism 92 3.4 America and Ireland: Two Examples of Limited Clientelism 97 3.5 Conclusions106 Bibliography107 4 Religion and Collective Representations of Communitas109 4.1 Temporal Continuity of Symbolic Classifications111 4.2 Symbolic Classifications and the Theory of Multiple Modernities112 4.3 The Greek Orthodox Ontology in a Weberian Framework of Analysis115 4.4 Orthodox Cosmology121 4.5 The Greek Orthodox Cognitive Mode123 4.6 The Icon124 4.7 Ceremonies and Rituals127 4.8 Greek Orthodox Effects on In-Worldly Constitutive Goods128 4.9 The Ramfos’ Thesis131 4.10 The Greek Orthodox Conundrum135 4.11 Orthodox Religiosity and the ‘Order-Taking’ Classes138 4.11.1 The Non-charismatic Religiosity of the ‘Little Traditions’139 4.11.2 The Charismatic Religiosity of the Folk Music143 4.11.3 Folk Music and Anarchic Individualism144 4.12 Greek Orthodox Code Orientations146 Bibliography150 5 Civil Religions of a Secular Communitas153 5.1 On Civil Religion153 5.2 The Secular and the Religious Constants of the Greek Civil Religion156 5.2.1 The Political Ground Base of Civil Religion157 5.2.2 The Religious Ground Base of Civil Religion158 5.3 Sponsored Civic Religion (1967–1974)161 Bibliography164

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6 The Metapolitefsis Civil Religion (1974–1989)165 6.1 Charisma and Civil Religion in Metapolitefsis176 6.2 From a Collectivist Civil Religion to Populist Political Orientations189 6.3 Populist Code Orientations and Ground Rules190 6.4 The Structural Effects of Populism194 6.5 Conclusions197 Bibliography199 7 The Discourses of the Second Metapolitefsis and of the Deep Crisis (1989–2015)201 7.1 Systemic Frustrations, Symbolic Black Holes202 7.2 Ethno-Populism: The Collectivist Offshoot209 7.3 Ethno-Romanticism: The Individualist Offshoot214 7.4 The Economic Crisis: A Brief Description219 7.5 The Perfect Storm222 7.6 The One Pro- and the Three Anti-­memorandum Narratives226 7.7 The Rise of Illiberal Radicalism and the Fall of the Sacred Communitas (2015–2018)237 Bibliography250 Part II The Symbolic Structure of the Greek Public Sphere 253 8 Data and Methods255 Bibliography259 9 Constitutive Goods261 9.1 Choosing Constitutive Goods262 9.2 Frequencies273 9.3 The Patterned Orders of the Constitutive Goods279 9.4 Concluding Remarks283 Bibliography283

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10 Internalized Code Orientations285 10.1 Description of Moral Imperatives286 10.2 Data Analysis of Moral Imperatives289 10.3 The Three Code Orientations of the Greek Political Culture291 10.3.1 The Amoral Familism Code Orientation294 10.3.2 The Populist Code Orientation295 10.3.3 The Egalitarian Code Orientation297 10.4 Conclusions298 Bibliography299 11 The Patterned Orders of Ethics301 11.1 The Hobbesian Ethics305 11.2 The Egoistic Ethics307 11.3 The Schismogenetic Ethno-Populist Ethics308 11.4 The Schismogenetic Ethno-Romantic Ethics309 11.5 The Clientelistic Ethics312 11.6 The Civil Ethics313 11.7 Concluding Remarks315 Bibliography316 12 The Ethics of the Collectivist Self and Conclusions of Part II317 12.1 The Primacy of the Collectivist Self319 12.2 The Communicating Vessels of Collectivist Social Behavior324 12.3 Concluding Remarks327 Part III The Formation of the Greek Political Self 329 13 Analysis of the ‘Democratic Self ’335 13.1 Analysis of the ‘Populist-Collectivist Democratic Self’336 13.1.1 Discourse Clusters and Groups of Respondents336 13.1.2 Internal Constellations and Juxtapositions342 13.2 Analysis of the ‘Civil-Liberal Democratic Self’351 13.2.1 Discourse Clusters and Groups of Respondents353 13.2.2 Internal Constellations and Juxtapositions357 Bibliography366

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14 Analysis of the ‘Democratic Relations’367 14.1 Analysis of the Populist-Collectivist Democratic Relations367 14.1.1 Discourse Clusters and Groups of Respondents369 14.1.2 Internal Constellations and Juxtapositions374 14.2 Analysis of the Civil-Liberal Democratic Relations385 14.2.1 Discourse Clusters and Groups of Respondents385 14.2.2 Internal Constellations and Juxtapositions390 Bibliography399 15 Civil-Liberal and Populist-Collectivist Democratic Institutions401 15.1 The Vertical Groups411 15.1.1 The Democratic Self411 15.1.2 The Democratic Relations412 15.2 The Horizontal Discourses414 15.2.1 The Civil-Liberal Discourses414 15.2.2 The Intermediate Discourses415 15.2.3 The Populist-Collectivist Discourse416 Bibliography417 16 The Semantic Map of the Greek Political Culture and Conclusions of Part III419 16.1 The Semantic Map of the Greek Political Culture419 16.2 Conclusions of Part III423 17 Conclusions: Greek Political Culture and the Theory of Multiple Modernities427 Bibliography439 Bibliography441 Index455

About the Author

Manussos  Marangudakis is Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of the Aegean, Greece. His work focuses on cultural sociology, civilizational analysis, and historical-­comparative sociology. He has published articles and books on the Greek social crisis, American fundamentalism, axial civilizations, and the social construction of nature. He has served as Visiting Professor at Queen’s University in Belfast, Julius-MaximiliansUniversität Würzburg, University College Cork, and Yale University, and is an alumnus of the Fulbright Scholarship Program in Greece.

With Contributions by Theodore  Chadjipadelis  is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. In 2001, he graduated from the Department of Mathematics and received his PhD from the Department of Statistics and Operational Research. He has been a member of the board of the Educational Research Centre (2000–2004), representative of the Hellenic Ministry of Education at EUROSTAT, and national representative at FP6 Initiative 7 (Citizens and Governance in Knowledge Society). He has published extensively on electoral ­analysis, public opinion, applied statistics and methodology, and urban and regional planning.

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 12.1 Fig. 12.2 Fig. 13.1 Fig. 13.2 Fig. 13.3 Fig. 13.4 Fig. 13.5 Fig. 13.6 Fig. 13.7

The analytical structure of the model 35 The traditional amoral familism 56 Mythical collectivism 61 Secular anarchic individualism 71 Clientelism 105 The Greek Orthodox Salvationist Model 149 The symbolic structure of the Metapolitefsis’ civil religion 188 The Metapolitefsis’ cultural system 198 The trajectories of the two civil religions 218 The Syriza governance 249 Dendrogram of the twelve pictures’ selection 280 Moral imperatives according to the degree of agreement— strongest to weakest 291 Schematic representation of the hierarchy for the eighteen statements of moral imperatives 291 The self: collectivist or individualist? 320 Schematic representation of CHA for E25/E23/E26 variables326 Bar chart for E16 items (i.–viii.) and the total sample according to the three levels of E17 337 Schematic representation of the hierarchy 338 Schematic representation of the five types of democratic self (intersections)340 Schematic representation of the five types of democratic self 341 Variable by Group [row percentage (%)] 343 Variable by Group [column percentage (%)] 344 Schematic representation of the hierarchy 347 xxv

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List of Figures

Fig. 13.8 Fig. 13.9 Fig. 13.10 Fig. 13.11 Fig. 13.12 Fig. 13.13 Fig. 13.14 Fig. 13.15 Fig. 14.1 Fig. 14.2 Fig. 14.3 Fig. 14.4 Fig. 14.5 Fig. 14.6 Fig. 14.7 Fig. 14.8 Fig. 14.9 Fig. 14.10 Fig. 14.11 Fig. 14.12 Fig. 14.13 Fig. 14.14 Fig. 14.15 Fig. 14.16 Fig. 15.1 Fig. 15.2 Fig. 15.3 Fig. 16.1

16A Greece Bar chart for E16B items (i. to viii.) and total sample according to the three levels of E17 Schematic representation of the hierarchy 16B Greece Variable by Group [row percentage (%)] Variable by Group [column percentage (%)] Schematic representation of the hierarchy 16Β Greece Presents the bar chart for E18A items (i.–vi.) and the total sample according to the three levels of E19 Schematic representation of the hierarchy 18A Greece E18A and E19 by group [row percentage (%)] E18A and E19 by group [column percentage (%)] Schematic representation of the hierarchy 18A Greece Greece 18A Presents the bar chart of E18B items (i.–vi.) and total sample according to the three levels of E19 Schematic representation of the hierarchy Greece 18B E18B and E19 by group [row percentage (%)] E18B and E19 by group [column percentage (%)] Greece 18B Schematic representation of the hierarchy Greece 18B E20 statements (De-AntiDe) Schematic representation of the hierarchy Schematic representation of the hierarchy The Semantic Map of the Greek Political Culture

350 352 353 356 358 359 362 365 369 370 373 376 377 380 383 384 386 387 389 394 394 395 396 398 404 406 408 420

List of Tables

Table 9.1 Table 10.1 Table 10.2 Table 10.3 Table 10.4 Table 11.1 Table 11.2 Table 12.1 Table 12.2 Table 12.3 Table 12.4 Table 12.5 Table 13.1 Table 13.2 Table 13.3

Pictures according to selection frequency (in descending order)273 Statements’ responses (%) in descending order 290 Correlation coefficients between the variables from phobic/ egoistic code orientation 292 Correlation coefficients between the variables from egalitarian/populist code orientation 292 Correlation coefficients between the variables from messianic/self-­righteous code orientation 293 Contingency matrix for groups of people and code orientations for the E23 question 303 Contingency matrix for groups of people for E23 question and E25 pictures 304 Statements’ responses (%) in descending order 320 Output for ACP analysis for E26 statements 321 Table of the factors (axes) on the set of E26 statements 322 The corresponding levels for each statement (rows) for the groups (columns) 324 Interconnections of E23, E26, and E25 325 Questions E16 (E16A: SET A, E16B: SET B) and E17 336 Frequency distribution table for E16 items (i.–viii.) and the total sample according to the three levels of E17 and total sample337 Contingency matrix for groups of people (columns) and discourses for E16 and E17 questions (rows) 339

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xxviii 

List of Tables

Table 13.4 Table 13.5 Table 13.6 Table 13.7 Table 13.8 Table 13.9 Table 13.10 Table 13.11 Table 13.12 Table 13.13 Table 13.14 Table 13.15 Table 13.16 Table 13.17 Table 13.18 Table 13.19 Table 14.1 Table 14.2 Table 14.3 Table 14.4

Weight (%) for the five types of populist-collectivist democratic self (E16A Grouping variable), E16A items, and E17 levels connected to each type Contingency table of variables and total sample (rows) and groups (columns) [row percentage %] Contingency table of variables (rows) and groups and total sample (columns) [column percentage %] Output for AFC analysis for E16A statements, variable E17, and E16A grouping variable Table of the factors (axes) on the set of E16A statements, variable E17, and E16A grouping variable Contingency table of E16A, E17, and E16A grouping variable and extracted discourses Contingency table of E16A, E17 (rows), and E16A grouping variable and discourses Frequency distribution table for E16B items (i.–viii.) and the total sample according to the three levels of E17 and total sample Contingency matrix for groups of people (columns) and discourses for E16B and E17 items (rows) Weight (%) for the five types of civil-liberal democratic self (E16B Grouping variable), E16B items, and E17 levels connected to each type Contingency table of variables and total sample (rows), and groups (columns) [row percentage %] Contingency table of variables (rows) and groups and total sample (columns) [column percentage %] Output for AFC Analysis for E16B statements, variable E17, and E16B grouping variable Table of the factors (axes) on the set of E16B statements, variable E17, and E16B grouping variable Contingency table of E16B, E17, and E16B grouping variable and extracted discourses Contingency table of E16B, E17 (rows), and E16B grouping variable and discourses Questions E18 (E18A: SET A, E18B: SET B) and E19 Frequency distribution table for E18A questions (i.–vi.) and total according to the three levels of E19 and total Contingency matrix for groups of people (columns) and discourses for E18A and E19 questions (rows) Weight (%) for the six types of populist-collectivist democratic self (E18A Grouping variable), E18A items, and E19 levels connected to each type

340 343 344 345 346 348 349 352 354 355 357 358 360 361 363 364 368 368 371 371

  List of Tables 

Table 14.5 Table 14.6 Table 14.7 Table 14.8 Table 14.9 Table 14.10 Table 14.11 Table 14.12 Table 14.13 Table 14.14 Table 14.15 Table 14.16 Table 14.17 Table 14.18 Table 14.19 Table 14.20 Table 14.21 Table 15.1 Table 15.2

Table 15.3

Contingency matrix for groups of people (columns) and discourses for E18A and E19 questions (rows) Weight (%) for the three types of populist-collectivist democratic self (E18A Grouping variable), E18A items, and E19 levels connected to each type Contingency table of variables and total sample (rows) and groups (columns) [row percentage %] Contingency table of variables (rows), and groups and total sample (columns) [column percentage %] Output of AFC Analysis for E18A statements, variable E19, and E18A grouping variable Table of the factors (axes) on the set of E18A statements, variable E19, and E18A grouping variable Contingency table of E18A, E19, and E18A grouping variable and extracted discourses Contingency table of E18A, E19 (rows), and E18A grouping variable and discourses Frequency distribution table for E18B items (i.–vi.) and total sample according to the three levels of E19 and total Contingency matrix for groups of people (columns) and discourses for E18B and E19 questions (rows) Weight (%) for the four types of rational-civil democratic relations (E18B Grouping variable), E18B items, and E19 levels connected to each type Contingency table of variables and total sample (rows) and groups (columns) [row percentage %] Contingency table of variables (rows), and groups and total sample (columns) [column percentage %] Output for AFC Analysis for E18B statements, variable E19, and E18B grouping variable Table of the factors (axes) on the set of E18B statements, variable E19, and E18B grouping variable Contingency table of E18B, E19, and E18B grouping variable and extracted discourses Contingency table of E18B, E19 (rows), and E18B grouping variable and discourses Questions E20 Frequency distribution table for E20 questions (a–l) and total according to the selection as democratic (DE) or anti-democratic (AntiDe). The items are ranked according to the De-AntiDe difference in descending order Frequency distribution of populist-collectivist and civilliberal institutions (PC_CL index)

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372 373 375 376 378 379 381 382 385 387 388 390 391 392 393 396 397 402

404 405

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List of Tables

Table 15.4 Table 15.5 Table 15.6

Contingency matrix for groups of people (columns) and discourses for E16A, E16B, E18A, E18B, and P_C index (rows)407 Frequency distribution for the eight groups and total sample (row) according to the P_R index and total sample (column)407 Contingency table of T1:T6 discourses (rows) according to E16A, E16B, E18A, E18B grouping variables and P_C index409

PART I

A Historical Analysis of the Greek Political Culture

CHAPTER 1

An Analytic Model of Culture and Power

Contents

1.1  Cosmological and Ontological Principles 1.2  Discourses, Code Orientations, and Organizational Ground Rules 1.3  Methodical Ways of Life and Substantive Rationality 1.4  The Binary Codification of Morality 1.5  Collective Effervescence 1.6  Demarcating Between Power and Meaning 1.7  Conclusions and Concomitant Suppositions Bibliography

   6    9  11  15  17  24  33  36

Anxiety, generated during periods of intense political and social conflict, such as the one Greece experiences today, urges a people to reflect on the most fundamental constitutive myths, symbols, and memories they identify with, and to question the values and cultural themes from which society’s institutional patterns and structures have been derived. These themes in question stretch from the constitutive cultural and institutional premises of the nation, to aspects of social cohesion and solidarity, and to individual moral stances and attitudes vis-à-vis fellow citizens and the state. Under pressure, these elementary components of norms, values, and morals become detached from social structures and institutions, exposed, and problematized. I endeavor to analyze and scrutinize these elementary components as they stand today, in the midst of a crisis that becomes deeper by the year, with no hope of being resolved in the foreseeable future. © The Author(s) 2019 M. Marangudakis, The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13589-8_1

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In a nutshell, in order to examine the moral self in Greece today, its historical roots and institutional forms, the types of social action this self encourages or inhibits, the kind of civil society it cultivates, and the civic aspirations it nourishes, we have constructed an original, multilayered, model of cultural analysis. It is used to descriptively examine the historical development of civil religion and empirically analyze political discourse in Greece today. It is based upon the Durkheimian sociology of morality as it has been informed by Alexander and Smith’s school of cultural sociology and expanded by Charles Taylor’s history of moral imperatives, and the Weberian theory of social action, as it has been clarified by Stephen Kalberg and employed in Shmuel Eisenstadt’s theory of multiple modernities. More substantively, the model adopts a phenomenological perspective to argue that the self is not prior to morality, but, instead, that (a) the self is substantiated in and through the taking of moral stances informed by ‘constitutive goods’ (Taylor 1989, 63) that emerge out of, and are embedded in, civilizational, cosmological, and ontological principles (Eisenstadt 1995, 146–148); (b) these constitutive goods manifest themselves in codes, myths, narratives, and symbols (Alexander et al. 2006); (c) inform methodical-ethical ways of life through processes that can be analyzed, employing the Weberian ideal types of rationality (Kalberg 1980); and, last, that (d) the binary oppositions that constitute these moral imperatives and ethical ways of life can be retrieved by qualitative (Alexander and Smith 1993) as well as quantitative analysis, allowing us to reconstruct the symbolic patterns that reflect these constitutive goods in social action and structures. We place this model into a neo-functional framework (Alexander and Colomy 1985) as we assume that these symbolic patterns do not constitute the moral foundations of harmonious social relations, but the moral resources used on the battlefields of social antagonisms, precipitating, even cultivating in some cases, deep social cleavages and long-lasting cultural traumas. In this vein, we regard moral principles to infiltrate social relations of power through discourses, that is, through internally coherent narratives, rhetorical practices, rituals, and performances which bind together the symbolic universe and the raw exercise of power, in an effort to create morally justified power relations. Power infused with sanctifying discourses constitutes the backbone of the public sphere and encapsulates moral imperatives which are mobilized by various elites and social groups in their struggle for political supremacy and privileged access to resources (Fairclough 1995). These discourses could be altered or informed by

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­ ifferent moral imperatives or constitutive goods (a) due to the multiplicd ity of moral goods which ‘float free’ in a given society (Eisenstadt 1963, 301), or, as this analysis reveals, (b) by the emergence of alternative and distinct moral variations that are produced out of the same moral universe by a process of selective affinity, and (c) by liminal processes in periods of structural disorder and moral confusion (Szakolczai 2009). Selective affinity among binary symbolic sets that are combined to produce wider and more comprehensive moral statements about the self, civil bonds, and civic obligations creates various patterned orders and constitutes the structural aspect of the public discourses that animate and shape the public sphere. These patterned orders provide social action with consistency. Yet, they do not create social action or social structure. Instead, they provide moral foundation to various social formations, acting as ‘a valid canon’ in Weber’s terminology (Weber 1978, 429), encouraging or inhibiting certain social stances, evaluating social events, and setting off ‘the good from the bad’ (Alexander and Smith 1993, 157). The actual power arrangements, the pursuit of power in all its various forms, constitute a different sociological domain with its own internal logic, dynamics, and social manifestations (see Sect. 1.6). This aspect of social interaction, that is, the actual social division of labor, is covered by theories of power such as Michael Mann’s theory of the social networks of power. The latter does not constitute a thematic subject of this book, but it is of use in scrutinizing and setting the analytic limits of moral structures vis-à-vis non-symbolic social structures. Such a theoretical syncretism, based upon compatible tenets that bind these theories together, allows us to probe some of the major perennial problems of modern Greek society, without becoming cultural essentialists, and without losing sight of specific historical exigencies and social processes that culminated in this ongoing deep social crisis. We suggest that to explore the causes of this crisis, we need to examine the interaction of morality, that is, ‘deep culture’, with historical processes and contingencies in the framework of the social division of labor and the networks of social power that together constitute ‘society’. In effect, we examine and analyze the above in the context of the Greek historical experience and the Greek civil religion, since it was the hegemonic political discourses that utilized sacred symbols to produce the rigid social structures that brought Greece to its knees. The qualitative as well as the quantitative analysis of these discourses, to reveal the moral imperatives in their pure form, constitutes the second and third parts of this study.

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1.1   Cosmological and Ontological Principles We start the analysis with the axiom that social action is structured around strong evaluations of right and wrong which are not identical to arbitrary choices, interests, or inclinations, but rather stand independent of these and offer standards by which social action can be judged (Calhoun 1991). ‘Constitutive goods’, definitive notions of the good, the beautiful, and the true (Windelband 2018, 305),1 provide the moral criteria for establishing the tangible ‘life goods’ that we cherish. Typically, constitutive goods are unarticulated, embedded in practical consciousness, in that the claims of our moral actions and reactions remain implicit. Latency urges us to explicate what is implicit, as well as a method to detect signs of major moral orientations. Even then, moral orientations cannot be taken for granted since there is a plurality of orientations (‘polytheistic value fragmentation’ in Weber’s nomenclature) that may coexist or be partially exclusive with one another. The disjunction between various constitutive goods demands an effort to explicate what is implicit, as well as a method to detect signs of major moral orientations. In all cases, constitutive goods define (either intentionally or instinctively) the boundaries, the substance, and the purpose of the moral community, and as such, they affect civility and social action in profound ways (Taylor 1989, 19–22). In this framework, personhood and its moral imperatives are products of historical ‘evolution’ (Bellah 2011). They are based on their predecessors to the extent that they accept some axiomatic validity in them (explicitly or not), as they proceed in asserting their own truth and their own vision. No moral imperative, and no specific notions of the good, the beautiful, and the true develop ex nihilo. They constitute mutations of basic themes that can be traced back to their historical sources no matter how remote or alien they appear to be to their contemporaries. Thus, Charles Taylor’s ‘self’ and the associated development of constitutive goods in his Sources of the Self do not refer to a universal self and to equally universal sets of constitutive goods (as his title suggests), but of the Western self, and its evolution from Plato’s inward-looking and Augustine’s rational self, to today’s modern multifaceted self, even though Taylor never explicates the social carriers of such evolution.

1  I base this definition of Windelband’s analysis of the Holy and its antinomian nature visà-vis pragmatic necessity (Windelband 2018, 305).

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Specific, present-time, constitutive goods are only timely manifestations of a long journey of symbolic-moral accumulation that is not visible to a cultural outsider. For example, ‘individual dignity’, as it is understood in the West today, could not exist without its predecessors, such as romantic expressivism, disengaged reason, and the affirmation of ordinary life. Thus, the empirical identification of any constitutive good in any given society would be of little significance if not associated and attached to indigenous or inherited moral imperatives. This genealogical dimension of cultural evolution is best captured by Shmuel Eisenstadt’s ontological and cosmological principles. Though Eisenstadt never fully explicates the term, the use of the concept leaves little doubt that he refers to the ultimate principles of a given symbolic order such as a Christian worldview, a Jacobin political program, or a liberal regime, all of which advocate very distinct definitions of reality and of the nature, the meaning, and the purpose of things, material as well as symbolic. In all respects, ontological and cosmological principles of any given society are hardly ever internally coherent and pure sets—not even in cases where a Jacobin revolution endeavors to wipe out any memory of past ‘impurity’. Instead, they constitute a depository of moral principles and codes which offer a wide (but not unlimited) variety of symbolic orders. While they are not identical, constitutive goods and cosmological and ontological principles are conjoined: they situate the individual inside time, space, and society; delineate the sacred and the profane; and provide answers to basic existential questions. They constitute the wide civilizational background upon which specific moral goods are produced and promulgated and suggest institutional ways and means to reach them. Civil religion, as it has been conceptualized by Durkheim as a moral community, and more recently explored by Bellah in his analysis of civil religion in its various symbolic and ritualistic manifestations, constitutes the most visible and tangible manifestation of hegemonic constitutive goods (Bellah 1967). And while some kind of causality among cultural heritage and constitutive goods should be acknowledged, the openness of the social system that allows communication among various social networks allows for a relative autonomy of the latter from its cultural cradle (Mann 1986). The free-floating quality of a certain imperative moral good suggests that its acceptance by any social system is a matter of elective affinity or compatibility between the social system and the cultural order, as well as a matter of interpretation and of various ways of its incorporation into the dominant symbolic framework. Concomitantly, to identify the ideal-­typical

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Greek moral self and its civil and civic manifestations today, we need to examine the genealogy of the moral constitutive goods in Greece and their crystallization through various historical processes of structuration, institutionalization, and charismatic social action. Such a quest needs a standpoint—theoretical as well as methodological. How do we evaluate and classify meaning on a societal level? And how do we identify constitutive goods? Neo-functionalists tend to agree that the construction of meaning is formed around two axes: the symbolic and the organizational (Alexander and Smith 1993, 159–160; Eisenstadt 2001). The symbolic axis defines the nature of the cosmic order and the relations between this order and the human world; the perception of time; and the relation between cosmic, mundane, and social time; the nature and the means of salvation and the major soteriological arenas (whereas salvation is achieved); and the relations between culture and nature, and between the reflexive subject and the objective world. The organizational axis, on the other hand, focuses on the problems and tensions intrinsic to the structuring of social relations and human interaction. It deals with tensions inherent in the construction of social order, the relations between the social division of labor, the regulation of power, and the construction of trust. Tensions around hierarchy and equality—the pursuit of instrumental goals, competition and solidarity, authority and participation, selective and collective goods, freedom and equality—are some of the issues that constitute the problematique of the construction of any society. Meaning then is not arbitrary but emerges at the intersection of constitutive goods and social structures to make social life meaningful and orderly. Order arises out of meaning since no naked social division of labor could ever assure the continuity of concrete pattern of interactions: any social division of labor is ridden with ambiguities and indeterminacies that no organizational structure can resolve. In fact, the very construction of the social division of labor (political, economic, or ideological) generates uncertainties with respect to some of the basic dimensions of social order, that is, trust, regulation of power, construction of meaning, and legitimation of the social order. Indeterminacy is not erratic but systemic: it is found in the social interaction among actors (collective and/or ­individual); it is located in-between actors and their goals; and in-between goal-­seeking actors and the resources, since access of different actors to the major resources that are being produced, exchanged, and distributed is not specified in any self-evident way. Likewise, resources tend to be of use in more than one way and to satisfy different goals, and various social boundaries

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do not have a self-evident, independent, existence (Eisenstadt 2001, 335). As for the symbols, they are open to interpretation, and objects are arbitrarily signified as such by their signifiers and are constantly open to new significations. Awareness of such kinds of indeterminacy intensifies fragility and changeability in a quest for more meaningful and more secure social interaction (Marangudakis 2015). From the above, it becomes quite clear that meaning constitutes a crucial component of the construction of social institutions, since without it there can be no common perception of social order, no basic agreement on the particular and concrete ways a certain social division of labor will take shape; it is internally coherent and systemically rational as regulation and distribution of power, notions of trust, and legitimation of the social order and social action derive from some basic moral principles that infiltrate and animate social interaction and social structures. Yet, the systemic order is porous and social consensus is fragile, a matter of shifting social dynamics that assure the constant restlessness and rearrangement of social order. These rearrangements are not a matter of systemic evolution as Parsonian theory suggests; instead, they constitute intentional efforts of various elites to redefine the meaning of the moral order redefining, as a consequence, the distribution of power, the legitimation of social action, and the boundaries of social trust.

1.2   Discourses, Code Orientations, and Organizational Ground Rules Cosmological and ontological principles, as well as constitutive goods, are incorporated into social structures through discourses. Discourses, while they communicate information, also perform an evaluative task, similar to Max Weber’s Wirtschaftsethik. The latter conceptualizes the actual process by which morality infiltrates social structures: it does so not piecemeal, eclectically, or arbitrarily, but as a generalized means, as a general, internalized (and thus often taken-for-granted and unarticulated) code of moral orientation. Code orientations suggest the same type of solution to various social settings or circumstances. The social actor does not need to question time and again the meaning, the moral worth, or the moral i­ mplications of the situation at hand. In a sense, code orientation functions as an algorithm to provide an instant moral evaluation of a situation, yet without determining the actual decision of the actor vis-à-vis the action per se.

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However, code orientations provide the actor with a vision of a good society, and as such provide moral justification to particular organizational criteria of the allocation of resources, as well as the more basic functional prerequisites of social interaction, such as instrumental goals, solidarity, and legitimation. More important to our study, code orientations that are related to the construction of the contours of collective identities, such as solidarity, trust, and membership criteria, shape notions of primordiality, civility, and various sacred-transcendental orientations and their combinations, such as civil society and civil religion, by specifying middle-range moral goods as well as means and ways to obtain them. Discourses in the form of ethical behavior and code  orientations, which influence the definitions of the spheres of social structures, entail the interweaving of symbolic and moral meaning with the organizational aspects of social life to produce relatively stable institutional formations crystallized in the institutionalization of the ground rules of social interaction. Ground rules combine the concrete specifications of the social division of labor (trust, power, and legitimation) with the regulation of the resources in society. In detail, ground rules specify: (a) the symbolic institutional boundaries of collectivities; (b) the criteria of access to resources and power; (c) the rules of distributive justice and equity, and the distribution of rights and obligations; and (d) the definition of the broader purpose or meaning and collective goals of any collective activity (Eisenstadt 2001, 344). Ground rules provide the normative framework of generalized exchange and the regulation of different actors’ access to the major economic, political, and cultural spheres or arenas; the conversion between these different resources in different spheres of social action; the patterns of distribution in space and time; and the regulation of spatial and temporal organization of such resources. All of these processes entail the limitation on free exchange of resources. The normative sources of the ground rules put limits to and shape the framework of general exchange by (a) specifying the criteria of the public distribution of private goods; (b) setting up of public goods; and (c) specifying whether the resources are used in immediate or long-term exchange, and thus the long-range functioning of the institution. Yet, there is no simple, one-to-one relation between ontological premises and the ground rules of social interaction; rather between them there exist selective affinities that allow for the constant presence of doubts, contestations, and struggles among social actors for the proper interpretation of ontological visions and of the ground rules.

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Such specifications, interpretations, and negotiations occur on different levels of social structures and constitute, in Weberian terms, the core of the charismatic dimension of human activity, to link concrete human activity to what is perceived in society as the ‘sources of being’. The charismatic dimension of human activity and the substance of the ontological principles and of the constitutive goods become most detectable in moments of crisis, when old and routine patterns of social interaction and of institutional structures are challenged and new ones are proposed and put into practice, and when efforts are made to reconstruct collective consciousness and to institutionalize the new social order. Such efforts combine the institutionalization of models of social and cultural order with attempts to control the production and flow of resources, concretizing particular interpretations of ontological assumptions of constitutive goods and the core societal symbols.

1.3   Methodical Ways of Life and Substantive Rationality The process from abstract cosmological and ontological principles to specific constitutive goods, to internalized code orientations, and to organizational ground rules, that is, to institutional patterns of social interaction, constitutes a mechanism of organizational structuralization of morality in the social division of labor. The process allows us, on the one hand, to identify the concretization of morality into social structures by examining how social action is infused into definitions of the major spheres or arenas of social interaction and to ground rules. On the other hand, and in reverse order, it allows us to extract aspects of taken-for-granted moral imperatives and fragments of cosmological and ontological principles and constitutive goods from particular social institutions and social structures. As indicated before, Eisenstadt’s ontological/cosmological principles, and Taylor’s constitutive goods, do not refer to a single moral foundation or to an ecumenical ontological source common to all societies. Instead, they refer to moral values specific to different civilizations which, following Max Weber’s historical sociology, animate civilization-specific ontological and cosmological principles and thus civilization-specific constructions of trust, distribution of power and legitimation, definitions and constructions of social arenas, institutionalizations of social action and social structure, and specifications of ground rules.

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Yet, Max Weber’s moral sociology suggests a possibility that the rest overlook: that the rationalization process that turns constitutive goods to discourses, to code orientations and ground rules, need not be influenced by moral imperatives, that is, deep-rooted religious or religious-like convictions. Instead, they could be inspired and informed by other meaningful sources of rationalization that are neither ethical nor methodical. In other words, Weber indicated that the rationalization process need not be unilineal. The fact that meaningful, conscious, action does not derive only from unilineal moral sources, makes possible a multiplicity of rationalization processes that variously conflict and coalesce with one another at all civilizational, societal, and institutional levels. To examine the rationalization of individual action through various ways in a civilizational context, we need to turn to Weber’s theory of rationalization and of the different types of rationality as they have been identified by Stephen Kalberg in Weber’s Economy and Society and the Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion as ‘theoretical’, ‘formal’, ‘substantive’, and ‘practical’ rationality (Kalberg 1980). The conscious regularities of action that all these types introduce serve to master fragmented realities, while the patterns of civilizational and social processes they consist of involve conscious regularities of action orientations and, in some cases, ‘ways of life’, that is, attitudes that penetrate the entire organization of life (Kalberg 1980, 1149), but only in some cases. Rationalized ways of life are formed only in some historical cases, above all in the West. Weber insists that rationalization processes do not expand, engulf, and absorb less rational social spheres through diffusion mechanisms, but instead that qualitatively different rationalization processes advance at their own pace and take place at various socio-cultural levels and in different life-spheres (i.e., institutional orders), both in those related to the ‘external organization of the world’ (law, politics, economics, science) and/or in the ‘internal’ spheres of religion and ethical ways of life. In Weber’s terms, a rationalization process may develop in various social arenas, without any particular arena determining the whole of the social system (e.g., the legal system to determine the economy), and/or without the particular method the individual employs in this sphere of his life (e.g., occupation), forming a methodical way of life. As rationalization occurs in diverse spheres of life, the conditions under which a single realm could become the carrier behind which all other rationalization processes fall in line became for Weber a matter of concern:

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…a specific rationalization process of historic significance in societies and civilizations have often originated when a constellation of factors crystalized that rewarded methodical rational ways of life… Weber argues that precisely these ways of life were based on values rather than on interests. (Kalberg 1980, 1149)

The reasons for this priority are as follows: Practical rationality is the way of life employed by an individual who is purely concerned and absorbed by its pragmatic and egoistic interest. Void of any absolute value system, the individual accepts given realities and calculates the most expedient means of dealing with the difficulties and issues of his life. Variations in regularities in this way of life arise from differences of the means available to master daily problems (Kalberg 1980, 1152). Theoretical rationality involves a conscious mastery of reality through the construction of precise abstract concepts rather than through action. It constitutes a cognitive process of logical deduction and induction, the attribution of causality, and the formation of symbolic meanings. Theoretical rationality provides meaning to life and the world at large, but it does so in a sober and detached way. Though theoretical rationality does not constitute a pattern of action since it constitutes a purely cognitive scheme, it contains a potential indirectly to introduce patterns of ethical action.2 Substantive rationality directly orders action into patterns in relation to ‘value postulates’. A value postulate implies entire clusters of values that even though they vary in comprehensiveness, internal consistency, and content, they have the capacity to organize action (Kalberg 1980, 1155). Substantive rationality is considered to be a ‘valid canon’, a unique standard against which reality’s flow of empirical events may be selected, measured, and judged. It exists always in reference to ultimate points of view, or direction, and it implies an identifiable configuration of values that determines the direction of a potentially ensuing rationalization process. Thus the rationalization process depends on an individual’s implied or stated preference for certain ultimate values. Every realm of life is animated by at least one value postulate, and the rationality within a given arena refers back to this value postulate. Life-spheres defend their own value postulates as rational and label those of other life-spheres, or rival 2  ‘An ‘ethical’ standard is one to which men attribute a certain type of value and which, by virtue of this belief, they treat as a valid norm governing their action’ (Weber 1978, 36).

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value postulates in their own arena as non-rational, thus rejecting the ultimate value-standpoints and world-views of their rivals. More important, as value-rational action itself, so substantive rationality’s sources are arbitrary: they cannot be compared and evaluated by using objective and detached rules.3 Formal rationality is directly linked to modern social division of labor and relates to spheres of life that acquired specific boundaries only with industrialization, and more precisely with the modern, Western, internal organization of the economic, legal, and scientific spheres and state bureaucratization. Formal rationality, in contrast to substantive rationality, ‘derives from means-end rational calculation by reference back to universally applied rules, laws or regulations’ (Kalberg 1980, 1158); it constitutes the more precise and efficient means for the resolution of problems by ordering them under universal and abstract regulations. Of the four, only substantive rationality can bring into being comprehensive ways of life and, in some cases, methodical ways of life, that is, a unified configuration of values since (a) the practical rational way of life lacks breadth and steadiness; (b) theoretical rationality confronts given realities abstractly and thus in detached ways, without providing practical directions or ethical examples; and (c) formal rationality does not need to infuse abstract rules with meaning other than the efficiency of the action embedded in these rules. Social action, as a conscious act that aims to master reality, is related to specific types of rationality: Practical and formal rationalities are related to means-end rational action and substantive rationality to value-rational action, while theoretical rationality is not directly linked to any  type of social action. Thus, for Weber, meaningful social action is always rational action. But as said before, this process is highly sensitive to historical exigencies and selective affinities between various rationalization processes. Actual social processes and code orientations are not clean-cut, ideal-­ typical, manifestations of such types of rationalization. Instead, they are found in various combinations of discourses structured around specific binary moral codifications. The identification of these code orientations, and the specific type of rationality they incorporate (formal, practical, substantive—even theoretical) is a matter of meticulous historical research. 3  For a striking example of two complementary cases of theoretical and substantive rationality (and their patterned combination) see Part II, Sect. 10.3.2.

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1.4   The Binary Codification of Morality There is a great value in Weber’s typology as it allows a researcher to examine the constituent elements of these diverse sources of rationalization and rational action, and to distinguish between principled and resourceful, authoritative and convenient, moral and amoral, sober and emotive statements of the self and its moral contours. By using the aforementioned Weberian typology, we can analyze complex textual arguments and examine their constitutive Weberian parts. Using this technique to analyze decisive public debates, statements, and arguments, we can examine the nature of the arguments used by the opposing sides, and thus draw conclusions concerning the character of the oppositional forces, and indeed the character of the political conflicts and of the social rifts in the public sphere. But there is more to text analysis. Following Alexander and Smith, discourses, especially ethical and moral ones, come in the form of ‘cultural structures’, that is, structures composed of symbolic sets located in narratives that can be analyzed to expose the deep moral convictions that animate and justify the argument of the discourse. This analysis belongs to the hermeneutical and post-structuralist tradition that has been employed successfully, exposing the deep moral structures of American civil society. Exploiting this principle for the benefit of our discourse analysis, we lose nothing from the Weberian analysis of rational reflection, and we gain valuable information concerning the deeper, even amorphous, visions of the good, as is articulated, or simply uttered, by social actors. In this context, Weberian types of rationality, and hermeneutic analysis of cultural structures, are not mutually excluded. Instead, substantive rationality needs to be phenomenologically understood and structurally analyzed, if we wish to make sense of the debates that animate institutional arenas and divide the political spectrum. To put it aphoristically, in modernity, there is no guarantee that the values of the political and social actors are specifications of a common value system. Instead, historical exigencies and uneven processes of modernization are possible to produce antagonistic cultural developments, incompatible cultural systems, and conflictual constitutive goods. The stronger the polarization among these constitutive parts of the cultural system, the deeper the division of the body politic will be. In short, the phenomenological approach to cultural-symbolic analysis assumes that people make sense and construct their worldviews, and ‘…their progress through time, in terms of stories, plots which have

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beginnings, middles, and ends, heroes and antiheroes, epiphanies and denouements, dramatic, comic and tragic forms’ (Alexander and Smith 1993, 156). Cultural logics of analogy and metaphor enable extended symbolic codes to be built up from simple binary structures whose meaning is derived not from its social referent (i.e., the signified) but from its relations to other symbols (i.e., the signifiers) within a discursive code. Since the meaning of a sign is derived not from its social referent—the signified—but from its relation to other symbols—the signifiers—the narrative crystallizes the symbolic universe of the social actor irrespective of the particular story context: ‘…when meaningful action is considered as a text, the cultural life of society can be visualized as a web of intertwining sets of binary relations’ (Alexander and Smith 1993, 156). Crucial to our study is the suggestion that sign-sets are organized into discourses that communicate not just information but also perform a forceful evaluative task when …they are charged by the religious symbology of the sacred and the profane, the good and bad, the desirable and the detested, the sainted from the demonic. Sacred symbols provide images of purity and they charge those who are committed to them with protecting their referents from harm. Profane symbols embody this harm; they provide images of pollution, identifying actions, groups, and processes that must be defended against. (Alexander and Smith 1993, 156)

The conceptualization of culture as a system of symbolic codes, which specify the good and the evil by virtue of their internal semiologics, affords the possibility of generalizing from and between specific localities and contexts—a possibility that the Weberian approach restricts to momentary expositions of reflection and intention. At the same time, the symbolic approach allows for voluntarism (i.e., individual action), and social-­ structural factors (e.g., institutional roles), to be included in the analytical frame. It allows for voluntarism, as actors are forced to choose among alternative interpretations of constitutive goods and of ontological principles; it allows for social-structural factors, since the choices social actors face are influenced by their particular institutional-organizational role they occupy, and the obligations and affordances they entail. On the other hand, symbolic codes inform action in two ways: first, they are internalized, and thus provide the foundations for strong moral imperatives, that is, constitutive goods that place on the individual strong psychological

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premiums; second, they constitute publicly available resources against which the actions of particular actors are typified and held morally accountable. To detect, extract, and analyze (discursively and statistically) the systemic arrangement of binary oppositions of these symbolic codes are to depict specific conceptions of the two major axes of meaning, the cosmological/ontological, and of the social division of labor, as well as their formulation into constitutive goods—and to locate key-exponents and promulgators of these narrations means to identify the various elites that struggle to redefine the meaning of these axes of meaning, thus promulgating competitive versions of cultural systems and hegemonic constitutive goods. The distinction between the two axes of meaning which correspond to a significant extent to Weber’s rationalities allows us first to distinguish between cultural principles and constitutive goods, and issues deriving from the social division of labor, and then to examine the effect of the social division of labor on the formation and articulation of constitutive goods, thus identifying the role of the social division of labor in shaping moral imperatives.

1.5   Collective Effervescence So far, we have identified symbolic meaning with speech. Yet, symbols and symbolic phenomena are not confined to speech and text alone. Instead, they extend to rituals and performances making culture primarily a somatic experience, which could, potentially, bypass or overwhelm our rational faculties altogether. Weber collapsed this multilayered category of somatic experience into the category of ‘affectual action’ without much further elaboration: affectual action lays very close to the margins of what can justifiably be called meaningfully oriented action since it is not based on explicit, rational, decisions. Rather, affectual action merges means and ends so action becomes impulsive. This fusion does not allow the actor to make calm, dispassionate assessments between the ends of action and the means that serve these ends; the means themselves are gratifying and become ends in themselves, and thus the actor becomes impervious to the consequences of his action (Weber 1978, 25). This is very true, and in case (as is the case indeed) society is influenced by irrational forces, it is a very significant component of social organization. Weber’s insistence that instrumental rationality tends to dominate modern social action made it hard for him to see that power symbols, which unceasingly exert control

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over social organization, and above all social solidarity, lay exactly on the mechanism he described so accurately and then dismissed. This mechanism is the fusion of means (such as a ritual or a performance) and the end (the internalization of the event itself and its subtexts). Weber is not alone in hesitating to include emotion in his action theory. Durkheim is equally apprehensive of the actual workings of emotiveness. In Primitive Classification, Durkheim and Mauss argue that though: …things are above all sacred or profane, pure or impure, friends or enemies, favorable or unfavorable … the differences and resemblances which determine the fashion in which they are grouped are more affective than intellectual… [Unfortunately] emotion is naturally refractory to analysis. (Durkheim and Mauss 1963, 86)

Yet, he paid particular attention to affection, as he took notice of the dynamic nature of emotiveness in modernity, and the creative character of rituals as a non-rational process that gives birth to ordering symbolic representations. He states this clearly in the Conclusion of The Elementary Forms where he anticipates for modern society ‘hours of creative effervescence, in the course of which new ideas and new formulae are found which serve for a while as a guide to humanity’ (Durkheim 1995, 475). Weber would not have paid any particular attention to the experience of the ritual. He focused on how people utilize the ritual turning it into a meaningful source of rational social action, rather than how the ritual binds together and moralizes a community people.4 Yet, arguably, the social domain of affection might bridge the gap which stands between the Weberian processes of social action and the Durkheimian ritualistic-­ symbolic processes of social order, thus allowing us to connect methodologically ritual and cognition as two aspects of meaning-making process, even though not exclusively so. Emotion might be refractory to sociological analysis, but not to the process itself. If text analysis allows us to examine what constitutes the pure and the polluted in a text, rituals and symbols inform us of the kind of social solidarity this bipolarity creates, the (polluted) solidarity it aims to destroy, and the specific soteriological arena this struggle takes place. 4  Weber states this rather clearly when he argues ‘Thus, religious or magical behavior or thinking must not be set apart from the range of everyday purposive conduct, particularly since even the ends of the religious and magical actions are predominantly economic’ (Weber 1978, 400).

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Their presence informs us of the degree social order is sacralized, inspires devotion to the cause, and cements group solidarity. Their particular form, and their relation to civil society and to civil religion, even Church religion, determines to a significant extent the width, scope, and success of the cause, especially so in liminal moments when social structures dissolve and new ones have not yet been shaped. Rituals and symbols shape and reflect the moral goods that define the collectivity, as well as the profane foe. Analysis of ritual organization (event structure, focal point, symbolization, performativity), improvised or patterned as this might be, provides us with valuable information of the institutionalization of power and social control it aspires to, and the changes thereof the collectivity wishes to achieve. In other words, rituals and symbols both reflect and structure the moral good and the sacred order, which written texts and public speeches hide behind proper language and self-censorship. Yet, the question still remains unanswered: are rituals as such, refractory to sociological analysis as Durkheim and Mauss argue? Recent developments in the cognitive and the symbolic analysis of rituals suggest they are not. We start with the former: The field of cognitive analysis focuses on cognition rather than context as the basis of transmission and distribution of religious or religious-like secular representations, studies the mind outside culture, and then uses these cognitive models to explain how religion works in specific cultural contexts. This ‘pre-cultural’ approach that examines the means rather than the content of the transmission argues that religious rituals belong to two basic, and mutually exclusive, religious modes: the ‘doctrinal’ mode, which refers to a rational process of internalization, and the ‘imagistic’ mode, which refers to an emotive process (Whitehouse 2004). These modes (not types) differ in that they are stored into two different kinds of memory and thus they are transmitted and communicated differently: the imagistic mode draws on ‘autobiographical’, ‘flashbulb’, memories triggering the mechanism of episodic memory retention; the doctrinal mode draws on frequently repeated textual doctrine, triggering the mechanism of the rather prosaic semantic memory retention. The episodic memory consists of specific events with a strong emotional connotation, while semantic memory consists of ‘general knowledge’ about the world. This very simple psychological difference has consequences for the codification, the imaginary, and the political structure of a religious, or a religious-­ like, tradition. The psychology of memory is crucial to the

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a­ rgument. For there are really only two principal ways in which relatively complex sets of symbols and norms, such as those found in religious systems, could be successfully stored in memory and be transmitted from one individual to another. One, the doctrinal mode, is a form of intellectual training, accumulating a great number of relevant and explicitly connected propositions. The other one, the imagistic, is a rare but exceptionally salient experience—so striking that its details remain engraved in memory, providing ‘focal imagery for subsequent reflection’ with people receiving ‘lasting revelations’ (Whitehouse 2004, 30). Each cognitive route is more appropriate to a specific kind of mental content and has specific effects on the nature of religious affiliation. The doctrinal mode requires constant communication of relatively intelligible and explicitly articulated material, therefore, high-frequency exposure. Imagistic effects require highly salient occasions, therefore, low-frequency exposure. The two routes to memory consolidation are not just different, but mutually exclusive: each religious tradition exploits one or other mode, or both but within discrete domains of operation. However, each mode can often incorporate elements of the other: Protestantism is thoroughly doctrinal but often uses music. The point is that nothing religious is transmitted through the music that cannot be explained outside this emotional medium. A whole range of social, political, and conceptual aspects of religious systems are the consequences of choosing one mode rather than the other. Modes of memory use, in this view, explain many other features of religious transmission: types of ritual action, forms of social organization, and access to collective resources, the symbolic boundaries of the community of believers, definitions of membership could all be affected by the mode of religiosity. This approach matches our cultural model quite well since it does not place religiosity (church or civil) inside an already existing cultural framework but, instead, considers modes of religiosity as analytically autonomous psychological-motivational factors. As the assumption behind it is that religious thought and behavior are a by-product of human cognition, it allows us to consider those aspects of religiosity that constitute the ­psychological basis upon which building blocks of symbolic codes and thus of symbolic patterns are structured. Coming to the symbolic analysis of rituals, and the ritualistic structure of symbolic communication, ‘cultural pragmatics’, a research program, as well as a theoretical perspective, has positioned rituals and their post-­ structural, hermeneutic, and dramaturgical analysis to the epicenter of

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social order. Instead of being ‘refractory to sociological analysis’, Jeffrey Alexander provides us with the analytic and methodological tools to understand the crucial role rituals and, more generally, ‘cultural performances’ play in shaping social dynamics and the public sphere itself. They do so by setting the standards, the rules, the script, the roles, the actors, the audience, and the resources that together constitute nothing less than Eisenstadt’s ‘political arenas’. In this vein, we can argue that political arenas, which Eisenstadt never explicated, constitute the staging of public debates as theatrical performances. Political arenas constitute public performances wherein constitutive goods and code orientations manifest themselves, where the good, the beautiful, and the true, and their opposites, are attributed to political issues, institutions, and agents and where the unfolding drama is judged by the spectators, and winners and losers are pronounced. Cultural pragmatics distinguishes, without dissociating, text analysis from ritual analysis since ‘staging’ a presentation of moral imperatives necessitates the mobilization of discrete factors and involves its own dynamics: Cultural pragmatics grows out of this confluence, maintaining that cultural practice must be theorized independently of cultural symbolics, while, at the same time, remaining fundamentally interrelated with it. Cultural action puts texts into practice, but it cannot do so directly, without ‘passing go.’ A theory of practice must respect the relative autonomy of structures of meaning. Pragmatics and semantics are analytical, not concrete distinctions. (Alexander and Mast 2006, 5)

The theatrical staging of a social phenomenon is the process by which a statement or an argument becomes morally meaningful to the viewer, and morality a somatic experience to the participants and the viewers. The prior occurs when the theatrical, and thus ritualistic and dramatic presentation, is successfully linked to the cosmological and the ontological principles and the constitutive goods of the audience and thus is comprehended as a vivid and actual depiction of ‘archetypal’ moral forces of light and darkness: In democratic societies, in order to achieve broad effects political actors must orient their tactics to address the moral frameworks that compel the larger population… In other words, social performances, like theatrical ones, symbolize particular meanings only because they can assume more general, taken-for granted meaning structures within which their performances are

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staged. Performances select among, reorganize, and make present themes that are implicit in the immediate surround of social life—though these are absent in a literal sense. Reconfiguring the signifieds of background signifiers, performances evoke a new set of more action-specific signifiers in turn. (Alexander 2006, 94)

Alexander most assertively argues that the outcome is not guaranteed. Instead, it is successful only under certain circumstances, when all the constitutive ingredients of a theatrical performance are combined successfully, thus achieving a sense of sincerity: Here, the dramas that scripts are meant to inspire aim at audiences composed of the publics of complex civil societies. The actors in these social dramas may be institutional authorities or rebels, activists or couch potatoes, political leaders or foot soldiers in social movements, or the imagined publics of engaged citizens themselves. The motivations and patterns of such actors are affected deeply, though are not controlled, by directors. In social dramas, these are the organizers, ideologists, and leaders of collective action… Social-dramatic action can be understood, in these terms, by the theatrical concept of the mise-en-sc’ene, literally, putting into the scene. Such dramatic enactment requires control over the means of symbolic production, which suggests a stage, a setting, and certain elementary theatrical props. For social dramas, control over such means points to the need to create platforms for performance in the public imagination and, eventually, to create access to such media of transmission as television, cinema, newspapers, radio, and the Internet. (Alexander 2006, 95; italics in original)

Audiences, actors, directors, and control over the means of symbolic production, and the various social forces that produce, distribute, and criticize the production, constitute the essential elements of the political arenas the public sphere at large is made of. Politics then is not solely a matter of pragmatic/rational interest but also a matter of symbolic presentation and persuasion; it is a matter of holding the moral upper ground against your opponent, thus neutralizing the rational aspect of his argument. In moments of deep systemic crisis, as the one Greece experienced the last eight years, symbolic confrontations, staged as public rituals and performances of the good and the evil, of the pure and the polluted, become of paramount importance, since the whole political system is in question, and the public reconsiders not its moral convictions (it will be the last thing someone will question indeed), but whether these moral

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convictions are betrayed by the political system, and whether hitherto marginal parties appear to be more qualified to implement a political program true to their moral imperatives. Rituals do not only constitute the way through which cosmological and ontological principles and constitutive goods are internalized by the individual or a collectivity. Rather, they are the way for a political issue to be moralized and internalized by actors as well as by the audience. If cognitive analysis of rituals/performances informs us of the overall mode, the issue will be comprehended by, and consequentially the way the issue will be approached (emotively or rationally) by, the participants and the audience, symbolic analysis informs us of how the same ritual contributes to structuring the public sphere, the political argument, and how it affects social power. In all, a cultural analysis of rituals necessitates (a) the semiotic analysis of the symbols, (b) the cognitive analysis of the mode, and (c) dramaturgical analysis of the performance. It is the combination of what is said, how it is said, and how it is performed that defines the issue itself and shapes social solidarities around it, and it is the specific features of this combination that will turn solidarity to a polemic social force by specifying trust, regulation of power, construction of meaning, and legitimation of its own social order. In all, we combine the Weberian and the neo-Durkheimian perspectives, in a rather heretic way. We do so, arguing that the ‘doctrinal’ mode of transmission and distribution of religious, or religious-like secular, representations is not the only means to construct a moral canon for living, even if this is neither ‘valid’ nor ‘comprehensive’ (Lebensfuehrungen) in Weberian terminology. Since we do not look for comprehensiveness in life-strategies, but rather how, and to which extent, the moral self affects the perspective, the attitude, and the temper a social actor displays toward the political domain, we can presume that all cosmological and ontological universes, even imagistic ones, are building blocks of predictable and recurring patterns of political predisposition notwithstanding absence of rational-Kantian methodical ways of internalization. To decipher the ­internal logic of these cosmological and ontological principles and consecutive discourses, we need to analyze both their doctrinal rationale according to the Weberian method, as well as their ‘imagistic’ ritual structure and narrative performativity according to the neo-Durkheimian perspective (Alexander et al. 2006). In this framework, ‘substantive rationality’ is no longer exclusively a ‘methodical-rational’ canon. Instead, it is a certain moral orientation, a canonical propensity to perceive the world in

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certain ways, and to act toward it accordingly, even though not necessarily methodically, or comprehensively. Thus, we infuse the Weberian morally meaningful action and comprehensive ethical life with Durkheimian rituals as the means by which morality becomes a somatic-psychological constitutive property of the individual.

1.6   Demarcating Between Power and Meaning Our insistence to include the Weberian perspective is due to our interest to delineate the motivational factors that lead a social actor to exhibit certain long-term predispositions toward the public sphere in general, and to support certain public discourses and political programs in particular. How important is morality (situated in substantive rationality), political ideology (i.e., theoretical rationality), and plain pursuit of interest (i.e., practical rationality) in political orientations? Theoretically, this question leads to the following problematique: If culture is the domain of meaning, then the social division of labor should be the domain of something else; if not, culture becomes a tautology and loses its explanatory value. Eisenstadt, following a Weberian reading of culture, recognized the necessity of this analytical distinction when he wrote: Human interaction is interaction between individuals pursuing their own goals. But such interaction is set, embedded within distinct frameworks of settings, and characterized by specific dimensions. Such settings, frameworks, and dimensions, are also continually created and recreated by human action. At the same time, they shape such action and may acquire a certain objectivity, a certain givenness of their own—some of the characteristics of Karl Popper’s World III.5 The two basic dimensions of human interaction are organizational and symbolic. The organizational dimension—the core of which is the social division of labor—is rooted in the prevalence of a situation of scarce resources in any setting of social interaction and in the necessity to coordinate human activities around the production and distribution of such resources. The symbolic dimension of human action is rooted in the construction of the meaning of the various patterns of interaction and their continual interpretation. (Eisenstadt 1995, 33 emphasis added)

5  World III refers to objective and tangible knowledge (scientific theories, technologies, tools, social institutions, etc.) created by humans, and which, contra World II, is (partially) autonomous from human interpretation (Popper 1978).

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Here, Eisenstadt explicitly distinguishes between two analytic dimensions of social interaction, the organizational and the symbolic, and provides us with clues about the internal logic and rules of the organizations humans develop to satisfy their needs: (a) pursuit of interest, (b) around scarce resources, (c) distinctive frameworks, (d) specific dimensions, (e) givenness of their own, and (f) coordination of human activities. Unfortunately, he then moves on to explaining the crucial role of meaning, which is the second dimension of human interaction, in ‘filling in’ the ‘spaces’ left ‘open’ by the organization of the social division of labor, making social organization meaningful. Eisenstadt never came back to the organizational dimension since his primary concern was not social organization as such, but the various functions and the forms meaning takes as it infiltrates social organization to produce the visible and tangible ‘society’. But if we wish to understand the formative role of culture in history, or in a historically specific case, such as the Greek crisis, we need to understand with precision not just the nature of culture per se but also the nature of the other dimension and of the social organization and its internal dynamics. For this, we need to specify the analytic boundaries of culture and structure, or meaning and power. We need to do so, since any other configuration is intrinsically deterministic: either culture is everything, and thus history is fatalistically determined by ahistorical cultural principles, as, for example, Huntington implicitly suggests in the ‘clash of civilizations’ theory, or culture is reduced to structural exigencies, and history is determined by systemic demands, as, for example, Wallerstein suggests in world system theory, and Frank in dependency theory. In the first case, humans become, to use Goffman’s felicitous term, ‘cultural dopes’; in the second case, culture is reduced to after-the-fact justification of ‘action’, making action a mere epiphenomenon of otherwise obligatory structural necessities, and synonymous to instrumental, short-sighted, action. In either case, culture is eliminated as an autonomous and reflective agent able to change the flow of events by restructuring the inner logic of social organization. Politically speaking, either the ‘culturalization’ of social structures or the ‘structuralization’ of culture would declare the Greek predicament as inevitable, as caused either by the ‘Greek character’ or by the international social division of labor and the relationship between core and periphery. This would be detrimental to both the relationship of Greece with the European Union (EU), necessitating Grexit, and the future of EU as an agent of political unification of various national ‘cultures’, necessitating

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the breaking down of the EU in peripheries based upon common cultural heritage. We cannot afford either of these ‘solutions’. Both analytically and politically, even normatively, the need to delineate cultural and structural boundaries, and to attribute each dimension its dues, is to bring agency to the fore and make precise suggestions of how symbolic structures can change for the better, affecting in a positive way technocratic social structures and organization. A macro-sociological theory which delineates the analytic boundaries and the internal dynamics of social organization, and is compatible to Eisenstadt’s theoretical presuppositions as equally neo-Weberian, is Michael Mann’s theory of social power (1986). It is crucial to briefly present and scrutinize Mann’s theory since only by doing so the role of culture in the abstract, as well in the Greek case, will become clear, and thus render to culture the things that are cultural, and to social organization (Mann’s ‘social power’), the things that are social organizational. Mann defines power in Weberian terms, as the ‘capacity to get others to do things that otherwise they would not do’. In order to achieve their goals which is control of scarce resources, humans enter into power relations which involve both cooperation and conflict with other people. Power is both collective, embodying cooperation to achieve shared goals, and distributive, exerted by some over others. Power relations are organizational and intentional relations. According to the kind of the resources human beings pursue, they set up appropriate, target-specific, organizational networks to coordinate their production and distribution. There are four main sources of power: (a) Economic power is the social organization of extraction, transformation, distribution, and consumption of the produce of nature; (b) military power is the social organization of concentrated and lethal violence; (c) political power is the centralized and territorial regulation of social life by order-providing government over a given territory; and (d) ideological power is the control of beliefs, norms, and values, as well as of aesthetic and ritual practices. Mann describes his approach as ‘organizational materialism’, meaning that (a) power always has to be contained in an organizational form, and is never free of agents, and (b) that the types of power are not ideal types in Weber’s sense, constructs that are imposed on reality, nor are they a reality separate from human beings and imposed upon us, but they are rather, to use Mann’s term, ‘emergent’, simultaneously creating and restricting social action as they develop. Accordingly, ‘societies are constituted of multiple overlapping and intersecting networks of social power’

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(Mann 1986, 1). Networks of people are the organizational means to attain these kinds of power and ‘containers’ of the four power sources (1986, 2). In relation to ideological power, this means that ideology must be contained in an organizational form to have an impact. Mann distinguishes between two types of ideological power, ‘socio-spatially transcendent’, covering a larger territory in a diffused way, and ‘immanent morale’, which intensifies ‘the cohesion, the confidence, and, therefore, the power of an already established social group’ (Mann 1986, 24). Furthermore, there are two types of political powers, ‘despotic’ and ‘infrastructural’. The other sources of social power also come in different types, so that in addition to ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ types of power, Mann distinguishes between authoritative and diffused power, and between collective and distributive power. The various combinations of authoritative/diffused and intensive/extensive powers yield four combinations of what Mann calls the ‘organizational reach’ of networks (Mann 1986, 9). The most complex, and for this reason problematic, type of network is the ideological one. It represents various aspects of meaning understood by Mann as follows: I prefer the term ‘ideology’ to ‘culture’ or ‘discourse’ not because I view ideologies as false or a cover for interests, as materialists tend to say. By ideology I mean only a broad ranging meaning system which ‘surpasses experience’. ‘Culture’ and ‘discourse’ are too all-encompassing, covering the communication of all beliefs, values and norms, even sometimes all ‘ideas’ about anything. My model abandons the distinction between ideas and materiality in favor of one between ‘ideas-and-practices combined’ (or ‘action and structure combined’) in each of four power networks. Yet the ideological is clearly more idea-heavy than the others. It comprises networks of persons bearing ideologies which cannot be proved true or false, couched at a sufficient level of generality to be able to give ‘meaning’ to a range of human actions in the world—as religions, socialism and nationalism all do, for example. They also contain norms, rules of inter-personal conduct which are ‘sacred’, strengthening conceptions of collective interest and cooperation, reinforced, as Durkheim said, by rituals binding people together in repeated affirmations of their commonality. So those offering plausible ideologies can mobilize social movements, and wield a general power in human societies analogous to powers yielded by control over economic, military and political power resources. (Mann 2006, 356 emphasis added)

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There are two observations to make of Mann’s conception of ideology, deriving from the instrumentality of his theory—one affirmative, the other critical. On the affirmative side, Mann correctly suggests that ideology could be secular or religious, since any type of comprehensive symbolic system could satisfy instrumental purposes. On the critical side, Mann ignores the difference between the construction of meaning and the use of meaning. He mentions norms only to tell us how norms are used by social networks to achieve control and rituals to tell us how rituals affirm the network’s cohesion. But these are the instrumental, second-order, products, or functions of these symbolic constructions in service of purposeful social actors. As for full-fledged ideologies, Mann reasons: When I discuss Sumerian or Christian religion, or nationalism, fascism, “Hutu Power” or American neo-conservatism, I do discuss their content, since powerful ideologies are those whose content gives plausible meaning to people’s lives. I do not claim to discuss all ideas, values, norms and rituals, only those mobilized in macro-power struggles. (Mann 2006, 346 emphasis added)

Here, again, Mann collapses meaning into mobilization. Ideologies may be used to mobilize social movements to some specific goals, but there are ideologies that were not created to become means of mobilization, and some of them, as Mann ascertains, never become means of mobilization. But all of them have emerged as symbolic orders, providing meaning to their followers, and if Bellah is correct, symbolic orders emerged out of a process of play and not of competition (Bellah 2011). Mann is aware of the importance of this ‘ideological’ aspect of social relations, and he infuses his explanatory narration of historical formations and processes by admitting the role of value and ‘emotion driven behavior’, of ‘norms and values’ as ‘important influences on human action’ (Bellah 2011, 345–346). He solves this conundrum himself by distinguishing between the ‘passive’ and the ‘active’, or intentional, ­ dimension of ideology: Yes—but some human constructs then become reified as institutions and social structure, socializing and constraining later actors. Sociologists from Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann to Anthony Giddens have called this the duality of action and structure. Idealist and materialist theories are equally simplistic by comparison… (Mann 2006, 356 emphasis added)

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Here, ‘reification’ is the key-word. Reification turns something which already exists into an object, a tool. It turns culture into power, transforms it into a resource that can be used to actively control the social (ideology) and the natural (technology) environment. But reification is an intentional ‘twist’ of ideology which is already in existence. In fact, if ‘ideology’ is to remain in line with Mann’s theory, it needs to remain instrumental. As a social network of power, ideology is not ‘a broad ranging meaning system which surpasses experience’ as he argues (see above), but instead the mobilization of a meaning system. It is a means to do something, to achieve something, and to make others do something for you. The definition of ideology, in this scheme of things, is not something reflective and meaningful as such. Rituals and symbols play their part in Mann’s analysis only when they are used intentionally for the intensification of a collectivity’s morale, or as Goffman suggests, used as a weapon against outsiders (Goffman 1959, 1967). This indeed is the case of ‘intensive social networks’, of established or emergent social orders that intentionally organize and/or participate in such rituals and symbolism. But these are social, visible, manifestations of a process which in fact is twofold: as an end in itself, it shapes the self; as a means, it musters the self to attain a goal. Without the internal dimension, rituals and symbolic classifications would be merely tool-kits to be used according to the occasion (Swidler 1986); but then, why bother to use symbolic classifications of right and wrong in the first place? Why is it important to refer to some moral imperatives? Rituals of symbolic classifications are significant because, as Mann correctly indicates, they intensify the morale of a social group. Intensification of morale means to instill deep moral convictions to the social actor, bind him to the other members of the group through the somatic-psychological experience of effervescence to these moral convictions, and make him impervious to cost-benefit calculations, so that he will not break ranks when instrumental rationality urges him to do so, to bring his to a condition to say: ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’ This process is exclusive, in that a second moral conviction, antithetical to the first, cannot be accommodated by the same self. Multiple antithetical meanings cannot exist simultaneously. Moreover, rituals, and symbolic orders and classifications might be universal means to achieve instrumental goals, but since they are based on different cosmological and ontological principles, they are culture-specific, and thus of quite different substance: since they perceive the world differently, they suggest equally different courses of action, courses that may

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clash with the inner logic of other types of social organization. Take, for example, the description of an astonished Englishman who witnessed the seamanship of Greek merchant vessels in the 1820s: The interior of each vessel presented a scene of still greater confusion and insubordination; there was the captain—but between him and a common sailor there was a void unfilled by any officer—no lieutenants or midshipmen, or grade of any kind. Among the men the same confusion existed; no portion of duty was allotted; no gangs where formed; if a sailor saw any thing that appeared to him necessary to be done, he did it without waiting for an order; or if an order was given, all hands sprung to perform it at once, though no more than five, perhaps, were necessary. They were perfectly free with their captain, except that he ate alone. (Howe 1828, 55)

Here, the generalized mode of a rural community (Chap. 2) clashed with the organizational prerequisites of the technical-formal, organizational, prerequisites of the capitalistic economic network this vessel belonged to in early nineteenth century. The organizational, indeed ideological, inner logic of the network, which according to Michael Mann should have prevailed, was pushed aside by the ‘background’ rural-­ communalist mode of the crew. This is only an instance of a widespread phenomenon of social habits confronting and defeating the logic of modern capitalist economic development (Harrison and Huntington 2001). In all, the instrumental use of moral convictions is a process different from the spontaneous, defused, and self-organized symbolic orders which do not pursue anything, but spontaneously emerge as a consequence of social interaction, or as Saussere puts it, of ‘conscience collective’ (Alexander 1988, 4). The emergence of the moral self is not a power relation, but only in the most general, and indeed tautological, sense. How then could we describe culture in social power—or social organizational—terms? As an ‘ideology of the self’ which was internalized, and thus became an internalized code orientation, a generalized means to morally comprehend the world. But this comprehension does not determine the course of social action; it only evaluates and imposes psychological premiums on action. These ideologies of the self, especially since the coming of the Axial age, are texts (e.g., the Bible, the Torah, the Koran) or speeches (e.g., Vedas) which methodically and comprehensively define sets of cosmological and ontological principles according to which someone must live his life, and which are internalized and perpetuated with the aid of symbols and rituals, and upon which political ideologies usually rest and are interweaved with, without being able to replace them. They do

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replace them, only to the extent they become internalized moral principles themselves (i.e., Stalinism, Nazism, Italian fascism, etc.). As Charles Taylor insists, antithetical moral imperatives cannot coexist. The theory of social power is purely a theory of social action which is perfectly combined and locks with the analytical prerequisites of Eisenstadt’s ‘meaningful structures’. This becomes particularly vivid in the all-important matter of what Eisenstadt calls ‘the interweaving of the symbolic and the organizational axes’—in other words, of the process by which structures acquire existential meaning. Mann recognizes the same process, albeit in social network terminology: Such configurations become what I called ‘promiscuous,’ drawing in and structuring elements from many areas of social life. In example 2 above, the transcendent organization of the culture of early civilizations drew in aspects of economic redistribution, of rules of warfare, and of political and geopolitical regulation. Thus we are dealing not with the external relations between different sources, dimensions, or levels of social power but rather with (1) the sources as ideal types that (2) attain intermittent existence as distinct organizations within the division of labor and that (3) may exert more general, promiscuous shaping of social life. (Mann 1986, 28 emphasis added)

Mann describes in the above passage the mechanism by which, in Eisenstadt’s terminology, the indeterminacy of the social structures becomes specific with the infusion of meaning. In the same way that culture is institutionalized by ‘drawing in’ aspects of the other three power networks, the same networks become meaningful by drawing in and ­structuring aspects of culture. ‘Promiscuity’ and ‘interweaving’ are two concepts that describe the same process observed from opposing viewpoints. The last subject-matter of interconnectivity I would like to bring to the fore is extra-institutional social action. For Eisenstadt, meaning radically changes social structures through charisma that emanates from the outside. Keeping this in mind, let us examine how changes occur in social networks: from the moment these networks are organized, they fall into organizational patterns that are not in control of the organizers. Organizations acquire certain objectivity and shape human action by structurally constraining action to the requirements of the organization, turning social actors to means by which organizational networks unfold and are developed over time. In other words, organizational patterns turn ‘action’ into ‘function’, to the extent that humans respond effectually to the structural restrictions of these organizational networks. Mann openly admits to this when he states:

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The greatest are the networks of ideological, economic, military, and political power—the four sources of social power. Each then implies distinctive forms of sociospatial organization by which humans can attain a very broad, but not exhaustive, package of their myriad goals. The importance of these four lies in their combination of intensive and extensive power. But this is translated into historical determinacy through the various organizational means that impose their general shape onto a large part of general social life. (Mann 1986, 28 emphasis added)

While the functions of the actual social networks are deterministic, the theory at large is not, since it allows for radical, ‘revolutionary’, change. Yet, this change does not emanate from ordinary processes inside social networks, but by unintended consequences and extraordinary instances that are not controlled or intentionally engineered for this purpose: I call my account of social change ‘neo-episodic,’ meaning that change comes in intermittent bursts of major structural transformation. Like Sewell, I oppose structural determinism because I see ‘structures’ as the outcome of collective actors, groups forming around the distribution of power resources. I see neo-episodic change as often emerging from the unintended consequence of action, from unexpected outside events, and sometimes indeed from accidents. (Mann 1986, x)

This perspective matches Eisenstadt’s scheme of the necessity of extra-­ organizational charismatic action for the major reconstruction of his ‘social arenas’. Certainly, charisma does not apply to all instances of social change, but not all instances of social change are about meaning—which constitutes the bridge that connects the two theories. The rather long discussion of the compatibility and connectivity of the two neo-Weberian theories is due to the crucial importance the theory of social power plays in distinguishing between symbolic and structural orders of the Greek crisis, as well as between cultural and structural changes which are vital to bringing Greece out of its multifaceted crisis. This effort could be successful only by distinguishing between social networks’ processes and structural constraints on the one hand, and cultural processes and symbolic orders on the other; only then we could tackle effectively the respective pathologies accordingly. Since pure culture does not exist in the actual world, this endeavor entails the identification of the symbolic domain (i.e., cosmological and ontological principles, moral constitutive goods, rituals and ceremonies, and symbolic orders) in the political, economic, ideological, and military/diplomatic power networks in the form of discourses,

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code orientations, and ground rules and extract them to analyze them as binary oppositions and symbolic visions of democratic orders. In this framework, we examine the types of Weberian rationality and of Weberian social action that these discourses, code orientations, and ground rules entail, with particular attention being paid in the relationship between theoretical/ideological and substantive/moral ‘rationality’ (in quotation marks since the moral component might not be rational at all). The reason for this juxtaposition is that in a secular environment, constitutive goods might be moral (religious or humanistic), but they might as well be secular ideologies (liberalism, socialism, fascism, etc.). Or they may, indeed, coexist and be interweaved in the same discursive maze. This is particularly important since it allows us to understand how ideology is perceived and employed by the social actors. It is important since, according to Weber, theoretical rationality is related to social action only indirectly. Only substantive (values), practical (interests, marginal utility), and formal (rules and regulations) rationality are directly linked to social action. This implies that sensu stricto ideology cannot provide guidance for social action without the aid of the other types of rationality. This issue is fully addressed in the empirical part of the study. In all we are concerned not with the inner logic of the four types of social networks in Greece, but with the meaning social actors infuse with the Greek social networks of power, and thus with the moralization of their action. This is the subject-matter of this study.

1.7   Conclusions and Concomitant Suppositions For our inquiry, we have limited the definition of culture to mean moral imperatives and symbolic structures of the good, the beautiful, and the true, and their opposite—instead of adopting a more generic definition of it as ‘a structure composed of symbolic sets’ (Alexander and Smith 1993, 156). Keeping this in mind, we summarize the basic theoretical suppositions, and the specific ways we intend to use key concepts in this study, as follows: 1. Culture is the domain of deep, constitutive, moral convictions, and thereof moral evaluations of the self structured around binary oppositions and codified in symbolic patterns. 2. Culture is a distinct and essential component of a social system since in the form of symbolic structures, it renders social organization meaningful, thus moralizing the social division of labor—not harmonizing it.

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3. Culture is passive in that it constitutes the ‘unmovable mover’ part of the self. It reflects upon, judges, animates, evaluates, justifies, and rationalizes social action. It encourages or discourages action, but itself is not action, since social action is identical with the pursuit of goals and thus with partaking in instrumental, calculative, and social interaction. 4. Political culture is the symbolic delineation of the self as citizen; the moral qualities the self considers to be his/her yardstick to define political obligations and rights, and to distinguish friend from foe, and the insider from the outsider. 5. The formation of the self constitutes a ceaseless, interactive, somatic, and cognitive process. It may well be multifaceted, combinatory, even fragmented, but not self-contradictory. 6. Civil religion is the institution by which the hegemonic political constitutive good appears in its most visible form in the public sphere, and the reference point of a symbolic analysis of the cultural landscape of a country. Alternative constitutive goods are to be found in less visible social settings, embedded in ideologically and culturally marginal and outflanked social networks of power. 7. Culture manifests itself in the social networks of power. 8. Ideology, as one of the four sources of social power, is not culture. Rather, culture is an internalized ideology that became a self-­ referential set of moral propensities and ethical principles. 9. Culture transforms social networks’ antagonisms for privileged access to resources to symbolic-organizational antagonisms. Symbolic antagonism is not an epiphenomenon but a formative component of antagonistic social relations and of social arenas. 10. Symbolic antagonisms vary according to the magnitude of social network antagonisms and vice versa. The more intense social network antagonisms are, and the more polarized, the deeper symbolic antagonisms intensify and question the heart of the symbolic system itself, and thus of the hegemonic constitutive goods. 11. Rituals, symbols, and symbolic classifications are both ends in themselves and means to achieving specific goals. In their prior dimension, they are meaningful and morally informative to the actor. In their latter dimension, they communicate meaningful and morally informative messages to the public audience. Both are accessible and open to empirical investigation: the former by asking the participants to describe the event as a personal experience; the latter by Geertzian ‘thick description’ of the event.

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12. Culture does not change over time. It is habits and customs that change over time, or swiftly when we switch to another culture, let us say another country. But habits and customs are not culture; they are mimetic and not self-reflective. They are routine social behavior in regular social networks of power. 13. Deep cultural changes could occur only at the level of constitutive goods: when one set of distinct, concrete, sets of socially informed moral imperatives are replaced by another set which, though equally emanating from the same cosmological and ontological principles, reorients social action in radically new ways via charismatic social action (see Fig. 1.1 below).

Ontological and cosmological principles

Constitutive goods

Charisma

Discursive manifestations of culture: Narratives/Rituals/Performances/social dramas Institutional ground rules Ethical orders

Actual networks of social power Ideological networks of power: Theoretical rationality

The operational requirements of social organization

Fig. 1.1  The analytical structure of the model

Internalized code orientations Various Rationalizations

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Bibliography Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1988. Durkheimian Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006. From the Depths of Despair: Performance, Counterperformance, and ‘September 11’. In Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason L. Mast, 91–114. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Paul Colomy. 1985. Toward Neo-Functionalism. Sociological Theory 3 (2): 11–23. Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Jasson L. Mast. 2006. Introduction: Symbolic Action in Theory and Practice: The Cultural Pragmatics of SYMBOLIC action. In Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed. Jeffrey C.  Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason L.  Mast, 1–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Phillip Smith. 1993. The Discourse of American Civil Society: A New Proposal for Cultural Studies. Theory and Society 22: 151–207. Alexander, Jeffrey C., Bernard Giesen, and Jason L.  Mast, eds. 2006. Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bellah, Robert. 1967. Civil Religion in America. Daedalus 96: 1–21. ———. 2011. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Calhoun, Craig. 1991. Morality, Identity, and Historical Explanation: Charles Taylor on the Sources of the Self. Sociological Theory 9 (2): 232–263. Durkheim, Emile. 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: The Free Press. Durkheim, Emile, and Marcel Mauss. 1963. Primitive Classification. Translated and edited by Robert Needham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 1963. The Political System of Empires. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. ———. 1995. Power, Trust, and Meaning: Essays in Sociological Theory and Analysis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 2001. The Civilizational Dimension of Modernity. International Sociology 16 (3): 320–340. Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. New York: Longman Publishing. Goffman, Ervin. 1959. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. New  York: Anchor Books. ———. 1967. Interaction Ritual. New York: Pantheon Books. Harrison, Lawrence, and Samuel Huntington, eds. 2001. Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress. London: Basic Books.

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Howe, Samuel G. 1828. An Historical Sketch of the Greek Revolution. New York: Gallaher and White. Kalberg, Stephen. 1980. Max Weber’s Types of Rationality: Cornerstones for the Analysis of Rationalization Processes in History. The American Journal of Sociology 85 (5): 1145–1179. Mann, Michael. 1986. Sources of Social Power. Vol. I.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006. The Sources of Social Power Revisited. In An Anatomy of Power: The Social Theory of Michael Mann, ed. John A.  Hall and Ralph Schroeder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marangudakis, Manussos. 2015. Multiple Modernities and the Theory of Indeterminacy. In Varieties of Multiple Modernities – New Research Design, ed. Gerhard Preyer and Michael Sussmann, 48–64. Leiden: Brill. Popper, Carl. 1978. The Three Worlds. The Tanner Lecture on Human Values, Delivered at the University of Michigan. http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_ documents/a-to-z/p/popper80.pdf. Swidler, Ann. 1986. Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies. American Sociological Review 51 (2): 273–286. Szakolczai, Arpad. 2009. Liminality and Experience: Structuring Transitory Situations and Transformative Events. International Political Anthropology 2 (1): 141–172. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society. 2 vols. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkley: University of California Press. Whitehouse, H. 2004. Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. London: Altamira Press. Windelband, Wilhelm. 2018. Praludiean. Vol. 2. London: Forgotten Books.

CHAPTER 2

The Greek Self in Social Analysis

Contents

2.1  The Anarchic Individualism of the Greek Self 2.2  Amoral Familism and the Moral Content of Collectivism 2.3  Mythical Collectivism: The Modernization of Collectivism 2.4  From Amoral Familism to Anarchic Individualism 2.5  Conclusions Bibliography

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Studies conducted on a ‘national self’ run against the basic suppositions of this study. Yet, studies that do make such a claim have the virtue of offering us a place to begin—a point of reference to our own analysis. Indeed, the fact that all relevant studies tend to agree that certain and definite features of the Greek self do exist obliges us to take them into account since they provide us with a valuable hindsight concerning the orientation of the Greek self’s ontological and cosmological principles as well as of the constitutive moral goods that this self leans toward. Yet the level of these analyses, and the self that emerges out of these studies, is so categorical and unqualified that it could not be used in earnest to understand either the impact culture has had on the current crisis or the influence culture exerted on the events that led to it, nor how to exit this dreadful predicament. But the fact that these researchers tend to agree, in spite of secondary qualifications, that there is indeed a certain moral orientation to the

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Greek self, allows us to employ their arguments to build an ideal-typical construction of the Greek self to be used as reference point to our own cultural-­sociological examination. To begin with, all of these studies—anthropological, ethnographic, social psychological and sociological—suggest that the Greek culture until recently was overwhelmingly collectivist, relying upon and fostering familial intimacy and solidarity rather than individuality, and that collectivism was both a matter of everyday social affairs and a matter of authoritative ideologies and aesthetics that constructed collectivist constitutive goods, and they all tend to agree that the Greek self is in the process of evolving from strictly collectivist (i.e., a strong sense of place, proximity, traditional moral order, and solidarity), toward more individualist forms of living. Evidence of the shift from collectivist to individualistic types of social behavior is most clearly shown in a series of social psychological studies by Triandis who identifies the rise of idiocentric values at the expense of allocentric ones (Triandis et  al. 1985). Allocentric (other-centered) values characterize traditional and collectivist cultures which privilege mechanic solidarity, normative tightness, and a self embedded in group membership, while idiocentric (self-centered) values characterize modern cultures, which acknowledge the priority of the individual over the group as well as societal normative looseness. According to the argument, Greece, until recently, was an overwhelmingly allocentric culture in which the values of the collectivity, that is, the extended family and the close friends that surround it were dominant, the success of the in-group has had priority over the success of the individual, and hierarchical authority inside the group was accepted and followed (Friedl 1962; Campbell 1964; Peristiany 1965; Triandis and Vasiliou 1972; Vassiliou and Vassiliou 1973). Nevertheless, as the studies suggest, since the 1970s, allocentric dominance has been challenged by urbanization, nuclear family structures, the spread of education, and closer links with the West, resulting in the rise of idiocentric values and of individuality (Polemi-Todoulou 1981; Dragonas 1983; Doumanis 1983; Triandis 1985). The shift from allocentric to idiocentric values in Greece has been described as a ‘collectivist culture in transition’. ‘In transition’ means that idiocentric values have not yet replaced allocentric ones, but rather that Greece lay between and betwixt these two poles. Thus, a series of social psychological studies by Hofstede (1980), Triandis (1985), Georgas (1989), and Green et al. (2005) place Greece in a middle position in the ranking of various western and non-western values such as collectivism

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versus individualism and self-reliance versus group integrity, and confirm the tendency of individuality to replace in-group and collective values in Greece. Other studies suggest that while personal collectivist values today are indeed in retreat, paradoxically, collectivism in social structures continues to predominate over individualism. The collectivist orientation of Greek social structures is exemplified by the still important role of kinship in structuring social networks; by the role of the paternalistic state as the main organizer of social life; by the role of the family in providing collective services such as welfare provision to its members; and by the economic domination of family-owned small enterprises (Chapman and Antoniou 1988). Furthermore, hegemonic political ideologies are also collectivist: The political Right stresses the heroic qualities and virtues of the undifferentiated Nation, while the political Left idealizes the similarly undifferentiated People as an authentic community and ultimate authority, and by promoting a sense of duty toward it as the ultimate moral principle for ensuring social solidarity and ideological conformity. Liberal ideologies which stress differentiated citizens and individual freedoms are not popular and constitute the underdogs of institutional arenas and political discourses. This perplexing state of the cultural and the organizational aspects of the Greek social system become even more perplexing and intriguing when we come to matters of social behavior. Here, as the relevant studies reveal, Greeks become less collectivist, less dependent on prescriptive, traditional, social roles, but not more civil, disciplined, and orderly. Instead, the emerging behavior is described as ‘anarchic individualism’, meaning a complete disregard for rules, procedures, and the law perceived as hindrances to personal freedom and expression. Thus, the emerging Greek individualist self is explained to be a peculiar mixture of modern and traditional, western and oriental, individualist and collectivist components that defy a clear categorization. Altogether, this is a highly idiosyncratic situation that does not comply with evolutionary models of modernity (Rostow 1960), yet is highly informative of the way a cultural system evolves under the pressure of modernity and of the modern social division of labor. In the following sections, we delineate the basic, ideal-type, components of the modern Greek self by (a) examining the key ethnographic, anthropological, and literature studies on the subject; (b) tracing these basic characteristics back in pre-modern rural Greece; and (c) re-­examining

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these basic characteristics in modern settings. This process of assembling, deconstructing, and reconstructing the findings allows us to align the latter with the Analytic Model and reconsider some established truths on the issue.

2.1   The Anarchic Individualism of the Greek Self Adamantia Pollis (1965), in a seminal article back in the 1960s, reflecting on the Greek self, argues that collectivism in Greece derives from two sources: a bottom-up cultural process of individual perception of society and a top-to-bottom political process of the State and the Church imposing an organic ideology of the state and society on the individual. In this framework, Greeks define themselves in group-related terms since individual existence detached from a group is inconceivable. In other words, whereas in the West the self is conceived intra-individually, as a reflecting interaction of the inner self with the social environment, in Greece it can only be understood inter-individually, as an interaction of the self with kin and kith which confirms prescriptive traditional roles and expectations. Later on, Pollis (1992) revisited individualism to argue that ‘historically, the dominant ideology in Greece considered the basic social unit to be the extended family, not the autonomous individual’. The notion of the individual self was not developed and, as a result, ‘continued to be understood in terms of “family”, to which was added another layer: that of the organic modern state’. This, Pollis argues, is a legacy of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires that isolated the Greeks from western rationalism and reinforced eastern emotive spiritualism, a fact that left its legacy in a tension and a contradiction between a western-like, individualistic, institutional framework, and the traditional frame of mind that prioritized the group (family, locality, nation) over the individual: to be free means to be free to belong to the nation and the people. Accordingly, such an ‘organic’ conception of society and the transposition of traditional collectivism to the nation-state made individual autonomy irrelevant with major consequences for individual rights and freedoms. Legal positivism, imported from Germany, further strengthened the ideological denial of individual freedoms and the legal subordination of the individual to the state, since it perceived the state to be the source of morality and of rights rather than the individual and civil society, as the liberal Anglo-Saxon tradition dictated. The persistence of an organic conception of society reveals a serious deficit of pluralism and diversity.

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However, she suggests that in recent years there have been signs that the Greek traditional worldview of society as an organic entity is breaking down in the domains of culture, social structures, and legislation, as Greece becomes a more integrated part of the European Union. This explains why Greeks often identify individual freedom with national sovereignty; as a consequence, ‘freedom as a personal attribute of man stemming from a view of the self was lost in the fight for independence and national sovereignty’ (Pollis 1992). In the West, self-fulfillment is attained through personally defined goals, whereas in Greece it comes through one’s role within a greater whole. This explains why in the West one experiences ‘guilt’, while in Greece someone experiences ‘shame’: In the West, an individual is his own critic, judge and at times executioner. Guilt is the punishment meted out for the transgression of internalized values. Since one is responsible to oneself, guilt operates psychologically whether or not the undesirable behavior is known to or affects others. In Greek culture, shame is the psychological device employed to ensure conformity, and shame is the emotion a person’s transgressions engender in him. (Pollis 1992, 173)

More recently, Roy Panagiotopoulou (1997), following Pollis’ reasoning, but concentrating more on the behavioral aspects of the Greek self rather than on its sources, wrote: Greek society is dominated by the stereotypes of an ‘anarchic individualism’ in which freedom is seen as synonymous to complete irresponsibility toward the law and toward others that is, toward ‘outsiders’. (Panagiotopoulou 1997, 354)

Panagiotopoulou suggests that Western individualism and its moral code have not succeeded in penetrating Greek social relations and, therefore, the concept of the self in the form of a civil individual is not accepted or acknowledged: Greeks have obstinately refused to accept the rules that govern liberal political systems. Western individualism, expressed as the institutionalized impersonal and collective organization of society, has been interpreted in Greece as individual action obedient to, and identified with, rules formulated through family relationships and governed primarily by personal commitments. (Panagiotopoulou 1997, 354)

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Hence, the individual is defined neither as possessing specific rights and responsibilities nor as a subject determined by his own will and accountability. The Greek notion of self is still conceived as an organic part of the nuclear family and their kindred: Outside the family, individuals construct their identities through relations with the (local) community and the nation. Consequently, the boundaries of identity are marked by the distinction between ‘kith and kin’ (i.e., nuclear family, kindred, people of shared geographical origin, other Greeks) and ‘outsiders’ (all those outside the above categories). This creates powerful dichotomies of inclusion and exclusion that have had a decisive effect on the social integration of those who migrated to the urban centers or abroad, often making it easier for them to integrate smoothly into the new social environment. This traditional concept of the mutual responsibilities of the individual and society cuts across social classes and permeates every sphere of social and political activity. (Panagiotopoulou 1997, 354)

Panagiotopoulou maintains that urbanization reproduced the social structures of the village instead of incorporating the individual in horizontal, civil, relationships. Thus, Greek villagers migrating to large cities are often directed to urban neighborhoods where relatives or fellow villagers already live, while in Athens the phenomenon of local associations is truly striking and of paramount importance as a primary web of urban social life. However, these practices of maintaining social cohesion, traditional values, and the sense of a community are gradually receding, pointing to wider changes in Greek society and mentality. In a second article, the process Panagiotopoulou (1996) identifies is that of ‘rational practices’ in the framework of an ‘irrational system’. This irrational system consists of institutional regulations and laws that pay lip service to liberalism, while regularly promote selective interests of collectivities such as syndicates, professional associations, and so on, allowing the individual to construct her own strategy for manipulating and exploiting the system: Since the foundation of the Greek state, institutional reforms imposed formally liberal social structures which, nevertheless, did not impose analogous moral, social, and political commitments as in the West. The Greek state was never completely detached from society, political parties and the government, and the private sphere [was never detached] from the public one.

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The Greeks resisted stubbornly and they did not accept the rules that characterize the liberal political systems and constitute the obvious precondition for their function. Western individualism which is expressed in the institutionalized, impersonal, collective social organization, was understood in Greece as individualist action, which obeys to, and matches rules that are formed through family and kin relationships, and are governed by personal commitment. The distribution of responsibilities and the constitution of values do not concern the individual, but the various forms of family and kin solidarity. (Panagiotopoulou 1996, 152–153)

Panagiotopoulou’s argument suggests that Greek individualism does not stand for ‘individualism’ as it is theoretically conceptualized to denote the self-disciplined, self-aware, and self-reliant person, but for ‘atomism’, denoting a selfish person who is at odds with civil society and civil institutions. It is not surprising then that reflecting on the basic mode of Greek civil society, and the way social structures are culturally shaped, Tsoukalas (1993a) argues: Distrustful of all institutional provisions, Greeks seem at least unwilling to see the eventual individual socioeconomic benefits they could have reaped from their personal commitment to collective rationalization. If anything, Greek rational individualism is a conscious free-rider individualism. (1993a, 76–77)

The free-rider mentality found in Greece (Tsoukalas 1993a, b) is hostile to social trust and thus to long-term civil engagement, compliance with normative standards, and dedication to the notion of citizenship as a constitutive good. The public domain is seen as a resource available for any individual or group without any moral hesitation. Such a behavior is not seen as something amoral, since collective identity is non-existent. In such cultural-moral environment, Greece’s modernization is the sum of individual successes—an aggregate of individual paths to growth. We could argue that instead of individualism, the sense of the self that derives out of this peculiar in-between condition is an individualized notion of collectiveness which requires neither idiocentrism nor a civic ethos to exist. It is felt as inner strength, as what Tsoukalas calls ‘authenticity’ (Tsoukalas 1993a). In a sense, authenticity in its various ideological and reflective, explanatory and motivating aspects captures the Greek perception of the self, of the community, and of the nation. To be authentic

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is a principle as much as a constitutive good, a rule to measure political programs as much as individual behavior: ‘I did it … because I am authentic’ is used invariably to justify any kind of social behavior that otherwise would be considered immoral, self-serving, selfish, and so on. There is then a general agreement that in spite of the (incomplete) transition from the so called allocentric to idiocentric values, there is no development of civil awareness. In other words, the aforementioned studies suggest that while there is a shift of priorities, and the individuation of collective values and sources of morality, the Greek self remains non-civil. This is both a matter of political concern and a theoretical aporia. Leaving the former alone for the while, let us focus for the moment on the latter, since a cultural analysis of this atomism can shed light on the construction, and the internal tensions of the Greek self today.

2.2   Amoral Familism and the Moral Content of Collectivism Pollis’ ‘collectivist self’, Panagiotopoulou’s ‘anarchic individualism’, and Tsoukalas’ ‘free-rider individualism’, analytically and historically, echo amoral familism, a concept developed by Edward Banfield (1958) to describe the social structures of backwardness he encountered when visiting the poor Italian village of Montegrano back in 1955. There, he observed a self-interested, family-centered society which sacrificed the public good for the sake of nepotism and the interests of the immediate family. Banfield postulates that its backwardness could be explained ‘largely but not entirely’ by ‘the inability of the villagers to act together for their common good or, indeed, for any end transcending the immediate, material interest of the nuclear family’ (1958, 10). The predicament of the village was rooted in the distrust, envy, and suspicion displayed by its inhabitants’ relations with each other. Fellow citizens would refuse to help one another, except when one’s own personal immediate and material gain was at stake. Montegrano’s citizens viewed their village life as a perpetual battleground. Consequently, inability to work together to solve common social problems, or even to pool common resources and talents to build infrastructure or common economic concerns, led to long-term social isolation and poverty. Banfield’s study of amoral familism is related to our study in two ways: First, it is a cross-national pattern of, mainly, Mediterranean agrarian life,

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and as such, it explains the width and the scope of amoral familism in the Greek public sphere since urban Greeks are by and large the recent descendants of peasants that moved to urban centers two or three generations ago and are still attached to rural culture (Mouzelis 1978; Herzfeld 2005). Second, amoral familism is directly linked to the concept of ‘limited good’, a cognitive pattern according to which social life is seen as being a series of zero-sum transactions and gains, and, as self-fulfilling prophecy, channels action to aggressive, selfish, and socially detrimental economic, political, and social attitudes (Foster 1965). The adaptive evolution of rural familism to urban anarchic individuality is described by McNall, who in his study of the behavior of the Greek peasant as he migrates to Athens during the third quarter of the twentieth century writes: …during early socialization, the young male comes to believe not only that he is destined for great things, but that he advances at the expense of others through luck, cunning, and sometimes deceit. He learns to support the in-­group at the expense of the out-group. He does not enter into cooperative endeavors; he almost automatically questions the motives of those who suggest cooperation. It follows that participation in politics, particularly participatory democracy, is shunned, because political officials are suspected of acting not for the public good, but for their own. (And, indeed, the past history of patronage in politics would support this belief.) In brief, child-­rearing patterns prevent the male child from adopting the behavior patterns necessary for successful participation in industrial bureaucracies. (McNall 1974, 106)

To understand the morality of the limited good means to understand the code orientation of strife and discord that tears apart Greece today. Yet, as soon as familial amoralism enters our analysis, it immediately turns Greek anarchic individualism into a paradox: why should agrarian familial amoralism remain a functional social pattern in an urban environment and in the framework of a western-liberal political and economic environment? If a symbolic pattern, such as familial amoralism, thrives in a certain organizational environment, such as subsistence rural economy, why should it not disappear the instance the organizational environment changes and becomes industrialized or urbanized? Or, we may ask, why is not every culture still characterized by amoral familism since in the past every person on the planet lived in rural communities? In other words, what does make some cultures adopt civil-liberal profiles, while others remain attached to the vicious circle of amoral familism? The answer, we argue, is to be found

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in the relationship between the two domains: the symbolic and the organizational. We can start probing into the matter by examining the way the pursuit of power and culture are interwoven in village society. Foster (1965) placed this provincial behavior into a wider modernization framework and suggested that peasants who live in subsistence communities around the Mediterranean nurtured an image of, in Foster’s terms, ‘limited good’ which is not moral-symbolic but economic-symbolic (Foster 1965, 305). Accordingly, Foster’s reasoning argues that in rituals, people trade wealth imbalances for the acquisition of prestige and that rural collectivism, in Montegrano-like social configurations, is not genuine: it is a ritualistic disguise of negative reciprocity and egoistic behavior for the long-term benefit of the family at the expense of the ‘community’ (Foster 1965, 310). Yet, perpetuation of ‘amoral familism’ even under capitalism suggests that the latter does not erase the familial moral ordering of the world. Amoral familism is retained but is expressed differently. The fact that familism is still present in Greece in the form of anarchic individualism is evidence of it. As thorough ethnographic research has shown, the culture of amoral familism, in the form of social and religious rituals, of moral imperatives and collective representations, as well as in the deference and demeanor rituals of everyday life, suggests that it continuous to shape the self, it imposes psychological premiums on atomistic social action, and restrains social change. Furthermore, ethnographic studies in rural Greece suggest that while Banfield-like social relations appear to be amoral, that is, practical-­rational, in fact, they are conditioned by deep moral convictions. While social relations are ruthlessly (though covertly) competitive aiming at the short-term gains of one’s own family at the expense of strangers, of the wider community, the self who partakes in this amoral competition is formed around deep religious notions of the sacred and the profane projected into social life. It penetrates all aspects of social life, making the economic, and political, and the social activities meaningful without becoming overtly visible: …it is only by a considerable and to some extent forced, effort of analysis that in a traditional subsistence village we are able to separate economic, kinship, political, and religious institutions. In sowing a field, celebrating a marriage, or baptizing a child, reason, emotion, and ritual were inextricably joined. A peasant sowed his field by unquestioned methods and customary

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rituals, a unified sequence of pragmatic and symbolic actions in a relation between human and cosmic forces involving a man, his family, the fertility of the earth, and the beneficence of God. (Campbell and Sherrard 1968, 361)

While a variety of ethnographic studies of rural Greece concur that culture is interwoven in the fabric of the social division of labor, one study stands out as it directly tests Foster’s idea of the ‘limited good’ and its effects on social action. In this ethnographic study, first conducted in the late 1960s (du Boulay 1974) at the mountainous village of Ambeli, du Boulay and Williams (1987) examine, first, how moral was ‘amoral familism’ and, second, whether culture merely reflects the actual economic conditions of the village or it actively arranges economic activities as such. Concerning the first issue, the researchers concluded that the worldview of the peasantry was deeply meaningful and moral, though not in terms of modern universalistic values, but in terms of premodern particularistic values. In this moral universe, the self becomes meaningful by becoming part of the religious cosmological and the ontological principles, a process which moralizes mundane activities. Land, labor, and family life become meaningful by being directly linked to Christian symbolism: the hardship of agricultural life is related to the fall of Man from Paradise, the abundance of food to the Garden of Eden, family life to the creation of cosmos from chaos, hospitality to a stranger to hospitality to Christ, and so on. In this scheme of constitutive goods and of ground rules, economic action and cultural symbolism are interwoven. For example, inheritance of family land and immortality are interwoven through the tradition of passing the land to members of the family that hold the same Christian name and are responsible for initiating memorial services held for the ancestors from whom the inheritance was derived: The perpetual life of the land gives the family not only vital material resources which are themselves perpetual, but gives also to each individual member a history, a place in the cosmos. (du Boulay and Williams 1987, 17)

Concerning the second issue, of culture affecting economic activities, the researchers focused on two related issues. First, the liturgical year: throughout the year, there are periods of feast and periods of fast which link the sacred drama with the agricultural life of the village. While being partly harmonious with the ecological sequence, the liturgical year is also partly independent of it: feasts are required to be held not only in periods

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of abundance (such as in summer) but also in periods of austerity (such as in winter): Whatever the material cost, the ritual obligation to feast must be allowed to predominate. In such an understanding, the very existence within nature of periods of abstinence and periods of abundance is seen as part of the divine ordering of redemption, and this ordering was succinctly expressed in the comment of one villager about the annual cycle: ‘The Year runs in accordance with the Faith’. (du Boulay and Williams 1987, 18)

But the full impact of culture on economic activity became vividly clear on two occasions when the peasants came face-to-face with the prospect of entrepreneurial innovation and growth of income. Here, de Boulay and Williams make a crucial observation: when the economic opportunity arrived for peasants to increase their income by using fertilizers for their production, they did take the opportunity, and they did increase their income. But when, a few years later, the state gave them the opportunity to further increase their income by abandoning subsistence agricultural production to become resin harvesters, they declined. After eliminating all alternative rational-choice explanations, the authors concluded: It seems, therefore, that a strong element in the villagers’ attitude to the resin subsidy, so markedly casual compared with their attitude to the introduction of fertilizer, lay not so much in their skepticism about economic growth, but in the absolute value attributed to work in the fields and to the bread of the family table which was its product; and this attitude is in fact readily comprehensible in the light of the sanctity of the house and the symbolic connections—already discussed—with its own land. Such links between the family and the land have also been noted elsewhere as being symbolized in the family’s bread … and the symbolism was succinctly expressed in Ambeli by an old woman who, discussing on one particular occasion the merits of buying bread for the liturgy from bakeries, rather than baking it at home-said, “I don’t know. I’m just a stupid toothless old woman, but I say that the farmer himself should produce the corn from his own land to make the liturgical bread. That is what is good’. (du Boulay and Williams 1987, 22)

The refusal to abandon production of their own bread is a rather clear example of the psychological premiums that constitutive goods impose on the social actor, since it is symbolic classifications and connotations

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(­land-­ wheat-­ bread-body of Christ-sacrifice vs. money-market place-­ commercial bread-consumption) that do not allow the actor to move to a new type of economic action altogether. This is not to say that the need to produce liturgical bread will keep the villagers away from economic modernization in perpetuity, nor will that family bonds remain strong and authoritative due to the sacredness of the Holy Family. Rather, we argue, first, that traditional symbolic classifications and patterns are not amoral; they are non-civil. They are deeply soaked into Christian symbolization and cosmological and ontological principles of good and evil, of pure and polluted, adjusted to the social division of rural life. This symbolization is not superficial. Instead, it is able to impose psychological premiums on social action and to prohibit the rational pursuit of wealth as is the case of refusing to abandon wheat cultivation for the sake of increased income. Their symbolic classification identifies family—not the village—with the pure, the good, and the just, while anything outside this fragile Garden of Eden is a representation of the fallen world: it constitutes the domain of danger and menace and needs to be kept at bay. Yet, the two domains are not sharply divided to form two separate worlds. Instead, they are bridged by Eve herself, sinful and sacred at the same time. Herzfeld (1987) reasons: Popular Greek cosmology has it that, without the sin of Eve, there would be no human community… And indeed woman, in the androcentric ideology reported in varying degrees by all ethnographers of rural Greece, reproduces the sinful condition of Eve as though it were a blessing—a segmentary reproduction, as the Pefkiot distich expresses it: I wish that you might branch forth as the mint bush does as Eve branched forth so that the world was filled. Carnal knowledge creates the entire world, the only justification for its presence on earth as well as the source of all discord and difference. The sin of Eve is not only the source of sexual experience. It is also, and concomitantly, the source of the “differences’ that the fact of procreation inevitably creates in a segmentarily conceived social universe… (Herzfeld 1987, 170–171, emphasis in the original)

Segmentary society is a consequence of the original sin, loss of innocence, and the fall from grace. It is a general cosmological and ontological condition for which the believer is not responsible personally. The belief that the world ‘out there’ is a dangerous place inhabited by egoists who

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want to take advantage of you, and thus you are forced to be an egoist to protect yourself, is based on this cosmological and ontological principle. John Campbell (1964), in Honor, Family and Patronage finds this symbolic pattern animating the whole social setting he investigated. In this study, he examined the ways Orthodox religion is intertwined with the social division of labor of the Sarakatsans, a shepherd community made of collectivist but fiercely competitive clans. He found that the symbolic universe of this mountainous community was structured around the myth of the Fall and the sin of Adam. While they consider themselves deep down to be gentle and kind, they cannot escape the fact that they live in a fallen and sinful world, and thus it is impossible to avoid sin yourself. The only way someone can survive, and prosper, is to use cunning, deceit, and lies; actually, they are obliged to do so to avoid being called a coward. But deceit, lies, and cunning estrange man from God. They are aware of this, and call themselves sinful, but they do not consider themselves responsible for being so. Rather, they hold Adam responsible for the sins they are obliged to commit to survive the dangers of the fallen world. Thus, their life is a series of immoral practices (only the nuclear family is sacred, symbolizing Eden, as in the village of Ambeli) interrupted by religious rituals (above all receiving the holy communion), which ‘lifts a burden from their shoulders’, allowing them to take a deep breath before resuming their sinful daily affairs. While all of the above provide us with a rather clear depiction of ordinary rural, pre-modern, life, they tell us little about rural social action, that is, non-routine action which does not depend so much on a constant, regular, flow of social interaction, but rather on voluntaristic decisions to act in extra-ordinary ways. What kind of internalized code orientations reveal themselves to us when the self is not situated in the context of ordinary institutional ground rules? The answer to this question is provided by Karapostolis’ Division and Atonement: Concerning the Political Morality of the Greeks (2010). In this ‘psychology of ethics’, Karapostolis examines the motives behind Greek political behavior and particularly so the psychological tensions in between these motives, as well as the counterbalancing psychological mechanism activated to heal the individual psyche of its misdeeds and offers atonement. He traces his problematique back to the nineteenth century and examines two very particular but crucial anthropological types which exemplify the antinomian aspects of the Greek self: the guerilla fighter and the magnate-donor. A famous saying by an archetypical Greek fighter of

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the War of Independence (1821–1830), General Karaiskakis, serves as the key to decipher their conduct. Not having performed well in his duties, he was called by the political authorities to explain himself. There, during the hearing he stated: ‘If I wish, I become an angel, and if I wish otherwise, a devil’—meaning that it is up to him to decide to become a protector of the community or a force to destroy it—and with it, to destroy his own self. The rationale behind it, as Karapostolis’ analysis suggests, is that under different circumstances, both protecting and destroying the community prove that the actor is a master of himself. This ‘anarchic defiance’, as we could call it, indeed, the extreme swing of mood of internalized code orientation which, as Karapostolis claims, runs through the great clashes and divisions of the Greek body politic through its history, is explained as follows: It is not the traditions, or the psychological predispositions, or the religious feeling in Greece such as to allow the notion of duty to become a stable value and life-shaping experience. Someone who serves his country does so because the country moves him in this particular instance in a particular way. But this ‘moving’ is not an erratic caprice of the moment to be classified as affectual social action. Instead, it is only the most visible part of a deeper ‘attitude’ that indeed forms a sturdy, albeit non-methodical, ‘way of life’ which shapes his life and becomes the response to a perennial, existential, question. Karapostolis reasons: This uplifting and dismissal of the self allows us to see the whole of the drama of the Greek self. The first act of the play involves the agonizing effort to discover freedom; in the second act freedom is taken for abuse. He who boasts that he can move from the one end of good to the other end of evil with only guidance his will, and without any particular reason for doing so, cannot escape from a fear deep inside him: that if he falls under a moral principle, under a moral imperative, hitherto he will act as an executive instrument; it doesn’t matter if it is the Good that gives the orders; the ‘you ought to do good’ in itself sounds very binding to someone who is not certain if he is indeed master of his actions. (Karapostolis 2010, 43, translation by the author, emphasis added)

The magnate-donors, Karapostolis’ second social group under consideration, provide the counterbalancing cultural force to this self-destructive tendency of the defiant self. The benefactors, great donors of the Greek state, were not of a different anthropological type. Karapostolis’ research

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reveals persons who were anything but altruists, but who, due to the wealth and fame they amassed, felt obliged toward the fatherland (πατρίς) and its struggle to remain alive in the face of adversary circumstances, but not toward the Greek society which they distasted, nor the Greek state which they scorned. Based on their personal correspondence, diaries, memoires, and Wills, the author reasons that the motives behind this ‘faceless-patriotism’, as we could call it, are not a way to prove their superior morality, but instead they constitute an ‘atonement libation’, an effort to cleanse themselves of the egoistic trespasses they had committed in the past, and to experience a superior sense of living as close as possible to blissful eternity. Donation was a way to tell themselves that they have reached the highest levels of Greekness—of being worthy not of their compatriots but of their ancestors. The benefactors Karapostolis examines had not escaped the routine worries their life involved; rather, they struggled as much as anyone else to survive ruthless competition, to find new markets, to sign new contracts, to take advantage of favorite circumstances using cheating and deceit, and so on. But they also wished to prove to themselves that they are free, that they command their life, and that they can scorn the domain of necessity and rise above it in defiance to it. The way to do so was to donate large sums of money to a fatherland under duress: What was missing from the world of toil, that is, contact with something immovable and permanent, appears now as a promise emerging out of a condition of danger. If you fight to defend this immortal entity called fatherland, you will also be immortal. Your essence is to deny your ego which kills you daily. But to make your refutation come true, your ego needs to will it. Thus, we return again to the same spot. To a selfishness which is elevated, refined, and sometimes returns to its starting point. (Karapostolis 2010, 285, translated by the author)

In other words, guerrilla fighters and benefactors share the same cultural orientations which, when placed in different contexts, lead to quite different outcome and consequences: that there is a certain flow of events, strange and incomprehensive, that the individual cannot control or rule. The only thing he can do is either to succumb to its ordeals or to defy it proclaiming his autonomy as against it.

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From Karaiskakis to Zappas and Kaplanis, and from those to Melas, Venizelos, Dragoumis and Velouhiotis, in spite the significant differences of their political orientations, common remains the basic meaning of their gesture, which is the meaning of a drastic intervention, a charge of the will to a reality which is ready to be shaped in the absence of the will and against it; the ego is offended as it is pushed aside by historical events, and counter-­ attacks in an effort to create a history with his own stamp. (Karapostolis 2010, 287, translated by the author)

Hence the picture of the not exactly traditional worldview of the Greek is completed, and its basic contours in full view. It reads as follows: The flow of events unfolds in the domain of the fallen world, and thus it can only mean depravity, suffering, and ordeal. The individual cannot really influence this flow decisively; he cannot control it to bring ‘Heaven on Earth’. He can either withdraw to his own entrenched Eden dealing with the world at large as a predator or to rush into the world armed with the feeling of compassion toward those who suffer with guilt feelings for his own self who beforehand remained idle. Thus, the individual becomes a hero, defying the cosmos and its rules; this is how he confirms his existence, and this is why he is allowed to switch from one internalized code orientation to another without suffering any psychological premiums. Luther’s ‘here I stand; I can do no other’ is repeated, but in the Greek case is mystical and egocentric—not methodical and disciplinarian. The advent of modernity and with it of reflexive and multifaceted individuality did not erase such a worldview; in a sense, it modernized it (see Part II, Sect. 10.3.1). Such cosmological and ontological principles, as well as code orientations and institutional ground rules, lead us to two preliminary hypotheses. First, that they constitute a direct refutation of Tönnies’ gemeinschaft and of the heartening idea of communal values. The studies suggest the following: First, that Greek cooperation is not based on an inclusive but on an exclusive idea of Eden, and a constant yearning of the individual to be supreme among similars. Second, that due to the self-referential nature of symbolic classifications, traditional symbolism of the sacred and the profane should not wither away unless they either go through some internal restructuring which allows new social action and thus new social structures to make sense or are replaced altogether by original symbols, original rituals, and original symbolic classifications and patterns. Until then, they remain operational by finding new organizational niches, and by doing so,

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they infuse old meaning to new organizational patterns that modern social networks impose on the individual, no matter how functional or dysfunctional the outcome of this infusion will be on modern organizational patterns. In other words, the symbolic meaning of social organization always outweighs the technocratic inner logic of social organization, of the Weberian formal rationality. The scheme below captures the ideal type of this worldview (Fig. 2.1).

The Fallen World

Family-Eden vs. Foreigners-Wilderness

Security, Survival, Observance, Repentance

Religious rites, ceremonies, festivals The family as a sacred unit

Negative Reciprocity

Segmentary collectivities

Traditional-religious rules and regulations

Fig. 2.1  The traditional amoral familism

Amoral familism

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2.3   Mythical Collectivism: The Modernization of Collectivism Symbols, rituals, and discourses found in modern social division of labor need not be modern. Relocation from the countryside to the city or the introduction of modern organizational patterns does not necessarily lead to the development of a sophisticated, individualized, modern culture. Instead, social dynamics, economic, political, and/or ideological, may produce urban symbolic orders without civility. In the Greek case, amoral familism was transplanted from rural family-cum-church to urban kin-­ and-­kith environments (see Chap. 3), and it was supplanted with new secular rituals, new visions, and new symbolic classifications without going through any radical alteration. Such a symbolic transformation occurred when newly organized literary and artistic trans-local networks, which emerged as part of the process that gave birth to the Greek national ‘imagined community’, brought together previously symbolically and spatially isolated peasant and urban communities into a moral community of common aspirations, visions, and identity. How did this become possible? How could a familist self internalize a supra-individualist identity and become a member of an imagined community? Amoral familism cannot be directly involved into this process since it is intrinsically inward looking, nurturing the ‘sack of potatoes’ mentality rather than cultivating the ideal of a trans-local communal totality. To take roots, an imagined community needs to deal and take into account familism. What kind of symbolic construction managed to bend (if not to overcome) Greek amoral familism and what was the outcome? The medium that transcended inward-looking scattered and insulated ‘familisms’ to a cohesive imagined community was artistic orality and poetry; and it was the internal logic and the dynamics of poetry that cultivated the construction not of an individualist, but of a collectivist self (Tziovas 1989). Orality is characterized by empathy and the close proximity and cognitive attachment between the artist/performer and the audience, in contrast to separation and self-reflection that distinguishes a culture of prose and of written communication which is found in individualist cultures. In an oral culture, the artist and the audience are in very close proximity to each other, which makes them operate within the same mental framework and system of beliefs. Close proximity is nullified by individual experiences and individualistic cognitive processes. Instead, it

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thrives on collective myths, collective experiences, and collective aspirations, and thus it assumes an undifferentiated audience: Oral culture is a culture of shared experience and poetry has been regarded as best suited to convey this sense not only as a literary form but also as a performance involving public recitals and setting to music. In oral cultures, poetry has been treated as a more public genre and hence the notion of the national poet or the poet laureate has been deeply embedded. (Tziovas 1989, 23, emphasis added)

As Tziovas (2003) argues, Poetry, which became the dominant artistic medium for a century in Greece (late nineteenth to late twentieth centuries), cultivated a collectivist self which was not built at the expense of familism, but, in effect, through it. By this mechanism, defiant familism acquired a new ecumenical dimension according to which every member of the trans-local ‘imagined community’ is potentially kith and kin. This ecumenical dimension transcended familism by adding a new layer of metaphysical meaning, ritual, and symbolism that at the same time was both original and compatible with the religious connotations already embedded in traditional, parochial, familism. Poets immersed themselves in the collective aspect of the social system, internalized it, and, most importantly, ritualized it (Sherrard 1992): [Poetry] has something of the function of a ritual drama; and the poet regards himself less as an individual expressing himself than as a mystagogue, a psychopompos, whose concern is through his poetry to communicate an awareness of an underlying pattern in life, the knowledge of which will help his readers towards personal fulfilment. (Tziovas 1989, 242, emphasis added)

In traditional societies, the role of the poet is to give expression to certain archetypal patterns of experience through myth and symbol. In the West, the break with the Mythical pattern occurred at the time of the Renaissance when a shift from the inner to the outer world and from vision to observation took place. With the Renaissance, ‘art as the expression of private and individual thoughts and feelings began to take the place of art as the expression of the universal verities’ (Tziovas 1989, 234). Greece did not experience this break-through and never went through the process of individuation that has taken place in Western Europe. As a

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result, the country’s culture retained supra-individualistic features that do not subscribe to the individualistic symbolic universe of the West. This embedded Mythical collectivism was reinforced by historical exigencies—by national catastrophes, wars, and intense political conflicts (in Chap. 3) that were equally traumatic to all and susceptible to ritual drama—strengthening the sense of belonging to a suffering community. In fact, the first three quarters of the twentieth century were a series of consecutive traumatic experiences that deepened and intensified the collectivist spirit that was already nurtured by broad-spectrum cultural trends such as out-worldly religious orientation, parochial familism, and localism. Cultural traumas, such as the withdrawal of Greeks from Asia Minor (1922–1923)—called a ‘Disaster’—the Axis occupation of the country (1941–1944), the civil war (1943–1949), the post-war anti-communist democratic regime (1949–1974), the expulsion of the Greek diasporas from Turkey and Egypt (1955–1965), the great emigration to the West (1950–1970), the dictatorship (1967–1974), the Polytechnic Uprising (1973), and the invasion of Cyprus by Turkish troops—called ‘Tragedy’ (1974)—found expression in poetry and in music (usually combined), to express the feelings and aspirations of national audiences that could be nothing else but collectivist in character. Thus, in spite of the very close links Greek social networks of power developed with the West, the collectivist, supra-individualist spirit of the Greek culture remained firmly embedded in collectivist cultural representations, rituals, and symbols. The latter were not relics of the past; instead, they were constantly renewed by waves of events experienced as cultural traumas, providing older symbols and myths with added meaning and emotional effervescence. Take, for example, the poetry of Odysseas Elytis (Nobel Prize in literature, 1979) and the way he connects past (in this case the death of the last Byzantine Emperor Constantine Palaeologos, May 29, 1453) and present time to delineate eternal spiritual meanings and authenticity hiding behind history: As he stood there erect before the Gate and armored in his sorrow Far from the world which his soul strove to reckon by the span of Paradise And much harder than stone for he had never been looked at tenderly—sometimes his crooked teeth gleamed strangely white And he passed with eyes focused a little above people’s stature and picked out One of them who smiled at him the True One whom death could not touch… (Odysseas Elytis, ‘Death and Resurrection of Constantine Palaeologos’, 1971, Phillip Sherrard trans.)

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Thus, traumatic experiences such as the fall of Constantinople in 1453 could be expressed in terms of archetypal images intended to serve as prototypes for trans-historical collective identity, and the fate of the last Emperor who fell on Constantinople’s walls defending the city from the Turks can become an archetype of personal identity. The title of the poem is telling: the ‘last of the Greeks’ is dead, but alive as well. He has been killed, but death could not touch him. Time, in ‘collectivist’ poetry, is cyclical; desire bends facts; and the distant and the remote become personal and experiential. As the above suggests, national identity became of paramount importance to Greeks, due to the collectivist conception of the nation and the fatherland as it came to be understood in earnest from the 1840s onward. Yet, as national identity remained problematic, due to inconsistencies between the glory that was ancient Greece, the grandeur of Byzantium, and the insecurity of the modern Greek state, national authenticity, both collective and personal, became a key problematique in Greek literature. In the last two centuries, four ways of viewing the ancient past and of bridging the gap between past and present have been adopted and tested. The first, archaeological-symbolic way, regarded the past as a monument and as a rule (how ‘Greek’ is modern Greece); the second way, the organic-­ romantic, regards the past as present in modern times in various social practices, beliefs, and motifs, and seeks to bring it back in prominence; the third, the aesthetic-modernist, seeks the presence of past in present time as well, not in social conditions, but as an aesthetic continuity in archetypes that can take various forms and manifestations; and the fourth, the post-­ modernist, brings forward the ambivalent moments in history to challenge and reconsider the past in ways that upset any linear interpretation. If the ‘archaeological-symbolic’ way characterizes the artistic form of the nineteenth century, the last three characterize the mode and the vision of the twentieth century, and they are the ways ‘personal and collective authenticity’ was defined and explored (Tziovas 2007). None of them deals with or reflects on the autonomous modern individual, and the absence of prose testifies to the indifference these intellectuals show for the subject. Kondylis criticizes this absence as follows: On this picture, the bourgeois, with his disciplined life and long-term targets, with the ordinary variation between emotion and duty, patriotism and cosmopolitanism, intellectual cultivation and material wealth, remains ­marginal. Indeed, the distinct bourgeois work ethic found no significant

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r­esonance in the theoretical and other modern Greek literature, exactly because it was the exact opposite of Greek-centrism and the basic elements of the Greek tradition, that is, of Orthodoxy (contempt of worldly goods and tendencies to communitarianism) and antiquity (abhorrence for manual work and superiority of the contemplating life). (Kondylis 2011, 55)

We capture the elementary form of Mythical collectivism in the scheme below (Fig. 2.2): Collectivism and with it national identity started losing ground in the last 50 years, yet the quest for authenticity (and with it the concomitant quest for defiance), remained central to Greek literature; it did so by shifting its attention to the individual, thus exploring individualistic notions of the self, testing the individual as a valid means for self-fulfillment and self-­ realization. The literary quest for individual authenticity is treated by novelists as more valid than past collectivist ones, yet not as more successful, The Eternal Spring of Truth and Authenticity

Mystical Union of Past and Present time

The poet, the Composer

Collectivist symbolic representations of victimhood and resurrection Absence of redemption

Imagined familial community

The ideology of Modern Greece as a continuation of Ancient Greece and Byzantium

Formal rationality as the enemy of authenticity

Fig. 2.2  Mythical collectivism

The authentic self

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since the individual eventually succumbs to surmounting social obstacles, that is, social structures, which appear as overwhelming forces above its reach. This pessimistic view of the fate of the authentic individual in modernity is a recurring theme in Greek fiction where characters are ‘transformed from free-floating individuals with idealistic tendencies into social victims or outcasts’ (Tziovas 2003, 34). Such a perception of individuality turned collectivism in an ambiguous concept: either an actual, powerful, enemy of individual freedom or an abstract, a-historical, entity endowed with transcendental and salvationist powers. In time, the two interactive, yet distinctive layers of meaning, amoral familism and collectivism, crystallized into two discourses: amoral familism gave birth to modern anarchic/narcissistic individualism, while collectivism split into two: on the one hand, it was incorporated into folk culture and re-enforced anarchic/narcissistic atomism (e.g., heavy folk urban music, hip-hop underground music scene), while on the other hand it became politicized and was attached to a comprehensive and sweeping political discourse of People’s victimhood, suffering and resurrection (e.g., the music of composer Mikis Theodorakis). The latter belongs to the framework of civil religion and occupies our attention in Chap. 4. For the moment, we stay focused on anarchic individualism and examine its symbolic components.

2.4   From Amoral Familism to Anarchic Individualism Rural familism is no longer the main carrier of Greek culture. Since the 1970s, Greek society has become increasingly urbanized, educated, pacified, individualized, and diversified, fragmenting and diversifying in the process both extended family structures and collective conscience. In this framework, poetry lost its niche; there is no longer a code to be shared between artist and audience any more but many codes that correspond to a plurality of individualized and fragmented audiences. In this framework, neither the poet nor the composer could act as the symbolic embodiment of collective myths, visions, or anxieties, and for this reason, they gradually lost their role as symbolic spokesmen: …[T]he balance between public and private life has become a vexed issue in Greece in recent years as the public culture was apparently being eroded. On the other hand, to know oneself has become an end, instead of a means

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through which one knows the world, and this suggests that gradually public culture is fractured and supplanted by narcissistic individualism and a growing atomization of the social. (Tziovas 2003, 16)

Long gone are also the rigid social structures of the extended family and lineage-based identities. Vendetta justice has been by and large replaced by proper legal procedures that punish only the offender, reflecting the switching of the practice of justice from identity based on family, to individual identity. Celebration of name-days has given way to celebration of birthdays, particularly by young people who prefer the individuality of their birthday rather than the collective sharing of a name day and its Christian connotations. These, and many other ordinary signs of individuality, are all predictable outcomes of modernization and urbanization. Even a certain narcissistic obsession with the self, as the one mentioned by Tziovas earlier, could be comprehended as a side-effect of the cult of the individual and the increased attention to the self modernization entails. But concern is in order since the emerging outcome of this modernization process is an uneasy and restless self at odds with modern social organization. This is most clearly captured in Tziovas’ conclusions about the modern Greek novel which crystalizes the process, the dynamics, and the tensions involved in the construction and the orientation of the modern Greek self: Most all of them [the novels] are narratives about an individual in search of selfhood against a background of social constraints. What emerges from the analysis of the novels is that there is an element of regression and withdrawal either to nature … to childhood … or the mother’s body. This nostalgia for origins and primordial innocence, which could be seen as a desperate search for personal freedom, involves a degree of resistance to social determinism … or often leads to transgression and suicide. (Tziovas 2003, 273) What the readings of the novels demonstrate is a rigorous defense of the inner world against social constraints … individuals in crisis, in constant search of self-identity, or in trying to articulate their desire to overcome dilemmas and define their social role. In turn, individuality does not represent a valorization of autonomous selfhood, but a form of rebelliousness and a challenge to cultural expectations. (Tziovas 2003, 274–275)

This ‘rigorous defense of the inner world’, in routine, everyday life, is crystalized in very specific, ritualized, behavioral patterns that confirm the priority of the individual over social constraints. Renée Hirschon

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looks into three aspects of this ‘personal freedom’ in matters of time perception, personal identity, and attitudes to authority (Hirschon 2014). Accordingly: [R]egarding time, these features include an elastic and imprecise approach, an attitude of negotiability and flexibility, a mode based on a sense of seasonality and of natural processes, in brief, it is a cyclical modality, not linear and it runs counter to modern western European notions of appropriate time conduct. (Hirschon 2014, 160)

Elastic perception of time affect matters of punctuality, forward planning, and rigid time schedules which are essential features of a modern economy. Thus, the overwhelming presence of small and very small-scale businesses, which can micro-manage schedules at their own pace: It is surely highly significant therefore, that even today Greek industry continues to be dominated by micro- and small-scale enterprises, mostly family-­ based, with few large industrial firms. Recent figures indicate that 99% of industrial and service industries are SMEs, while 85% are in employed in SMEs (OECD 2010), the highest proportionally than any other European state. (Hirschon 2014, 160)

In the same vein, Hirschon (2014) suggests Greek culture is a culture of resistance to authority. Hirschon traces this attitude back to resistance to the Ottoman domination, and he considers it to have persisted in modern Greece in the form of ‘verbal non-accountability’—a ‘survival strategy’ according to which children at an early age are instilled with a skeptical attitude to adults’ verbal utterances. Lack of punctuality is … in essence the exercise of non-accountability and can be seen as reluctance to conform to the expectations of others, a form of resistance, or of the exercise of personal autonomy. (Hirschon 2014, 168–169)

Hirschon relates this micro-contact to macro-events since they are characterized by the same symbolic logic and code orientation. Representatives of the ‘Troika’ dealing with the Greek economic crisis as well as foreign diplomats deplore the way that EU directives are not followed. Typically, these are published, transmitted to Ministries, and then ignored. ‘Why do they not observe the rules?’ these officials complain. This

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is one aspect of the phenomenon, and closely related to it, is the reluctance to concede to authority. Similar problems, I am told, are encountered in the application of EU integration measures for enlargement required for the Balkan states: the slow application of reform measures is a continuing matter of concern… I suggest that the underlying reasons for these patterns of conduct lie in cultural factors which have been molded by historical forces. (Hirschon 2014, 169)

In routine social interaction, this culture of resistance, Hirschon notices, could become openly aggressive dissolving any sense of civility and politeness, revealing a ‘long-established confrontational spirit of Greek social relations’, expressing the ‘deeply competitive spirit and the contestation of hierarchy associated with the concern with personal autonomy, of not being beholden to anyone else’. Following this, Hirschon detects that Greek personal identity is still rooted in family ties and family life: [N]o Greek exists (in the old paradigm) outside of the kinship nexus which confers identity upon him or her … ‘individuals’ here have family obligations as a primary point of reference and they are always contained within the context of family life. (Hirschon 2014, 164)

Hirschon considers all three aspects of the Greek culture to be relics of the past. We beg to disagree; rather, we would argue that time-elasticity, resistance to authority, and anarchic individualism should be taken as symbolic references of modern Greek symbolism, embedded in ‘deference and demeanor’ rituals of everyday life that confirm a certain personal identity and symbolize apt social interaction. Rejection of ‘law and order’, but also of temporality and of civil order, suggests a modern identity obsessed with autonomy without being informed by civility and, to the extent that family becomes increasingly less central to someone’s life, without autonomy being informed by the collectivist constraints of familial life. In this symbolic framework of friend versus stranger/foe, absence of punctuality and regularity become symbols of personal freedom. Thus, the proverbial ‘personalized’ or ‘arbitrary performances’ of petite civil servants toward their customers (some are cordially served, some others blatantly ignored) symbolizes defiance to the system and the freedom of the individual. They constitute discursive performances and interweaved ritualistic and substantive exhibitions of the civil servant’s autonomy: their power to provide or deny service according to their own whim, ‘either by gracing

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customers with what they desire, or else by proudly rejecting the implication of obligation to customers in refusing to satisfy their desires as they would like’ (Herzfeld 1993). Yet, research time and again claims that Greek social attitudes are ‘collectivist’. This is paradoxical as much as intriguing, since it contradicts the principle—indeed, the code orientation—of anarchic individualism. How is this possible to be anarchic and collectivist at the same time, to be the only master of yourself and still rely on the opinion of others in order to form an opinion about yourself? To resolve this paradox, we examine Greek collectivism as it was analyzed by two ethnographic-linguistic studies of routine social interaction among Greeks. They both argue that collectivism is expressed through specific patterns of ‘positive politeness’, which reflect in-group values and worldviews; in other words, that positive politeness constitutes a signifier of solidarity and togetherness. In the first study, Maria Sifianou (1992) compared behavioral patterns of politeness in England and Greece. She concluded: The English seem to place a higher value on privacy and individuality, i.e., the negative aspect of face, whereas the Greeks seem to emphasize involvement and in-group relations, i.e., the positive aspect. (Sifianou 1992, 41)

Negative politeness is a sign of respect to the overarching principle of privacy, and concomitantly of always taking into account the possibility of having to ‘save face’ in case something goes wrong during the interaction process. For this reason, negative politeness is avoidance-based and is characterized by self-effacement, formality, and restraint. In this context, requests and wishes are expressed more elaborately and indirectly. Positive politeness, on the other hand, is more informal, more direct, more expressive, and more authentic. Verbalizations of thanks and requests tend to be more imperative, while the process itself is an indication that the person employing positive politeness wishes to befriend the receiver, or approaches the receiver cordially, as if he were a friend. In this context, formality and restraint are understood as ‘cold’ and thus potentially a sign of hostile or selfish behavior. The person who employs positive politeness is concerned not to give the impression that he is ‘cold’ and thus rude. If politeness for the English is understood in the framework of privacy, for the Greeks, it is understood in the context of intimate relations, that is, in the context of kin relations. Different cultural perspectives lead to different meanings which lead to negative stereotypical comments such as

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‘the Greeks are impolite’ and ‘the English are hypocritical.’ Sifianou argues that positive politeness is a sign of the presence of collectivist values, and that overt manifestations of politeness are necessary only in societies that place emphasis on privacy and individuality. The study verifies the presence of Greek-specific, in-group intimacy, which is much more expressive and direct than their western counterparts. Yet, intimacy as a norm does not say much about neither the symbolic framework nor the actual context of the conversation. Only an analysis of the speech act could expose the background structure and the collective representations that define the symbolic universe of the discussants. Such an analysis is provided by Kakava’s (2002) study of the content of intimacy in the Greek school culture. The results of this study indicate that while social interaction is indeed characterized by positive politeness, it is also ‘agonistic’; it does not seek agreement and mutual understanding, but instead it is constructed around confrontation and seeks disagreement for the sake of it: in her words, it constitutes ‘a ritualized form of opposition for the sake of opposition’ which, in the study, penetrates three types of social context: family, friends, and schoolmates. ‘Disagreement constitutes a social practice that is pervasive and ‘preferred’ because it is expected and ‘allowed’.’ In the study, solidarity is preserved not because participants arrived at the same conclusions by a Habermasian process of mutual understanding, but despite the disagreement: This agonistic type of discourse represents an interactional practice in which participants engage to match their wits, compete for ideas, yet do not necessarily resolve their differences. While agreement can enhance solidarity and present speakers as supportive and like-minded, in intimate contexts, Greek participants were cooperative by agreeing to disagree. (Kakava 2002, 1563)

Kakava’s remark that Greek interaction is intrinsically argumentative and confrontational, and that Greeks cooperate by ‘agreeing to disagree’, is of profound importance. It suggests that solidarity is based solely on the form of intimacy and the aesthetics of gesticulation, without being accompanied by osmosis of beliefs. Other studies reviewed by Kakava (2002, 1563) verify these remarks. Aschenbrenner (1986), an anthropologist and a regular visitor of a Greek village Karpofora from 1969 onward, claims:

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The nearly universal trait of free expression of emotion, opinion, and disagreement lends village life a particular ethos, but it also sometimes threatens the facade. Parents reinforce this trait in children and they consider it normal in adults of both sexes. Not only do villagers freely vent feelings and opinions themselves, but also they delight in others doing so. They expect social interaction to often exceed relatively calm verbal exchange. One hears not only chatter and idle gossip but also moments of keen debate, heated argument, and occasional frenzied verbal duels. (Aschenbrenner 1986, 42)

Friedl (1962), an anthropologist who did her fieldwork in rural Greece, first confirms that the collective representation of ‘Greekness’ is associated with ‘the love of freedom in all spheres to the point of unwillingness to take orders from anyone’ (1962, 106), and then she stresses that to her surprise argumentative skills in discussions are highly valued, but ‘the aim of the discussion usually is not to arrive at a rationally based conclusion or to exchange information, but to display skill at allusions, verbal quips and niceties of expression’ (Friedl 1962, 83). Mackridge (1992, 114) also describes street arguments that seem serious but ‘turn out to be amicable conversations’, and pigadaki, ‘a knot of people discussing issues of the day in a public place’, during which they engage in ‘impassioned and agonistic public debate’. Foreigners are perceived as ‘cold, haughty, and secretive because they refuse to engage in an argument’ and thereby fail to enter into expected relations of solidarity. In Tannen and Kakava (1992, 23), Tannen reports that her effort to sound agreeable in conversations led her to use markers of agreement which, however, ‘often reaped a harvest of disagreement’. Last, Makri-Tsilipakou (1994) reports on how ‘Greek women engage in the public destruction of the face of their male spouses, partners, friends, or relatives to ‘protest’ their discontent with them through scorn, ridicule, or disapproval, which provides additional ­linguistic evidence to ethnographic claims about the ‘free expression of emotion, opinion, and disagreement’’ (Aschenbrenner 1986, 42). All six studies confirm and explicate Hirschon’s observation that personal autonomy of action and freedom of expression is at the heart of the Greek cultural value system (Hirschon 2001, 18–19), a system that exhibits ‘reluctance to concede hierarchy or to accept subordination—at least towards strangers or outsiders’ (Hirschon 2001, 26). In effect, they all suggest that gemeinschaft solidarity is an illusion that exists only in collective representations and not in actual social organization. Cons­ equently, collectivism is an illusion as well: it is a collective representation

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of togetherness projected by individuals who share a symbolic code of intimacy, positive politeness, and closeness without this representation being interweaved with a moral obligation or determination to reach substantive agreement. In other words, social interaction constitutes a ritual performed for the pleasure of acting it out; as such, it is symbolic but not substantially moral. Discourse, then, remains suspended, unsettled, and ambivalent, as its constitutive ingredients, the symbolic and the social referent, remain adversaries: ‘we (symbolically) agree to (substantially) disagree’. This unresolved tension leads to a perpetual search for authenticity in the approval of others, without accepting their individuality. How is anarchic individualism related to familism? Xenakis, in her analysis of the modernizing and the anti-modernizing ‘recalcitrant’ social forces in Greece, suggests that anarchic individualism is the behavioral aspect of a wider, constitutive good, which she calls ‘the good of freedom-­ and-­equality’ which combines the symbolic classification of hospitality with the spatial delineation of familism: The ‘good’ of ‘freedom-and-equality’ … is embodied in the weight accorded within the [recalcitrant] position to the notion of hospitality, while its limits are demarcated by that accorded to familism, and spans the highly-prized values of personal autonomy of action and resistance to modes of subordination. (emphasis added, 2013, 178)

The way hospitality and familism are combined is described by Herzfeld: At the same time, hospitality is a symbolic strategy of very considerable force. The sharing of bread, meat, wine, and social space indexes the ambiguity of all host-guest relations: an equality of interest that both marks and cloaks the guest’s (perhaps transitory) state of dependence. This again is the logic of moral obligation. In offering bread and wine, the host effects a model of social transubstantiation—the symbols of the Eucharist, perhaps, but also (as we have already noted) those of agnatic kinship: wine as blood, bread and meat as body. This is truly a model of reciprocal incorporation— the absorption of the familial body by newly incorporated insiders: friends, guests, clients. In the most extreme illustrations of this logic, we find hosts threatening to kill those who have threatened their guests, because the guest, having broken bread with them, is now a virtual insider—even one against whom the hosts themselves may have expectations of taking revenge at some later time. (Herzfeld 1993, 176)

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The acute observation of Xenakis that the constitutive good of ‘freedom-­ and-equality’ derives from the merging of familism and hospitality, in combination to Herzfeld’s description of hospitality as a familial ritual, suggests that Panagiotopoulou’s ‘anarchic individualism’ and Karapostolis’ ‘anarchic defiance’ as we called it (the defiance of collectivism by the individual) derive from fragmented collectivism, and it is genuinely anti-collectivist as it avoids and ignores the authoritarian, patriarchal, aspect of familism. Rejection of patriarchal authority shatters the integrity of familism, removes discipline, and shifts attention from vertical to more horizontal relations of antagonism. It suggests a repositioning of signifiers to new structures of symbolic logic and meaning, structures that turn collectivist symbolic representations into fragile and conditional social interactions. Ritual then is in the heart of this symbolic dislocation and re-­combination: it is the means by which someone exhibits his/her independence, and it is the means by which someone welcomes a stranger to be a member of his virtual community. The ritual of feasting first transcends and then reaffirms the diachronic divide between kin and stranger. A fact that explains why in Greece feasting with friends and relatives is the primary means to exhibit solidarity, and why it is never fully satisfactory if it does not include a crescendo of emotional togetherness—usually taking place during large communal feasting occasions (glenti) and routinely in folk taverns where it is appropriate to ‘lose yourself’. Either as daily, routine, simple rituals of social interaction or as exceptional rituals of feasting and celebration, cultural interaction—detached from the functional needs of the social division of labor—strives to establish or to reaffirm both the autonomy of the individual and collective intimacy. In effect, these rituals are closer to Victor Turner’s communitas (a community of undifferentiated and intense solidarity) rather than a structured and hierarchical collectivity based on mutual interests (Turner 1967, 1969). Indeed, it is a rudimentary feature of everyday social interaction in constant tension with the social division of labor and its functional prerequisites; and it is more self-referential than purposive in that it does not decisively dissolve structure but keeps social interaction in a state of constant flux. Thus, it installs liminality that is, dissolution of order, structural fluidity and ambivalence, in the heart of ordinary social interaction; a condition which is based on the internal contradictions of the constitutive good of ‘freedom-and-equality’ and is manifested as ‘anarchic individualism’. Under stable political conditions, it could be a source of innovation and change; of reflecting and acting ‘out of the box’. In conditions of

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Out-worldly Salvation The rigorous defense of the inner world The good of freedom-and-equality

Political collectivist music

The self

Atomistic heavy folk-urban music, hip-hop, rock

Anarchic individualism

Authenticity

Agonistic social interaction

A contest of the ability of the individual to remain authentic

Fig. 2.3  Secular anarchic individualism

political or economic crisis, it becomes a multiplier of social divisions and strife. But this is the subject of the last two chapters. The main contours of this anarchic individualism in search for authenticity can be depicted as follows (Fig. 2.3):

2.5   Conclusions Tensions between culture and the social division of labor are not solved by the triumph of the ‘structural needs’ over meaning but, for lack of original symbols of meaning, by original combinations of old meaning and new structures. In fact, what all relevant ethnographic studies suggest is that amoral familism survived the onslaught of modernity by adapting to the modern social division of labor: social relations that are not related to the intimacy of family life, either organizationally or symbolically, are considered

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instrumental, superfluous, and expendable. The relative priority of family, or family-like relations, over horizontal civil ties in modern Greece, as well as the hegemony of paternalistic and clientelistic social relations over contractual bonds and professional ties (more about them in the next chapters) suggests that familial symbolic categorization still renders modern life meaningful in Greece, even though individuals no longer belong to extended family structures, and familial intimacy is more fictitious than substantive. And if familism is still identified with the pure and the good, as ‘anarchic individualism’ as perceived by an outsider, or as ‘freedom-and-­equality’ as perceived by an insider, it is because the sacred and the profane are still anchored in familial symbolic classification. When they are refuted, the individual stands alone—morally and socially—for better or worse. More specifically, the ethnographic and literal studies of the Greek self conducted in the last 50 years suggest that in the heart of the Greek moral universe today, in an ideal-typical form, lays a modernized form of familism, as both urbanized egoism and ideologized nationalism. As Campbell (1964) asserts: A boy learns from songs and stories (and later at school) to identify himself with the values of the idealized heroes of the Revolution. He comes to believe in the superhuman deeds of Katsandonis and Kolokotronis, and in the ability of men to repeat them where the cause has sanctity and men possess honor. (Campbell 1964, 307)

The elevation of heroic, and violent, egoism to a national virtue would prove to be rather counter-productive in peaceful times, when the nation would be in need of civil trust more than of martial virtues. If rural social organization was culturally attached to particularistic values of classical amoral familism, urban life today is culturally attached to a culturally modernized form of familism, a ‘community’ conceived though in ecumenical moral terms and symbolic classifications. We explain: in a traditional rural setting, the good was identified with actual kinship ties. This could not be so in an urban environment. To the extent that city life relaxes the social bonds that tie the individual to his/her extended family, and to the extent that urban life necessitates reflexivity and universalistic codifications, tangible amoral familism gives way to an abstract and imagined bipolarity between friend and stranger/foe. This bipolarity comprises a symbolic classification of intimacy-authenticity-expressivity contrasted with enmity-inauthenticity-subjugation.

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The imagined, virtual, character of this symbolic bipolarity allows for the celebration of unattached selfhood, which recognizes the others (i.e., friends as well as strangers/foes), as the looking glass of his worth. To this effect, the individual needs friends as much as he needs foes: The friend authenticates the prestige, the uniqueness, and the desirability of the individual; the enemy confirms the struggle of the individual against obedience, subjugation, and inauthenticity. The side effect of this binary symbolic classification is that the anarchic individual tends to ignore those personality traits of the other which are intrinsically different from his own self. The individual is obliged to remain attuned to an elementary binary matrix of ‘alike’ and ‘not-like’; for this reason, anarchic collectivism tends to recognize friend and stranger/foe alike as undifferentiated bipolarities. Thus, positive politeness is nothing else but interactions between an individual who addresses others as if the latter have thoughts, feelings, experiences, and impressions similar to their own: Eghoismos is neither [patriotism or individualism]. Like good luck and bad character, it is always negative in others, positive in members of one’s own social group. But because the Greeks feel forced to contend with the otherness within themselves, they often express profound moral ambivalence about eghoismos while acknowledging its pervasion of social life. (Herzfeld 1987, 128)

Herzfeld is right to notice the ambivalence of eghoismos which combines anarchic individualism, positive politeness, and agonistic behavior. But we think there is more to this. Apparently, there is a behavioral aspect of positive politeness and agonistic behavior which has been overlooked: These behavioral patterns are always open to various interpretations and thus to misunderstanding. To avoid this unfortunate possibility, a very specific line of interactive performativity is necessary: if such an interactive response is not performed correctly, then ambivalence takes hold of the social setting and ambivalence sets foot in the midst of it. Thus, agonistic behavior can be performed properly, without misunderstanding or complete failure, only among insiders—among those who know the full sequence of performances and counter-performances. Furthermore, deducing from Hirschon’s ethnographic observations, this kind of behavior usually performs two antithetical but equally important values, domination and saving face, which should remain balanced during the performativity. But for this to happen, everyone in the setting needs to

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perform their part. If among strangers, the whole balance is lost, and the actor remains exposed. In this sense, the collective self is collective not only because it needs the presence of the rest of the community to reflect its worth upon it but also because it needs the presence of others to perform its own self. In other words, collectivity breeds exclusion for the sake of self-integrity. Rural-particularistic familism and urban-universalistic collectivism  are not mutually excluded, since the latter is a symbolic variation of the former—not a radical departure. A city-dweller could combine them to the extent that he is attached to his family and his locality but is also attached to modern social networks of power and the modern social division of labor. In this case, kith and kin constitute an extended community symbolically structured around traditional obligations and modern social networks of power. Either blood relatives infiltrate through nepotism the bureaucratic rationality and logic of the social networks the individual is attached to or friends become relatives by religious rituals which turn them to family members (best man and godfather, son in law, etc.). In an alternative scenario, professional associations and political parties develop exclusive ‘blood like’ bonds and defend their exclusive interest as if they were a family rather than their profession as an expression of an ideal and a constitutive good.1 The ones that are left out of this symbolic kin-and-­ kith web are strangers and, potentially, enemies. This ability of rural-segmented familism to absorb civil relations into its own symbolic framework and social structures (e.g., nepotism, clientelism, paternalism), has been taken by the studies we have reviewed to mean rural familism being symbolically identical to universalistic collectivism. Our cultural analysis suggests a more nuanced exegesis: if we compare the symbolic classifications of the two, of ‘family-purity-bliss vs. outsiders-­ pollution-­ necessity’ with ‘intimacy-authenticity-expressivity vs. enmity-­ inauthenticity-­obedience’, we detect that the latter does not constitute in full an abstraction of the former. While ‘intimacy vs. enmity’ and perhaps ‘expressivity vs. obedience’ could be seen as emerging out of the binary opposition ‘family vs. outsiders’ and ‘bliss vs. necessity’, this certainly cannot be said about ‘authenticity vs. inauthenticity’. Expressivity vs. subjugation might have emerged out of rural familism since a traditional peasant was not a stranger to such a classification; yet, quite possibly it might not 1  For Professions being symbols of civility rather than a familial affair, see Stephen Kalberg (2014).

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be related to rural familism at all, since patriarchal obedience was an integral part of the peasant’s normative principles and religious symbolic universe. Such obedience, under some circumstances, could be easily transferred to symbolizing a bureaucratic system, and actually it could justify and reinforce modern forms of obedience, as the case of the modern Turkish disciplinarian self suggests (Bayraktaroglu and Sifianou 2001). ‘Authenticity vs. inauthenticity’, on the other hand, is completely unrelated to rural familism. In fact, authenticity does not belong to the micro-­ cosmos of peasant. Rather, it constitutes a macro, ideological, entry and relates micro social processes with macro developments of the construction of the national identity. This is the subject-matter of the next chapter. To these conclusions, Karapostolis’ insightful observations on the two faces of the defiant warrior and donor, as well as the symbols and the meaning behind it, provide us with a pattern able to bring together all the previously mentioned studies: constant disagreement, agonistic behavior, in-group intimacy, positive-aspect-of-face, and so on, are but various manifestations of the internal tension between individual freedom and collectivist reflection of the self: a tension which results in a dialectic of full conformity and rebellion; an endless circular struggle of a self who fights his similar-to-him others to be approved by them as the first among them. But since the others are his own identity, the only way to be self-approved is to return to the warm bosom of his antagonists. First, I affirm my being by antagonizing the other members of my collectivity, and then I return to my similars (oi homoioi) to receive their approval—or, I remain detached in a defiant act of self-destruction. The self remains a binary existence of being or not being, and the collectivity becomes a reflection of the individual self in social structure. This ‘collectivism’ is highly idiosyncratic—someone could say it is not collectivism at all, since it is not based on the priority of the collectivity over the self, individualized or not (as in most advanced countries, western or not), but on the reverse: the priority of the collectivist individual over a collectivity of individuals. It is a contradictory identity, making social interaction impulsive and social structures unstable. For the moment, let us conclude the chapter with a suggestive note: utterly absent from the construction of the modern of Greek self is the disciplinarian experiences that distinguish the construction of the Western self. Greeks never experienced the confessional, post-Reformation, ‘obsessed’ campaigns of Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism to force the community to conform to Christian morality; there were no Calvinist-­ like

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c­onsistories, no Lutheran-like marriage courts, and no Catholic-like Inquisition. And there were no efforts of secular cum religious authorities to transform ‘vagrants’ and other ‘ne’er-do-wells’ into obedient and productive subjects through the introduction of more rational—and often punitive—systems of poor relief. In short, there was no campaign to introduce disciplinary practices, and no early modern ‘disciplinary revolution’ ever took place (Gorski 1993, 2003). And there were no civil actions, no social movements, and no moral ‘crusades’ to combat social ills such as alcoholism, prostitution, domestic violence, racism, poverty, and so on, of the kind we find in the West. Well-­ intended or pretentious as they might have been, these civil movements (Foucault’s faceless ‘disciplines’) instilled on Western societies the idea that the moral self needs to be constantly evolving, to be disciplined, self-­ reflective, and vigilant; that morality is not a constant and steady condition of the soul, but an in-worldly activity toward the self and toward others. Take, for example, the ‘leaving home’ movement that took place in nineteenth-­ century America (Bellah et  al. 1985). The movement re-­ evaluated the meaning of family and reconsidered the role of the parents toward their offspring: that the upbringing of the children should not be oriented to comfort and protect them from a hostile world, but to prepare them for leaving home to become autonomous individuals (Bellah et al. 1985, 56–57). This brought profound changes to the public sphere in two ways: it detached the individual from society, and separated the private from the public sphere in radical ways. In contrast, as Hirschon indicates, Greek children’s upbringing is characterized by over-protection and insulation from the outside world. Over-protection as a way of upbringing leaves children unprepared to enter adulthood. But more crucially, over-­protection is a condition that familiarizes children with perceiving the world as intrinsically hostile that should be confronted, and bended, if need be. It constitutes the most detrimental effect of modernized familism in Greece today. True as it is that not all Western societies went through the same disciplinarian practices, most Western societies went through practices of that sort. In Greece, some efforts were made toward this direction, but they were, at best, incomplete and were always interrupted by some overwhelming events that delegitimized and nullified them. At the end, the Greek self was constructed around the question of how to hold its atemporal integrity against the onslaught of incoming historical forces rather than how to actively shape it. Yet, this worldview was constructed neither

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intentionally nor through a bottom-up process of deliberate retreat into blissful stillness. Rather, it was the unintentional consequence of the state’s efforts to construct a modern, but still atemporal, national identity for its citizens. We proceed to examine this process.

Bibliography Aschenbrenner, Stanley. 1986. Life in a Changing Greek Village: Karpofora and Its Reluctant Farmers. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt. Banfield, Edward C. with Laura Fasano. 1958. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Bayraktaroglu, A., and M. Sifianou. 2001. Linguistic Politeness Across Boundaries: The Case of Greek and Turkish, 1–16. Edited by A.  Bayraktaroglu and M. Sifianou. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bellah, Robert, Richard Madsen, William M.  Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M.  Tipton. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life Habits of the Heart. Berkeley: University of California Press. du Boulay, Juliet. 1974. Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village. Oxford: Oxford University Press. du Boulay, Juliet, and Rory Williams. 1987. Amoral Familism and the Image of Limited Good: A Critique from a European Perspective. Anthropological Quarterly 60 (1): 12–24. Campbell, John. 1964. Honour, Family and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community. Oxford: Clarendon. Campbell, John, and Philip Sherrard. 1968. Modern Greece. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. Chapman, Malcolm, and Christos Antoniou. 1988. Uncertainty Avoidance in Greece: An Ethnographic Illustration. In The Strategy and Organization of International Business, ed. Peter J.  Buckley, Fred Burton, and Hafiz Mirza, 55–72. London: Macmillan Press. Doumanis, Mariella. 1983. Mothering in Greece: From Collectivism to Individualism. New York: Academic Press. Dragonas, Thalia. 1983. The Self-Concept of Preadolescents in the Hellenic Context. PhD Diss., University of Aston. Foster, George. 1965. Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good. American Anthropologist New Series 67 (2): 293–315. Friedl, Ernestine. 1962. Vasilika: A Village in Modern Greece. New  York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Georgas, James. 1989. Changing Family Values in Greece, from Collectivist to Individualist. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 20 (1): 80–91.

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Gorski, Philip S. 1993. The Protestant Ethic Revisited: Disciplinary Revolution and State Formation in Holland and Prussia. American Journal of Sociology 99 (2): 265–316. ———. 2003. The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism, Confessionalism and the Growth of State Power in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Green, Eva, Jean-Claude Deschamps, and Dario Páez. 2005. Variation of Individualism and Collectivism within and between 20 Countries: A Typological Analysis. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 36 (3): 321–339. Herzfeld, Michael. 1987. Anthropology Through the Looking Glass. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1993. The Social Production of Indifference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. London: Routledge. Hirschon, Renée. 2001. Freedom, Solidarity, and Obligation: The Socio-cultural Context of Greek Politeness. In Linguistic Politeness Across Boundaries: The Case of Greek and Turkish, ed. Arın Bayraktaroglu and Maria Sifianou, 17–42. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ———. 2014. Cultural Mismatches: Greek Concepts of Time, Personal Identity and Authority in the Context of Europe. In Europe in Modern Greek History, ed. Kevin Featherstone, 153–170. London: Hurst & Co. Hofstede, Geert. 1980. Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-­ Related Values. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. Kakava, Christina. 2002. Opposition in Modern Greek Discourse: Cultural and Contextual Constraints. Journal of Pragmatics 34 (10–11): 1537–1568. Kalberg, Stephen. 2014. Searching for the Spirit of American Democracy. New York: Paradigm Publications. Karapostolis, Vasilis. 2010. Division and Atonement  – Concerning the Political Morality of the Greeks [Διχασμός και Εξιλέωση  – Περί πολιτικής ηθικής των Ελλήνων]. Athens: Patakis. Kondylis, Panagiotis. 2011. The Causes of the Decline of Modern Greece. Athens: Themelio. Mackridge, Peter. 1992. Games of Power and Solidarity – Commentary. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 10 (1): 111–120. Makri-Tsilipakou, Marianthi. 1994. Greek Women and the Public Destruction of Face. In Cultural Performances, Proceedings of the Third Berkeley Women and Language Conference, ed. ΒυchοΙtz Mary, Α.C. Liang, Laurel Α. Sυttοn, and Caitlin Ηίnes, 462–477. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. McNall, Scott. 1974. The Greek Peasant. Washington, DC: American Sociological Association.

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Mouzelis, Nikos. 1978. Modern Greece: Facets of Underdevelopment. London: Macmillan. Panagiotopoulou, Roy. 1996. Rational Individual-Centered Practices in the Framework of an Irrational Political System. In Society and Politics – Aspects of the Third Greek Republic 1974–1994 [“Ορθολογικές” ατομοκεντρικές πρακτικές στα πλαίσια ενός “ανορθολογικού” πολιτικού συστήματος, στο Κοινωνία και Πολιτική  – Όψεις της Γ’ Ελληνικής Δημοκρατίας 1974–1994], ed. Christos Lyrintzis, Ilias Nikolakopoulos, and Dimitris Sotiropoulos, 139–160. Athens: Themelio. ———. 1997. Greeks in Europe: Antinomies in National Identities. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 15 (2): 349–370. Peristiany, John. 1965. Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Polemi-Todoulou, Mina. 1981. Cooperation in Family and Peer Group: A Study of Interdependence in a Greek Island Community. Doctoral Dissertation, Bryn Mawr College. Pollis, Adamantia. 1965. Political Implications of the Modern Greek Concept of Self. British Journal of Sociology 16: 29–47. ———. 1992. Greek National Identity: Religious Minorities, Rights and European Norms. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 10: 171–195. Rostow, Walt. 1960. The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sherrard, Philip. 1992. The Poetry and the Myth. In The Marble Threshing Floor: Studies in Modern Greek Poetry. Limni, Evia: Denise Harvey. Sifianou, Maria. 1992. Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece: A Cross-­ Cultural Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tannen, Deborah, and Christina Kakava. 1992. Power and Solidarity in Modern Greek Conversation: Disagreeing to Agree. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 10 (1): 11–34. Triandis, Harry C. 1985. Collectivism vs. Individualism. In Personality, Cognition and Values, ed. Christopher Bagley and Gajendra K.  Verma. London: Macmillan. Triandis, Harry C., and Vaso Vasiliou. 1972. An Analysis of Subjective Culture. In The Analysis of Subjective Culture, ed. Harry Triandis. New York: Wiley. Triandis, Harry C., Kwok Leung, Marcelo J. Villareal, and Felicia I. Clack. 1985. Allocentric vs. Idiocentric Tendencies: Convergent and Discriminant Validation. Journal of Research in Personality 19: 395–415. https://doi.org/10.1016/ 0092-6566(85)90008-X. Tsoukalas, Constantine. 1993a. Free Riders in the Land of Miracles  – About Greeks in Greece [Τζαμπατζήδες στη Χώρα των Θαυμάτων. Περί Ελλήνων στην Ελλάδα]. Greek Review of Political Sciences 1 (1): 9–52.

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———. 1993b. Greek National Identity in an Integrated Europe and a Changing World Order. In Greece, the New Europe, and the Changing International Order, ed. Hany J. Psomiades and Stavros B. Thomadakis, 57–78. New York: Pella. Turner, Victor. 1967. Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage. In The Forest of Symbols. New York: Cornell University Press. ———. 1969. The Ritual Process. New York: Aldine. Tziovas, Dimitris. 1989. Residual Orality and Belated Textuality in Modern Greek Literature and Culture. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 7: 321–335. ———. 2003. The Other Self: Selfhood and Society in Modern Greek Fiction. Oxford: Lexington Books. ———. 2007. Greekness and the 1930s Generation [Ελληνικότητα και γενιά του ‘30]. Cogito 6 (May). http://www.nnet.gr/cogito/cogito%20downloads/ cog06_p.6-9.pdf. Vassiliou, Vasso G., and George Vassiliou. 1973. The Implicative Meaning of the Greek Concept of Filotimo. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 4 (3): 326–341. Xenakis, Sappho. 2013. Normative Hybridity in Contemporary Greece: Beyond ‘Modernizers’ and ‘Underdogs’ in Socio-Political Discourse and Practice. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 31 (2): 171–192.

CHAPTER 3

Clientelistic Social Structures and Cultural Orientations

Contents

3.1  State Formation and Clientelism in Greece 3.2  Social Power and Clientelism 3.3  Culture and Generalized Clientelism 3.4  America and Ireland: Two Examples of Limited Clientelism 3.5  Conclusions Bibliography

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In the previous chapter, we examined how modern, urban, anarchic individualism is genealogically linked to traditional, rural, amoral familism and the defiant yet collectivist individual. However, above face-to-face social interaction, there are at work macro-social processes and structures that command and shape individual attitudes decisively. They constitute social networks of power which impose their own organizational criteria of allocation of resources, and their own functional prerequisites of adaptation, solidarity, legitimation, and goals. These organizational criteria affect individual behavior and thus face-to-face interaction in ways that cannot be easily detected by ethnographic or anthropological fieldwork. To examine the effect of organizational and social structures on individual behavior, and inversely, the way and the extent individual behavior legitimizes, reinforces, or challenges these structures, we need to shift our inquiry to societal processes concerning the formation and the interaction between the modern Greek state and civil society, the social dynamics © The Author(s) 2019 M. Marangudakis, The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13589-8_3

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between center and periphery, and the interweaving among political, economic, and ideological networks of power. This chapter deals with state-­ civil society contact and the way it has affected Greek social dynamics. To what extent is amoral familism and anarchic individualism affected by diffused symbolic classifications and cultural imperatives, and to what extent by the actual social structures of power?

3.1   State Formation and Clientelism in Greece There should be little doubt that one of the most crucial factors in determining the shape of a contemporary society as a moral community, its public values, and the content of the constitutive goods it embraces is the moment of its establishment as a modern society, that is, when, not being part of the first, sui generis, wave of modernization, it becomes a nation-­ state as a swift outcome of social engineering. It is crucial since it is the moment fundamental social structures are institutionalized; various indigenous social elites ascend to state apparatus; boundaries and power aspects of social classes and social groups are crystallized into legitimized political classes, parties, and coalitions; the social division of labor is mobilized; and certain moral goods and symbolic orders are crystallized in the constitutional order and the legal system of the new state. This, basically Herderian, argument for a bottom-up process of folk culture turning to polity, is qualified by Gellner’s (1997) sociological suggestion that modern states have produced different kinds of national cultures according to the presence, or absence, of strong dynastic states, and/ or normative High Cultures and corresponding codified cultural practices at their founding moment. Accordingly, Gellner divided eighteenth century Europe into four different ‘time zones’. Time zone I (roughly the Atlantic zone, excluding Ireland and northern Spain) consists of strong and stable national cultures due to the presence of a combination of High Cultures and strong aristocratic dynasties which were the perfect means to culturally homogenize their populace in terms of manners, attitudes, ethical standards, and national identities. Time zone II (mainly Germany and northern Italy) lacked dynasties but was ‘…exceedingly well-equipped with pre-existing, codified, High Cultures’ that provided the populace with a comprehensive cultural identity, moral imperatives, and normative guidance, which matched quite well the needs of state-building mechanisms and national bureaucracies.

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Time zone III, which Gellner identified with central and Eastern Europe (Greece included), lacked both strong dynasties and High Culture. This deficiency resulted in the presence of many ‘low cultures’ which necessitated the eradication of those which were distorting the principle ‘one culture, one nation’, the construction of a nation-state, and the elevation of one low culture (language, religion, and history) to the status of the corresponding national High Culture. ‘If the eventual units were to be compact and reasonably homogenous, more had to be done: many, many people had to be either assimilated, or expelled or killed’ (Gellner 1995). Gellner’s unease primarily concerns the question whether nationalism will be civil and open or ethnic and closed. But the same factors identified by Gellner as causal to cultural homogeneity, are also at work in shaping the cultural outlook of the new national society vis-à-vis the state’s efforts to modernize the country, and thus to install some kind of cooperative structures between the nascent state apparatus and the politically inexperienced and segmented civil society. Absence of High Culture (such as the Renaissance for the northern Italian city-states, the Reformation for the Germanic peoples, and the Jesuit neo-scholastic educational system for the Catholic societies) means that the ethical codes, cultural standards, and moral imperatives of a third-zone national society necessarily are based on normative rules which are not ‘comprehensive’, in that they do not constitute a bottom-up ‘imagined’ ideal for social co-existence. Instead, the cultural imperatives and ethics of these communities are—by default—traditional, that is, parochial, particularistic, and paternalistic—a perfect match for the clientelistic and nepotistic practices and prescriptive social roles that characterize the indirect rule of medieval agrarian states, and absence of dynastic houses that radiate charisma and command respect made the foundation of modern states in this time zone weak, unstable, and lacking confidence, thus forcing the state to concede to particularistic demands coming from the periphery. Together, it meant that the new states had neither the power to enforce rational bureaucratic rules to their periphery nor the cultural capital to initiate the transformation of parochial kinship-based norms, rules, and practices to ecumenical ones to foster a modern imagined community. Most crucially, time-zone III social configurations, such as what would become Greece, did not have the time to adjust to the new rational-bureaucratic demands of modernity. Instead, modernity and the establishment of a ‘modern’ democratic state occurred simultaneously, as modernity was introduced in these societies in earnest via the

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establishment of state structures prefabricated somewhere in the West, and modern economy, in the form of capitalism, came even later, at the end of the nineteenth century, was weak, and instead of shaping civil society according to its own rationality and class structure, it became embedded in the parochial center-periphery structures that were already in place. Thus, traditional collective identities entered modernity via their subsequent consolidation in national political, economic, and cultural systems, and notions of solidarity, trust, and membership criteria were re-evaluated and crystallized in modern, yet, ambiguous forms frustrating the modernization of the state and of society thereof. Greece is such a case of a third zone country: the modern Greek state and its national social configuration since its foundation in 1830 has been characterized by a deed suspicion of the state vis-à-vis its citizens and vice versa. Culturally speaking, this condition instead of being recognized as instances of symbolic pollution, various forms of traditionalism are considered ‘normally abnormal’. McNeill describing this social condition and its structural-political effects writes: Absence of this [feudal] class in modern Greece had wide-ranging repercussions. The showing-of of wealth and power in the new kingdom was taking place in a very discourteous way. Families were ascending and descending much faster than typically in countries where the long-term established class of landlords was providing the majority of senior military officers, executives of the public administration, and intellectual leaders, and scorned the nouveau riche. In Greece almost all were nouveau riche; and the combination of established respect toward the superiors and status holders, on which the western European state systems depended on, simply did not exist… Furthermore, in Greece there was no social class equal to the prosperous middle class of Western Europe of the 19th century… There remained only a peasantry organized in closed nuclear families each one of them pursuing its own interest swopping with third parties based on deals commencing or terminated at will. For the rulers or aspiring rulers such as society reminded quicksand. Any pressure [from above] was not met with resistance [from below] but with avoidance: expectations for respect and obedience to office or rank bestowed by the king were never realized. (McNeill 1978/2017, 103—translated by the author from the Greek edition)

Today, traditionalism in Greece is expressed via two institutions of social exchange: particularism and clientelism (Koliopoulos and Veremis 2002). Particularism refers to autonomous social groups which recognize as members of the ‘imagined community’ only their members and deal

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with society at large and the state only in terms of the selective benefits they can acquire for themselves, without considering universalistic-legal routes of access to resources. These groups could be either pre-modern (based on kinship and/or locality) or modern (trade and labor unions, professional associations, party members, etc.). In all cases, these groups display a very low level of community cohesion and solidarity, antagonistic, zero-sum, relations to other groups or individuals, rejection of ecumenical rules and values, and abuse of power to achieve selective benefits rather than collective goals. Particularism results in social fragmentation and thus (a) in ‘elites’ rarely considering themselves responsible for the sober management of their own society, and (b) in wider social strata showing no commitment to a broader social or cultural order. In a nutshell, particularism results in social fragmentation, and it is an obstacle to economic development, social differentiation, and cultural innovation. Social fragmentation is itself only the most vivid institutional aspect of a deeper form of social relations, of clientelism. Patron-client relations are not the effect of under-development, and they do not characterize underdeveloped or ‘developing’ countries, as it was once believed. Instead, clientelistic relations, as the central mode of institutional arrangements, can persist despite changes in levels of economic development and the structure of political organization (Roniger 2004). Thus, in Greece, the major institutional frameworks retain some very strong clientelistic characteristics, despite the growing incorporation of local and professional or occupational settings within the sphere of influence of national, EU, and international market networks as well as a series of administrative modernizations in the EU/European peripheries framework. In fact, instead of modernization erasing clientelism, it is clientelism which is modernized in the framework of increased bureaucratization and formal rationalization. Both of them constitute modes of vertical and authoritarian incorporation of the periphery to the political center rather than inclusive and horizontal integration (Mouzelis 1995). Particularly interesting for our study is the persistent character of this paternalism that characterizes Greek political life until today in spite the fact that Greece was the most open and West-oriented society and state in the Balkans, having developed trade, educational, and cultural links with Europe long before it achieved independence in 1830. And instead of witnessing the demise of these modes of paternalism in the twentieth century, we actually witnessed their ­modernization: clientelism evolved from ‘club-of-notables’ oligarchic ­parties into broadly based clientelistic parties with a centralized party

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­ ierarchy; populism, expressed as anti-elitism and anti-institutional egalih tarianism, also evolved and was modernized under the development of broader forms of political participation to mass parties under the control of charismatic-­autocratic leaders able and willing to bypass both oligarchic clientelistic networks and formal institutional arrangements of social power. This diachronic condition turned normal social development into an abrupt series of ‘breakthroughs’ interrupted by an equally abrupt series of disasters (Kalyvas 2015). A book published last year summarizes modern Greek history in its title: Seven wars, four civil wars, and seven bankruptcies (Dertilis 2016). To this list, we could add three dictatorships, two humanitarian catastrophes, and the triple Axis occupation of the country (Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria 1941–1944) of the country that left Greek society in tatters. Such a series of historical indeterminacies constitute a valid hypothesis of interrupted modernity—that the process of modernization did not have time enough to be consolidated. Yet, all these interruptions, most of them traumatic, took place in the first three quarters of the country’s existence (1830–1974)—the current seventh bankruptcy being the only exception. In contrast, the last 40 years of the twentieth century (1974–2010) were quite uneventful, and compared to its troubled past, they were normal, since, rather than catastrophes, Greece experienced unprecedented levels of political regularity, economic prosperity, institutional openness, and collective optimism fueled by EU membership. Yet, the basic traditionalist aspects of social life, both culturally and organizationally, remained alive and in control of Greek political, economic, and social life. How can we explain such a failure of the modernization process to truly modernize the country, instilling individualistic, contractual, and rational modes of social organization? The political and economic manifestations of clientelism, such as weak internal solidarity and trust, lack of organizational differentiation, clientelistic networks, and lack of corps intermédiaires, have been exhaustively examined and expounded in many authoritative social studies (Charalambis 1985; Arambatzis et  al. 1991; Voulgaris 2001; Paparizos 2000; Pappas 2013; Kaklamanis 1998; Karamouzis 2009; Karkatsoulis 2004; Dermetzis 1990). Yet, all these studies tend to leave the causes of the persistence of clientelism unexplained, despite the deep, structural incorporation of the country, and the country’s economic, ideological, military/diplomatic, and political networks of power to the geopolitical (NATO) and geo-­ economic (EU) core of Western modernity, and despite the adaptation of individualistic and secular cultural stricto senso, motifs, behavioral patterns, and values. Clientelism has proven to be a black box, an object to fear and loath, but up to now impervious to explanation.

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3.2   Social Power and Clientelism To open the black box, we need to follow the story from the beginning, aided by our dual theoretical tool-kit: the cultural/symbolic and the social organizational/social power dimensions of social life as depicted in our Analytic Model. How far could a purely organizational explanation take us in understanding and explaining the persistence of clientelism? For starters, clientelism is a specific political network of power since it involves political parties using public resources, and particularly government offices, as a means of rewarding political supporters. Based on this observation, someone could argue that clientelism is the unavoidable outcome of ‘objective’ organizational factors, that is, the only possible outcome of competition among equally flimsy central and peripheral political networks competing for access to scarce resources. The Greek state was weak in that it lacked resources, personnel, and legitimacy to access the periphery to collect taxes, impose law and order, and recruit men for army service. As for the patrons, their power was real but of limited scope: they did not comprise institutional landed nobility since the Ottoman political system, patrimonial as it was, was not recognizing feudal rights and semi-­ autonomous regional political power. Thus, patrons, powerful as they might have been in their own locality, could only exercise informal, piecemeal, and short-term influence on the center. This made them insecure and institutionally weak when dealing with the authoritative power of the political center, and thus unpredictable in their actions and only conditionally loyal to the political center. When constitutional democracy and universal male suffrage was established in Greece through a military coup organized by these notables in 1844, they became proper patron politicians. Without a bureaucratic tradition, or a political coalition to protect bureaucratic autonomy, the public sector of Greece was ripe for poaching by these local patrons-politicians who needed availability of jobs in the public sector to mobilize mass publics. Emerging out of the Ottoman Empire, the tiny south-most fringe of the Balkans that was the Kingdom of Greece in 1844, lacked bureaucratic tradition, its people were illiterate, and the Orthodox Church, unlike the Catholic one, was not bureaucratic—and thus neither disciplinarian nor rational-organizational. Political parties made of local networks mobilized voters based on kinship and village networks of patrons and clients. Since patrons and magnates were in control of the state apparatus and state resources, they had every reason to circumscribe horizontal social n ­ etworks

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of power and make sure that the state rather than the private sector is the main source of opportunity, privilege, prestige, and resources. Under statism, urbanization in the twentieth century did not involve the same transformation of gemeinschaft into gesellschaft as in other countries, but rather the transfer of Greek-style gemeinschaft wholesale into an urban environment, with the consequent survival of traditional patron-client relationships. This pattern never seized to exist, not even after Greece entered the European Economic Community in 1979 and subsequently entered a phase of rapid modernization and, alas, of rapid de-­ industrialization. As one century earlier, the two mainstream political parties Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and New Democracy sought power through the distribution of government jobs to their supporters, while Greece’s powerful public sector unions succeeded in getting tenure for civil servants. This meant that every rotation from one party to the next did not result in the firing of the other party’s employees, but to an expansion of overall public employment. This ‘social power’ explanation could also extend to matters of economic classes, underlying the fact that the Greek bourgeoisie never have had the time to get organized and become powerful enough to challenge clientelism and its non-rational, nepotistic, features. Instead, it remained weak and unorganized for most of the first half of the twentieth century due in part to historical exigencies: most of the ethnically Greek bourgeoisie resided outside of Greece, and when they migrated to Greece, they did so as ousted refugees from Bulgaria (1919), Turkey (1922–1923), and Egypt (1950s); and those who resided in the West, primarily in London and Vienna, were too far away to affect social developments in Greece. Twenty years later, in the 1940s, the middle class was obliterated, first by the brutal triple occupation of the Axis forces (Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria—1941–1944), and then by the civil war between the UK and US-aided elected government and the Yugoslavia-aided communist insurrectionists (1944–1949). Thus, post-war Greek civil society was too weak in all respects to initiate the country’s economic and social recovery, a role that was taken by the state. A purely rational-instrumental explanation could also explain without the need to resort to cultural factors why clientelism lasted much longer than social constraints necessitated by referring to ‘path dependency’ principles; that practical concretization of clientelism combined with ‘institutionalization’ of bureaucratic cacophony were obliging new social actors to follow clientelistic practices, like it or not. According to path-­dependency

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logic, clientelism managed to remain alive and to shape structural code orientations and ground rules by becoming modernized, that is, by ‘tuning in’ to major social developments and state reconstructions the country witnessed in the following decades. Patrons usurped the state apparatus and used the state’s growing infrastructural power to become brokers and redistributors of social power, something that was achieved first by employing droves of political supporters to administrative posts and later by centralizing and controlling economic, administrative, and ideological structures, even when those structures were linked to EU institutions and to European capitalist networks. We have already mentioned the first modernization of clientelism when the king was obliged to accept the majority rule and thus the prime minister’s clientelistic networks voted in the elections. Clientelistic networks were modernized, again, in the 1950s by proclaiming their loyalty to the post-civil war nationalist regime; in the 1980s by being absorbed to the newly developed post-dictatorship mass parties and their local branches; and in the 1990s by clientelizing the political and economic structures of statist labor unions, farmers’ unions, and municipal authorities—a process that had already started in the 1980s. McNall describes clientelism put to practice as follows: To abide by the rules and let officialdom work its will unassisted seems to most Greeks a mark of stupidity or laziness. Things just do not get done that way, and everybody knows it. It is up to each man to make his mark by activating the network of friends and acquaintances he has been able to create, to get the services and permissions needed for whatever business he wishes to pursue. Anything else is simply self-defeating. Such behavior, well enough attuned to a village or small town in which everybody knows everybody else … successfully survived Athens’ tremendous growth and showed no signs of faltering in 1976. No one who has lived there for any length of time doubts that the most important transactions of everyday life occur at this personalized level, and are only registered and ratified by official, formal enactment afterwards. (McNall 1974, 79)

Clientelism then gives the impression that it could be explained in purely rational terms, either political or economic, as a series of unavoidable organizational arrangements, without the need to resort to culture as such. Following this, the adoption of Western forms of government, and the adoption of Western culture and administration patterns by the center, first brought to Greece in earnest by king Otto, were interweaved, but not

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merged, with the preexisting clientelistic networks of social power, to create a schizophrenic model of social organization characterized by (a) a center which tended to avoid the implementation of formal authority, (b) a bureaucracy that could not penetrate the periphery and could not control the lower levels of administration, (c) by a tendency to interpret the law flexibly to suit the interests of various clientelistic social groups, (d) by the control of the periphery through overlapping and conflicting agencies and regulations, and (e) by the weak impingement of the periphery, mostly through the extractive policies of military recruiting and taxation. The interweaving, but not the blending, of the two modes of social organization, created a fundamental contradiction between formal-typical (bureaucratic) and a combination of substantive and instrumental rationality in the form of amoral familism we examined in the previous chapter—a contradiction made worse by civil suspicion and hostility. Amoral familism by and large remained unchecked and short-sighted, unattached to rational-institutional regulation of interest, but empowered—since it was linked to the political center, if only in principle. Unbounded practical rationality resulted in the emergence of cut-throat antagonistic political networks, based in the periphery, competing for selective benefits and for the appropriation of scarce collective resources in the center. In ethnographic terms, this primary tension is responsible for a bipolar relationship, with one of the two poles becoming unstable and split ad infinitum. Herzfeld, reflecting on his own ethnographic research in Greece in the 1970s and 1980s writes: In Greece, moreover, the same opposition appears as a contrast between centralized, unified government (the sublimation of the individual) on the one hand, and segmentary social relations (the relativization of self-interest) on the other. These are the disemic poles: a rigidly centralized and ‘European’ bureaucratic system of law and government on the one side, a pervasively exotic segmentary idiom for the expression of social relations on the other. Each level of this segmentary system reveals a further disemic tension between the unities of self-display to those one does not ‘know’ (kseni) on the one hand, and the knowledge of further internal subdivision that one shares with insiders (dhiki [mas]) on the other. (Herzfeld 1987, 161)

These networks were headed by free-lance politicians and their close associates in rural areas (e.g., lawyers, wealthy farmers) that were shifting their party allegiance according to the selective benefits they were receiving for themselves and their following by various political parties. Thus,

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patrons-turned-to-politicians, and politicians-turned-to-patrons, controlled the votes of the peasants in exchange for particularistic access to state resources, such as state jobs, monopolies, and infrastructural works. State bureaucracy became infiltrated by political clientelistic networks made of top political leaders who could bypass the bewildering maze of formal administration and implement or stop particular projects from being implemented. Thus, explanations that stress vested interests and path dependency principles give the impression that they are adequate explanantia of persistent clientelism. In fact, they become so only by turning description to explanation, assuming, implicitly, that this course of events was the only possibility. In our case, they ‘explain’ clientelism by describing how traditional forms of authority and power serve the interests of the social groups and classes that are involved in client-patron transactions at the expense of the outsiders who, being organizationally outflanked, are obliged, or forced, to accept the arrangements, hoping to be included in these networks somewhere in future time, and/or come to believe that client-­ patron relations constitute a normal social condition. And ‘accept’ and ‘hoping’ are explained as the ideological hegemony of the ruling patron class, which makes client-patron relations appear as inevitable and natural. Yet, in the Greek case, the given indeterminacy of social structures, their relative openness and flexibility, the fluidity of social strata and classes, and the instability of the political system due to historical upheavals and exigencies provided outsiders with ample opportunities to shift the system from clientelistic to contractual modes of social interaction, as it happened, for example, in America, where clientelism was eradicated at the beginning of the twentieth century as a consequence of rapid economic development and pressure exerted by various public advocates of meritocracy (Shefter 1994). Alas, this did not happen in Greece. In fact, clientelism was never challenged, either practically or ideologically. Even when statism was not in full control of social organization and of collective resources, as, for example, immediately after the civil war when the Marshall Plan was administered exclusively by the American side for fear of local corruption, and mostly during EU membership, clientelism remained hegemonic. To explicate such a persistence of patron-client relations under a variety of historical circumstances, irrespective of amount and quality of resources available for mobilization, and irrespective of the technical ability of the bureaucratic center to penetrate the periphery administratively, we need to

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explain the diachronic inability of the center to impose its own distinctive, legal, authority both to its own political apparatus and to the periphery, and we need to explain the inability of peripheral, non-clientelistic, social networks to impose rational-meritocratic code orientations and ground rules to the political center. Why did no social carrier from below or from above ever make its public appearance demanding state modernization? And why was it not possible for state bureaucracy, or industrialization cum educational expansion to infuse pre-modern attitudes with their own rational logic? Economic and political factors are unable to provide us with a full explanation, since clientelism persisted even when economic and political conditions changed radically and provided opportunities for outsiders to commence structural changes which were left to pass. Therefore, we need to shift our attention from strictly organizational factors of interest to cultural factors of meaning and symbol, such as moral imperatives, collective identity, and the symbolic orientations of the Greek social configuration—a configuration which has retained some crucial cultural traits throughout its existence—despite momentous historical rearrangements and societal reorganizations.

3.3   Culture and Generalized Clientelism Employing Eisenstadt’s scheme of cultural-organizational features that characterize clientelistic societies (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1984), we can identify the following points as relevant to the Greek case: first, a key feature of the major Greek social groups is their low degree of internal solidarity, symbolic autonomy, and organizational autonomy, irrespective of their centrality, and of their power. This internal weakness does not allow them to autonomously access the major collective resources needed to implement their goals and to control their own resources. Lacking formal or institutional credentials and status, the notables, the merchants, or the peasantry, were, as they still are, ad hoc social strata organized around issues of interest. It was these interests, rather than ideological principles and symbols of political autonomy and worth, and of identification of a social strata with the national interest, which determined the kind of mobilization, the organization, and the pressure that they could apply to the center. In all cases, the interest is served only indirectly: by a successful appeal to the political center rather than by directly controlling the center and its resources.

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Second, there are few symbolic and institutional differences between center and periphery, other than ecological, demographic, and of symbolic articulation. For this reason, the center does not possess any charisma that would distinguish it from its periphery, allowing the former to impose through its prestige its own authority to the latter. Athens, before becoming the capital city of Greece, was an insignificant village, the Parthenon an imposing remnant of a temple but not a living ceremonial center, and the administrators and state functionaries where foreigners and outsiders possessing little cultural capital. The center could maintain its prestige only by replicating the periphery in its ideal-type form (in parades, commemorations, ceremonies), and by insisting of representing and upholding the purity of the periphery in classic Herderian fashion. The only time the center tried to penetrate the periphery in a charismatic way was by first adopting for itself, and then by demanding the periphery also to adopt the artificial ‘purist’ language (katharevousa, a mixture of classical and demotic languages). The inconclusiveness of this endeavor, which led to the schizophrenic situation of the administrative apparatus, the press and the literati using the purist language, and the hoi polloi speaking the demotic language, shows the weakness of the center, symbolically as well as organizationally, to truly penetrate the periphery even when it monopolized discursive literature. As a result, the resources and symbols of the center are not structured and organized through autonomous sources of prestige, but embedded in the power domains of the periphery and structured according to principles of the periphery. Third, the services, the center provides its periphery with (law and order, public works, provision of some distributive goods), are implemented through existing local social networks and through neo-­ patrimonial bureaucratic centers in control of the provision of services to the population. Thus, the intersections of the flow of resources between the center and the periphery are controlled mostly by clientelistic networks of local notables and state bureaucrats who operate in traditional rather than legal-bureaucratic frameworks. Forth, and related to the above, is the low level of corporate, symbolic, and organizational autonomy of all social strata of the periphery. These run parallel to lack of collective consciousness and self-identity, based on firm symbols of kinship, territoriality, class, or strata. While identity is firmly located in the periphery, this very identity is not based on firm organizational ground: kinship is indeed at the heart of self- and organizational identity; yet, kinship follows the organizational pattern of the nuclear and

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not of the extended family. Thus, kinship networks remain weak and in need of a patron to exchange resources and to have access to the center. More generally, the periphery does not have the resources, material or symbolic, to control access to outside resources, or to institutionally influence the center either with respect to policy-making or allocation of resources. Fifth, the autonomous middle sectors, the corps intermédiaires, such as professional associations, are weak and dependent on the center for the acquisition of status, prestige, and access to selective benefits and collective resources. Thus, while the system of rank and hierarchy is elaborated and rewarding, no strata with countrywide state consciousness ever arose; instead, these units tend toward status segregation with little autonomous political orientation. They are characterized by narrow status consciousness, combined with a strong tendency to segregation, and organized as political factions for privileged access to specific and concrete resources. Sixth, the ontological and cosmological orientation of the Greek religion (more in Chap. 4) is characterized by a combination of a conception of tension between the ‘higher’ transcendental and the mundane order, with the absence of any sense of necessity to overcome these tensions through some in-worldly activity (other than acts of philanthropy) oriented toward the reshaping of the social and political order. Instead, there is strong emphasis on images of protection and of saints-mediators who solve problems and obstacles in miraculous ways without the believer having to act in methodical ways. Last, and closely related to the previous point, the cultural and social order is perceived as given; the perception of active, intentional, and autonomous participation of any of the social groups in developing new modes of social interaction, of producing novel types of resources, as well as of ‘taking its destiny to its hands’ is weak, and thus remains an exception rather than the rule. Concomitant to this is that the major social groups do not perceive themselves as actively responsible for the shaping of the country or the state. Thus, the presence of hegemonic social groups does not guarantee the presence of ‘elites’, that is, members of the upper class who feel obliged to be responsible for the fate of the nation. As explained in Chap. 1, all the features mentioned earlier (i.e., trust, legitimation, collective identity, code orientations, and ground rules) are discourses intertwined with social organization. In the particular forms described earlier, they do not constitute cultural gloss; rather, they constitute organizational factors, in that they shape the organizational contours

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of the social division of labor altogether. First, as they tend to produce limited social trust, not easily transferred to broader or different settings, they restrict organizational potential even when such organizational forms are ‘functionally’ desirable. Second, as they tend to produce a condition whereas no social actor enjoys autonomous, ‘corporate’ legitimation of securing status and resources, they limit the productive scope of such organizations arbitrarily, restricting the productive capacity of the whole process for the benefit of no one. Third, as these characteristics, and especially so the religious one, result in a passive definition of identity, no novel social structuration nor social development takes place, even though, as comparable cases suggest, such structuration process is possible (e.g., Ireland and the US, see later). And fourth, since there are no corporate institutions that would impose ground rules and ethical contact to institutional social interaction, that is, specific rights, obligations, and duties in the context of specific organizational settings, and specific codifications of social interaction, individual actors are obliged to provide for themselves, thus the proliferation of self-centered initiatives of anarchic individualism. All the above-mentioned factors indicate not the domination of some social organizations at the expense of some others, but a generalized and widespread inability for organizational institutionalization as such, other than patron-client networks, as well as beyond amoral familism, irrespective of its social source, its material and immaterial resources, its structure, or its goals. Interestingly enough, the issue involves not only discipline and control, as identified in the previous chapter, but matters of meaning as well. It suggests that code orientations, as well as the criteria of membership, the rules of distributive justice and equity, the rules for the distribution of rights and obligations, and the definition of collective goals and of collective activity cannot be grounded in tangible, goal-specific, and formal organizational endeavors. And it also suggests that, somehow, meaning does not allow the development of symbols, performativity, and discourses able to bring together and to organize imagined communities in long-term intensive organizational networks. Inability of the state to impose formal rationality to its administrative apparatus and structures prohibits the state, as the ‘centralized legal authority’, from becoming an autonomous actor, diffusing formal rationality principles to civil society, and mistrust, heteronomy, and passivity turn client-patron relations to a generalized mode of social interaction and place it in the heart of civil society. A static cultural orientation makes clientelism the mode by which both the state and ‘civil’ society produce, control, and distribute collective

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resources and selective benefits. They generate zero-sum competitions for access to and control of the flow of resources which are considered to be fixed, given, and eternal. Our analysis suggests that the consolidation of clientelism as an ‘organic’ part of Greece’s social division of labor is more than a relic of the past, and it entails more than a distortion of an otherwise steady process of modernization. Rather, it is a symptom of a comprehensive social configuration whose contours are radically different from those of non-clientelistic societies. The seven factors that we have highlighted as both foundational and diachronic features of the hegemonic Greek social configuration do not just make the process of modernization more idiosyncratic or difficult; instead, they have established a distinctive modernization model characterized by ‘boom and bust’ cycles, made of definite, albeit short periods, of modernization, followed by critical systemic break-downs. The reason for the ‘bust phase’ being as prominent as the ‘boom phase’ is that the systemic presence of clientelism, social distrust, zero-sum competition, insecurity, and sectorial compartmentalization very quickly block and neutralize the benefits of modernizing institutional openness and symbolic inclusion commenced by charismatic leaders generate (e.g., Trikoupis, Venizelos, Karamanlis, Simitis). Since all the earlier-mentioned social arrangements show strong tendencies toward institutional closeness and free-riding behavior, the wide ‘distributional coalitions’, as analyzed by Olson (1982), formed during the modernization phase soon become parasitic or reactionary, to the detriment of the process itself. This cycle gives the impression of a perpetual Manichean struggle of light and darkness, of progressive and regressive political and social forces fighting for the soul of the country, as the famous and highly influential Diamandouros’ scheme of ‘modernization vs. underdog’ cultures argues (Diamandouros 1993, 1994, 2000). Our analysis suggests otherwise: Diamandouros’ progress versus reaction scheme actually refers to idealistic values and political promulgations rather than to concrete and embedded to the lifeworld culture. As such, it is more a contribution to analytic clarity rather than a schematic depiction of actual, historical, or social forces, or actual cultural and political camps. Instead, social development in Greece is a matter of the pursuit of power (as anywhere else), under these specific ‘clientelistic’, neo-­ patrimonial, and structural conditions and symbolic configurations. This means that the approach of an average social actor toward major issues of the day, issues that an external observer would be classified as ‘­ progressive’,

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‘reactionary’, or ‘regressive’ is determined not by a predisposition toward the issue in principle, but opportunistically, that is, by immediate interest. In effect, weak collective consciousness combined with low sectorial autonomy does not allow for progressive grand alliances and strategic planning taking place. Thus, irreversible progressive reforms such as the British Reform Act of 1832, the American Great Society reforms of 1964, the Finnish Educational Reform Act of 1968, or the Irish Tallaght Strategy Act of 1987, that is, of major reconstructions of the state, of polity re-­ orientation, and ideological modernization which enjoy the consent of both the absolute majority of the political elite, and of civil society, in the case of Greece have not been possible. Rather, whether a political program in Greece will be modernizing or reactive is a matter of circumstances— more the unintended consequence of immediate concerns such as professional demands, war aims, consolidation of party hegemony, reaction to major disasters, and satisfaction of sectorial demands rather than of ‘social carriers’ and elites with societal aspirations and visions of generalized modernization.

3.4   America and Ireland: Two Examples of Limited Clientelism The absence of modernizing social carriers in Greece invites comparative examination with actual cases wherein even though clientelism was/is a mode of organizing political networks of power, certain social carriers in conjunction with anti-clientelistic code orientations and constitutive goods prevented clientelism from becoming a generalized mode of social interaction. Two cases prove the point in a comparative perspective—the US and the Republic of Ireland. As in Greece, the US developed a modern polity based on the ideals of political equality, participation, and equal access of the citizens to the centers of power. And as in Greece, in the US, democracy arrived before the establishment of the modern state and its bureaucratic structures. This made American society prone to political patronage: when in the 1820s and 1830s the franchise expanded to almost universal White male suffrage, the political parties responded by mobilizing these new masses of voters clientelistically, since it was the most efficient, resourceful, and thus rational way to mobilize relatively poor and illiterate voters. Such voters tended to care less about programmatic policies and ideologies than an immediate

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personal benefit, like a job. This practice became a proper political ‘culture’ when it was connected to the process of rapid urbanization and the economic inequalities existing in the cities, and it was particularly reinforced during the massive foreign immigration to the US from the 1840s to the 1920s which turned the cities into disorderly metropolitan centers without any integrative political, economic, and social mechanisms— mechanisms that the traditional political networks of power, the ‘gentry’, was unable, or unwilling, to develop. Under these conditions, the ‘political boss’ and his ‘political machine’ emerged as a way to ‘get things done’, helping the newcomers (e.g., jobs, crime control, neighborhood services, settling disputes, obtain bail in criminal courts) in return for votes he had promised to a proper politician. Thus, a clientelistic social network emerged, made of dislocated migrants, political bosses, and the party, held together by short-term clientelistic bargaining to mobilize votes and to gain support in a system where electoral success was the only means for obtaining control of government resources and sources of employment and social services. For the remaining of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century, American politics was organized around the ability of the two competing parties to hand out government jobs through these political machines. Yet, this political culture withered away due of modernization: the rapid industrialization of the country produced new middle-­class strata like businessmen and professionals, who being able to be organized in autonomous horizontal networks, escaped from, and opposed, the logic of clientelism. As for the classes which were the subject of the political machine, they were happy to distance themselves from it, when upward mobility and social integration made access to these bosses unnecessary. These boss-client relations were limited to political and economic considerations and had little unconditionality built into them. In fact, the success of the relationship diminished the need for the relationship to exist at all, since the supply of a resource by the boss made the client less dependent on him. In addition, industrialization and modernization also produced urban movements, civil associations, and professional and political circles, that is, active sectors of ‘public opinion,’ that, united in a Progressive Movement, advocated civil service reform and merit-based bureaucracy, closely akin to the premises of equality, and of participation in, and universalistic access to markets and centers of power in American society. Accordingly, the political boss and his political machine were discredited as polluting the ideals

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of Protestantism and the City Upon the Hill. Under this dual pincher move, and the later, 1940s, nation-wide development of industrial unions and state-led social services, clientelism was eventually eradicated on both federal and municipal levels in the 1950s. On the other hand, Ireland escaped generalized clientelism even though clientelistic pressures and practices have been endemic to the Irish political system since the Irish independence in 1922. One fundamental reason for the persistence of clientelism is that there is tradition of a weak identification by civil society with the political center. Ireland, before becoming independent in 1922, was governed from London, and the massive demographic imbalance meant that the center was not deeply attuned to local needs, which bred alienation and an amoral relationship with the center. This persisted after independence, influenced further by the trauma of the Irish Civil War, which made the Dublin government not fully accepted by many, and the capital city not exactly charismatic. For example, clientelism characterized local politics—captured in idiomatic expressions such as ‘parish pump politics’ (political action that is personal, local, and not attuned to broader collective interests) and in archetypal figures such as ‘cute hoors’ (patrons who can subvert rational bureaucratic logic), and acts such as ‘strokes’ (successful clientelistic acts)—and it is quite common appointments to state positions to be clientelistic (but not to the civil service which is always merit based). And more recently, local politics became a hotbed of clientelism in the early Celtic Tiger era through local politicians’ power to zone land for development. These clientelistic relationships are constantly reproduced and modernized, as in Greece, as they are anchored to the central political system of proportional representation which makes Members of Parliament acutely concerned with local issues; indeed, most of their role is mediating between voters. Even today, various surveys indicate that Irish voters believe political brokers are necessary, and the Irish party and electoral system encourage politicians to compete with each other in providing it. Irish citizens invariously believe that they have a claim on a politician’s services, and voters expect close personal contact with their politicians. From the citizens’ point of view, the task of a politician is to be available to provide services and to be seen as available. On the other hand, politicians hope through such activities to obtain the electoral support needed to stay ahead of party rivals, and to create personal loyalties, which can be useful in both the party and community arenas.

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Yet, widespread as this social network of power is, patron-client relations have been isolated within certain areas of political life and confined to micro-management of allocation of economic and political resources. Confinement has been possible due to the ability of the center to penetrate the periphery, and to impose its bureaucratic logic thereof. This ability did not emerge out of ‘Irish culture’ at large. Instead, it was imposed by specific social carriers and charismatic social strata that promulgated and imposed a rational-formal political program and rules of contact. This set of formal-rational rules is not meaningless. Instead, it is symbolically informed by a combination of secular and religious moral overtones of substantive rationality: that a proper, modern, state, whose citizens can be proud of, needs to be rational, that is, frugal, far-sighted, and disciplined; and that bureaucracy inspires and cultivates an ethical way of life. The main social carrier to impose this ethical way of life was the strong and institutionally autonomous bureaucracy that the British colonizers left behind them when they withdrew from the southern part of the island in 1922. Thus, despite the presence of populist social networks and parties (e.g., Fianna Fail) and pressure from the periphery, the authority, the prestige, and the formal autonomy of the Irish bureaucracy prevented clientelism becoming institutionalized. This bureaucratic apparatus was not isolated. Instead, it was supported by (a) a political coalition led by the more upper class and paternalistic Fine Gael party; (b) the Cabinet system of government which facilitated strong central leadership, insulated from populist pressures; (c) the Catholic Church which had already installed in the Irish political culture the value of bureaucratic rationalism (the Catholic Church being bureaucratic par excellence); and (d) the charismatic-ascetic nature of the first post-independence political generation (e.g., Éamon de Valera) who were fundamentally hostile to the grubbiness of money. They saw themselves as soldiers, and so morally purer, and were strongly influenced by an eschatology—a rebellious group whose goal was to eliminate centuries of suffering and bigotry. Indeed, this first generation of ascetic politicians shattered local politics at independence, as they were acutely concerned about their clientelistic nature, forcing them to adopt a much-­attenuated form. Crucially, the Irish Catholic Church does not follow the Jesuit tradition (characteristic of the southern European Catholicism) but the more ‘Calvinistic’ version of Jansenism, which survived its ­condemnation by the pope (early eighteenth century) in the form of informal practices stressing in-worldly asceticism (Garvin 2005).1 1

 Also John O’Brien, personal communication.

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Together, the American and the Irish example suggest the following: social networks of power (such as universal suffrage, high levels of inequality, absence of pre-democratic bureaucratic structures, non-charismatic center) do play a significant role.2 Yet, this flexibility does not apply to matters of constitutive goods and of moral imperatives. While Protestantism and Catholicism, in the abstract, are quite different religions, especially so in their ‘theology of social organization’ (individualistic-competitive vs. hierarchical-collectivist), both American sectarian Protestantism and Irish Catholicism stress the moral worth of discipline and methodical in-worldly quest for salvation. In both cases, in-worldly, ascetic, and disciplinarian constitutive goods manifested themselves not only as diffused and internalized cultural orientations but also as intentional political discourses of specific social carriers. These dominant political networks of power, acting as social carriers, intentionally manipulated these pre-existing cultural orientations and joined hands with the corresponding ideological networks to advance their own worldview promulgated in universalistic terms. In other words, the ideological manipulation of these constitutive goods, self-­ serving as it might have been, was not egoistic, and thus it should not be understood as cases of Gramscian instrumental ideological hegemony. Instead, they constituted moral visions for a community in danger of being corrupted by particularistic and manipulating clientelism, and they promulgated meritocracy as a code orientation and a valid canon for everyone—even of themselves, as facilitator of collective benefits. In this respect, both the Irish bureaucratic-political-church apparatus and the new American middle classes of evangelicals spoke on behalf of society at large, arguing for the institutionalization of moral imperatives they already adhered to, in an original configuration. As the two cases suggest, anti-particularistic, civil, constitutive goods, when activated in the form of ideology by ideological networks of power, become formidable means of prohibiting clientelism from becoming a morally valid canon, and thus a generalized mode of social interaction. In Protestant US, clientelism operated for over a century as a mutual benefit, short-term, contractual arrangement with no generalized obligations 2  Interestingly enough, this combination of detrimental factors is not fixed and absolute, but instead, the absence of one factor could be neutralized by the presence of another. Thus, democracy-before-bureaucracy, as is the American case, was neutralized by widespread economic development; local interests, as in the case of Ireland, are kept at bay by an autonomous bureaucracy. Thus, a society could arrive to meritocracy, following various organizational paths.

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bestowed on to it. In Catholic Ireland, clientelism operates as a long-term, loose bond between peripheral rural communities and center-stage politicians, but it remains of limited range and applicability. In both cases, clientelism was/is justified as a political means, as an instrument, to access scarce resources, but it is not seen as a moral, meaningful way to organize social life in general, and to turn it to a code orientation, applicable to all kinds of social interaction. The difference between functional-limited and cultural-generalized clientelism is decisive in matters of social development; thus, between the US and Ireland on the one hand, and Greece on the other. Limited clientelism is functional, and in a sense morally sound to the eye of the beholder, in that it allows ‘the little people’ to have some access to centrally controlled resources otherwise inaccessible. But the clientele does not consider this access, or this interaction, to be the basis for an ethical life, since it goes against its moral principles and symbolic classifications, and societal code orientations; thus, they either takes clientelistic transactions to be one of the many types of short-term contractual exchanges, or to be unethical and thus withdraw from such transactions when economic and political developments allow such exit. In contrast, generalized clientelism is the dominant code orientation, and the dominant way to organize basic social interaction, since it falls in line with the basic ontological and cosmological premises of the respected society. Indeed, it is considered to be ethical and the basic rule to construct collective identities, and to evaluate solidarity, trust, and membership. Yet, its ethics are self-defeating and unsustainable: clientelism is considered ethical when the actor benefits from it, and unethical when someone else does so at his expense. Thus, clientelism is a twisted form of ethics. Instead of forming sound collective identities, it undermines any kind of solidarity, trust, and membership above immediate kinship. Symbolic egalitarianism and the democratic principles upon which the Greek collective conscience is built on, in principle, goes against patron-­ client relationships. In Herzfeld’s words: Consider, for example, the relationship between powerful political patrons and humble Sarakatsan shepherds (Campbell 1964). Relations of mutual obligation (ipochreosi or filotimo) bind host and guest. What they have to offer each other may be very different: votes on the one side, a degree of security and protection on the other. But the patron needs the shepherd’s votes as much as the shepherd needs the patron’s good offices, and both

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parties know this. The ideologies of formal social symmetry and moral obligation cloak the pragmatics of often severe inequality and mutual need, respectively. Mutual courtesy marks the clear understanding that loyalty gets protection, and protection loyalty. (Herzfeld 1993, 175)

Unequal social exchange establishes a tension deep inside the meaning of the transaction, a tension of grave consequences to social cohesion and political normality, undermining any kind of truly moral community. As such, generalized clientelism is a hindrance to social development and differentiation altogether and, in the long run, detrimental even to the beneficiaries themselves.3 Furthermore, as both cases suggest, social carriers are not merely the way culture manifests itself in the world; nor are they purely political networks to forcefully impose their will arbitrarily. Rather, the respective social carriers, or social networks in Mann’s terminology, specified a new derivative good, ‘meritocracy’, which emerged out of, but was not identical to in-worldly, methodical-rational, and disciplinarian ethics. In other words, both social carriers used a pre-existing ontological principle to justify a modern ideology, to promulgate a specific code orientation, and to specify corresponding ground rules and ethical contact accordingly. This brief comparative examination of the US and Ireland clarifies two points: first, that meritocracy and clientelism are political matters of institutional ground rules, which are based on the moral principles of methodical-­rational and in-worldly social action, irrespective of whether these orientations are embedded in individualist or collectivist organizational frameworks. In other words, Greek ‘collectivism’ which we explored in Chap. 2 could not be the source of Greek clientelism, at least not its main source. Constitutive goods, which lie above and beyond collective social organization, and amoral familism, seem to be crucial in this respect. Second, and closely related to the above, of the seven cultural-­ organizational features of Greek clientelism, the last two are of crucial importance in consolidating patron-client relationship as a generalized mode of social organization: the absence of in-worldly activity as a means to overcome the tension between the transcendental and the mundane order, and the perception of the social order as given, crystallized both in  discourses as well as in rituals, ceremonies, and performances, allow 3  All of the examples of clientelism derive from rural Greece. Unfortunately, no anthropological or ethnographic studies on urban clientelism exist to my knowledge.

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c­ lientelism to appear as justifiably immoral, and thus as regretfully normal. These two features are not organizational structures with cultural overtones, as the rest of them, but, rather, they are symbolic patterns of institutional significance. They constitute cosmological and ontological principles that could not be easily detected in a structural analysis of political institutions even though they are quintessentially political (transactions between party and voters, and between state and citizens), and not economic. They are not easily detectable, since no direct observation of them is possible; only indirectly we can observe their influence: by the ways they shape code orientations and ground rules to encourage and reward passivity rather than action, indifference rather than innovation, immediacy rather than long-term planning, certainty rather than challenge, similarity rather than differentiation, and conformity rather than originality. Herzfeld’s ethnographic observations of rural Greece are suggestive: The play of fate (mira, riziko) and character (fisiko; cf. fisi, ‘nature’ [Classical Greek physis]) in everyday Greek discourse resembles attributions of rule and strategy in the anthropological literature. My successes are the result of my character (fisiko) and my failures simply the effect of malign fate (riziko), while your (i.e. another’s) successes are attributable to a benevolent fate and your failures to ineradicable flaws in your character—recall the similar relativity according to which the eghoismos of others is bad, one’s own morally justifiable and good. In the same socio-logic, their rules are passively and unthinkingly accepted, while our strategies represent the quintessentially European virtue of individualism. (Herzfeld 1987, 140)

In the above quotation, passivity and thus fate, manifests itself not as an attribute of the person (that would be unacceptable to the esteem of a modern self) but as a general condition characterizing everyone else, that is, characterizing the social milieu. Contrary to this general condition, the person attributes its successes to its symbolic opposite, which, in his symbolic classification, is the ‘natural features’ of the self (fisiko) which manage to defy malign fate (riziko). In this symbolic classification, the person juxtaposes fisiko to riziko, meaning that his symbolic classifications remain anchored to fatalism, even though he considers himself as struggling against this ontological predicament. This is crucial to the way he ­organizes his action through his personal code orientation: he does so by depending on spontaneity and gut-feeling (fisiko) rather than on method—as he would, if his code orientations were structured around

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secular ontological principles of predictability and calculative rationality; thus, the proverbial practice of the opportunistic ‘grabbing’ of profit (arpahti) without approaching the situation methodically and rationally. Interestingly enough, then, opportunism and the perception of society as a hostile and immoral environment up for grabs, emanates from an ontology of passivity, conformity, and indifference to innovation and creativity. The same holds true, of course, for political systems and governments which spend borrowed money today, without thinking of tomorrow (see Fig. 3.1 below).

Sharp distinction between out-worldly purity vs. in-worldly pollution Cultural and social order perceived as given

Access to fixed, given and limited resources

Protection-loyalty performativity modeled on saints-mediators

Social exchanges of patron-client of weak institutional loyalties

Cut-throat antagonistic networks Zero-sum games

Bureaucracy as a means to facilitate patronclient transactions

Fig. 3.1  Clientelism

Friend-enemy Family-stranger

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3.5   Conclusions Returning to the question we asked in the beginning of the chapter, the answer is that familism and anarchic individualism on the one hand, and generalized clientelism/patronage on the other, are complementary. They are so because the symbolic classification of a-moral familism (i.e., familial purity vs. worldly pollution, egoistic interest vs. social trust, interpersonal vs. institutional procedures, friend vs. stranger/foe) is compatible with the structural features of clientelism (i.e., interpersonal vs. institutional procedures, interest vs. social trust, exclusive vs. inclusive relations, immediate gratification vs. long-term investment). This correspondence minimizes the differences between the customary-familiar and the exclusive-­ preferential behavior, and it reduces the psychological premiums of uncivil behavior. This compatibility legitimizes exclusive and preferential relations, encourages social fragmentation and predatory behavior, and turns clientelism to a generalized mode of social interaction. As for our synoptic comparative analysis of clientelism in the US and Ireland, it suggests that while scarcity of, and competition for, resources (i.e., contingent conditions of the social networks of power) create and maintain limited clientelism, generalized clientelism is produced when political competition is combined with other-worldly quest for salvation, and static ontological and cosmological visions, religious or secular as these might be. And since our analysis of amoral familism has shown that the latter is not amoral at all, it is moralized by the same other-worldly quest for salvation and static ontological and cosmological visions, it follows that Greek clientelism and Greek amoral familism are related to each other by selective affinity, that is, through common signifiers which bind together different symbolic classifications in long chains of meaning which defies the distinctions between the private and the public domain, as well as between micro and macro structures. This ‘structuration’ of meaning that joins morality and interest brings us back to Weber’s substantive rationality. Being constitutive goods, static ontological-cosmological visions belong to the framework of religious or religious-like existential stance and dominant immaginaire of the ultimate meaning of life. Thus, we need to inquire into to the religious and the secular sources of the self in an effort to identify these elements that encourage fragmented and compartmentalized social orders. In the next chapter, we examine the religious sources of the Greek self. We then turn to the secular sources of the Greek self in Chap. 5 in the framework of Greek civil religion.

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In both chapters, the question remains the same: how does other-­ worldly quest for salvation, and static ontological and cosmological visions, entrench the self in compartmentalized social orders? And what kind of modern worldviews and modern constitutive goods emerge out of such visions?

Bibliography Arambatzis, Evangelos, Nikolaos Ventouris, and Thanos Veremis, eds. 1991. Liberalism in Greece [Ο φιλελευθερισμός στην Ελλάδα]. Athens: Vivliopolion tis Estia. Campbell, John. 1964. Honour, Family and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community. Oxford: Clarendon. Charalambis, Dimitris. 1985. The Army and Political Power  – the Structure of Political Power in Post Civil-War Greece [Στρατός και Πολιτική Εξουσία - η δομή της πολιτικής εξουσίας στη μετεμφυλιακή Ελλάδα]. Athens: Exantas. Dermetzis, Nikos. 1990. The Greek Political Culture in the 1980s. [Η Ελληνική πολιτική κουλτούρα τη δεκαετία του ’80]. In Elections and Parties in the 1980s [Εκλογές και κόμματα στη δεκαετία του 1980], ed. Christos Lirintzis and Ilias Nikolakopoulos. Athens: Themelio. Dertilis, Giorgos. 2016. Seven Wars, Four Civil Wars, Seven Bankruptcies 1821–2016 [Επτά πόλεμοι, τέσσερις εμφύλιοι, επτά πτωχεύσεις, 1821–2016]. Athens: Polis. Diamandouros, Nikos. 1993. Politics and Culture in Greece, 1974–1991. An Interpretation. In Greece 1981–1989 – The Populist Decade, ed. Richard Clogg, 1–25. New York: St Martin’s Press. ———. 1994. Cultural Dualism and Political Change in Postauthoritarian Greece. Working Paper 1994/50, Instituto Juan March de Estudios e Investigations, Madrid. ———. 2000. Cultural Dualism and Political Change in Metapolitefsis Greece [Πολιτισμικός δυισμός και πολιτική αλλαγή στην Ελλάδα της μεταπολίτευσης]. Athens: Alexandria. Eisenstadt, Shmuel, and Louis Roniger. 1984. Patrons, Clients and Friends  – Interpersonal Relations and the Structure of Trust in Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garvin, Tom. 2005. The Evolution of Irish Nationalist Politics: Irish Parties and Irish Politics from the 18th Century to Modern Times. London: Gill & Macmillan Ltd. Gellner, Ernest. 1995. The Importance of Being Modular. In Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison, ed. John Hall, 32–56. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1997. Nationalism. New York: New York University Press.

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Herzfeld, Michael. 1987. Anthropology Through the Looking Glass. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1993. The Social Production of Indifference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kaklamanis, Gerasimos. 1998. Analysis of the Modern Greece Civil Ideology [Ανάλυση της Νεοελληνικής αστικής ιδεολογίας]. Athens: Roes. Kalyvas, Stathis. 2015. Disasters and Triumphs: The 7 Cycles of Modern Greek History. Athens: Papadopoulos. Karamouzis, Polykarpos. 2009. Religion and Dominant Ideology in Modern Greek Society [Θρησκεία και κυρίαρχη ιδεολογία στη νεοελληνική κοινωνία]. Science and Society [Επιστήμη και Κοινωνία] 21: 83–102. https://doi. org/10.12681/sas.453. Karkatsoulis, Panagiotis. 2004. The State in Transition [Το Κράτος σε Μετάβαση]. Athens: Sideris. Koliopoulos, John S., and Thanos M. Veremis. 2002. Greece: The Modern Sequel, from 1831 to the Present. New York: NYU Press. McNall, Scott. 1974. The Greek Peasant. Washington, DC: American Sociological Association. McNeill, William. 1978. The Metamorphosis of Greece Since World War II. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mouzelis, Nikos. 1995. Modernity, Late Development and Civil Society. In Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison, ed. John Hall, 224–250. Cambridge: Polity Press. Olson, Mancur. 1982. The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities. New Haven: Yale University Press. Paparizos, Antonis. 2000. Enlightenment, Religion, and Tradition in Modern Greek Society. In Greek Political Culture Today [“Διαφωτισμός, Θρησκεία και Παράδοση στη Σύγχρονη Ελληνική Κοινωνία” στο Η Ελληνική Πολιτική Κουλτούρα Σήμερα], ed. Nikos Demertzis, 97–108. Athens: Odysseas. Pappas, Takis. 2013. Why Greece Failed. Journal of Democracy 24 (2): 31–45. Roniger, Luis. 2004. Political Clientelism, Democracy, and Market Economy. Comparative Politics 36 (3): 353–375. Shefter, Martin. 1994. Political Parties and the State; The American Historical Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Voulgaris, Yiannis. 2001. Greece during the Metapolitefsis 1974–1990 [Η Ελλάδα της μεταπολίτευσης 1974–1990]. Athens: Themelio.

CHAPTER 4

Religion and Collective Representations of Communitas

Contents

4.1  T  emporal Continuity of Symbolic Classifications 4.2  Symbolic Classifications and the Theory of Multiple Modernities 4.3  The Greek Orthodox Ontology in a Weberian Framework of Analysis 4.4  Orthodox Cosmology 4.5  The Greek Orthodox Cognitive Mode 4.6  The Icon 4.7  Ceremonies and Rituals 4.8  Greek Orthodox Effects on In-Worldly Constitutive Goods 4.9  The Ramfos’ Thesis 4.10  The Greek Orthodox Conundrum 4.11  Orthodox Religiosity and the ‘Order-Taking’ Classes 4.11.1  The Non-charismatic Religiosity of the ‘Little Traditions’ 4.11.2  The Charismatic Religiosity of the Folk Music 4.11.3  Folk Music and Anarchic Individualism 4.12  Greek Orthodox Code Orientations Bibliography

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Our analysis of the religious sources of the Greek self should start with the well-known Weberian dictum: the formation and consolidation of modernity is strongly related to the presence of methodical and systematic ways of living that rationalize the social division of labor. The crux of the matter in this argument is that methodical and systematic ways of the © The Author(s) 2019 M. Marangudakis, The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13589-8_4

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rational self create the preconditions for social and economic rationality, and that absence of substantive rationality makes political structures volatile and unstable. A rational ‘society’ (‘social configuration’ in Weber’s nomenclature) cannot be created out of the organizational-functional needs of modern institutional structures (i.e., formal rationality), or by modern ideologies (i.e., theoretical rationality), or by a calculative-­ technocratic attitude to daily affairs (i.e., practical rationality). It could only occur as a process by which the individual produces a comprehensive ethical method of living out of internalized moral principles. The ethical sphere is informed by moral universals, while behavior is determined by principles higher than the individual—principles which place limits on selfishness; duty and obligation should have priority over the egoistic. In cases whereas the source of morality places emphasis on rationality, rational ethics emerged as the way to organize social life in binding civil bonds. In effect, Weber reasoned that modernity itself does not have the means to create ex nihilo a morality strong enough to infuse the world with ultimate meaning. If left alone to its own devises, it will crumble under the cold, soulless functionalities of the bureaucratic system, or it will succumb to boundless practical egotism; the fate of the communist societies stand as witnesses of such failure. This is why axial religion is important as a cornerstone of primary social cohesion, the significance of religion in modernity, and to no less extent, Weber’s profound pessimism about the fate of the modern self, as deep moral convictions fall into oblivion and formal and practical rationality rule instead. Weber’s bleak prediction, in spite the massive expansion of both formal and technical rationality, has not been confirmed (Kalberg 2001). In fact, religion is not withering away—various fundamentalisms around the world testify the power religion exerts today, paradoxically at the expense of secular ideology. But there is no doubt that next to religious morality, secularism created its own ‘religions’, moral boundaries, ethics, and visions, which follow the cultural codes, and, to an extent, the symbolic structures of its religious predecessor. Thus, Weber’s analysis of rational and non-­ rational, in-worldly and out-worldly approaches to the divine or the transcendental remains as valid as it was a century earlier. It means that the internal dynamics of a modern division of labor do not impose their logic on the moral sources of social action. Instead, the latter depends on meaning constructed of symbolic codes infused with moral, religious-like, imperatives, national or ecumenical, modern or post-modern, material, or post-material as they may be.

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This means that irrespective of how much a society has become secular, its premodern religious foundations remain significant even as an echo of the past, imprinted in its civil moral imperatives, or its civil religion. An empirical inquiry into the moral condition of this social configuration needs to take into consideration the Weberian dimensions of this religion and then to test empirically the extent that these dimensions shape its actual moral orientations.

4.1   Temporal Continuity of Symbolic Classifications The entry to modernity and the subsequent development of the inner, secular, self through specific cognitive paths of reflection and, above all, through the development of secular ethical ‘ways of life’ is by no means independent from pre-modern religious constitutive goods and symbolic orders. While in the process of modernization the social division of labor and the content of the cosmological and ontological principles and of moral constitutive goods are infused with various humanistic (or, anti-­ humanistic), ideological, and scientific principles, continuity with pre-­ modern past is preserved in two ways. First, the symbolic construction of meaning that defines the new worldview remains embedded in the genealogical lines of its predecessors, and, second, certain constitutive goods embedded in pre-modern cosmological and ontological frameworks remain alive by a process of symbolic selective affinity to secular sources of morality and to secular ontology. For example, the evolution of the Augustinian ‘inner’ self to the ‘order-constructing’ Cartesian self, to the ‘disengaged’ Lockean self, to, eventually, the ‘decentered’ secular self of today, constitutes a case of the former; the development of the modern ‘civic virtue’—the ‘republican’ tradition celebrated by Jefferson, Rousseau and Arendt—out of the Aristotelian ‘cardinal values’ and Thomist ‘Christian virtues’ constitutes a case of the latter. Both these cases indicate that the passage to secular notions of morality and of the moral community is not unqualified or unconditional. It also suggests that there is no univocal relationship between cosmological and ontological principles on the one hand, and constitutive goods on the other. Instead, more than one set of constitutive goods could emerge out of one set of cosmological and ontological principles (e.g., Early Christianity gave rise to a constellation of dogmas and Churches; Marxism gave rise to a plurality of socialist and social-democratic political programs).

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We explain: While the social division of labor changes in rather drastic ways, its symbolic meaning cannot be deduced from its inner logic, since the constant presence of indeterminacy demands symbolic, that is, ‘arbitrary’ interpretation. While the new division of labor and, concomitantly, its formal rationality provide the referent elements, the symbolic codes and classifications that create both a patterned order out of this division of labor, as well as consistency in social action, remain self-referential. The patterned order will be constructed independent of the social organization, as such, out of binary sets that define the moral good and evil of the new social division of labor. To choose between alternative symbolic codes is to choose between alternative constitutive goods. This is to say that the past does not, and could not, impose itself directly on present time. It imposes itself in present time only through the symbolic ordering of present social structures, old and new, according to the ways various social networks and elites become legitimate, interpret trust, and define solidarity by using recomposed old and new binary oppositions to create novel symbolic classifications.

4.2   Symbolic Classifications and the Theory of Multiple Modernities The temporal extensiveness, continuity, and adaptability of premodern symbolic patterns is most clearly depicted in substantive rationality that constitutes the heart of the Western civilization, both as a way to construct and maintain social order and as a way to dominate nature through the quantification of all aspects of materiality, notwithstanding the various drastic transformations the concept experienced in the last millennium. In fact, the perseverance in modernity of symbolic patterns that were first formed in the pre-modern past constitutes the core of the theory of multiple modernities. The latter suggests that contrary to formal and technical-­ empirical rationality (at large the functional demands of the modern division of labor) which operate together as a homogenizing, centrifugal, force, civilization-specific symbolic patterns, drawn from religious and secular traditions and crystallized in modern moral frameworks, act as centripetal forces. The significance of the civilizational aspects of society lies in the ways the modern division of labor and its functional prerequisites are ordered by civilizational-specific combinations of religious and secular interpretations of the political program of modernity, and corresponding substantia-

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tions (code orientations and ground rules) of cosmological and ontological principles. In this vein, religion does not constitute, in principle, the only component of such cultural imperatives. But it constitutes a first-order moral source of collective representations and of collective imaginaire of defining the structure and the worth of the transcendental and the mundane orders, and of suggesting various ways to bridge the gap that lies between them. And it constitutes the most crucial mechanism of constructing the self, even the secular one, if religious sources of ultimate meaning, religious moral codes, symbolic patterned orders, and collective representations have not been utterly replaced by various secular ones. To the extent that symbolic continuity does indeed exist, key components of the political order in Greece today, such as definitions of citizenship, civil society, moral community, civil religion, as well as the meaning of political authority and its corresponding accountability, should be found to be influenced significantly by the cosmological and ontological heritage of the Greek religion in the form of theoretical rationality (Greek Orthodox theology) as well as in the form of code orientations and ground rules (Greek Orthodox religiosity and ethics); and due to symbolic continuity, this influence should not be exhausted in religious contexts, but it should be influencing secular ones as well, always in the framework of the four types of social networks of power. Greek Orthodox constitutive goods of the good, such as grace, passion, sacrifice, atonement, and salvation; of the beautiful, such as visions of the divine and the experiencing of its presence; of the true, such as the meaning of life; and of the just, such as the definition of collective and individual rights, the denotations of collectivity, proper social contact, and charisma, should also be found in secular symbolic classifications, incorporated and attached in secular symbolic codes and frameworks that constitute the vocabulary of political ideologies in Greece today. As Protestant or Catholic ideals, temporal and spatial configurations, and constitutive goods are embedded in American and European civil religions today,1 Orthodox Christianity and its principles should also be imprinted on Greek modern-secular worldviews and attitudes toward the self, civil society, and state institutions. In this vein, clientelism, which for political sociology is one of the many factors that form the political domain, for the theory of multiple modernities—with the strong emphasis on moral imperatives and cultural codes as the way to order, preserve, and reproduce social structures—it means 1

 See Bellah et al. (1996), de Hart et al. (2013).

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much more: only by referring to a generalized mode of social action embedded in cosmological and ontological principles, could political paternalism and clientelism be justified and established as a ‘natural’ property of social interaction, even though it only serves the interests of the few insiders with access to centrally controlled resources. Political paternalism could not be sustained without a corresponding presence of moral meaning, that is, without the presence of corresponding and internally coherent symbolic codes, in collective representations, and in constitutive goods and ontological and cosmological principles which shape the symbolic contours of the public sphere. This, again, does not constitute an exceptional condition. Instead, modern Western, secular ideologies, ontological principles, and even cosmological depiction of time, space, and matter derive from, and are inspired by, premodern, principally religious worldviews. For example, Jacobin ideologies and political mobilization are inspired by medieval messianic-chiliastic movements; liberalism and individualism, by Augustinian internal self and natural rights; and astronomical search for the ‘beginning of time’ by biblical Genesis; even rationalism itself is, arguably, an unintentional consequence of Thomism.2 What distinguishes the canonical Western modernization process from the Greek one is that the modern social organization that was imported from the West to Greece—Western political and cultural ideologies included—was intertwined with a pre-modern, religious, cosmological, and ontological vision that was rather alien to both the premodern substantive and the modern formal rationality of Western social organization. In structural terms, it meant the uncomfortable coexistence of competitive, and to an extent, incompatible notions of abstract code orientations and ground rules, as well as incompatible notions of tangible regulation of power and social trust. Thus, although practical (i.e., technical) rationality has had no problem ­whatsoever to take roots in Greece, the presence of an out-worldly religion and religiosity, combined with a series of unsettling historical exigencies and cultural traumas, created a universe of corresponding political symbolic classifications which is highly volatile, internally unstable, and in some cases self-defeating. 2  For structural links between antinomian medieval and early modern messianic movements with modern Jacobin movements, see Eisenstadt (2000b); for the Augustinian roots of modern liberalism and individualism, see Ryan (2010); for the connection of astronomy with the Bible, see Schroeder (1991); and for connections of physical principles with Hinduism, see Capra (1984).

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This tension has been described by Mouzelis (1978) as one between formal and substantive rationality. In his words: …where vocabularies imported from the West are used to conceal and/or legitimize institutional arrangements that are a far cry from the political modernity seen in Western European parliamentary regimes … in Weber’s terminology, formal rationality … completely displaces substantive rationality. (Mouzelis 1978, 240 italics in original)

If, indeed, there exists a tension between formal rationality and substantive rationality in Greece, or, even worse, if, as Mouzelis suggests, formal rationality completely displaces substantive rationality, it follows that their sources are at odds. Mouzelis argues that this displacement is caused by the instrumental rationality of the capitalist class. We  beg to disagree; the capitalist class, a few hundred families that is, was never strong enough to impose its will on the political elites. Rather, it always served its interests by accommodating the needs of the political class, or by bribing them. Instead, we suggest that this real incompatibility reveals a fundamental tension between social moral standards and the abstract regulations of the social division of labor. Knowing that formal, bureaucratic, rationality is Western in origin, what makes prevalent substantive rationality in Greece so incompatible to it?

4.3   The Greek Orthodox Ontology in a Weberian Framework of Analysis Weber’s thesis on the role of religion in modernity is straight forward: Rationalism could become a societal, indeed, a civilizational valid canon, only when nature becomes fully immanent, and God fully transcendental; and the way the faithful fulfills his religious obligation is a pro-active stand that intends to make the fallen world orderly and restore in this world the Glory of God. This arrangement took place only once in human history, when sectarian Protestantism, in a radical rearrangement of basic Christian doctrines, dissociated salvation from social action, and, instead, it attached faith to action and salvation to predestination. The Protestant message stated that it is impossible to achieve salvation by your own actions, though your faith obliges you to act for the glory of God even if you are in fact damned; only inconclusive signs could give the believer some hope for eternal salvation. This theological argument brought into being an absurd,

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yet dynamic, ‘in-worldly asceticism’; absurd it was, since, until then Christianity, in all its variations, tended to emphasize the remote but still actual presence of God in the world and the duty of the believers to reach God by renouncing the flesh and all material concerns. The basic Christian doctrine, when introduced to a structured agrarian society, mutatis mutandis, tended to create sharp distinctions between religious elites and salvation-seeking followers of two kinds: (a) mystics (religious virtuosi) and their lesser followers who aspire to salvation by being attached to their master; and (b) institutional authoritative Churches and the vast body of believers who are granted salvation by obeying to rules authored by these institutions. The result in both cases is a tendency to undervalue, in various ways and intensity, in-worldly social action (Weber 1978, 557–576). Furthermore, emotiveness, mystical charisma, God-­ invoking rituals, the miraculous appearance and actions of God in everyday life, and the priority of exceptional ecstatic or miraculous moments over routine and mundane life are constitutive factors that inhibit the development of a ‘way of life’ able to penetrate consistently the entire organization of life, and constitute fundamental elements of both Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Yet, while Catholicism shares with Eastern Orthodoxy these non-­ methodical, non-rational, features that dissociate them from Protestantism—the unintended cradle of fully developed substantive rationality, Weber considered the Catholic Church to be more rational than the Eastern, Greek Orthodox, Church, due to a series of theological and organizational factors. John Meyendorff summarizes with precision this difference as follows: Wherever the responsibility may lie, it is clear that the theological estrangement between East and West goes back to Augustine’s anti-Pelagian polemics. Opposing the anthropological optimism of Pelagius, Augustine developed his doctrine of the original sin and of justification by grace, thus setting the essential frame of later controversies in the West. The categories, in which a Western Christian viewed salvation, became those of justification from an inherited guilt, and of merit, made possible by ‘created grace.’ The reformers, on the other hand, rejected the idea of merit, and insisted upon salvation sola fide. Meanwhile, the tradition of the Eastern Fathers, if it mentioned at all ‘guilt’ and ‘justification,’ did so only in a wider setting: it considered the very concept of nature as implying participation in God’s life; it understood original sin not as an inherent guilt, but as a break of the original communion between God and man and as an enslavement to Satan; and

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it interpreted salvation, first for all, as a restoration of the lost communion with God, as sanctification and deification. The relations between God and man are thus viewed in the East in terms of organic participation, and not juridical obedience: salvation is not a simple state of forgiveness, granted when certain conditions are fulfilled, it is true life, true joy, true humanity, which can exist only in the communion of the Holy Spirit in Christ. (Meyendorff 2012, 144, emphasis added)

This Orthodox theology of ‘deification through communion’ establishes the out-worldly orientation of salvation and defines the constitutive good as to grasp the unified meaning of the world by emptying the self from daily concerns and activities. This is the core of the Orthodox theology. Contrary to this out-worldly and utterly mystical orientation of the Orthodox Church, rationalization was never alien to Catholicism; instead, it was present from the beginning, in the legalistic ‘cataphatic theology’3 of Tertullian and of Augustine, as well as in later Thomist scholasticism, which blended biblical revelation and Aristotelian logic. In the East, the strong attachment to oriental mystical traditions, and an effort of the Church to remain distinct from its Catholic counter-part, intensified the already present orientation to ‘apophatic’4 theology, the doctrine of ‘deification by grace’, and later, during the fourteenth century, the Palamian doctrine distinguishing between in-worldly divine ‘energies’ visà-vis out-­worldly divine ‘essence’. This distinction, while acknowledging the full transcendence of God, secured theologically the mystical belief in the immanent presence of God and theologically justified the Orthodox mystics of the day, the hesichasts, and their efforts to be united to God in this world. In short, Eastern theology downplayed methodical, rational, observation of the dogma and, instead, stressed the supra-social process of ‘emptying’ (κένωσις) of the self from personal and collective identity, ­making room to receive the divine ‘energies’ (ενέργειες) and thus to achieve deification (θέωσις) not by the mystic’s volition, but by the grace of god (also Weber 1978, 558). Furthermore, the Catholic Church was structured, almost from the beginning, as a centralized bureaucratic administration, and so were its Orders, the ethics of monastic life, and the Holy Inquisition itself: ‘Only 3  It asserts that God and humans are joined by the faculty of reason, and thus humans can approach God by rational-logical processes of deduction and induction. 4  It asserts that God is beyond rational comprehension, and thus He can be approached only by contemplation and mystical experience.

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in the Occident, where the monks became the disciplined army of a rational bureaucracy of office, did otherworldly asceticism become increasingly systematized into a methodology of active, rational conduct of life’ (Weber 1978, 555). No such strict bureaucratic hierarchy exists in Greek Orthodoxy; instead, each bishop is fully in charge of his diocese exercising his authority at will, with local churches and monasteries enjoying a considerable degree of administrative autonomy, while bureaucracy and legalism are only minimally exercised. Bureaucratic centralization of the Western kind was not possible in part due to this apophatic theology which allows for two equally autonomous sources of grace and thus of legitimation: the institutional grace of the church authorities and the charismatic grace of the monastic monk (Weber 1978, 561). In such a framework of charismatic and institutional devotion, the Orthodox self, always in Weberian terms, could not be rational-­methodical, as both the institutional and the charismatic dimension of the Orthodox theology, and the constitutive goods it produces, are hostile to a methodical, in-worldly, life. On the one hand, Weber argues, the institutional principles of ‘piecemeal evaluation’5 of personal ethics, ‘implicit faith’,6 and ‘ardent devotion to the Church and its rituals’ cultivate, accordingly, an un-methodical, non-rational, and heteronomous devotional structure, and thus they spare the necessity of developing a methodical pattern of life based on ethical foundations. As Weber reasons, ‘the sinner knows that he may always receive absolution by engaging in some occasional religious practice or by performing some religious rite’ (Weber 1978, 561). On the other hand, the charismatic principles of intense, self-contained contemplation encourage the faithful to find meaning in grasping the unified meaning of the world by emptying the self from all daily concerns and in-worldly activities. In this framework, the salvationist good is not a pro-

5  The piecemeal evaluation of morality is shown in the importance the Eastern Church pays to biographies of saints as various standards of ethical behavior. Particular individuals should follow the example of particular saints according to the case or the issue. For a review of the irrational-mystical aspects of the Eastern Church, see Makrides (2005, 179–210). 6  ‘For the Catholic, the detailed knowledge of dogmas and sacred texts is dispensable, since the church, as an agency of salvation, intervenes for him; it is sufficient if he trusts its authority by believing its prescriptions as a whole (fides implicita), Faith is here a form of obedience toward the church, whose authority does not rest upon sacred texts; rather, the church guarantees their sanctity, which the believer himself cannot verify’ (Makrides 2005, 1201). It also applies to the Orthodox Church.

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active quality of action (a conscious dispensation of the divine will) but an inner condition of contemplation. Furthermore, the selective affinity between social action and the constitutive goods these two versions of Orthodox morality produce or encourage do not coincide but in fact produce a very peculiar combination. The constitutive good the institutional Church produces is best met in conditions of routine social life, whereas it encourages the acceptance of the given social organization: [Institutional grace] ultimately and notably tends to make obedience a cardinal virtue and a decisive precondition of salvation. This of course entails subjection to authority, either of the institution or of the charismatic personality who distributes grace… Such external authority, however, increases the elasticity of concrete sacred commandments and thus makes it easier to adjust them in practice to changed external circumstances, though in a direction different from that of a Gesinnungsethik. (Weber 1978, 562)

In contrast, the constitutive good the charismatic source of morality, the mystical monk, produces, is best met in moments of social crisis, whereas his unworldly mystical habitus turns to millenarian-revolutionary habitus. This habitus is irrational in that it ‘despises any rational arrangement’ giving priority to the feeling of godly love: In that case, his revolutionary preaching to the world will be chiliastically irrational, scorning every thought of a rational order in the world. He will regard the absoluteness of his universal acosmistic feeling of love as completely adequate for himself, and indeed regard this feeling as the only one acceptable to his god as the foundation for a mystically renewed community among men, because this feeling alone derives from a divine source. (Weber 1978, 550)

This divine, undifferentiated, and uncompromised love which is achieved by emptying the self from its social context defines the ­ontological premises of the Orthodox worldview and delineates the religious ­community as well as its internal distribution of power, the legitimation of its social action, and the boundaries of social trust: The core of the mystical concept of the oriental Christian church was a firm conviction that Christian brotherly love, when sufficiently strong and pure, must necessarily lead to unity in all things, even in dogmatic beliefs. In other

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words, men who sufficiently love each other, in the Johannine sense of mystical love, will also think alike and, because of the very irrationality of their common feeling, act in a solidary fashion which is pleasing to God. Because of this concept, the Eastern Church could dispense with an infallibly rational authority in matters of doctrine. (Weber 1978, 551, emphasis added)

This is closely related to the Orthodox theological principle that the individual does not constitute an ‘instrument’ (as does in Weberian asceticism) but a ‘vessel’ of God. The difference between the two modes of social action is that while the ‘instrument’ perspective assumes and acknowledges the social division of labor and thus the specified and differentiated individual, the ‘vessel’ perspective recognizes the individual as an abstract entity to be taken over by the grace of God. What matters in this perspective is not the mundane individual but the transcended human being. Thus, social action is not a process by which the world becomes rational by rational action in the framework of the social division of labor, but a process by which the feeling of mystical knowledge is activated by an undifferentiated community of the righteous: The illumination consists essentially in a unique quality of feeling or, more concretely, in the felt emotional unity of knowledge and volitional mood which provides the mystic with decisive assurance of his religious state of grace. (Weber 1978, 546)

In the framework of undifferentiated love and mystical union, social action is not a rational process of organized social interest striving for tangible objectives, but an explosion of emotions toward achieving a constitutive good in an absolute way and in a single chiliastic stroke. In effect, the inbuilt tensions of the social division of labor are left meaningless, in a state of symbolic emptiness. These strong non-rational tendencies in the Orthodox Church became the official doctrine of the Church during the fourteenth century. During this agonizing period of a shrinking Byzantine Empire, and possibly in an effort to shield the Church from Latin influences, the Emperor accepted the doctrine proposed by the monk Gregory Palamas (c. 1296–1359) after a debate of the latter with Barlaam, a monk from Calabria who was defending a dogma of salvation close to the Catholic rationalistic model. The Palamian dogma, intentionally polemic to Catholic Thomism, dismissed the notion that the world and civilization are factors participating

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in salvation. Instead, mankind is saved by insulating his self from worldly concerns and worldly activities, either by fixing his mind to God, or—­ concerning the vast majority—by participating wholeheartedly in the trans-­social, trans-temporal, Johannine communitas, in direct communion with Heavens, as the latter is substantiated in Mass. Acceptance of the Palamian dogma signaled a critical shift from anchorite practices of world-rejecting asceticism, to practices that resemble oriental world-flying mysticism. Thus, at exactly the moment the West was exiting High Middle Ages and was entering the humanistic Renaissance, the Orthodox Church was embracing a world-denying constitutive good and concomitant code orientations, in reaction to Catholic acceptance of in-worldly social action as participating in salvation. The adoption of an almost world-flying mysticism allowed the Church, a century later, to accept and even justify the Ottoman conquerors of the Byzantine Empire, since the world and its political configurations had become completely irrelevant to matters of salvation. On the long run, the same code orientations prohibited the Orthodox self to anchor faith to modernity and to consider salvation as a process that takes place in history and in the world through the development of the modern self, as indeed was the case of the development of the self that took place in the West.

4.4   Orthodox Cosmology Next to the ontological premises of the Greek Orthodox Church stand the cosmological principles, that is, the definition of time, space, and the meaning of the material world. Central to the understanding of the cosmos is the concept of ‘functional time’ (λειτουργικός χρόνος), which constitutes the crucial concept that dissociates the Orthodox from both Protestant and Catholic theological cosmologies. Functional time fuses timeless God with the temporal material universe, humanity, and the self. As God is pure actuality, that is, He never evolves, never changes, and never feels time past and time future, His presence in the life of the individual, according to the ontological process of deification fuses past, ­present, and future time in a ‘now’ that transcends the ‘heavy yokes of worldly time and space’.7 Furthermore, as God is pure extension, He transcends physical space and embraces everything in His presence. This ‘theology of space’ is simi7

 Abbot Ioustinos Popovic. http://www.impantokratoros.gr/B8B062D6.el.aspx.

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lar to the ones found in other two branches of Christianity; yet, in the presence of functional time, space is sharply divided into a transcendental and a mundane reality, while, in its mundane dimension, space becomes significant to the extent that it participates in the divine plan of salvation. Thus, the actual churches are neither ordinary-functional places of worship (as in Protestantism) nor artistic depictions of heaven and hell (such as in Catholicism) but genuine presentations of Heavens; they become the location where the visible Church meets the invisible, the faithful meet Christ, the saints and the martyrs and in unison stand in the actual hierarchical line that exists in Heavens. As for the material world, this is distinguished in the periods before and after the original sin of Adam and Eve. Before its occurrence, the material world was ‘good’ to become corrupted in its aftermath. It became the ‘unnatural’ domain of the Devil, and its main characteristics became the constant decay and death. The material world will be saved, alone with humanity after the Second Coming of Christ who will restore both humanity and the material cosmos to a state of eternal grace. But for the time being, to escape this constant presence of death, the faithful need to enter functional time to experience the transcendence of temporality, and to live, in the presence of God, the historical events that lead to salvation as if they happen in present time. Thus, in the context of the liturgy, the priest begins the chanting of the commemorated event (e.g., birth of Christ, the crucifixion, the annunciation, etc.) with the word ‘[T]oday takes place…’ followed by the specifics of the particular event. The use of present-time in the incantation denotes, not a dramatic philological exaggeration, but the actual unfolding of the event in real present time. This is made possible by the fact that the divine time is a constant and perpetual ‘now’. Thus, it takes place in the spiritual ‘extension’ (επέκτασις) and ‘present-ation’ (παροντοποίησις) of the event to allow each and every generation of the faithful to participate equally to the unfolding of the divine plan. The principle of the cosmological and the ontological principles of the Eastern Church is that the community of the faithful can actually e­ xperience the eternal truths, the eternal constitutive goods of the afterlife in present time and space by transcending, partially by its own effort, its own habitus. Even though there is a sharp dissimilarity between the material and the immaterial cosmos, the Eastern Church insists on the constant ‘communication’ of the two domains by divine energies; thus, the crucial symbolic

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significance of the holy relics of the saints which, infused by the grace of God, become vivid exemplification of the a-temporal grace in present time. Actually, the very recent development (since the 1990s) of the performativity of the holy relics, whereas the relic does not rest in the solemnity of its monastic crypt, but instead it is carried out to be demonstrated in State-sponsored public processions—attracting large crowds of believers—alters the civil meaning of the public sphere, as it turns it from a place of in-worldly civil activity, to a stage where out-worldly rituals and ceremonies are performed. The unintended consequence of this type of rituals is through, that like an empty theater after the play, the public space, being related to the presence of the grace of God, without it, symbolically, becomes a wilderness: vacuous, meaningless, and polluted.

4.5   The Greek Orthodox Cognitive Mode As current Orthodox religion is much older than imported modernity, it is valid to assume that the actual construction and transmission of the Orthodox dogma and the religious feeling has deeply affected the ways modernity has been culturally codified and incorporated into Eastern-­ Orthodox societies. Particularly important is how Eastern dogma, its construction and transmission, affects the formation and reproduction of symbolic binary codes, code orientations, and the symbolic patterns that characterize secular ethics and constitutive goods. Considering the ‘supra-­ rational’ pathways opened up by the Eastern theology for the faithful to reach and experience salvation, it becomes crucially important to consider the actual cognitive processes and mechanisms that this theology brought into life. Bringing in Whitehouse’s modes of religiosity, it is a matter of fact that even though the Orthodox religious liturgy—rituals and ceremonies— incorporates both modes of transmission, it certainly shows preference to the imagistic rather than the doctrinal mode. One reason is that the Eastern Church theology quite intentionally favors emotive and corporeal processes of religious expression over doctrinal-rational modes based on the concept of Johannine love, salvation through devotion, and ‘emptying of the self’. A second reason, this time an unintentional consequence of the insistence of preserving the holy tradition, is the use of the Hellenistic (late antiquitarian) version of Greek language for all liturgical purposes, a language incomprehensive for the average lay person. In practice, it mini-

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mizes the significance of the autonomous contribution of the doctrinal mode and, instead, turns it into an associate of the imagistic mode by amplifying its melodic dimension. Combined, theology of achievable union with God and the incomprehensiveness of the liturgical language strongly orient the worshiper toward an imagistic mode of symbolic patterns and intense collective effervescence based on nonverbal images, sentiments, and episodes, framed inside the collective setting of a religious service or a religious procession. In contrast to this, catechisms—instructions for a Christian life or comments about public issues and concern— which take place at the end of the liturgy are spoken in vernacular Greek. The effects of highly emotive rituals ‘imposed’ on a silent-passive audience are in line with the mystical notion of unity of all things, but not as meant to be. While its purpose is a ‘felt emotional unity of knowledge and volitional mood’, the result is the sanctification of egocentrism—of a self-­ referential, self-righteous self. It enhances the idiosyncratic wishes, desires, and feelings which each faithful carries with her in the church, allowing each individual to believe that his projection of the good is not only holy and righteous but also shared by the whole congregation. In a sense, while imagistic, unspoken, rituals give the impression of constituting the basis of collective conscience, it is more probable that they undermine it as, instead of a moral community, what emerges out of this experience could as well be a self-righteous self. The imagistic, non-verbal, non-rational, and emotive modes of Greek Orthodox religiosity is further enhanced by the special status of the icon in Greek Orthodox theology.

4.6   The Icon In the nexus of the spatial and temporal principles of the Eastern Church stands the central feature of the Eastern liturgy and worship: the holy icons. The Second Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (AD 787) stated that ‘the honor paid to the images passes on to that which the image represents, and he who does worship to the image does worship to the person represented in it.’ This understanding gave rise to a particular type of aesthetics in which the devotional image is employed as an unmediated connector between the beholder and the deity, which Freedberg calls ­‘aesthetics of presence’ (Freedberg 1989, 45). The icons in Eastern devotion do not constitute ‘signs’, mere instruments of catechism, or representations of past events or persons, as are in Western theology, but objects which are related ontologically to the spiritual beings they depict. Quite

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literally speaking, icons are windows which allow the beholder to see and sense a reality that lies beyond this world; the transcendental domain itself. It follows that icons constitute the essential component for the temporal and spatial structuration of the worldview of the faithful: [H]oly icons are the object of veneration at all levels, from the family to the entire spiritual community of orthodoxy; all are refractions of the Holy Spirit through the social order, and the largest refraction is the national or religious community of all Greeks… [S]ocial life is riddled with relativities. (Herzfeld 1987, 164)

The interior of the churches is covered with icons in strict hierarchical-­ theological order, and during religious services, they are venerated by both clergy and laity with words of devotion, bodily gestures (kneeling, crossing, prostrating, kissing, rubbing against the glass covers cloths in the belief that the icon’s spiritual power can be transferred through physical contact), and silent contemplation. On special occasions, the icons are carried by priests in processions outside the church with the faithful who are in need prostrating in front of it so that the icon will pass over them in order to receive a special blessing by the icon itself. Whenever the most venerated icon of the Theotokos (Mother of God) is carried out of the monastic Mount Athos to Athens and to other Greek cities, giving the opportunity to the faithful to pay homage to it, the State grants it honors equivalent to those reserved for head of states. Similar honors are paid also to the Holy Flame that arrives from Jerusalem every Easter by plane and which allegedly is lit by the Holy Spirit itself in the Church of the All-Holy Sepulcher; later that day, the flame is distributed to as many churches as possible around Greece to be carried to home by the faithful after the Resurrection religious service. For many faithful, the religious service, spoken in inconceivable Hellenistic-ancient Greek, functions merely as a background ambience for the veneration of the icon, the only aspect of the Orthodox religiosity that has never been challenged for their secular or religious criticisms of the Greek Church. Icons become ‘windows’ to the transcendental realm due to their particular antinaturalistic, two-dimensional, artistic configuration which urges the onlooker to gaze through the icon rather than admire the icon per se. Yet, icons are not ‘passive’. Instead, in the context of the Greek Orthodox theology, they are alive, and so they are perceived by the faithful: they have rich ‘biographical dimensions’ and ‘social life’ that are enriched by the

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legend that surrounds their creation, discovery, and/or location and relocations, by the passage of time and their miracles. They constitute living objects that are contextualized in the life of the believers through ‘internal’ and ‘external’ narratives referring accordingly to ‘the story that the image communicates’ and the ‘social context that produced the image and the social relations within which the image is embedded at any moment of viewing (Freedberg 1989, 50). Icon narratives are built upon an intimate personal relationship of trust between the beholder and the venerated icon that is expressed in highly emotive terms. As such, these ‘mute narratives’ are simultaneously social and asocial, active and passive, and to the extent that they incorporate tangible benefits for the beholder (i.e., good health) and the spiritual being represented on the icon (offerings), material and spiritual. Agency and personhood are deeply affected by such a relationship as the ‘source of being’ lies neither completely inside the individual nor in its collectivist self; it does not cultivate the inner-self of a self-contained individual, as is the case of the Western model, as it does not cultivate the collective ‘distributed personhood’, as is the case in various non-Western cultures. Instead, it cultivates a bi-polar personhood that shifts between the immanent and the transcendental and so are his internalized ethics and code orientations. The inner conversation of the individual takes place vis-à-vis the icon rather than the inner-self, thus forming a self-reflection made of imagistic autobiographical impressions rather than an inner ‘valid canon’ of methodical life. This process certainly develops specific code orientations but not a concrete substantive rationality; the process remains perpetually open and uncompleted. In a Weberian framework, we could argue the icon functions as a crystallization of the mystical way, since the moral fervor activated by the ‘method’ of the mystical charismatic action sharply opposes sober rational calculation. Since no rationalization process is possible under mystical-­ imagistic influence, no unified value postulates are possible to emerge to comprehensively address and order all aspects of life. Substantive and theoretical rationality remain disconnected as there are no solid internal values to be turned into internally unified value constellation by the impact of a theoretical rationalization process. Theoretical and formal rationalities are left in a state of limbo since what gives the impression of substantive rationality is in fact personal desires and elusive images of constitutive goods covered with a veil of transcendentalism.

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4.7   Ceremonies and Rituals If the aim of Protestantism is to establish the Kingdom of God on earth through material and spiritual improvement, and of Catholicism to function as the bureaucratic gatekeeper of Heavens, the aim of the Orthodox Church is to ‘pull’ the transcendental from Heavens and place it in the midst of earthly materiality, either directly by ceremonies and rituals, or indirectly by infusing transcendentalism to social institutions and material objects. The Church emphasizes above all tradition to the extent it regards it as holy and thus untouchable. Tradition includes scripture, the Nicene Creed, the decrees of the ecumenical councils, the writings of the Church Fathers, the icons, and the books of liturgical service. Liturgy is characterized by observation and faithfulness to ancient practices and traditions, allegedly from the days of the apostles. In the heart of this strict observation is the belief that the beliefs and practices of the past should be left unchanged, so that the experience of contemporary believers will be identical to the experience of the very first Christians, in an uninterrupted stream of worship and sacrament as a means of capturing God’s eternity in present time (Pollatos and Kouravelos 2017). In this context, ceremonies and rituals are highly formalistic and figurative, and they serve the primary purpose of worship, that is, the immediate connection of the faithful to divine Grace, and the ritual itself to Biblical episodes and the story of Christ. Thus, the bread used in the Eucharist is baked, arranged, and cut ritualistically in specific ways to recall Gospel stories, such as the miraculous feeding of the 5000, and the crucifixion. The priest wears distinctive, Byzantine-style garments and says specific prayers as he puts on each piece of clothing. The Divine Liturgy is also highly formalistic and retains its ancient structure, even though its functional structure is somehow obsolete (e.g., there is no longer an observance of the distinction between catechumens and faithful). Davies-Stofka gives a short yet comprehensive description of the liturgy allowing for an equally comprehensive analysis of its form: It proceeds in three parts: The first is called the Offering, during which the priests prepare the bread and wine for the communion. The second is called the Liturgy of the Catechumens. In the early church, catechumens were people preparing for baptism or chrismation. During this part of the Liturgy, everyone is welcome to participate. The priests and the congregation say litanies, or prayers of petition in which the needs of the church, the nation,

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and the world are recited in unison. The final part of the Liturgy, devoted to the Eucharist, is called the Liturgy of the Faithful. Those not baptized and confirmed in the tradition do not participate in the Eucharist. The Eucharist is followed by prayers of thanksgiving, the preaching on an issue of the day in vernacular Greek, and a dismissal by the priest… The Divine Liturgy is marked by splendor, evoking a sense of awe and wonder. It is said to occur outside of normal time, in the eternity of heaven. Yet the congregation displays a feeling of informality rarely seen in the more ordered masses of the western liturgical traditions. Orthodox Christians stand throughout the service, but they also walk around, pray and make offerings before icons, bow or prostrate themselves, and make the sign of the cross, as they are moved to do so. People arrive late and leave early. While the services can be very long, they can also finish in less than two hours. (Beth Davies-Stofka)8

Davies-Stofka correctly describes the Orthodox ceremonies with the words ‘awe and wonder’, since it is the means by which sacred space is constructed, a space which will receive the passive faithful and engulf them in a psychological state, which transcends time so that the faithful will achieve the union with the divine in a mystical way. Thus, while the strict observance  of the ritual assures that no individual sentiment will ever disturb the collectivist spirit of the congregation, emotion elicited during the ceremony, allegedly, reinforces the collectivist spirit, as the manifestation of the divine grace. The social consequences of such collectivism remain unpredictable: it could reinforce pietistic conformism, as much as mystical defiance of authority. The strong tendency of political disputes to turn to deadly confrontations between two uncompromising sides could be attributed, as Stelios Ramfos argues later, to such mysticalcollectivist rituals.

4.8   Greek Orthodox Effects on In-Worldly Constitutive Goods There are two ways the Orthodox religion affects the constitutive goods of modern Greeks; directly, as the consequence of an individual falling in line with the rules and teachings of the Church in ordinary life even if the 8  Beth Davies-Stofka. http://www.patheos.com/Library/Eastern-Orthodoxy/RitualWorship-Devotion-Symbolism/Rites-and-Ceremonies?offset=1&max=1. Retrieved 10 May 2017.

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individual is not religious and, indirectly, as the unintended consequence of being immersed in the Orthodox cosmological and ontological principles. Directly, an individual who follows Orthodox rules and regulations is indifferent to worldly matters, since no success or failure in this domain affects the chances of salvation. Rather, in-worldly success is dangerous, as it could disorient the individual and drive him away from the salvationist path of emptying himself from materialist concerns: [B]ut we often confuse things; the purpose of our lives with the purposes of ourselves. The purpose of our life is the one who defined us, God and His Kingdom. ‘Seek for the Kingdom of God.’ This should be the purpose of our lives, while the purposes of ourselves are all these things our self-­centered self commands. [They constitute] some idols and some purposes which in no way aid the task of our salvation. Examples: Glory, money, material goods, might and power, passions and desires of this world; things that lead us to other cares and ways of life, often vain and sinful. Our Lord for our salvation, ‘emptied Himself as a servant, and took away their sins.’ This emptying of the Son and Word of God is for every Christian a strong challenge of self-knowledge. Still according to the Evangelist John as He ‘walked, we need to walk’; as He emptied Himself of the glory and majesty of divinity for our salvation. So we too should empty ourselves from the selfishness and the arrogance that dominates our human nature after the first man fell into sin. By breaking the command of God, the first man wanted to become God here and now, without needing God. Of course man did not become god. He omitted himself from the greatness of the divine image, was imbued with claims of being equal to God and with demonic arrogance. This arrogance should be emptied from within the man who strives for his salvation.9

Stripping ordinary worldly life from any moral meaning, except of philanthropic acts which denote compassion for regular earthly suffering, and being oriented to passive indifference to the world, the individual is left with the sense that secular temporality and worldly activities are not the domain of open-ended moral potentiality—the way the self is actualized and enriched—but a treacherous place ready to corrupt the self at any time. This worldview is instilled in the individual irrespective of its 9  The work of our salvation [Το έργο της Σωτηρίας μας]. https://www.pentapostagma. gr/2017/12/%CF%84%CE%BF-%CE%AD%CF%81%CE%B3%CE%BF%CF%84%CE%B7%CF%82-%CF%83%CF%89%CF%84%CE%B7%CF%81%CE%AF%CE%B1 %CF%82-%CE%BC%CE%B1%CF%82.html.

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religious convictions, and before the latter chooses its action orientation: of either to retreat in a secluded habitus seeking out transcendental bliss, or, more probable, to orient itself to in-worldly success and achievement. In the former case, the individual exhibits contempt for earthly activities, scorns those who do so, and develops ‘alternative’ bohemian lifestyles of carelessness and easiness. With no great effort, this orientation can become a destructive force in line with Weber’s mystical ‘outbursts of violent emotions against manifested injustice’, as today’s growing nihilistic anarchism in Greece testifies. This nihilistic anarchism does not ask for space to develop its alternative social vision, but instead it thrives on hating and violently assaulting civil society and upsetting routine social structures. Its worldview is based on the triptych: ‘blame-victimhoodviolent revenge’ (Gerodimos 2013). Apparently, it constitutes a secular offshoot of the Orthodox vision; a self that struggles to remain pure of the modern world not by constructing a new communitas, but by destroying modern civil society. In the latter case, the individual is bound to perceiving the world as Campbell’s fiercely religious and fiercely competitive Sarakatsans: as a Fallen immoral world up for grabs. In this case, the individual accepts immorality as a necessary evil and does not hesitate to become a sinner himself for the sake of success: ‘either me or them’; ‘you cannot achieve anything in this world holding a cross’; ‘you cannot trust anyone in this world’; ‘come on now, does this bother you?’; and ‘this is how the world works’ are common phrases widely circulated, used to justify cut-throat antagonisms, corruption, and misdemeanors. Alternatively, in the form of free-floating resources, these worldviews could become a ‘moral multiplier’ of political programs and promulgations, infusing political ideologies (i.e., Weber’s theoretical rationality) with deep moral meaning (i.e., Weber’s substantive rationality) and thus with strong and deep convictions of the righteousness of extreme and radical political programs which target the immoral dark forces which rule the world, or the immoral elites which rule the country. Paradoxically, the political parties that carry these moral imperatives do not consider themselves to be accountable and obliged to be moral. Instead, they are, in effect, anomic or antinomian: comfortable enough to be as immoral as their predecessors, accusing at the same time their accusers of being hypocritical, and since they are so, they do not constitute a legitimate source of accusations.

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4.9   The Ramfos’ Thesis And then there are the indirect effects. These have been explored and extensively analyzed in the pioneering work of Stelios Ramfos who single handedly has developed the study of the influence of Orthodox religiosity on the behavioral patterns of modern Greeks. According to him, the Greek Orthodox self remains intrinsically ‘premodern’, that is, constructed around a symbolic system that ignores the symbolic openness and the temporal progressivity of modernity and, instead, is animated by medieval-­type visions of transcendental ‘stillness’ which, in modernity, in the midst of the modern social division of labor, takes the form of unqualified political goals and unqualified desires. The source of this fixation is the Orthodox dogma concerning the nature of the Trinitarian God, according to which the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone.10 This ‘Father-only’ approach—for the sake of securing the primacy of the Father over the other two persons of the Holy Trinity— downplays the role of in-worldly activities and humanity in matters of salvation, and situates the grace of God completely out of history, in the timeless domain of the Godhead (Marangudakis 2001). Consequentially, it ignores as insignificant the ordinary temporal and material world—a condition which the late medieval Palamian theology of divine energies only intensified, since ‘energies’ is the way the transcendental enters the human psyche, establishing a gap between the self and her social identity. In this vein, salvation is achieved by re-attachment of the self to timeless visions of the holy, at the expense of rational methods of introspection and the methodical in-worldly construction of the self and of the public sphere. The out-worldly orientation of salvation turns the self to a ‘boundless will’, an ‘ocean of emotions unescorted by reason’, an ‘endless expectation’, without the aid of reason to turn vision of the good into practical projects. The Orthodox religiosity first strips the self of its social context and identity, and then orients the remaining, featureless, individual inwardly, to its own emotions and desires, as if they were the grace of God and the 10  During the eleventh century, the issue, better known as the ‘filioque dispute’, became the cause of the schism with the Catholic Church. The latter had made an addition to the original Nicaea Creed according to which the Holy Spirit proceeds not just from the Father, but from the Son as well. The filioque, next to securing the primacy of the Pope in matters of institutional authority, had an unintended consequence: it opened the possibility of human volition and social organization to participate in salvation.

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source of the good. This fixation of conscience to premodern comprehension of the self frustrates the interaction between the reflective ‘I’ and the social ‘me’ and allows for feelings to be perceived as a valid source of moral legitimacy and accountability. Thus, as Nikos Kalapothakos’ phrases it: ‘we live without purpose, yet all together’.11 The Orthodox priority to re-unite the individual to God in a socially and temporally neutral way frustrates the development of individuality and cultivates the egotistic person, while the entrenched identity, which is exhausted in the inner circle of kith and kin, allows for the development of psychological predispositions which tolerate clientelism, and encourages anarchic individualism. Furthermore, the Orthodox ‘functional time’ collapses past and future into a motionless and emotive present time. Situated in a ‘timeless present time’, the Orthodox self recalls the past with yearning nostalgia; as for the future, instead of being the domain of methodical affordances, it becomes the amorphous domain of desires. Certainly, this peculiar perception cannot erase two basic human needs: the satisfaction of the basic materialistic needs and the longing of the self to be acknowledged by the significant others. The interaction of these two bio-psychological needs with a timeless present-time distorts the way the self acts in the world. It creates a self that recycles and exchanges time for space, by becoming permanently trapped in the safety of kith and kin, of the glorious past, and of dream-like desires, rejecting at the same time the right of other perspectives to exist as valid alternatives of truth. We could not start understanding the Greek problem, Ramfos argues, before we comprehend the ‘tyranny of present-­ time’ which seeks the instant gratification of political visions as repetition of the glorious past. The future, seen through these lenses, is not open-­ ended and malleable enough to be shaped through social action, but an unknown territory full of dangers and unanticipated events, of miraculous interventions and dark conspiracies of the eternal evil. Therefore, collective representations, instead of being living symbols that turn individual desire to methodical, civil, initiative, in fact, are fantasies of egotistic self-centeredness. The motionless gazing of the Orthodox self trapped in timeless inertia is captured magnificently in the cinematic vision of the renowned director Thodoros Angelopoulos. In his movies, time becomes space, memory is 11  Kalapothakos, Nikos. ‘We live without purpose, but “all together”’. http://www.kathimerini.gr/826238/gallery/proswpa/synentey3eis/nikos-kalapo8akos-zoyme-xwrisskopo-alla-oloi-mazi-video.

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frozen in time, action turns to gazing, the world is a décor, and the moment becomes ‘the fog that swallows mercilessly the faces’, as invariably the protagonist-hero is stripped of a self and thus of volition. This ‘fixation of the gaze’, that Angelopoulos is so fond of, Ramfos argues ‘is a peculiar combination of timeless Orthodox and post-modern perspective, a paradoxical narration without a narrator, the definite stillness of the event, empty of meaning’. Consequently, the Orthodox self is lost in a sea of dullness, since dullness is the definition of a static present time. The self demands a better life, but the self does not plan for it: ‘We always ask for extra time, we constantly ask for time-out to “see to it tomorrow”. We do not anticipate, and always delay, as if we were threatened by our own actions and their consequences’ (Ramfos 2011, 32). Ramfos suggests that lack of trust and suspicion for strangers, even when the stranger is a neighbor or a co-worker, is a reflection of a deficient self; a self who is not placed firmly in time and space and thus not in control of temporality. The reason for this deficiency is the way Orthodox religion comprehends time and space as timeless fate. It accustoms the individual to remain trapped in habit and custom, in the bosom of his family and in constant repetition of daily routine, as if time stands still.12 The timeless span of fate nullifies the logic of effort and encourages the growth of a selfish self who demands from others and from the state without acknowledging corresponding obligations. In this blissful perspective of stillness, future time has no place, as no place there is for prediction, planning, and method since the flow of time is meaningless, while the security of circumscribed space breeds idleness, postponement, and indifference. Circumscribed space entrenches the self in given perceptions, and emotions, instead of urging the individual to act, demand the perpetuation of present time and its conditions. Stillness of time urges the individual to find solutions in critical moments not in doing things differently, but demanding the crisis to pass without affecting his present condition—as if the crisis is the tangible ‘presence’ of an external threat, and that some kind of spell can eradicate it, as if by some magic spell.

12  The inability of the Byzantine society to develop something equivalent to Western Medieval Commenda, that is, a form of trust in which goods are delivered to another for a particular enterprise (as for marketing abroad), with no legitimate liability on the part of the agent, could be attributed to this particular code orientation (Udovitch 1962).

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In this worldview, the family represents the holy cradle of someone’s stillness. The family protects and shelters ‘the child’ from the world as if the latter is a dangerous and treacherous place. To this purpose, the family comforts, insulates, and spoils the child for as long and as much as possible, without feeling the need to train and acclimatize it to be responsible. Giorgos Lanthimos’ disturbing movie Dog Tooth (2009) reflects on this condition—in spite of the insanity and oddness of the plot. This is a worldview that does not wither away as the child becomes an adult. Instead, the family is replaced by unions and associations that play the role of the family: not to uphold the principles of citizenry, but to protect the member from impending danger, notwithstanding the crime he has committed or the anti-deontological behavior he exhibited. This deficiency nullifies any institutional or organizational openness, and any chance to build a civil society based on abstract principles and values rather than merely on kin and kith ties. Boundless yet ephemeral emotions, not anchored in time and space, constitute the fertile ground upon which passion is confused for meaning, and collective passions are taken to be the will of the people. Adulation of collective sentiments instead of leading to the construction of an open civil consciousness leads to a façade of comfortable togetherness which hides the fragmentation of the community to various egoistic interest groups. Anchored in its privacy, and locked in familial and guild-like professional ties, the Orthodox self rests in an enchanted time awaiting the leader-hero to save the day by providing inexpensive, indeed imagistic, solutions to demanding problems. When the hero fails to deliver, frustration turns to violence, blind and mindless, the expression of a circumscribed self that demands not freedom from the bondage of stillness, ‘but to go back to sleep’. This is a sweeping indictment of the Orthodox religion, powerful and suggestive. Indeed, it tends to ignore social organization and the social networks of power as dynamic contributors to the psychological outlook of the self, and it recognizes them only as the indifferent means by which the ideal-typical self finds expression. Yet, we cannot ignore the very powerful manifestations of this ideal-type self in the Greek public sphere, under certain structural conditions. What follows is an introduction to the interweaving of the Orthodox religion to these structural conditions. It is further explored in the following chapters.

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4.10   The Greek Orthodox Conundrum The Orthodox Church is not obsessed with the past in the abstract, as it is accused; rather, it is a victim of its own institutional success of first becoming the State-sponsored religion of an exemplary medieval empire, the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine Empire, and then was fixated in this memory of glory even when Western enlightenment and modernity opened new paths to selfhood. This ‘success’ established a deep internal contradiction that follows Orthodoxy since then: an out-worldly oriented religion became obliged to provide with meaning a worldly institution. This, in turn, created a second tension, this time inside the Church, a tension that was established by the functional differentiation between institutional conformity and institutional insubordination induced by defiance of worldly institutions.  When it became the State-sponsored religion of Greece, in the 1830s, due to king Otto’s desire to control it in a fashion similar to the State’s control of the Church in the German lands, institutional grace was interweaved with bureaucratic State authority and nationalism to turn the Church to a compliant and formalistic institutional actor—as long as its privileges vis-à-vis other religions were acknowledged and funded by the State. Attachment to bureaucratic State authority attenuated the charismatic character of the institutional Church (i.e., its ability to inspire and institutionalize new kinds of social action), and instead cultivated the functional-­ bureaucratic service of the Church as the guarantor of the constant communion of the Christian community with the divine. In effect, the Church conflated social structure and political authority, and perceived both as being the domain of the State. Identification of social structure with political authority was easy, since they are theologically equally insignificant to salvation achieved by a mystical re-union of the faithful with God in a supra-rational, supra-social, and supra-political way through the Church, which exclusively guarantees proper devotion to Johannine community and Johannine love. Thus, both by definition and by default, both dogmatically and practically, the Orthodox theology detached itself from social developments. Having turned its back to in-worldly social structures and action, the institutional Church became concerned mostly with rules of proper religious contact, that is, pietistic regulations. In this vein, ­obedience, humbleness, and observation of Johannine love remained the main concerns of the institutional Church, which very easily are attached symbolically to the acceptance of, and obedience to, political authority.

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As for charismatic grace, its unpredictable, uncontrollable, and potentially subversive character situates it in a structural position of perpetual ambiguity. Being part and parcel of Greek Orthodox theology, the institutional Church cannot subdue or dismiss it, and cannot accentuate it. Religious charisma then, as it is cultivated and practiced in Greek Orthodox anchoretic communities and by hermits in their solitary ‘cells’, could renew, revive, and reinforce Church authority, or could challenge and undermine it. And due to the historical-theological bonds of institutional Church and the State, charismatic insubordination could easily attack or glorify the State according to policies which either substantiate or challenge the authority and prestige of the Greek Orthodox religion to the public domain. In other words, a series of institutional contingencies, political as well as ideological, first reinforced the mystical orientation of the Orthodox theology, and then, due to Latin and Ottoman invasions, completely froze it in time. The triple fusion, of institutional and charismatic grace, of the State and the Church, and of religious charismatic grace and the secular state, blurs the limits between religion and the secular public domain both organizationally and symbolically. The blurring is not ‘functional’, in that it does not reinforce some tendencies or orientations toward a certain common constitutive good or code orientation. Instead, due to the incompatibility between the three institutions, tension among them is a constant feature of their relationship, a tension between bureaucratic rationality and voluntarist social action, between moral homogeny and moral egotism, and between civic virtue and civil disobedience. The tensions which take place in the political domain, such as the institutional autonomy of the State vis-à-vis the Church, or the economic domain, such as the economic scandals concerning various Church institutions, have been already identified and analyzed.13 Much less attention has been paid to the cultural domain—to matters of symbolic orders and structure, and to symbolic classification and ritual performance. The metaphorical, metonymic, and synecdochic relations of religious signs to ­political signs (as they are conventionally understood in a given social milieu), as well as structurally similar collective representations of the pure 13  See, for example, in brief, The persons of the ecclesiastic drama [Τα πρόσωπα του εκκλησιαστικού δράματος] Η Καθημερινή, 11/2/2007. http://www.kathimerini. gr/277426/article/epikairothta/ellada/ta-proswpa-toy-ekklhsiastikoy-dramatos.

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and the polluted, and of the good and the evil, generate a fluid symbolic interaction between the religious and the secular domain, so that secular issues could easily be understood in religious terms by symbolic association. This connection is at the heart of civil religions worldwide, and it guarantees the moral continuation between the religious and the secular ontological orders, constitutive goods, and collective representations and rituals, and thus of the moral foundations upon which formal and theoretical rationality have been erected, and to a lesser extent practical rationality as well.14 Yet, the chiliastic-apocalyptic nature of charismatic grace escapes this continuity, and operates as endemic justification of individual authenticity in mores and habits, and an epidemic source of emotional outbursts in moments of civil crisis. In this vein, religious charismatic grace allows for the extra-institutional charismatization or, more often, condemnation, of any civic institution which does not stand up to popular expectation, and thus falls out of grace. And it does so, not in doctrinal, but in mystical-imagistic mode which ruptures the ordinary flow of ordinary social life, and it fuels the dramatic emergence of subversive liminality and performances of the undifferentiated community (Szakolczai 2009). Orthodox constitutive goods, then, are neither comprehensive nor consistent enough to impose normative standards upon human action and thus to place psychological premiums on the ethical action in the world. This does not make Greek Orthodox religiosity immoral; rather, it suggests that it does not encourage an in-worldly and methodical way of life as a generalized means for social action. Code orientations that should offer stable, long-term solutions to problems generated by the social division of labor, such as regulation of power and construction of trust, of meaning, solidarity, and legitimation thereof remain informal, a matter of improvised arrangements only to be changed in the first instance of new circumstances. As psychological premiums are not based upon a consistent, doctrine-like, configuration of constitutive goods, the psychological cost of compromising rules and regulations is small, while the psychological cost of obeying the binding and ruthless rational-institutional ground rules is high since your ‘consciousness’ tells you that these rules are meaningless and inhumane. Consequentially, the symbolic classifications and the performativity of Greek Orthodox religiosity do not invite and do not encourage a meaningful construction of a methodical self; it does encourage a disciplinarian self, but only as an external sign of conformity to the  For an example of the moral aspects of economy, see Djelic and Vranceanu (2007).

14

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authorities, and this only conditionally. As for charismatic social action, it does not lead to the concretization of morality into stable social structures as ethics, but the informal institutionalization of defiance and the pursuit of authenticity as an end in itself. In ideal-typical terms, the political consequences of such a religion match the last two characteristics of a clientelistic society according to Eisenstadt: an insulated self that cannot accept the difference in the ‘other’, but only absolute resemblance; a self that is expressed primarily by emotion rather than reason; a self that seeks the eternal and the static in social organization rather than progress and experimentation; a self who inevitably seeks ‘similarity of emotions rather than similarity of the minds’ (Karapostolis 2010, 228). Always in ideal-typical terms, this triplet of effects, together, encourages, cultivates, and justifies a political self that seeks salvation either in programs that consider the given social organization as fixed and eternal, or in programs that declare war to such a condition and promise Jacobin-like salvation in one stroke. In both cases the aim  remains the same: to experience salvation as motionless temporality. We examine how this predisposition is incorporated in Greek civil society.

4.11   Orthodox Religiosity and the ‘Order-Taking’ Classes The Orthodox self, a self who lingers between conformist conservatism and mystical defiance and insubordination, is not constrained, as an ideal-­ type, by the principles of official theology. The modern social division of labor ensures a plurality of religiosities, that is, of distinct and perceptible ways by which religion is comprehended, narrated, and performed by various social classes and groups. One way to examine religiosity in this respect is the general distinction of ‘order-giving’ and ‘order-taking’ social classes (Collins 2004): The order-giving class identifies with the official values, with the ‘sacred objects’ which are the content of their order-giving discourse. The order-­ taking class, because it is being dominated by these rituals, tends to be implicitly alienated from them, and hence withdraws into identification with its backstage group. In Goffmanian terms, the order-giving classes have a ‘frontstage culture,’ the order-taking classes have a ‘backstage’ culture. (Collins 2004, 114)

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Backstage culture does not take place only ‘behind the scenes’ but also away from the hegemonic, central, and official stage of the order-giving classes. Collins uses the concept to distinguish between rituals that assert hegemonic political power from rituals that undermine it, but it could also be used in the context of our analysis to examine the religious periphery of ceremonies, rituals, and performances. We focus on two major cultural fields that have been strongly influenced by the Orthodox religion: magico-superstitious ‘little traditions’, found primarily in rural areas, and urban folk music. Both of them constitute off-shoots of the Orthodox religion,—they are popular and affect the political outlook of those practicing either of them in certain ways. And while the socio-political consequences are not identical to the ones of ideal-type Orthodox self, in most cases they nourish the mentality of fatalism and of anarchic individualism. 4.11.1  The Non-charismatic Religiosity of the ‘Little Traditions’ Not everyone experiences religion in the same way. Class decisively affects participation, performance, and comprehension of rituals and the meaning of official theology and of the faithful self. Following Tilly’s scheme, ‘order-giving’ classes tend to identity with the official theology and rituals, and the ‘sacred objects’ which are the content of their order-giving discourse, while the ‘order-taking’ classes tend to develop (next to official rituals) alternative rituals and alternative ‘theologies’ even though symbolic classifications tend to remain the same. This takes place as official symbolic classifications of the good and the evil are attached to different sets of signifiers and to different collective representations according to the group’s habitus and lifeworld. We have already seen how agricultural communities such as the Sarakatsans comprehended Orthodox religiosity in an almost heretic way: Evil is the ordinary condition of the fallen world; a Christian needs to take on board this ‘evilness’ in order to survive; home is the only place safe enough to imitate and experience the innocence, the abundance, and the sacrality of Eden; and faith alone is a secure reference for salvation rather than his actual deeds. This rural religiosity is prone to incorporate in its cosmology notions of evil that are not only moral but material as well; they are corporeal demonic powers that hound the ­faithful and put in danger not only the symbolic purity but also the physical health of the community. Charles Stewart (1991) codified the little traditions of the Christian symbolic classification in rural Greece as follows:

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Christian

Non-Christian

Christ Pure East Light Life White Sinless Named Baptized Inside Righteous Holy Spirit High/Heaven Healer

Devil Impure West Dark Death Black Sin Nameless Unbaptized Outside Wicked Spirits (demons) Low/abyss Disease-bearing (Stewart 1991, 206)

This tangible, somatic, religiosity, certainly does not cultivate a methodical way of life since  the faithful, instead of developing an ethical-­ comprehensive way of life toward the constant flow of events, is absorbed into manipulating the evil forces through magical means: spells, incantations, special prayers, occultist knowledge, sacrifice, ritual performances, and so on. Magic, as Weber asserts, is the social entity which gives supernatural sanction to the traditional contact of life; it leads to a ‘stereotyping’ of modern economic and political relations, since it invokes the sacred against any attempts to rationalize them (Weber 1978, 129–130, 405–406, 577–579). Magic cultivates a worldview which is circumscribed, finite, and static, and made of voluntarist forces of light and darkness in a constant Manichean struggle that will end with the End of Times. This inclination to less than rational and methodical way of life might not inhibit the individual to act rationally in the framework of the modern social division of labor, and of practical rationality, but it might urge the individual to view the nonimmediate, wider social environment, in magical terms if such a worldview is socially accepted and does not hinder the cultural capital of the holder. Rationality then, Stewart argues, is not necessarily a generalized mode of action and of reflection, but a matter of hegemonic ideological power and its ability to bestow cultural capital to its followers. As he indicates in his ethnographic research, belief in demons vanishes not because the locals understand the physical forces behind natural phenomena, but because mentioning demons as a cause brings ridicule to the holder:

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In practice, the exoticá are vanishing amidst sound of mockery; they are being blotted out by emotions such as embarrassment, not by the action of silent contemplation leading to enlightenment. (Stewart 1991, 116)

This means that someone descending from such social milieu might as well continue to follow such a worldview made of dark forces committed to destroy the Christian community and the faithful individual even in a modern habitus. And certainly is the case when the social milieu approves such practices. This is the case with the ‘evil eye’ which even today is believed by the majority of Greeks (and acknowledged by the Church), as well as various superstitions found in both villages and the urban centers: astrology, mediums, tarot, and clairvoyance are popular pastimes and practices which are socially acceptable, and, in some environs, constitute social capital (Stewart 1991, 131). The reason why superstition and related magical practices are quite widespread in Greece is that the Orthodox theology, by stressing the role of grace in salvation, downplays the role of actual social action as a valid salvationist canon. Thus, the evil, that is, unfortunate circumstances, is confronted not by employing ‘graceful’ social deeds, but by appealing to the grace of God—by wishing things to change without action. For example, jinx (vaskanía) is recognized by the Church as actually existing, and has developed particular rituals to repel it accordingly. Thus, the Orthodox and the non-Orthodox type of superstition are linked by symbolic association of the material manifestation of the divine versus material manifestation of the evil, legitimizing superstition to believers and nonbelievers alike. Such beliefs, social research certifies, are not compatible with open society and civil processes.15 They tend to orient the individual away from the public sphere, to a world of dangerous supernatural and/or metaphysical forces, which need to be tamed, controlled, and manipulated. Such worldviews cultivate self-obsession, suspicion of others, and secrecy and, thus, civil alienation. In moments of extraordinary social crisis, the individual—unfamiliar with methodical-rational analysis of institutions, arguments, and perspectives, and faced with a pressing, demanding, and complex issue which surpasses his expertise—tends to adopt a defensive, 15  Lucian W. Pye. 1999. Civility, Social Capital, and Civil Society: Three Powerful Concepts for Explaining Asia. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 29 (4) Spring. 763–782; Preye K. Inokoba, Adeyemi-Suenu Adebowale and Perepreghabofa D Johnnie. 2010. The African Metaphysical Worldview and Its Prostrate Condition of Backwardness. Journal of Human Ecology. 29 (1) 23–31, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09709274.2010.11906245.

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‘phobic’, attitude, and to attribute the crisis to a ‘hidden’, simple, and sinister cause—and to look for a solution accordingly (see Part II, Sect. 10.3.1). In all, the tendency of a superstitious self is to redirect responsibility from the individual onto external forces. Social research confirms it: Superstitious individuals tend to be prejudiced in social issues, dogmatic, uncritical, conventional, conformist, and they tend to take the path of protest votes, a fact which exemplifies political alienation and authoritarian attitudes (Canetti-Nisim 2003; Randall 1997; Heard and Vyse 1998; Altemeyer 1996; Adorno et al. 1950). Folk religiosity and the related superstitious symbolic universe of the order-taking social classes reveal a type of out-worldly salvation that is as counter-civil as the theology of the Orthodox religion. But they are not identical. Rather, while the Orthodox ideal-type of the self always refers to the primacy of the ability of the divine to penetrate the inner-core of the personality and infuse it with God’s grace, and thus charismatize it, the folk religiosity of the little traditions, that is, the tradition of the religious periphery, is magical, and the ‘shaman’ does not claim abilities or intend to change the lifeworld in toto (exceptions are rare). Little traditions are not radical; they are concerned with manipulation of evil forces with the instrumental use of benign supernatural forces. In this sense, the religious little traditions of the order-taking social classes Stewart studied refer to Weber’s ‘practical rationality’—not to ‘theoretical’ and ‘substantive rationality’. In other words, even if technology and the modern way of life are adopted with all their organizational prerequisites by a given community or person at the expense of magical practices, their theoretical rationality, and even more so their substantive rationality, need not follow suit and become rational-scientific. Instead, the magical component will remain alive due to their significance as cognitive and symbolic references (as myth and as ritual) to group and individual identity. In political terms, this means that even though these magic-inspired peripheral cultural classes do not produce charisma,16 they nevertheless are part and parcel of the wider order-taking cultural strata, and as such, they 16  Perhaps the only exception to this rule is the ritualistic walk on burning coal performed by the anastenarides (‘moaners’) cult in the village of St. Helen in northern Greece during the name day of St. Constantine and St. Helen (21 May). The members of the cult are possessed by the grace of the saints, and in an ecstatic mood, they walk and dance on a trail of burning coal. The cult is not recognized by the Church but is tolerated.

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remain susceptible to charisma, as it allows them a connection with ‘powers’ outside the accepted social and religious hierarchy (Turner 1982; Lewis 1971). In following charismatic leaders, the marginalized deny the legitimacy of the mainstream social order and experience a subjective sense of power. These order-taking cultural classes will not produce a charismatic leader in moments of crisis, but they will follow a charismatic leader who will nourish their anxieties, and present a ‘magical’ solution to their predicament to restore the status quo ante. 4.11.2   The Charismatic Religiosity of the Folk Music Interestingly enough, while the Orthodox small traditions do not demand exceptional states of consciousness and charismatic powers, folk music, inspired by the cosmological and ontological principles of Orthodoxy, does. To a large extent, it constitutes a ‘therapeutic’ music, and the performer a charismatic healer; he is a mystic, a ‘hero’, who transcends the worries and the pain of the audience and turns them to moral elements of a familiar to them cosmology. The performer is staged as a shaman who, grasping the meaning of life intuitively in a moment of ecstasy, initiates and forms around him the undifferentiated community of believers, the communitas. He activates culturally specific beliefs and expectations through dramatic, imagistic, performances to bring himself and his audience to a state of ecstasy, and an immediate experience of the sacred. Oikonomou explains: ‘The successful ritualistic therapy establishes a symbolic fusion of the mind, the body, the social framework, and the transcendental domain of moral principles’ (Oikonomou 2015, 333). The strong imagistic mode and out-worldly orientation of the Greek folk music are due to its strong ties with the anchorite (‘ascetic’ in Greek) tradition of religious mystics, and the idea that the one who suffers in this world is vindicated in the afterlife. The moralization of ‘entrenched life and of social isolation’, very prominent in the first, incipient, period of the urban folk music (1920–1940), shaped by underground sub-cultural networks of Asia Minor refugees, is based on the eastern tradition of deprivation. In the framework of out-worldly orientation of religious salvation ‘the desire, not only should not be satisfied, but also should not be uttered’. Accordingly, deprivation, painful and uninvited as it may be, it is a necessary means for the purification of the soul from a meaningless and futile world. Since salvation, in this cultural configuration, is an individualist accomplishment which is achieved through the communal life, the

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­ erformance is structured in such way as to exemplify the collectivist spirit p of the audience: the performer hides his personality behind a ‘mask’ that reflects the collective persona, the lyrics, and the passionless performativity reflect the archetype of the suffering yet austere anchorite, while the feeling the song elicits is attached to a fixed role which identifies and dissociates the collective audience from the outsiders. In the post-war period which follows the end of the civil war (1944–1949), parochial collectivism of underground networks subsides, as a novel urban individualism emerges. But, as much as the labor class culture is concerned, it was not an optimistic, in-worldly, individualism. Rather, it was a fatalistic and out-worldly oriented egocentrism, anchored on on-going hardship and the recent traumatic experience of the civil war. Depravity, the trade-mark of the previous period, gave way to ‘pain’ that the hero needs to endure, if he is to stay true to himself and his principles. Due to the importance of personal, indeed, individual, experience of the audience, the performer now removes his mask, the performance stresses his individuality, and the lyrics shift from representing the collective role-­ feeling to the actual ordeal of the individual caused by the injustice of the ‘fake world’, and the ‘cruel society’. In this period, the song aims at alleviating the pain caused by the calamities of war, of the dislocation of the individual from his place of origin, and the traumatic relocation to a materialist and utilitarian social environment that, in the eyes of the beholder, lacks morals, ethics, and purpose. To this hostile environment, the singer juxtaposes his pure heart, his eternal love of family, his sacrifice for the benefit of kith and kin, and his ascetic acceptance of defeat as the inescapable fate of the hero. 4.11.3  Folk Music and Anarchic Individualism The miraculous economic development of the 1960s and the subsequent improvement of the labor class, which alleviated much of the objective conditions of pain and hardship, and healed a good deal of the trauma caused by the war, necessitated changes in the symbolic universe of the folk song. In the late 1960s, the symbolic representation of pain mutated into two quite different forms: The first turned pain, caused by social forces, to kapsoura, loosely defined as a mood of constant craving and of wounded pride and referred to a persona best described as ‘egocentric underdog’. Obsession with the self is performed as a way of life, an existence that is authenticated by the condition of craving for love

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and self-­obsession. The self is presented as being caught in a web of uncontrolled desires which, invariantly, consume him (e.g., alcoholism, fornication) and lead to his (very rarely ‘her’) demise. Thus, even though the individual does not have to face a ‘cruel society’ any more, the psychological condition of the underdog remains actually desirable, and the individual finds meaning in being helpless as a general disposition and orientation to the world.17 The second form ideologized the symbolic universe of the dislocated individual, and turned individual pain and moral perseverance to attributes of the nation: of national suffering and collectivist virtues. Thus, enclosure and pain became the attributes of an innocent People thrown in the midst of immoral forces which seek its demise. In this genre, the subject is the undifferentiated ‘People’ who is purified by persecution and hardship and seeks salvation in freeing itself from its internal and foreign enemies. In this worldview, the promised triumph of the People is reserved for a Mythical, apocalyptic, future time. Until then, the audience needs to find solace in the moral struggle as an end in itself. Both these genres provide collective representations and symbolic patterns as moral resources of anarchic individualism. The imagistic effervescence that engulfs the audience function in ways similar to a religious liturgy: all together, all elevated, and all excited in the presence of others, but each one isolated in a mystical union with himself. While in the last 40 years other types of more refined and sophisticated forms have emerged out of classical folk music, they managed neither to overshadow the political and the egoistic forms, respectively, nor to introduce in-worldly, non-egoistic, music forms. Instead, both the political and the self-obsessed genre, offshoots of Orthodox religiosity and ontological principles, are still with us today, the former as recurring self-obsession, the latter as the heroic soundtrack of labor-class rallies and demonstrations. The more in-worldly individualistic and sophisticated genre of pop songs and ballads which emerged in the mid-1960s became symbolically ‘contaminated’ by its latent endorsement by the junta regime (see Chap. 5) and to a large extent it lost its legitimacy. In the 1980s onward, it was decisively re-oriented to out-worldly moral visions, to images of an individual who transcends desire to an out-worldly illusive purity. In the same 17  For the performativity around which nightclubs stage this genre of folk music, in which the individual ‘loses’ his social identity and immerses himself in a Bakchtinean, carnivalesque effervescence, see Papaioannou (2017).

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vein, Western imports, such as rock and hip-hop, did not adopt the original western symbolic meaning of these genres, that is, the person who reflects on the ups and downs of the mundane life, but instead they adopted the symbolic meaning of the folk music: the isolated, entrapped, individual who scorns and battles the corrupting forces of modernity. Curiously, in these genres, the individual does not state his own moral imperatives. Instead, the audience is obliged to assume the morality of the hero: by the fact that he struggles against these forces. This peculiarity opened a path of youthful nihilism, wherein the struggle is justified not by its goals but as an end itself. We return to the issue in the last two chapters. While it does not exhaust the variety and moral orientation of the Greek music scene, a strain of out-worldliness does run through the modern Greek folk music, a strain that conceptualizes and visualizes the world as dangerous, and immoral, or alternatively as meaningless. The former conceptualizes purity and goodness as indescribable and elusive, and salvation as deeply felt but unsaid visions. The latter is a celebration of self-­obsession and self-indulgence, wherein the self acknowledges and accepts her weaknesses as what it means to live a good life in a fallen world. In fact, the fallen world, and how to deal with such a given condition, is the hegemonic discourse of the Greek folk and modern music scene, alienating the individual from the immanent world, a world as unfulfilled desires.

4.12   Greek Orthodox Code Orientations Greek Orthodoxy is out-worldly because it believes that earthly ­activities— success or failure in in-worldly matters—have no impact and consequence to the salvation of the individual. What kind of code orientations could emerge out of this approach to social life? In the past, the traditional self lived in a world of multiple time-frames which guaranteed cosmic order. There was the time-frame of God, aeon, which as present-time encompasses the beginning and the end; the referential time-frame of the icons where everything refers to its destination; and the time-frame of descent, where each act is recognized in the framework of its ‘founding treaty’. Every time-frame depended on its symbolism, and there was no neutral time-frame. This multiplicity of time-frames is incompatible with modernity and modernity’s homogenous, linear, and physical time with no metaphysical connotations (Einstein’s relativity of time is indifferent to the experienced, mundane, world). Furthermore, in the older versions of urban folk music, eternity was experienced as eternal

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present-time. These are music forms which carry out-worldly social values unable to fit in a secular, in-worldly, time frame and secular cosmological and ontological principles. In these and other forms of popular art, such as icons, everything needs to refer to a supreme metaphysical source of meaning and worth; absence of such meaning makes the art form meaningless. This fixation to timeless, out-worldly, sources of the good, the beautiful, and the true hinders the development of a moral self able to inspire the development of a set of ethical rules and regulations of the reflective self in matters of social structure and social action. Instead, the self is allowed to refer always to the metaphysical sources of the good, the beautiful, and the true, and to attach intentionally his conscience directly to the eternal truth. In such a cosmological and ontological framework, ‘society’ loses its in-worldly bearings and features, and becomes an abstract, eternal, entity. ‘Greece’ is no longer the tangible country with its tangible people and its tangible problems, but the eternal Greece, shiny and glorious, or abused and suffering, which the individual comprehends in mystical ways. But this mystical path to eternal truths is nothing else but the reflection of the ego as eternal truth; the egotistic self becomes the source of ethics. Social organizations and institutions, such as syndicates, associations, or parties, seen through this looking glass, become the means by which the ego finds self-justification.18 Worse, it cultivates a ‘culture’ of indifference to civil society, and negligence in matters of civic responsibility, even among those who, due to their cultural and material capital, should consider themselves to be the moral elite of the country. A representative case is the following report: Crystalized in the lifestyle spread of Mr. & Mrs. Varoufakis, is the Achilles heel of Greece, which remains the inability of the well-heeled to demonstrate any meaningful empathy with those outside their social class. Greeks who live in important places, surround themselves with important people and consider themselves important, become addicted to grasping for whatever they can get, no matter the consequence to society. The country’s history supports the premise that no matter how much the ruling classes manage to amass, it is never enough. The grotesque inequality afflicting our world is 18  Kalapothakos, Nikos. 2015. We live without purpose, but ‘all together’. [‘Ζούμε χωρίς σκοπό, αλλά ‘όλοι μαζί’]. Καθημερινή. 9/8/2015. http://www.kathimerini.gr/826238/ gallery/proswpa/synentey3eis/nikos-kalapo8akos-zoyme-xwris-skopo-alla-oloi-mazi-video.

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asymmetrically on display in Greece, where power and wealth in the hands of so few is used and abused against so many. This isn’t just measured in how the rich avoid paying taxes. It’s much deeper than that. It has become a way of life and a prevailing ethos among many Greek elites who even now, after everything the country has suffered, shows no sign of abating.19

In this respect, it is safe to hypothesize that clientelism and anarchic individualism, two critical characteristics of the Greek social configuration, are attached to the symbolic classification of the Orthodox religion which orients the self to grasping the world in mystical ways which ignore the various moral configurations of the modern social division of labor, and which is suspicious of rational-bureaucratic institutions as obstacles to reaching salvation, and to achieving the social imperative of the Johannine, undifferentiated, communitas. Only recently a county branch of the Federation of Secondary Education Teachers (ELME) rejected the donation of a private institution, the Bodossaki Foundation, to their schools with the following announcement: The Board of ELME of Magnesia, on the occasion of the sponsorship of the Bodossaki Foundation, declares its categorical opposition to any attempt to commercialize Education. It rejects the sponsorship logic that replaces the responsibility and obligation of the State for the operation of public schools. We call on the associations and school managers not to accept the Bodossaki Foundation’s sponsorship of the “basic equipment” of the High Schools’ workshops. If they have accepted it in the past, they should, collectively, cancel the sponsorship. We call on the Ministry of Education to intervene immediately to prevent companies from entering school premises under the guise of sponsorship programs.20

This is the logic of the communitas against social differentiation and civil society thinly disguised as left-wing ideology. The Foundation is an outsider; a sinister hypocrite who under the disguise of the donation wishes to corrupt the community. The State on the other hand is (should be) the protector; the sacred communitas itself—if not a pro Geroulis, Eve. (15/3/2015). ‘Lifestyles of the Rich & Marxist: Varoufakis Style’, Greek Reporter. http://greece.greekreporter.com/2015/03/15/lifestyles-of-the-rich-marxistvaroufakis-style/. 20   Teachers reject sponsorship. https://www.reader.gr/news/koinonia/ekpaideytikoiaporriptoyn-horigia-toy-idrymatos-mpodosaki-ti-apanta-idryma. 19

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vider of collective resources, at least the guardian of the people in the endless struggle against modernity and its concomitant social differentiation. Alas, since this undifferentiated community is impossible to achieve in a modern social configuration, the modern individual is left alone to his own devises to make sense of the modern institutional logics, which are, by definition, symbolically vacuous and morally meaningless. No wonder that the result is the individual to swing between pure egoism and the desire for a blissfully perfect egalitarianism (Fig. 4.1). It follows that political parties in Greece are rather obliged to render their promulgations morally meaningful by attaching them to the symbolic classification of the Greek Orthodox, or Orthodox-like folk religiosity. This is done by presenting their political programs in ways Presence of God in Creation through His Energies and the Saints The Un-restorable Fallen World Functional time–perpetual present time Restoration of lost communion with God Deification by Grace by emptying the self Emotional unity of knowledge and volition Afterlife vindication of the sufferer Mystical religious dramas Rituals and performances of time-space-individual-collectivity fusion Boundless will Instant gratification Self-righteous social action Non-methodical social action Conformity or rebelliousness

Lifeworld as an endless expectation Feelings as a valid canon of moral legitimacy and accountability Yearning for the past The ego as eternal truth

Not relevant to salvation (Resulting in self-centered interest groups Togetherness of egoists Ad hoc social structures) Not relevant to salvation

Fig. 4.1  The Greek Orthodox Salvationist Model

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compatible with Orthodox moral visions and constitutive goods, irrespective of whether the political networks and elites adhere to these visions. To the extent that a political program is attached to out-worldly moral imperatives, it will clash with in-worldly formal, bureaucratic, and technocratic rationality, since the latter, in the framework of out-worldly salvation, instead of becoming a generalized precondition of social organization, it remains isolated to serve the most elementary, organizationalfunctional, elements. Simultaneously, theoretical (i.e., ideological) rationality would also be understood in mystical terms, intensifying its transcendental orientation accordingly. In this case, practical, utilitarian, rationality, instead of being attached to methodical formal rationality, would either be attached to out-worldly visions of salvation or, alternatively, be completely dissociated from any kind of moral imperatives, and thus would be reduced to naked, egoistic, utilitarianism, and cynicism (such as the case of the government of Syriza-Anel (see Chap. 7)).21 This interplay between culture and ideology, and the subsequent social interweaving of these forces, constitutes the spirit of civil religion. It is the subject of the next chapter.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W., Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford. 1950. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper and Row. Altemeyer, Robert. 1996. The Authoritarian Specter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bellah, Robert, Richard Madsen, William M.  Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. 1996. Habits of the Heart. Berkeley: University of California Press. Canetti-Nisim, Daphna. 2003. Two Religious Meaning Systems, One Political Belief System: Religiosity, Alternative Religiosity and Political Extremism. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 4 (3): 35–54. 21  See newspaper analyses of an ideology that became bland cynicism: Harry van Versendall. Kathimerini. (20/2/2015) Cynical SYRIZA puts its soul on the line. http://www.ekathimerini.com/167552/article/ekathimerini/comment/cynical-SYRIZA-puts-its-soul-onthe-line; Paschos Mandravelis. Kathimerini. The Cynicism of the Armchair [Ο Κυνισμός της Καρέκλας] (22/1/2017). http://www.kathimerini.gr/892823/opinion/epikairothta/ politikh/o-kynismos-ths-kareklas; Sakis Moumtzis. Liberal. The Syriza people are not only cynics; they are insolent. [Οι Συριζαίοι δεν είναι μόνο κυνικοί. Είναι και θρασείς] (25/1/2017). http://www.liberal.gr/arthro/147629/apopsi/arthra/oi-surizaioi-deneinai-monon-kunikoi-einai-kai-thraseiskurios.html.

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Capra, Fritjof. 1984. The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture. London: Bantam. Collins, Randall. 2004. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Djelic, Marie-Laure, and Radu Vranceanu, eds. 2007. Moral Foundations of Management Knowledge. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 2000b. Fundamentalism, Sectarianism and Revolution: The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freedberg, David. 1989. The Power of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gerodimos, Roman. 2013. The Ideology of Far Left Populism in Greece: Blame, Victimhood and Revenge in the Discourse of Greek Anarchists. Political Studies 63 (3): 608–625. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.12079. de Hart, Joep, Paul Dekker, and Loek Halman, eds. 2013. Religion and Civil Society in Europe. London: Springer. Heard, Keneth, and Stuart Vyse. 1998. Authoritarianism and Paranormal Beliefs. Imagination, Cognition, and Personality 18 (2): 121–126. Herzfeld, Michael. 1987. Anthropology Through the Looking Glass. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kalberg, Stephen. 2001. The Modern World as a Monolithic Iron Cage? Utilizing Max Weber to Define the Internal Dynamics of the American Political Culture Today. Max Weber Studies 1 (2): 178–195. Karapostolis, Vasilis. 2010. Division and Atonement  – Concerning the Political Morality of the Greeks [Διχασμός και Εξιλέωση  – Περί πολιτικής ηθικής των Ελλήνων]. Athens: Patakis. Lewis, Ioan M. 1971. Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Makrides, Vasilis. 2005. Orthodox Christianity, Rationalization, Modernization: A Reassessment. In Eastern Orthodoxy in a Global Age, ed. Victor Roudometof, Alexander Agadjanian, and Jerry Pankhurst, 179–210. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Marangudakis, Manussos. 2001. The Medieval Roots of Our Ecological Crisis. Environmental Ethics 23 (2): 243–260. Meyendorff, John. 2012. The Orthodox Church. Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 19: 143–150. Mouzelis, Nikos. 1978. Modern Greece: Facets of Underdevelopment. London: Macmillan. Oikonomou, Leonidas. 2015. Stelios Kazantzidis – Trauma and Symbolic Healing in Folk Urban Song [Στέλιος Καζαντζίδης – Τραύμα και συμβολική θεραπεία στο λαϊκό τραγούδι]. Athens: Pataki. Papaioannou, Freideriki. 2017. A Night at the Bouzoukia. [Μια Νύχτα στα Μπουζούκια]. BA Thesis, University of the Aegean.

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Pollatos, Thanasis, and Thanasis Kouravelos. 2017. The Roots of Anomie [Οι Ρίζες της Ανομίας]. Athens: Armos. Ramfos, Stelios. 2011. Yearning for the One; Chapters in the Inner Life of the Greeks. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press. Randall, T.M. 1997. Supernatural Belief and Political Alienation. Perceptual and Motor Skills 84 (3): 1394–1394. Ryan, Alan. 2010. On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present. London: Liveright. Schroeder, Gerald. 1991. Genesis and the Big Bang: The Discovery of Harmony between Modern Science and the Bible. London: Bantam. Stewart, Charles. 1991. Demons and the Devil. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Szakolczai, Arpad. 2009. Liminality and Experience: Structuring Transitory Situations and Transformative Events. International Political Anthropology 2 (1): 141–172. Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Udovitch, Abraham. 1962. At the Origins of the Western Commenda: Islam, Israel, Byzantium? Speculum 37: 198–207. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society. 2 vols. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 5

Civil Religions of a Secular Communitas

Contents

5.1  O  n Civil Religion  153 5.2  The Secular and the Religious Constants of the Greek Civil Religion  156 5.2.1  The Political Ground Base of Civil Religion  157 5.2.2  The Religious Ground Base of Civil Religion  158 5.3  Sponsored Civic Religion (1967–1974)  161 Bibliography  164

5.1   On Civil Religion Civil religion, either in its Durkheimian form, as a sui generis normative integration of a society to the effect of moral community, or in its Rousseauian vision, as the intentional construction of virtuous citizens by the state, constitutes a means for achieving political cohesion through cultural means. It constitutes the moral binding force that holds together the body politic, giving purpose to the political community, and spiritual meaning to its existence (Bellah and Hamond 1980; Cristi 2001).1 Yet, Durkheim’s and Rousseau’s certainty, that when established, civil religion produces socio-political cohesion, derives more from a normative understanding of the process, and less from empirical observation. What if the 1  For various civil religions and their moral sources, see: Bellah and Hamond (1980/2013) and Marcela Cristi (2001).

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constitutive ingredients of civil religion make social cohesion unattainable? What if civil religion is indeed ‘shared’ in terms of ritual, meaning, and behavior, but its structure makes the political community unstable and its cohesion brittle? In other words, in principle, there may be patterns of civil religion which, while they indeed provide a vision of political community, the vision itself makes actual cohesion unachievable. How is this possible? The answer is suggested in Coleman’s definition of civil religion (Coleman 1970). Merging the Durkheimian and the Rousseauian perspectives, he defined it as ‘… a set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man as citizen and his society in world history to the ultimate conditions of his existence’ (Coleman 1970, 69 emphasis added). His definition makes more vivid what is implicit in Durkheim, and more hesitantly so, in Rousseau: that civil religion entails a certain kind of salvation.2 This ‘civil salvation’ resembles church salvation, since it constitutes a response to the same existential problematique.3 But civil religion is more complex and, potentially, less cohesive than its church counterpart. The partaking of moral, political, ideological, religious, and historical factors in the construction of civil religion, as indicated in Coleman’s definition, make the outcome unpredictable and ambiguous, not only in terms of approvability but in the very definition of salvation. In other words, while the question ‘what I need to do in order to save myself’ is answered comprehensively and confidently by all church religions, not every civil religion, in principle, is able to do so. This possibility, a civil religion being a source of instability, arises when the constitutive goods crystallized in it, such as freedom, equality, ­fraternity, justice, and democracy, are defined in ways that their materialization, and thus the activation of the salvation mechanism, is inversely related to the organizational stability of the social system by undermining 2  As Bellah and Hammond argue (ibid.), nationalism is not necessarily a form of civil religion. Secular nationalism, such as the Mexican one, does not constitute a civil religion. To be so, nationalism needs to be organically attached to transcendental, religious, symbols, texts, and rituals. 3  As Weber indicates, salvation is not to be found in all ethical religions. Confucianism, for example, certainly has a religious ethic, but it has not a need for salvation. The reluctance of post-war China to incorporate in its civic religion cultural-traumatic events, such as the Nanking massacre (Alexander and Gao 2007), which entail sacrifice with salvationist overtones, could be attributed to this propensity. Christianity, on the other hand, is deeply salvationist, and thus civil religions that appear in Christian countries are affected by, and incorporate, visions of salvation. See Hayes (1960, 164–167).

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social trust, solidarity, and membership criteria. If political religion justifies ­challenges to the very foundations of the main social networks of power, no real social stability could ever be achieved. This is a condition that escapes the typical accusations of various cultural practices, habits, and routines which hinder modernization.4 Rather, it captures a more fundamental condition, whereas the shared normative understanding of constitutive goods, and consequently, the legitimacy of the political order, hinders even the possibility of normative integration, and undermines the functional prerequisites of the modern social division of labor. This is the condition that characterizes the civil religion which emerged in Greece in the second half of the 1970s. As is shown in the following sections, it constitutes a diffused discourse of mystical-imagistic visions that situates ‘the People’ in a perpetual liminal stage between a traumatic past and a blissful future. This civil religion first rallied the Greek people around a soteriological vision of a communitas, then kept it in a perpetual state of instability, to finally tear it apart in the moment of crisis in 2010–2015 (see Part II, Sect. 10.3.3). This process, the ad infinitum rupturing of a moral community by a discourse that brought the community together at the first place, we call it schismogenetic.5 In a very short period that followed the traumatic collapse of the Junta regime, in 1974, a number of endemic, but otherwise self-contained, out-worldly cultural tendencies were turned to an epidemic onslaught of mystical visions of an undifferentiated, brotherly community as reflecting a heroic and defiant community of martyrs. This event does not constitute an ‘evolutionary stage’ of a unified linear evolution toward increased social differentiation. Rather, it would be better to call it a mutation; a radical recombination of preexisting and scattered symbolic representations and classifications, past cultural traumas, rituals, and performances, brought together by the centripetal force of a soteriological narrative. The discourse that emerged out of this process produced an original and authoritative civil religion, and in this context gave new symbolic meaning and intensity to all its foundational components. Paradoxically, the same discourse that glorified the ‘heroic and democratic’ people became the justification of a generalized  For example, see a series of case studies in Harrison and Huntington (2001).  The term was coined by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1935) to describe forms of self-destructive competitive social interactions; that societies can be stuck for a long time in a state where unity is broken, and yet the schismatic social components are forced to stay together, producing an unpleasant and violent existence. 4 5

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anomic, egoistic, and eventually an hedonistic lifestyle intensified under the influence of clientelism, anarchic individualism, and familism in the public sphere. How did it emerge? And how does it affect the social division of labor? To answer these questions, we first need to consider its genealogical trajectory.

5.2   The Secular and the Religious Constants of the Greek Civil Religion Social structures—formal, institutional, or vernacular—cannot be sustained politically if they are not anchored in moral imperatives of right and wrong and in visions of the sacred and the profane. These imperatives assume a presence of their own when they become a distinctive discourse through public rituals, speeches, ceremonies, commemorations, and festivals, and thus become the mechanism by which sacrality is internalized, the body politic becomes sacred, and the basic contours of the social configuration and of the regime, inviolable. In the form of a distinctive discourse, it constitutes a moral evaluator of the political self, as it informs the individual of its moral responsibilities and obligations to itself as a citizen but also to the self vis-à-vis its fellow citizens. It suggests a commitment to certain political constitutive goods, thus allowing the self to take an active stand: to evaluate and participate in the public sphere accordingly. This is to say that civil religion is not a solid and insulated entity. Instead, it is intrinsically modular and responsive to its environment. Major rearrangements of the web of social networks of power could change its outlook in rather radical ways. Even if only one of the factors involved in the formulation changes, the phenomenological nature of civil religion assures that the other symbolic components will be affected as well so that the new construction might be radically different from the previous one. Yet, some modular components of a civil religion are more time-resilient than others, thus guaranteeing a minimum of genealogical continuity. According to Bellah, a factor that does offer such continuity is civil religion’s ‘religious ground base’ which he defines as the ‘… basic social structure itself, the religion embedded in the family, village, work group, and so on’ (Bellah and Hamond, op. cit. chapter 4). Next to this, we add a second, secular this time, ground base: the national ‘myth of origin’. Anthony Smith (1986) identifies its significance in the purpose it provides with the national community:

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There can be no identity without memory (albeit selective), no collective purpose without myth, and identity and purpose or destiny arc necessary elements of the very concept of a nation. (Smith 1986, 2)

Purpose stems from myth, and myth shapes the ontological premises and political orientation of civil religion. It orients the national community to the attainment of an ultimate goal, and to a destiny it needs to fulfill to be true to itself; it is the rule according to which the past is explained, the present is understood, and the future is visualized. To the extent the myth of origin is internalized by the members of the national community, it unites them in a common purpose and shapes their collective identity accordingly. Thus, even though more than a myth is needed for the formation of a civil religion, the myth of origin per se, provides the foundations of the general orientation of the national identity, and the psychological predisposition of the individual as a political being. If the religious ground base is the soul, the myth of origin is the flesh of civil religion. We proceed in examining these two basic foundations of the Greek civil religion, as a way to comprehend the present configurations of this schismogenetic civil religion. 5.2.1   The Political Ground Base of Civil Religion Unlike most nations, modern Greek identity is built upon not one, but two distinct ‘myths of origin and descent’: the ancient Greek and the medieval Byzantine—both being cases of exemplary high civilizations. The duality makes modern Greek identity somewhat confusing and contradictory; as for the glory they radiate, it exerts almost unbearable pressure on modern Greeks to prove worthy of their ancestors. The two myths of origin were interlinked in the work of the historian Constantine Paparrigopoulos, who, in his magnum opus The History of the Greek Nation (still the official doctrine), argues that the Nation is both an historical and a metaphysical entity. Prevelakis captures the spirit of his work as follows: Paparrigopoulos’ Greek Nation is, above all, historical. Its identity is its history, or, rather, the Greek Nation is to be understood as the moving force of History in the Balkans. The Greek Nation has always had a mission of advancement and civilization. For Paparrigopoulos, the Greek Nation is not exclusively linked to a particular national characteristic, be it language or

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religion. In fact, the remarkable thing is the way the author copes and maintains the unity of the nation through History, while accepting the fact that race, religion, language, and even the consciousness of the nation, have changed in time. He sees the nation as a mystic entity surviving through various transformations. (Prevelakis 2003, italics added)

The most troubling aspect of the secular equation that produces modern Greek identity is that this double ancestry is not exactly under Greek control or command. Rather, ancient Greece is appropriated, certainly intellectually, and to a significant extent materially (e.g., various ancient artifacts located in western museums), by the West to the extent that the latter does not recognize any real continuation between modern and ancient Greeks. As for Byzantium, while it is truly a living tradition, and modern Greeks are the direct and undisputed descendants of most of those medieval Byzantines who did not convert to Islam, its charismatic center, the church of Aghia Sophia, ‘the great monastery’, is located outside the country’s borders, in Constantinople—modern-day Istanbul. Thus, both identities are traumatic; they urge the Greeks to prove the unprovable, and to imagine the unimaginable. Such traumatic memories, with no real chance to be healed by reclaiming the spirit of the ancients, or the Byzantine territories, operate as a constant feeling of existential restlessness. Based upon emotive cultural predispositions, this existential restlessness gives birth to complexes of inferiority and superiority, longing and nostalgia, disgrace and pride, desire and frustration, determination and resignation, all being part and parcel of the Greek national identity from its modern inception until today. Attached to modern traumatic experiences, or geopolitical concerns, it becomes a precipitating factor that many a time clouds sober reflection and strategic planning, potentially turning the issue of the day to an apocalyptic struggle with salvationist overtones. 5.2.2   The Religious Ground Base of Civil Religion The reason religion provides the ‘ground base’ of civil religion is obvious. It infiltrates and shapes basic human interaction and thus micro social structures before any secular ideology does so. As such, it constitutes the way civility operates, unless secularism intentionally either prohibits it or replaces it, with an alternative moral system of its own. Yet, even in its most differentiated form, civil religion hardly ever escapes the basic symbolic structure of the church religion. Thus, to comprehend civil religion

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in Greece, it is crucial to understand the way faith and civility are symbolically interlinked. Even before the ideological manipulation of the state, mystical religiosity was transferred into the Greek secular public domain, and it became a constant way of perceiving civility, by default, through the identification of the Orthodox believer with the Greek citizen as a personal, existential experience. The individual who experiences the Christian-Orthodox truth, by default, experiences the condition of citizenship. This is a crucial identification; it meant: [N]o clear distinction between the concepts and the relative perception of a human being, an individual, a citizen, a Greek, and a faithful, as there is no clear distinction between the rights of man, the individual, the citizen and the faithful. Thus, it becomes clear from this point of view, that the attribute of the faithful and of the indigenous person constitute the main and primary features of the Greek from which all rights proceed. (Paparizos 2000, 97–98)

This is much more than a manipulation of the Church by the State, or of the State by the Church, whereas the State is consolidated by the ardent support of the Church, or that Church’s hegemony is guaranteed by statist paternalism. It constitutes the definite infiltration of the public, secular, domain by mysticism: citizenship is not something which is realized through the involvement of the person in public affairs, through his/her involvement in various public organizations, through civil acts that turn abstract notions of morality material and visible, but through the experience of worship and acts of faith. In effect, citizenship becomes a mystical experience. Thus, through the State, the Nation and the Church became somehow identical: the nation became a sacred entity that was perceived in transcendental terms similar to the religious ones. Karamouzis (2009), reviewing the literature of the effects of the Orthodox Church on Greek citizenship, concludes that anything national by definition became sacred and inviolable and vice-versa: the good Christian is the virtuous citizen, but, crucially, we would add, not vice-versa. Religious behavior is an efficient verification of ethical civility: [I]n this way, a peculiar type of citizen was established, a citizen who ought to comprehend his/her political presence in the modern Greek society through a set of rules which were legitimized only through religious duties which defined the virtuous citizen. (Karamouzis 2009, 92–93)

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The Nation and the Church become identical, as the nation becomes a sacred entity perceived in transcendental terms similar to the religious ones. The regime, its functions, its wars, is not to be scrutinized and evaluated but revered in a fashion similar to the fundamental rituals and theology of the Church: faith, perseverance, suffering, salvation, and resurrection.6 These are not exceptional developments; in the framework of the construction of modern states and state ideologies, they took place everywhere in Europe and beyond during the last two centuries. Yet, in a country which combines out-worldly religiosity with weak social structures and no tradition of civil institutions, their effects were overwhelming. They absorbed and neutralized any notion of civility. Anything national by definition became sacred and inviolable and vice-versa: the good Christian is the virtuous citizen, but, crucially, we would add, not vice-versa. Civility, unlike religiosity, was not routinely recognized as being an autonomous source of national identity or of personal worth: We should not forget that the religious subbed of the modern Greek society throughout the 19th century constituted a significant parameter in the identification of the Greek citizen; the result of this could have produced more permanent consequences in the consciousness of the modern Greek compared with a secular national-political identity free of religious overlays. In this way, a peculiar type of citizen was established, a citizen who ought to comprehend his/her political presence in the modern Greek society through a set of rules which were legitimized only through religious duties which defined the virtuous citizen. (Karamouzis 2009, 92–93)

The identification of the citizen with the orthodox faithful, even at an elementary level, could not have been inconsequential. The symbolic association of the mystical mode of perceiving and expressing religious ideals, such as the ‘fallen world’, ‘tribulation’, ‘salvation’, and ‘brotherly love’, to perceiving and experiencing civil ideals such as citizenship, political participation, and civic responsibility, could only mean the symbolic identification of the body politic with Johannine communitas. Seeking to find in the body politic something equivalent to a communitas is to reject the very process of modernization, that is, social and political differentiation: the individual evaluates fellow citizens not through some abstract notions of 6  Interestingly enough, redemption is not part of this recurring discourse. It assumes that the Greek nation never sins. This is a crucial omission from the moral equation used in public discourses. We delve on this very crucial peculiarity at a later point.

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civility—notions that allow for individual disparity but through fixed personal and collective identities and ascriptive roles (e.g., kinship, local community, and guild).7 In moments of crisis, in liminal situations, the same individual would experience ‘truth’ in apocalyptic, messianic, visions of right and wrong, seeking for the charismatic leader to lead him to safety. Thus, to the extent that civility is affected by the religious experience, the Greek self faces modernity as a Janus figure: as both a pietistic conformist and as millenarian zealot. The constant ruptures, divisions, and civil wars that characterize an otherwise deeply conformist population might be explained through such an anthropological reading of the Greek self; as a generalized tendency to perceive interest and identity in exclusive, non-­ negotiable, and polemic terms. Or, in Karapostolis’ terms, as a means to affirm his very existence.

5.3   Sponsored Civic Religion (1967–1974) Before Greek civil religion became differentiated from both State and Church in the late 1970s, it was so firmly attached to state ideology and church religion that it had hardly any existence of its own. Being a country primarily of illiterate peasants, held together by only the Orthodox church and the centralized state, it could have not been otherwise. The two generations that took Greece to develop a bourgeoisie and approach a European standard of literacy was a period long enough for the establishment of a State-Church ideological hegemony, embedded in state institutional structures, such as the educational system, the civil service, and in various ideological networks attached to them. This hegemony, which was firmly established during the Metaxas dictatorship (1936–1941) entailed interconnected identities: to be a good citizen, you needed to be a good Christian. The complex was powerful and flexible enough to serve various political programs, reactionary as well as progressive. For better or worse, it eventually interconnected state, church, and civility to propagate the triptych ‘Fatherland, Religion, Family’ and to justify political visions accordingly (Gazi 2011). The high tide of this Church-State sponsored civic religion was the period of the second dictatorial regime the country experienced in the twentieth century—called ‘21st of April’ as it was commenced on 21 April 7  For the development of the moral self in the West, see Taylor (1989); for the equivalent development of the self in the East see Ramfos (2011).

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1967—and lasted for seven years (1967–1974). During this period, sponsored popular parades, festivals, ceremonies, and commemorations celebrated the virtues of the fighting/resisting/revolting freedom-loving Greek People throughout history, while the regime intensely promulgated itself as the latest bearer of the ‘Greek-Orthodox civilization’; more important, and close to the heart, they claimed they personify the spirit of the defiant Greek warrior vis-à-vis the spirit of corrupted politicians—a notion still popular in the public imaginaire, and especially so in the country-­ side.8 Crucially, the officers’ corps was not drawn from the ranks of the refined upper classes, but instead from the lower social strata and from the rural periphery—the regions which were brutalized during the civil war and wherein the symbols of the tough defender of pride and honor were ruling supreme. These officers scorned the ‘hypocritical and corrupted’ upper classes, as much as they scorned intellectualism and civility. Anything liberal was either communistic or degenerative, or both. They adored technological and economic progress, but they demanded progress to be controlled and circumscribed by the conservative triptych Fatherland-­ Religion-­Family, that is, traditional social structures and the values of patriarchy, authoritarianism, and pietistic social behavior. Nationalistic traditionalism became their official ideology and evangelical-like Church para-organizations gained immense power and direct access to the educational system. Military parades and ecclesiastical processions completed the ecclesiastical-military complex of this sponsored civic religion. Alas, the seven years of the dictatorship, the ‘National Revolution’, as it was its official name, also proved to be the swan song of this hegemony. The shameful downfall of the regime in July 1974, as a result of its inability to react to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus (itself a reaction to a junta-­ sponsored military coup in Cyprus), challenged the validity of this undifferentiated civic religion, and unintentionally gave birth to an original and autonomous civil religion to be examined in the next section. As for the sponsored civic religion, while it withdrew from front-stage politics after the collapse of the dictatorship, the discourse which identified Greek citizenship with the Orthodox religion remained alive and popular among the more conservative social groups for the years to come. This popularity is reinforced and, to an extent, institutionally justified by the 8  See William McNeill (1978); also, Nikos Kalapothakos’ analysis of popular culture after WW II. https://jaj.gr/readings/%E1%BC%95nas-%E1%BC%A5ros-m%E1%BD%B2-panto %E1%BF%A6fles-1958-senario-skinothesia-%E1%BC%80lekos-sakellarios/.

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constitutional identification of the Orthodox faith with the state and the nation (Constitutional Article 1), and the concomitant religious sanction of the basic political institutions (e.g., inauguration of the government and the Parliament, celebration of the various national, occupational, and educational holidays). Thus, both directly and indirectly, the sponsored, traditional, and civic religion remains alive in formal state ceremonies such as national parades and state ceremonies. It also ascertains that the pietistic, ascetic, and conservative, in all respects, religious outlook of the slogan still constitutes the unofficial discourse of the Church. Reflecting on its societal effects, we are compelled to conclude that the slogan and its connotations could not have contributed to the construction of an in-worldly oriented moral community of citizens. It could not, since it nourished the religious spirit of mystical collectivism, the undifferentiated faithful who deep in their heart experience the communal spirit in religious rituals and ceremonies, and in acts of emotional effervescences which incarnate the essence of ‘citizenship’.9 ‘Fatherland’ and ‘family’, seen through this discursive religious lens, are stripped of their practical, tangible, attributes. ‘Fatherland’ becomes a transcendental vision of past and future glory, not the tangible country and its people; its mystical worshipping bypasses and ignores the responsibilities of the citizen toward the body politic, as much as it bypasses and ignores clientelism and corruption since they belong to another, material, and thus lesser domain. In a similar vein, the elevation of ‘family’ to the basic social cell of this holistic vision, fully justifies familism, while, simultaneously, it nullifies the significance of the autonomous citizen. In short, someone who complies with this slogan will not find it contradictory to love his country while he evades taxation, or to love his family to the detriment of anything else that lies beyond the familial boundaries. He would still consider himself a sound and proud patriot. But as we said, this sponsored civic religion is not hegemonic anymore. Next to it, during the 1970s, another, civil this time, religion emerged. It was secular and fully autonomous. It worshipped the People in the same way the previous one was worshipping Family-ReligionFatherland, but being independent of State and Church, sponsoring it is not controlled by the formal attributes and the power interests 9  The presence of this fusion of civility and religiosity made itself visible during the police ID cards crisis in 2000 when millions of Greeks demonstrated against the political decision to remove the recordation of the citizens’ religious affiliation from them.

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embedded in these institutions. It is this civil religion that transformed public morals and civil attitudes in unprecedented ways, and it opened the door to the disastrous developments that took place in the 2010s.

Bibliography Alexander, Jeffrey C., and R. Gao. 2007. Remembrance of Things Past: Cultural Trauma, the ‘Nanking Massacre’ and Chinese Identity. In Tradition & Modernity: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Yan Shaodang et al., 266–294. Beijing: Peking University Press. Bateson, Gregory. 1935. Culture Contact and Schismogenesis. Man 35 (December): 178–183. Bellah, Robert, and Philip Hamond. 1980/2013. Varieties of Civil Religion. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers. Coleman, John. 1970. Civil Religion. Sociological Analysis 31 (2): 67–77. Cristi, Marcela. 2001. From Civil to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Gazi, Efi. 2011. Fatherland, Religion, Family—A History of a Slogan [Πατρίς, Θρησκεία, Οικογένεια - Ιστορία ενός Συνθήματος]. Athens: Polis. Harrison, Lawrence, and Samuel Huntington, eds. 2001. Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress. London: Basic Books. Hayes, Carlton. 1960. Nationalism: A Religion. New York: Macmillan. Karamouzis, Polykarpos. 2009. Religion and Dominant Ideology in Modern Greek Society [Θρησκεία και κυρίαρχη ιδεολογία στη νεοελληνική κοινωνία]. Science and Society [Επιστήμη και Κοινωνία] 21: 83–102. https://doi. org/10.12681/sas.453. McNeill, William. 1978. The Metamorphosis of Greece Since World War II. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Paparizos, Antonis. 2000. Enlightenment, Religion, and Tradition in Modern Greek Society. In Greek Political Culture Today [“Διαφωτισμός, Θρησκεία και Παράδοση στη Σύγχρονη Ελληνική Κοινωνία” στο Η Ελληνική Πολιτική Κουλτούρα Σήμερα], ed. Nikos Demertzis, 97–108. Athens: Odysseas. Prevelakis, Nikolas. 2003. The Spirit of Greek Nationalism: The Greek Case in the Light of Greenfeld’s Conceptual Framework. 1st Ph.D.  Symposium on Modern Greece, London School of Economics. http://www.lse.ac.uk/ europeanInstitute/research/hellenicObservatory/pdf/1st_Symposium/N_ Prevelakis_paper.pdf. Ramfos, Stelios. 2011. Yearning for the One; Chapters in the Inner Life of the Greeks. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press. Smith, Anthony. 1986. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 6

The Metapolitefsis Civil Religion (1974–1989)

Contents

6.1  Charisma and Civil Religion in Metapolitefsis 6.2  From a Collectivist Civil Religion to Populist Political Orientations 6.3  Populist Code Orientations and Ground Rules 6.4  The Structural Effects of Populism 6.5  Conclusions Bibliography

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The colonels’ dictatorship lasted for seven years (1967–1974). It constitutes the deeply traumatic experience which, paradoxically, triggered a happy transition: the transformation of Greece from a ‘limited democracy’ (as other cold-war western countries) to a full democracy, that is, a regime with no restrictions, whatsoever, concerning the ideological makeup of competing parties and of citizens. Its demise also triggered a mechanism by which generalized clientelism, familism, and religious representations of communitas gave birth to political populism. To understand how it all happened, we need to examine the traumatic transition itself. The transition from dictatorship to democracy was traumatic due to three painful events related to the downfall of the regime: first, the shocking revelations concerning the extensive use of torture used by the military police against the regime’s opponents; the bloody suppression of the Polytechnic students’ uprising in 1973; and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus

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triggered by a junta-inspired coup against the legitimate government of the island (1974). Thus, the transition to democracy was not controlled by the preceding authoritarian regime—as it was in the cases of Spain and Turkey. Instead, the transition was rapturous, painful, and bewildering. It occurred under the pressure of the advancement of the Turkish army in Cyprus, and involved the handling of power by a cowed quasi-military government to a political personnel that was on the one hand unable (or unwilling as many still believe) to intervene to Cyprus, and on the other not radical enough to initiate a cathartic, emotionally releasing, purging mechanism against the junta personnel. Thus, political paralysis and psychological despair could not be absorbed by ordinary institutional tenets of democratic order, since these tenets had lost their legitimacy. The ordinary, taken-for-granted, structures of political life were suspended, and a liminal condition emerged in the midst of the body politic. Then something peculiar happened: while the political vacuum was filled by ex-prime minister Konstantinos Karamanlis who returned from his self-imposed exile in France to lead Greece out of this chaotic, desperate, situation (which he did), the symbolic vacuum remained wide-open. Karamanlis himself was not able to play in full the role of the Weberian charismatic leader, and to lead Greece not only politically but also symbolically, to a new, post-dictatorship era. Being absent during the period, the colonels ruled Greece (and thus not belonging to the traumatized community), austere, remote, and authoritarian as a personality, and following a forgive-and-forget polity toward the junta rank-and-file, Karamanlis—indispensable but unsatisfying at the same time—became an ambivalent figure, and the trauma remained open for years to come. The political discourse that emerged in the following years as a response to this deep psychological wound formed the cultural trauma that marked the moral development of the public sphere, and when fully developed, it became the back-bone of a new civil religion. This discourse was symbolically anchored on the image of the sacrificial democrat and the triumphant democratic people. Inspired by the ominous fate of many Greeks who resisted and were tortured by the dictatorship, this discourse idealized the defiant democrat who, unwilling to compromise his ideals, was hunted down, jailed, tortured, and in some cases murdered.1 And though there were many dispersed examples of such martyrdom, the political discourse 1  In a recent interview, a prominent Greek intellectual Apostolos Doxiadis ‘confessed’ that only 1000 people actively opposed the junta regime. Apostolos Doxiadis speaks fearlessly to Lifo for the myths of the Polytechnic generation. https://www.lifo.gr/articles/book_

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in question focused on and exemplified one key-event: the Polytechnic Uprising, that is, the bloody revolt of a few hundred university students who rose against the regime in November 1973; a revolt that lasted a few days and was countered by a combination of army and police forces who left behind tens of murdered students. In 1974, and after the dictatorship surrendered power to politicians, the event became the symbol of the people’s resistance and eventually a Myth2: The few hundred students came to symbolize the People who were subdued and suffered under the Junta’s yoke until they finally rose and defeated democracy’s evildoers, both native and foreign. The narrative exemplified no particular political party or ideology, but abstract notions and visions of democracy as a moral struggle of the People against its enemies. These visions were extracted indirectly from the traditional figure of the warrior-hero (see Part I, Sect. 10.2) and directly from the aesthetic-modernist (see Part I, Sect. 10.3) cultural movement born in the turbulent 1930s. It had risen as an urgent effort to redefine Greek identity at the aftermath of the expulsion of the Greek Army from Asia Minor, the subsequent traumatic evacuation of the Greek Orthodox populations from Turkey, and the end of Greek irredentism. The traumatic death of the nationalist dream called The Great Idea, which until 1922 was the unifying state and civil ideology and embraced all social strata, urged cosmopolitan intellectuals to seek new sources of symbolic unity; of a non-aggressive, non-expansionist idea of Hellenism. The result was a new, lyrical, modernist, poetry which defined Hellenism as a combination of natural elements, historical memories, and religious transcendental archetypes. Drawing on the non-rational and the myth, this aesthetic-­ modernist movement identified Greece with high moral and aesthetic values, turning the land of Greece itself into a transcendental Myth. This diffused and popular, and unstigmatized by political and religious authority, literary movement was now combined with anti-authoritarian political discourses to form the post-Junta popular political religion. Symbolically, and by selective affinity, it linked transcendental visions with articles/210014o-apostolos-doksiadis-mila-atromita-sti-lifo-gia-toys-mythoys-tis-geniastoy-polytexneioy. 2  A forceful description of ‘myth’ is provided by Bellah: ‘Myth does not attempt to describe reality; this is the job of science. Myth seeks rather to transfigure reality so that it provides moral and spiritual meaning to individuals or societies. Myths, like scientific theories, may be true or false, but the test of truth or falsehood is different’ (in Alexander and Sherwood 2002, 11).

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the traumatic experience of the dictatorship, turned the Greek People to the source of high democratic aspirations, and the political autocratic authorities to its enemies. Again, by selective affinity, it restructured and reinterpreted historical events and actors, even though this affinity was in fact highly arbitrary and ambivalent. Through this symbolic affinity, the dictatorship was attached to the US (due to American support for the regime) and the rest of the West (due to earlier western interventions in Greek politics), to anti-communism, to post-war right-wing parties, to the civil war nationalist camp, to the slogan fatherland-religion-family, to the monarchy, and to the Metaxas regime—in other words, the still present, State-sponsored civil religion. The post-dictatorship narrative turned the turbulent past to a unified traumatic experience, and the traumatic experience to conspiracies of various sinister elites aiming to curtail people’s rule. As for the opponents of these elites, they became automatically symbols of democracy, irrespective of their political affiliations and ideological stands. Thus, the post-materialist and anti-authoritarian university-based counter-­culture that in the West emerged in the late 1960s, in Greece arrived not only belatedly; it also arrived in the form of political radicalism frustrated and bloated by the self-restrained and low-profile transition to democracy initiated by Karamanlis. This was of grave consequence to the way political institutions and civil society developed in the following years: first, communitarian radicalism attracted the elite’s youth (‘out of guilt-­ feeling’ for their parents’ indifference as said) to the detriment to the development of individualist-institutional notions of civil society. Second, it led to the emergence and institutionalization of a generalized practice of contentious action and ‘street politics’; and third, it triggered a, quite popular, wave of terrorism in the name of these ideals that were betrayed by the ‘system’. All three of them were animated by the assumption that parliamentary procedures and the law-and-order complex is not the way true democracy manifests itself; instead, democracy is the defiant stand of ‘the people’ against authority, manifesting itself in ritualized acts of aggression against the state. The general orientation of the Greek youth, even of the upper class, to leftist ideologies was not solely the effect of the Junta regime; it predates it. It was a post-war phenomenon that the Junta regime only intensified and radicalized. The reason for this is that the ‘limited democracy’, anti-­ communist, model the political system adopted after the war, was not able, not willing in fact, to incorporate liberal-progressive promulgations

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and social programs. Instead, the post-war democracy that was installed in the country was reactionary—it was against the liberalization of morals, of thought, and of social action and practices. It quickly became a circumscribed social system of privileged families and magnates not allowing political entry to the rest. The left was the only political and ideological sphere which, not being part of the spoils system, was willing to voice the demands and aspirations of these ideological outsiders, and especially so of the socially ascending youth. Paradoxically, in the mid-1960s, the defenders of liberal democracy in Greece were more illiberal than its sworn enemies. Thus, a classic case of relative deprivation was combined with a schizophrenic mismatch of political ideologies and social practices. Sotiropoulos, in a book review on the Greek experience of the German occupation during WWII, notes: The work of Rufus or Fragopoulos criticizes the bourgeoisie and its post-­ war restoration, as if the latter did not take any lessons from what had occurred during that interval. Thus, ‘the indifference of the Athenian industrialists while the poor nationalists were being killed in the neighborhoods’ is criticized. They also reveal another tragic dimension that escapes most: that rejection was not experienced after the war only by the persecuted communists but also by those (primarily) youths who took part in non-leftist organizations such as of Zervas, who never welcomed them. They may not have been imprisoned, but were treated with suspicion by the post-war regime for their resistance action. And they bitterly saw being reconstructed a state of an old, spiritless and super-conservative elite that excluded the ‘myriads of the working people who are being educated, working, creating’.3

Genealogies, that is, cultural orientations perpetuated in time by homology and selective affinity, do not correspond neatly to a reassigned social division of labor. Mann’s theory of social networks of power explicates the phenomenon neatly: Being autonomous of each other, and each one of them of its own internal logic, ideological and political networks may be combined in peculiar ways: In the case of post-war Greece, formally liberal parties were against social progressiveness, while quasi-legal but in actual fact marginalized parties which were supporting Soviet-style regime and socialism were embracing social progress either instrumentally, 3  Δημήτρης Σωτηρόπουλος. Η αστική τάξη που ηττήθηκε στην Κατοχή [The bourgeoisie which was defeated in the Occupation]. http://www.kathimerini.gr/966080/article/politismos/vivlio/h-astikh-ta3h-poy-htth8hke-sthn-katoxh.

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as a means to attract the socially marginalized, or due to sincerely believing that socialism means personal freedoms. In any case, interest was never routinized and legitimized as part of the formal-rational institutional process, since the latter was not firmly attached to symbols of freedom and social progress. Thus, plans and suggestions of economic rationalization were routinely confronted by arguments based upon the ‘injustice’ of the measures proposed. Detached from substantive normalization, interest was left morally polluted, as something evil. It was a perception detrimental both to the public sphere and to the self: it cultivated the notion that the public sphere is evil (as the radicals claim), and that to support your interest, alas, you need to become polluted. In effect, economic rationalization was attached to traditional familism and the entrenched self, reinforcing egoism in the public sphere (see Part II, Sect. 10.3.1). The cultural hegemony of the notion that democracy is an arena to achieve ‘social justice’, rather than a forum for the civil management of various competing interests, is the heritage of the old post-war frustrations and of the new, post-junta, civil religion (see Part III, E20). The Polytechnic Uprising became the charismatic center of a discourse and a symbolic codification of the democratic society which updated pre-­ existing political aspirations and symbolic classifications.4 It was not an expression of an actual political event. Doxiadis states it blatantly: The ‘Polytechnic’s generation’ is a construction, a myth created by those who wanted to exploit it politically. Otherwise, almost half of the Greeks, after the dictatorship, were self-proclaimed resistance…. (Doxiadis in Lifo op. cit. fn. 48)

It was a discourse. It cultivated the formation and crystallization of a new set of collective representations, of visions of the good society and the good citizen, based on updated cosmological and ontological principles. It was a product of cultural codifications of certain ideological networks of mostly leftist5 artists, performers, and writers who compiled in tandem a performative jigsaw puzzle; a synthesis of numerous symbolically compatible discourses in which the ‘holy people’ were portrayed as a transcendental 4  Snapshots and trailers of the event: https://www.in2life.gr/features/notes/article/ 357826/ntokoymenta-apo-thn-exegersh-toy-polytehneioy.html. 5  In the 1970s, the Left came to symbolize an undifferentiated blend of liberal-individualist and collectivist Marxist ideas. Only today, and under the experience of the Syriza government, the two elements are in a process of political and symbolic differentiation.

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entity, experiencing Christ-like stages of suffering and resurrection in a secular-political eschatological reading of Greek history.6 Such a symbolic restructuring of key historical events became possible because the new discourse was infused with, and animated by an avalanche of poignant cultural artifacts and symbols (movies, theatrical plays, music compositions, novels, etc.) that were performing the suffering of the people and were celebrating its eventual vindication and innate virtues: heroism, defiance, perseverance, and, above all, their democratic spirit and their passion for social justice. It successfully restructured the post-junta disjointed political codification of democracy and freedom, their meaning and their purpose, their moral imperatives, and their enemies. The emerging anti-dictatorship performativities, redefined democracy to mean not only parliamentary procedures, free elections, and the rule of law, but also power to the people, social justice, and full access to power centers; and freedom from meaning national freedom it came to signify social freedom as well, that is the right and the ability to turn particular visions of the good and of the just to tangible social structures (Voulgaris 2001, 68–79). More crucially, this definition of democracy exemplified above all protest. This is quite understandable: A political milieu, habitually involved in protests, acculturated in traditional habits of paternalistic passivity, and taken by symbols of revolutionary action, was bound to exemplify protest. Yet, protest as a principle—as a constitutive good—is problematic. As Hirschman (1972) allows us to presume, protest (‘voice’ in his nomenclature) cannot be a constant condition in the midst of an organization: you cannot take a permanent stand of protesting, similar to the other two options, ‘exit’ and ‘loyalty’. Instead, ‘voice’ is an in-between condition, a warning or a step toward either loyalty or exit. To declare protest as being an end in itself is to accept liminality as a permanent condition of the public sphere. Liberal democracies are indeed characterized by liminality, yet they are also characterized by means, organizational and symbolic, to absorb it. Alas, the Greek left does not possess either of them (see in Conclusions the Syriza politics). Thus, ‘liminal protest’ became a permanent feature of the Third Greek Republic. 6  In spite of its strong leftist undercurrents, this civil religion did not emerge out of a leftist party—in fact the Communist Party, the arch-enemy of the Junta regime, at first strongly opposed the Uprising and condemned it as reactionary-provocative since it was undermining the liberalization process the junta regime had initiated a month earlier.

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Symbolically, anything not of the far-right was declared to be democratic, and the more left-wing, the more democratic it was since communism was the most loathed enemy of the loathed junta regime. Symbols and rituals, performances and discourses, were calibrated so as to turn the binary opposition junta versus communism to a binary opposition of authoritarianism versus the left. Thus, communism first was dissociated from its authoritarian and anti-civil features, and then it was placed into the wider mythical domain of ‘the heroic left’. As such, it came to personify the innocent and always betrayed Greek people. As no response in kind came from the always pragmatic and always anti-intellectual conservative social milieu, the new civil religion found no resistance. From now on, anyone who dared denied the pure, humanistic, intentions of the far-­ left was in danger of being called an admirer of the junta regime. The ones who continued to hold such heretic beliefs were, indeed, either far-­rightists or preferred to remain silent. Even the moderate right eventually came to accept the alleged ‘moral superiority’ of the far-left. Thus, in the 2000s, and under the leadership of Kostas Karamanlis (nephew of the post-junta Prime Minister), the ruling conservative party declared its respect for ‘the struggles of the left’; in effect, the victorious side of the civil war was recognizing the moral superiority of the defeated side. Guilt feelings bred low psychological premiums in instilling a robust, anti-populist, liberal regime. When the current crisis arrived 30 years later, there was no argument in principle against the rise of the far-left and its very particular understanding of democracy. The results were catastrophic. But symbolically, it all makes sense. The dictatorship itself defamed, and thus neutralized, the conservative symbols of national strength, national unity, and national integrity exactly because it failed to upheld them even though it had ‘performed’ all three of them in its own version of civic religion. Under the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and the revelations of police brutality against the ‘enemies of the state’, the conservative classes that had sided with, or tolerated, the dictatorship regime could not offer any symbolic resistance to the avalanche of the new grand narrative. Thus, the Metapolitefsis’ civil religion became hegemonic, partially incorporating in its discourse the narratives and the rituals of the old sponsored civil religion. Thus came in existence the visions and the morality that defined Greece today: a set of defiant-mystical political imperatives embedded in modern discourses of the democratic citizenship, the democratic civil society, and the democratic state (see Part III). Together, they formulated a secular

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collective conscience delegitimizing in the process particular political ideals and legitimizing other ones: authority, obedience, and discipline were ousted as echoes of political authoritarianism and were replaced by the ideals of volition, expressivity, and social protest. The new discourse did not reject the nation, or the Orthodox religion. Instead, it rejected the authoritarian element in them, while it incorporated both nation and religion as expressions of the people’s struggles in history. Thus, the new civil religion reframed the older one by stripping it from right-wing nationalism and clericalism, and by rearranging past cultural traumas in its own narrative. What was left at the end were the defiant and revolutionary ethnic community, its internal and external enemies, and its maximalist aspirations. The various performativities colonized the public sphere as a comprehensive spectacle of celebration and exaltation of the will of the Greek communitas. These social performances were not occasions for self-­ reflection; instead, they were political events, whereas the constitutive elements of civil religion were imagistically performed and experienced in massive concerts held in stadiums in cities all over Greece. It was indeed a people worshipping itself in classic Durkheimian fashion. Concerts, movies, exhibitions, and rallies, as well as political organizations, associations, and networks, were the main means civil religion, its worldview, and its moral imperatives were transmitted and internalized in rites of communal effervescence without any official support from State or Church. The sense of injustice and betrayal, of suffering and resurrection found their place in songs and movies made by the high priests of the new religion: Mikis Theodorakis, Giorgos Xarhakos, and Giannis Markopoulos (music composers), Odysseas Elytis, Giorgos Seferis, and Giannis Ritsos (poets), Theo Aggelopoulos, Kostas Gavras, and Pantelis Voulgaris (movie directors). Each one of them, from various perspectives, and through their particular artistic means, managed to link in various combinations social and political critique with the quest for the eternal in Greek identity, a quest for the diachronic Greek communitas. One of the most emblematic songs of the era, ‘There is two of us’, by Mikis Theodorakis, speaks of the people emerging as out of nowhere, determined to bring justice to the world: … there is one thousand and thirteen (of us) Riding we go to the time… The avenger, the redeemer…7 7  http://lyricstranslate.com/en/eimaste-duo-eimaste-treis-there-are-two-there-arethreeof-us.html#ixzz3HBgJJ600.

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Another composition, ‘The bells will ring’, by the same composer, speaks of the eternal community of the living and the dead, a timeless community of the soil who are holding their breath as resurrection is close at hand: … Be silent, in some minutes the bells will ring. This soil is theirs and ours… They are waiting for the time, they are waiting to ring the resurrection…8

Probably the most evocative of all, ‘Don’t Cry for Romiosyni’ (i.e., the Greeks as descenders of the byzantine people), is a haunting elegy for the righteous Greek communitas whose fate is a constant cycle of rise and fall: Don’t cry for Romiosyne… With a knife in the bone… With the harpoon of the Sun.9

These are secular songs, yet they are soaked into Christian eschatology and traditional defiance, chiliastic urgency, tribulation, heroism, struggle, and resurrection; the trans-historical community of the righteous, the unspecified just cause, the urgency of an apocalyptic struggle, the absolute conviction of the uprightness of the cause, forcefully heightened emotions, nourished the collective spirit, and turned the audience into a flock, united by visions of a biblical ‘New Heaven and a New Earth’10 so crucial in Christian eschatology. Soon, the constellation of all these performances, rituals, commemorations, and discourses started taking a definite shape and orientation. They exemplified and promulgated a communal spirit which was defined as the democracy. A democrat was a defiant ‘austere mystic’, ready to sacrifice his/her wellbeing for the benefit of the community, ready to ‘kill the beast’ of authoritarian rule. It heralded a bifurcation of political loyalties and of sacred spaces. In a sense, it duplicated, politically, the religious bifurcation between institutional Church and charismatic mystics. On the one hand, Greeks performed the ceremonies and commemorations of the nation-state; on the other hand, they performed the ceremonies and 8  http://lyricstranslate.com/en/10-tha-simanoun-oi-kambanes-bells-will-ring. html#ixzz3HBlakFiM. 9  http://hellas-songs.ru/en/song/300/. 10  New Testament, Revelation 21.

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commemorations of rebelliousness. On the one hand, she/he was a loyal citizen; on the other hand, a defiant democrat. The two notions were not contradicting each other. Instead, due to similar symbolic connotations and elective affinities, the new, collectivist civil religion and the old, nationalist-religious civic religion, merged. They were both expressions of the same foundational Myth of a chosen, proud, and suffering communitas exemplified in national holidays. Thus, alongside March 25 (the officially recognized start of the War of Independence in 1821, a date which coincides with the religious Annunciation Day) and October 28 (the start of the war against the Axis Powers in 1940), the Polytechnic Memorial Day completed the triptych of the national Myth of defiance, martyrdom, and resurrection. The Polytechnic Uprising added one more element to the National Myth: atonement. It became the symbol of the unspoken guilt Greeks felt for not reacting against the junta as they should, being democratic citizens. In this vein, the students became a Christ-like collective figure who lifted the sins of their fellow citizens by their own sacrifice. The homology gave birth to a highly charged ritual of grave consequence: The occupation of public buildings and facilities. It became a secular ritual of performing the Polytechnic Uprising; a mimetic repetition of the original uprising which was sacralizing the occupiers and was stigmatizing the police who would try to remove them by force as profane. Any violence against the occupiers, any drop of blood, was verifying the moral standing of both sides accordingly. But this was an illegal performativity as the law clearly prohibited it. But defiance to the law was an integral and crucial part of the ritual; it was the meaning of the ritual: to expose the cold and soulless law against the just. In this fashion and through this ritual, thus, martyrdom of the few became the atonement of everyone. Now everyone could be a passionate democrat and, when in groups, imitators of the Polytechnic fallen heroes. Thus, performativity became the way anomie infiltrated the public domain in earnest and the way substantive rationality displaced formal rationality.11 Those students had washed away the sins of the Greeks, the Orthodox way. Conceptualization of sin, not as a debt that the sinner needs to pay 11  Even this very day, any charges, brought to people involved in violent ‘political’ actions, trigger accusations of the state behaving as the junta regime. https://www.protothema.gr/ politics/article/823018/kaloun-se-apologia-ton-lafazani-me-katigories-tou-misoupoinikou-kodika-kanei-logo-gia-houda/.

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back to God, but as a distance established between the sinner and God, urges not for a methodical-rational reflection of wrong-doings and a consequent reorganization of the lifeworld, but a wholehearted reconciliation with God which occurs when the sinner forsakes his selfishness and remorsefully opens his heart to receive God. Such a perception of sin does not allow a corresponding civil religion to incorporate in its narration clear statements of guilt and repentance; to ask ‘what we did wrong to allow the dictatorship to happen?’; or ‘how could we prevent distrust and ruptures in the body politic?’ This is not to say that these kinds of questions were not asked at all by no-one. Rather, this is to say that it did not become a public concern. It did not because this type of problematique makes no sense to an Orthodoxy-inspired symbolic code orientation, an ontological vision which stresses people’s emotive commitment to the constitutive good: to the democratic ideal grasped in an imagistic mode. The post-­ junta public performances underlined this very claim: that the people cannot err; rather, they can be deceived and tricked because they are intrinsically innocent and pure. Thus, the otherwise inexplicable worship of the ‘holy people’ that we encounter in this post-dictatorship civil religion.12 For a while, between 1975 and 1981, during the conservative governments that came to power after the collapse of the dictatorship, the two civil religions remained uneasily apart. They virtually merged under the socialist rule in the 1980s.

6.1   Charisma and Civil Religion in Metapolitefsis At the beginning of the Metapolitefsis, the new secular civil religion had no direct political impact. Neither the moderate conservative government under the imposing leadership of Konstantinos Karamanlis nor the Centrist party in opposition under its spiritless leadership incorporated the vision of the new civil religion in their rhetoric or in their political program. Rather, they remained loyal to the old sponsored civil religion as if the junta regime never happened. This gap between popular sentiment and political power was bridged in 1981 when the socialist party PASOK came to power. It was the creation of a single man, Andreas Papandreou; l’ enfant  http://www.stixoi.info/stixoi.php?info=Lyrics&act=details&song_id=22511.

12

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terrible of Greek politics, son of the deceased centrist and populist Prime Minister George Papandreou, an American citizen, a Harvard-based economist, and a left-wing radical. His charismatic personality and his populist political program altered the public sphere in ways that define it even today. To achieve this, he incorporated in his political program the new secular civil religion and its collective representations. He managed to do so because he was charismatic as the social role is defined by Weber and explicated by Eisenstadt: A crucial role is played in the crystallization of institutional frameworks by people who evince a special capacity to set up broad orientations, to propound new norms, to articulate goals, to establish organizational frameworks, and to mobilize such resources necessary for all these purposes as the readiness to invest in the appropriate activities. (Eisenstadt op. cit. 132)

This capacity was evinced by Andreas Papandreou. He managed, in a period of seven years (1974–1981), to construct single-handed a new, personal, party, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and a radical ‘patriotic-socialist’ political program, and to make it popular by infusing it with symbolic codifications that came straight from the new civil religion. Accordingly, his grand narrative, a blend of Marxist dependency theory and Orthodox eschatological imagery was threefold: (a) the world is made of two opposing forces: the evil imperialist/capitalist capitalistic (Western) core, and the depended and deprived world periphery; (b) Greece, belonging to the periphery, is sold out to the imperialist/capitalist exploiters by the treacherous Greek establishment that serves their interests; and (c) PASOK represents the under-privileged who are victims of the establishment, and the means for the people to come to power (Pappas 2009, 77–158). In other words, he attached an ‘ideology’ (the Weberian ‘theoretical rationality’) to the moral imperatives of the new civil religion (the domain of the Weberian substantive rationality) to produce a potentially powerful discourse. Potentially, since to make it look genuine and authentic, he needed to ‘perform it’ convincingly. How did he achieve it? What made him ‘charismatic’? There is no doubt that Papandreou fulfills the behavioral aspects of the Weberian ‘pure charismatic’ authority: he was obeyed unconditionally by the rank-and-file of his party; he was totally indifferent to formal-legal aspects of his office; he inspired a cult-like adoration of his person; and the

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norms he introduced in the political arena became the political canon of the country. But still, what exactly made him charismatic? Or, to be more precise, what was it that made others consider him to be charismatic? Weber does not provide us with a clear delineation of the features of a charismatic personality. But identification of these features is rather important to our own inquiry, since it is only by specifying the genuine charisma of Papandreou that we can evaluate the charisma of a successful imitator of Andreas Papandreou, the current enfant terrible of Greek politics, Alexis Tsipras, and his ongoing Messiah-like adoration by his followers during the Greek crisis. Biographical recollections indicate that, as is usually the case, a narcissistic sense of self-importance urged him to dominate the political landscape. In line with this psychological predisposition, he founded his own party, crashed the internal opposition that challenged his authoritarian rule, dismissed all of his political opponents as ‘the establishment’, and cultivated a messianic-like public image (Veremis 2008). He substantiated this larger-than-life self-importance in a master narrative in which he presented himself as a messiah coming from the desert (i.e., the US where he was expelled during the dictatorship), denouncing the devil (i.e., his American background), and promising a new world (i.e., his motto: ‘Change, Now’).13 He based this personal identification on an original, yet of recognizable elements, interpretation of Greek history as a perpetual cultural trauma: on the one hand, he laid the struggling People suffering various tribulations and, on the other, their perpetrators. In this context, he declared himself champion of the people, and the deliverer of social justice (Papandreou 2014). Second, this self-importance was communicated as an outstanding cultural capital made of various extraordinary elements. Interestingly enough, they were to a large extent contradictory (e.g., promulgator of anti-­ Americanism but, at the same time, an American citizen and professor at Harvard University) and thus could be used against Papandreou as evidence of being a hypocrite. This is exactly what his political opponents tried to do but failed. They failed because Papandreou managed to turn his biographical and ideological contradictions to mutually reinforcing evidence of his charisma. He achieved this by turning internal contradictions to a mechanism of neutralizing the negative connotations of each 13  ‘Cultural performance is the social process by which actors, individually or in concert, display for others the meaning of their social situation’ Alexander (2004, 528).

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elementary feature of his cultural capital by other elementary features. Thus, as the son of the late Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou, he carried the clout of his father’s institutional authority, and in the context of Greek culture, traditional authority as well, but as imprisoned by the Junta regime, and then expelled, he could present himself as an enemy of authoritative rule and a renouncer of tradition. As a radical opponent of US and NATO presence in Greece, he exemplified the anti-imperialist sentiments of the new civil religion; but as a naturalized American and Harvard professor of economics, he also presented himself as an esteemed insider and knower of the system. As an advocate of anti-imperialism and pacifism, he pleased his leftist audience; but as a hardliner toward Turkish aggression, he satisfied his audience’s patriotic pride. And advocacy of third-world, ‘third-way’ socialism, was mitigated by his cosmopolitan outlook and personal connections with the Western political elite (François Mitterrand, Ulof Palme, Felipe González, etc.). Thus, the symbolic structure of his political vision was counter-balanced by the symbolic presentation of the self. He managed (and this is a charismatic achievement) to be, simultaneously, rebellious and systemic; an outsider and an insider; a mystic and a scientist; a pacifist and a warrior; a promiscuous bohemian and a father-­ figure. At the end of the process, not only the negative connotations and contradictions had disappeared, but the remaining positive connotations and symbolic representations, due exactly to this mechanism, were alleviated to something extraordinary: contradictions had been transcended to extra-ordinary charisma. Third, he meticulously constructed the public presentation of himself accordingly, as unique and original. His academic dressing code (polo neck, pipe, untidy hair) radiated academic authority; his confidence and flair radiated elegant cosmopolitanism; his oration in Parliament radiated prowess, confidence, and ascetic determination. Concerning the crucial matter of performativity in public speeches, to underlie his political persona as l’ami du people, he delivered his speeches in an original and captivating way: not from a balcony high above the crowd, as his opponents did, but from a podium, only a few meters above ground as if he were in communion with the crowd. His appearance was staged methodically: popular political songs were aired beforehand to effect a certain collective effervescence; an excited, yet invisible, voice was announcing his entrance; arms extended, he came on stage embracing the crowd; flares and flags added excitement to the moment; to the political slogans of the crowd he responded with short catch-phrases of his own, giving the impression of a

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conversation; his voice deep and steady, he presented in simple and clear terms his triple message: ‘We change Greece by bringing the power to people: the just, the virtuous, and the under-privileged’. This was the way Papandreou communicated the message that politics is the arena in which the human drama of tribulation, struggle, and deliverance takes place. Was it not the people who struggle for liberty and justice since the war of independence? Was it not the foreigners who always undermine these efforts? Was it not the people who had thrown out the junta colonels and their dictatorship? Was it not the Americans and the later junta leadership who had invited Turkey to invade Cyprus? The answer to these questions is anything but affirmative, but in the post-Junta era, it was the truth everyone ‘knew’. And Papandreou was the only party leader willing and able to heal these traumatic experiences as a shaman: by using the civil religion’s symbolic classification, performativity, and sentiment in rituals of catharsis from guilt feelings and moral rebirth. Relying on his performative abilities to present himself as a messianic figure, and to present his message in apocalyptic visions of good and evil, Papandreou reinterpreted, and symbolically restructured the Greek citizenry, as an undifferentiated and trans-historical communitas threatened by various dark foreign forces and their native cronies. It signaled the beginning of Greek ‘ethno-populism’. But what was his political program? In other words, if all of the above represent the cultural-symbolic aspect of Papandreou’s political discourse, what was the political-institutional program? And how did he join them successfully? The answer is to be found in September 3 Declaration, the political manifesto of PASOK. In this, he brought together the basic ingredients of his argument in a comprehensive worldview: (a) The Cyprus tragedy was caused by NATO, (b) NATO is the armed instrument of capitalism and multinational companies, (c) multinational companies exploit the Greek people, and (d) the Greek people will overthrow the ‘foreign influence’ and enjoy political freedom and economic abundance.14 Thus, Papandreou connected morality and trauma with authentic democracy— as the unmediated will of the People in power. And if culturally the ingredients were interconnected symbolically, politically, they were interconnected temporally—the one was the prerequisite of the other:

14  The September 3 declaration [Η διακήρυξη της 3ης Σεπτέμβρη]. https://www.news247. gr/politiki/i-diakiryxi-tis-3is-septemvri.6226233.html.

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The struggle of the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement, for our national rebirth, for a socialist and democratic Greece, is based on the principle that our national independence is a prerequisite for the realization of popular sovereignty, that sovereignty is a prerequisite for the realization of social liberation, and social liberalization is a prerequisite for the realization of political democracy.

It was this outlook Greeks came to prefer over the Conservative party which chose to be forgetful rather than cathartic, even though conservative politicians had been subjected to imprisonment, exile, and torturing not unlike leftist politicians. In 1981, Greeks voted overwhelmingly for PASOK (48% of the popular vote) just a few months after Greece became a member of the European Economic Community (EEC), thanks to Karamanlis’ determined lobbying and in spite of objections from Papandreou and the rest of the opposition. Paradoxically, Papandreou’s governments not only embraced wholeheartedly the accomplished entry, but in the following decades they used EEC/EU funds to implement a series of populist programs which shielded the fate of the economy. Yet, Papandreou and his party, were, senso strictu, populist in an ideological-­political way: they were aligned with the ‘third-way’, third-­ world liberation movements and ‘dependency theory’ which, combined, propagated self-contained, self-sufficient, anti-capitalist direct-democracy ‘guided’ by Party cadres (the infamous party’s ‘green-guards’ as they came to be known) and its charismatic leader.15 This is to say that they were not populists in a cultural way. To put it aphoristically, they were propagating ‘people in power’; not ‘passions in power’ which became indeed the trademark of Metapolitefsis populist culture. Instead, the cultural aspects of populism in the public sphere—that is, envy, greed, egoism, self-serving interests, and so on—were the making of an unexpected, extra-systemic, social actor who forcefully introduced uncivil political culture in the public sphere in a most pure and unadulterated form: the newspaper editor Giorgos Kouris. Giorgos Kouris (1937–2018) was the epitome of the uneducated boorish hustler who scorned etiquette, manners, and properness, as much as elitism and authority. He epitomized rural amoral familism, which he 15  Papandreou did try to implement this political program in the first years in power, without success. He then, gradually, aligned his policies to the social-democratic, European, agenda.

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brought forcefully and established it in the midst of the public sphere turning it to a powerful weapon against his political enemies which he chose arbitrarily (as did his political friends), based upon personal interest. In 1980, he published the infamous daily newspaper Avriani committed to a moral war against the conservative party’s leadership, accusing them (without any evidence whatsoever) for immoral behavior, mobilizing for this purpose a vulgar, macho, phraseology which remained its trademark, and which until then could only be spoken privately. The newspaper Avriani became a symbol of yellow journalism and raw confrontation against the ‘Right-wing’ as the term was used in a contemptuous way. Aided by a one-month-long press strike in 1980 which Avriani did not follow, and a lower than the legal retailing price, its circulation sky-rocketed to 200,000 copies per day, confusing its enemies and encouraging the friendly socialists to endorse it. Reporter Nikos Gionis comments: ‘Friend-less’ and ‘uneducated’ (as he proudly called himself) Kouris, sensing Papandreou’s emotional ambivalence, lifted his ego, supported him to death, imposed people who worshiped him [i.e., Kouris] in the PASOK cabinet—among them his brother Makis Kouris—and boasted that he overthrew Karamanlis.16

Populist Avriani employed brutality and malice, and it was ‘radical’ only in name. It lowered the boundaries between oral and printed speech, while ideologically and culturally it remained amorally traditional: antiWestern, chauvinist, and sexist. Its first page announcements have remained symbols of yellow journalism. The newspaper performed not the detached reporter who speaks the truth with sobriety and civil concern, but a shouting folk-man who exposes, yelling and mocking, the profane, the treacherous, and the perverted. In this symbolic universe, political and cultural civility such as the rule of law and respect for privacy were completely dissociated from morality: ‘Bring out of jail the editors who brought victory to Pasok’; ‘Zahos was playing with Dimitra’s (Andreas 16  Nikos Gionis, Μερικές Κουβέντες για τον, εντός μας, Κουρή [Some words for, and inside us, Kouris]. 22 May 2018. http://metarithmisi.liberal.gr/post/%CF%83%CF%87%C E%BF%CE%BB%CE%B9%CE%B1-%CE%B4%CE%B9%CE%B1%CE%BB%CE%BF%CE%B3% CE%BF%CF%82/%CE%BD%CE%AF%CE%BA%CE%BF%CF%82-%CE%B3%CE%BA%CE% B9%CF%8E%CE%BD%CE%B7%CF%82-%CE%BC%CE%B5%CF%81%CE%B9%CE%BA%CE %AD%CF%82-%CE%BA%CE%BF%CF%85%CE%B2%CE%AD%CE%BD%CF%84%CE%B5 %CF%82-%CE%B3%CE%B9%CE%B1-%CF%84/.

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Papandreou’s partner) tits’; ‘She is the one who rules us (naked picture of Dimitra on the front page)—wake up poor fellow Andrea.’17 In other democratic countries, yellow journalism enjoys some popularity. In the 1980s, Greece became the flagship of popular PASOK, and the symbol of the desires and the morality of the common folk. This unprecedented popularity became possible due to the upward social mobility of the lower-middle and labor classes initiated by the PASOK economic and institutional policies of expanding state bureaucracy and state-controlled monopolistic companies, and it was funded by the EU developmental projects and transfers. Familism, which was until then organizationally and ideologically outflanked in the public sphere by the upper-middle class civil-minded intellectual and political elites (both right- and left-wing), was now outflanked in turn by a third-world socialist party which scorned the Western-looking and Western-behaving domestic elites. Thus, the rural populations that recently arrived at urban centers now emancipated by socialist policies, and symbolically sponsored by the ideological gloss of the socialist ideology, became confident enough to challenge ‘hypocritical’ bourgeois morality with their own folk morality as the honest and genuine alternative to it. Avriani’s most emblematic moment came with the 1985 elections when the newspaper helped erupt an extreme polarization of public opinion by first pushing PASOK to withdraw its support for the re-election of the conservative statesman Constantine Karamanlis for the presidency of the Republic, celebrating the event when it happened, backing the institutionally problematic presidential election that followed (the government used ballots painted in different colors to prevent PASOK members of the Parliament from voting against the will of their leader), giving the tone to the pre-election period and casting the leader of New Democracy Konstantinos Mitsotakis with the most impotent, vulgar, and rather effective way. Stathis Kalyvas recalls: ‘I remember the slogan at the Constitution square in Andreas Papandreou’s final pre-election speech: “The Nazi dog dies tonight.”’ Kalyvas, reflecting on the style of the newspaper, continues in the same article:

17  https://www.altsantiri.gr/ellada/giorgos-koyris-ta-axechasta-protoselida-kai-oimegales-toy-kontres/. Retrieved 22 May 2018.

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It was] extreme aggressive and irritably vulgar, indifferent or even allergic to the truth, based on the separation between the people and their enemies: the first (and its political representatives) was the expression of the absolute good, while the latter were the objective of unstoppable attacks and unruly hatred. The emergence and legitimacy of its lumpen style is linked to the dominance of corresponding values and behaviors. In 1989, in his famous song ‘Don’t wait for little jokes,’ Dionysis Savvopoulos sang of ‘Koutsogiorgas’ harsh citizens’ and ‘the well-known Avriani natives, the troglodytes’, who were not other than ‘the horrible small-to-middle social classes’ without whose excesses ‘the shops would not afford to pay not even the electricity bill’. These excesses eventually led to destruction, but the criticism of Avriani is still viewed as ‘elitist’, which illustrates the continued dominance of lumpen society, as the values which opposite it, such as ethics, labor, truth as a value in itself, or meritocracy are considered ‘elitist’.18

The newspaper triggered an imitation mechanism which spread yellow journalism and vitriolic discourse throughout the public sphere and became known as Avrianismos. It did not just hurt the political fabric of the country. It primarily harmed the country’s civil culture itself, devaluing and marginalizing the elites, treating education and refinery as illness, proclaiming street-wisdom of the ‘folk soul’ as superior to any kind of education, and vulgarity as authentic and thus superior to any elitist refinery. The dictatorship was also anti-elitist and folkish, but it was not vulgar. Avrianismos erased this last obstacle of respect to authorities from the public sphere, celebrating all the parochial and amoral vices as virtues. In the hands of Papandreou, and the political network of his cronies which came to be called ‘deep PASOK’, these vices spread-out across the country as wild fire. They eroded the press, the parties, the unions, even the social movements, and forced many capable individuals away from politics for fear of being victims of vicious assaults—a process which lead to the deterioration of the quality of the available political personnel in the years to come.  The process became successful by selective affinity: a culture of confrontational politics, urbanization of rural familism, self-complacency, disaffection with self-serving political elites, and a perverted reading of 18  Stathis Kalyvas. The road to mess [Ο δρόμος προς τον πολτό]. http://www.kathimerini. gr/962777/opinion/epikairothta/politikh/o-dromos-pros-ton-polto?platform=hootsuite. Retrieved 22 May 2018.

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mythical collectivism, all joined forces to turn vice to a major force of the public sphere. It eroded, as it still does today, the institutional aspects of constitutional democracy, and promoted the principles of what today is called ‘illiberal democracy’ Pappas (2014). Interestingly enough, while on the political-ideological level Avrianismos was despised by many, it proved to be triumphant in popular culture, and particularly so in comedy. A series of popular political commentators and comedians cultivated populism and anti-elitism as no yellow journalism and no populist politician could ever manage to do so. In their various acts, either directly or by différance, they mixed ‘ordinary’ political-moral subjects, such as vanity, excesses, bureaucracy, and hypocrisy, with statements such as the authenticity of parochialism, the principled moral superiority of the little man, the superiority of folk wisdom versus intellectualism, the condemnation of hypocritical West, and the priority of moral sentiments vis-à-vis the law; they were not ridiculing the shortcomings of modern life, but modern life itself. … I will turn my children to puppets In an office cage like a wild boar I play an endless mute sorrowful solo.19

The music video which accompanies the song shows newsreel of the communist-led EAM army handing down their weapons in the infamous Varkiza Agreement which symbolizes until today the traumatic experience of the communist-socialist resistance alliance forced to accept, if only temporarily, the western-capitalist domination of Greece. In the song, scorning of materialism and consumerism is linked to the authenticity of traditional life and the cultural trauma of the defeat of the Left which claims, until today, that it is the authentic carrier of indigenous values. Theo Angelopoulos’ (1935–2012) iconic movies The Traveling Players (1975) and Alexander the Great (1980) are testimonies to this claim (Horton 1999). The belief that it is the Left that personifies grass-roots peoples’ culture, ‘Romiosini’ has its roots in the anti-Axis leftist resistance movement (EAM—National Liberation Front) in the liberated wilderness of the Greek mountains and small traditional villages. The narrative was constructed around victimhood, struggle, and resurrection and the interpretation of  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9Q4nTg0rNw.

19

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the Greek revolution as a popular movement such as EAM was in 1944. The iconic EAM figure of the guerilla war Captain Aris Velouhiotis stated in a famous speech he delivered in Lamia, a small town in central Greece: In the period of slavery [the country] had a hard time, dark years and many ‘smart’ amongst them a certain Fallmerayer claimed that the Greek race was mixed with other races which have nothing to do with the ancient Greek race. But it doesn’t matter what we say. We have proven our Greekness. It is a fact that our country rose up and was reborn free. No one wanted this. Neither the foreign kings, nor the native landowners … everyone, foreigners and natives, struggled that the people will not rise and achieve its freedom… John Kapodistrias, who appears as grant and mighty in schools, with busts and portraits was the first destroyer of Greece… The mighty of the Earth were frightened and used all the tricks to drown the revolution. But they were wrong… Thus our ancestors forced all our enemies to lick were they were spitting and acknowledge our struggles and our liberty … the fairytales of philhellenism being responsible for our liberty were fabricated to make believe that our country was liberated not by us but by the foreigners… The reaction, native and foreign, used all means to castrate the people’s character of the movement and to force a new slavery.20

It was this ‘people’s narrative’, alternative to Mythical romanticism narrative, that during the late 1970s came to become hegemonic, but in a latent way. Not as a formal Leftist Myth, but as a People’s myth about itself in which EAM constitutes only a chapter. But it was never articulated and ideologized. Thus, each and every citizen felt free to imagine the People as he wished, until specific ideological and political networks of power functioned as ‘centers of gravity’ pulling all these scattered narratives and symbolism toward them. The result was the Metapolitefsis populism: the redefinition of the internalized code orientations and of institutional ground rules according to a felt vision of communitas in the name of socialist principles. Arguably, the Metapolitefsis constitutive goods were the making of two individuals, carriers of the two major foundations of the modern Greek culture: Giorgos Kouris, carrier of amoral familism, and Andreas Papandreou, carrier of the ideological discontent with the West and promulgator of the anti-dictatorial civil religion—itself a vessel carrying mystical romanticism and memories of the civil war’s ‘lost cause’. Nikos Kouris  Quoted by Andreas Pappas, To Vima Newspaper, 27 May 2018, 24.

20

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was a poor villager moving to the political center despising the elites, reducing politics to the moral universe of the ‘little man’, turning the nascent civil sphere into a rural coffee-house. He managed, quite easily, in fact, to reduce politics to the morality of amoral familism and the religious vision of the insolated village household and the inevitable evilness of the ‘world outside’, precisely as this was described by Campbell referring to the Sarakatsans’ ontological and cosmological principles. Nikos Kouris proved in practice that Greek civility is feeble and meaningless—and in the fashion of ‘the king is naked’, he proclaimed the meaningfulness of the ‘coffee-shop morality’: mockery is good. Andreas Papandreou, in turn, was an upper-class, well educated, academically respected, politically trained, cosmopolitan Greek who ‘saw the light’ when he returned to Greece in the 1960s to direct a newly founded public center of economic studies and became involved in his father’s party politics and internal struggles for its control. Then and there he became a staunch radical advocate of dependency theory and of a political program which envisioned the liberation of the People from vicious foreign elites and capitalism (Veremis 2008). But he was also a maverick, vane, and thirsty for power and all good things in life. He despised elite culture, and even though he knew how to present his self to these cosmopolitan circles, he preferred to socialize in urban folk music halls (the so-­called bouzoukia) performing the role of the simple folk man unleashing his emotions to the tune of the urban folk songs (see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.11.3). And he had no problem using the Avriani’s accusations to his advantage and similar to Kouris’ vocabulary to attack his political enemies (e.g., ‘the cursed Right’ for the conservative party, ‘nightmare’ or ‘traitor’ for his arch-enemy and leader of the conservative party Konstantinos Mitsotakis). Thus, while Kouris and Papandreou at first glance appear to be as different as chalk and cheese, in fact they shared contempt for the elites, for civility, and for high culture, and a deep appreciation of folk culture and amoral familism; the fact that Papandreou placed all the members of his family in key governmental positions stands as a testimony to this. If the selective affinity between amoral familism and the Metapolitefsis civil religion is based on the authenticity of the past, then the selective affinity between Papandreou and Kouris is the authenticity of the folk people and their egoistic ways. In this vein, the civil culture of the Metapolitefsis era was founded on key moral aspects of traditional rural life.

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The Metapolitefsis mystical civil religion, the third-world socialist ideology, and yellow journalistic amoral familism combined forces to bind among them the public morality and the individual ethics of the Third Greek Republic. This is not to say that there were no exceptions to the rule. Indeed there were. But they were individual efforts; isolated, and unorganized struggles going upstream, assaulted by all parties, mass media, unions, and social movements infected by what came to be called ‘Greek populism’. They were all defeated by the dominant populist political program. This is where we turn our attention now (Fig. 6.1).

The People as the source of Truth, Beauty, and Justice Soteriology of Victimhood-Struggle-Deliverance-Freedom ‘Revolution is Resurrection’ Democracy as the Desires of the People

Nikos Kouris Amoral Familism Andreas Papandreou Cosmopolitan anti-elitism

Secular Communitas Democracy as the absence of authority

Metapolitefsis civil religion Performativity of Anti-authoritarian communitas

Political voluntarism as manifestation of true Democracy Politics as Morality Achievement is attained by demand, by struggle, by force Democracy as satisfaction of demands of the People

The desires of the Self as manifestation of the Democratic Principles

Segmentary professional, labor, and civil associations Generalized clientelism Spoils system as people’s democratic rights

Limited accountability of political authorities Non-deontological unions, civil service, and professional associations Multiple and contradictory rules and regulations

Fig. 6.1  The symbolic structure of the Metapolitefsis’ civil religion

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6.2   From a Collectivist Civil Religion to Populist Political Orientations Thus far, we have examined how familism, generalized clientelism, and anarchic individualism symbolically anchored in religiosity, provide the cultural background of the Greek social division of labor, thus affecting, to a significant extent, the code orientation of collective identities, such as solidarity, trust, and membership criteria; and how the out-worldly and communalist orientation of the Orthodox religiosity became the symbolic foundation of both the sponsored and the post-1974 grass-roots civil religion. These developments constitute the transformation of culture to ideology as we have defined them in the first chapter; the transformation of atemporal to the inner self definitions and visions of the good, to temporal narrations of the fate and the destiny of a certain collectivity; and they also constitute the emergence of ideological networks of power as the producers and gatekeepers of these ideologies, variously attached to the state apparatus. We have also examined the decisive role of a charismatic leader, Andreas Papandreou, to turn collective representations of the body politic to an ideology by symbolic association and eclectic affinity. He did so by injecting a vaguely socialist ideology with the moral imperatives and constitutive goods of this civil religion, that is, with the moral imperatives of the vision of the undifferentiated and defiant community, thus making popular an ideology that would otherwise make no sense to a population consisted of shop-keepers and small farmers, alien to ‘third-way’, that is, third-world, PASOK’s socialist ideology. Their interweaving produced a populist political program with strong collectivist overtones in matters of state organization, economic development, education, health, and political participation; a program that was dividing the people between two competing communities: the privileged and underprivileged ones; the haves and the have nots. But this political program was not merely the manifestation of egalitarianism in socialist terms. It was not, since it stressed power arrangements that do not appear in the civil religion’s vision or the party’s manifesto: the rule of the authoritarian leader. The symbolic classifications and collective representations of the civil religion, and of the socialist transformation of society, as it was described in the party’s manifesto, were of egalitarian orientation, not paternalistic.

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Papandreou managed to reorient this vision to unsaid, yet clearly assumed, paternalism, by convincingly presenting himself as a messianic-­ heroic figure, shifting the collectivist collective representations accordingly. Charisma, in other words, was arbitrarily fused in the process of turning a cultural vision to an ideology, and the ideology to a political program; it remained unarticulated and unspoken; yet, it was always clearly assumed, and as such, visible. When the inevitable routinization of charisma took place after PASOK came to power, and through Constitutional changes the party initiated in 1985 and secured the absolute power of the prime minister and the executive branch at the expense of the judicial and the legislative ones, the result was the normalization of authoritarian arbitrariness, and the establishment of political voluntarism as a normal process, at the expense of formal rationality. The Greek Constitution already maintained illiberal features, such as the close institutional links between State and the Church, the subordinate position of other denominations and ethnic minorities to this complex, the absolute control of the tertiary sector of education (e.g., universities) by the State, and specific articles which declares the State being responsible for guaranteeing egalitarianism (but not freedoms). The constitutional changes PASOK initiated in 1985 deepened this state paternalism making sure that there will be no checks and balances between the three branches of political power, and no accountability of the Executive for its deeds (Alivizatos 2012).

6.3   Populist Code Orientations and Ground Rules Lack of institutional checks and balances, and ideological justification of arbitrariness as the necessary and the desirable way charisma manifests itself, undermined successfully the value of formal rationality, and justified the process of turning the code orientations of the Orthodox religiosity of familism, generalized clientelism, and anarchic individualism, to the almost official ground rules of the Greek social division of labor. In other words, the symbolic institutional boundaries of collectivities, the criteria of access to resources, the rules of distributive justice and equity, and the definition of the broader purpose or meaning and the collective goals of any collective activity were defined not by some kind of formal rationalization, but by the imitation of the charismatic powers of the leader, and the arbitrary

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invocation of ‘social justice’ and ‘power to the people.’ As they became the cultural patterns of the civil sphere, they produced code orientations and ground rules that were incorporated into the political and the administrative structures, as well as to the outlook of the public sphere as follows: 1. Political voluntarism and party clientelism. The Greek administration is structured around political voluntarism and party clientelism. The work of a minister is measured by the new structures he has created, and the people he has ‘served’, and not with the benefit and the effectiveness of the targets. These structures usually are not compatible with the other ones, but they maintain an arbitrary and self-referential systemic identity whose purpose is to reproduce the structure, not the benefit it offers: ‘The clientelistic system has achieved, at the regulatory level, the absence of any sanction for public service, or civil employee being counterproductive or that squanders taxpayers’ money. Neither the Constitution, nor the common laws require that public services be productive and operate economically’ (Karkatsoulis 2017, 104). The code orientation to ‘multiple structures’, rather than to ‘beneficial structures’, allows the Minister and the Cabinet to serve clientelism in earnest. Any refusal to do so is met with strong pressure from below or from above, from the press and the unions, from local communities and the Church, and from the Prime Minister to local party organizations, to comply with the moral imperative of accommodating the ‘wishes of the people’, for providing ‘security to the people’, and to comply with ‘the demands’ of the people. Even if the government does not comply with social pressures, the ministerial public servants could obstruct the implementation of the law, since the Constitution virtually protects them from being coerced (Anthopoulos 2007). 2. Constitutional loopholes. The Constitution and the law encourage corruption and hinders every attempt to reform and rationalize the administrative apparatus. The code orientation to ‘collective action’ and ‘collective responsibility’ encourages the dissemination of responsibilities, the constitutionally affirmed limited ministerial responsibility to a vague and general justification of the minister’s actions (and not in terms of measurable benefit and performance), the paternalistic way of assuming state responsibility toward employees, and the notion that elections wash away the sins of the previous

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government composes a grid that perpetuates and supports multiplicity and maladministration (Karkatsoulis 2004). 3. ‘Symbolic’ Violence. Violence, or the threat to use violence, is considered a legitimate symbolic action to any governmental actions that threaten the ‘democratic rights’, or popular ‘conquests’ (i.e., anything considered to have been achieved through struggle against ‘the system’). As mentioned earlier, it constitutes the heart of the democratic performativity of the cultural institutionalization of the civil religion, since the social actors re-enact iconic-imagistic components of the civil religion, thus putting on stage the ritual of the ‘struggling people’ against authoritarian rule.21 4. Popular Terrorism. Left-wing terrorism should be considered as an extreme offshoot of the Metapolitefsis declared constitutive goods, and thus, as a code orientation of, specifically, the military social network of power. It has become an ‘organic’ part of this civil religion: as the conscience of the People against the evils that the compromised ‘political system’ does not dare to face and tackle. This terrorism is implicitly supported by a substantial part of the press (paying lip service to rejection of violence as counter-productive to the struggle against the enemies of the People) and a large part of the public opinion that agrees with the rationale of the terrorists. Most of the terrorist organizations (November 17, People’s Revolutionary Struggle, Anti-state Struggle, Fire Nuclei, May Organization, Revolutionary Nuclei, Sect of Revolutionaries, Revolutionary Solidarity, Revolutionary Combating Left, etc.) employ the Polytechnic Uprising discourse to justify their acts, and they consider themselves to be the continuation of that struggle. In other words, terrorist organizations are seen as self-righteous vengeance of the suffering/oppressed people (Gerodimos 2013; Marangudakis and Paschalidis 2019). None of these factors alone constitute a Greek prerogative. Yet, as a whole, it suggests the hegemony of certain cultural patterns and ­subsequent ground rules that penetrate and characterize the heart of the Greek political life, and consequently, of the Greek civil society. 21   ‘New high record of violence in Greek Universities.’ http://www.iefimerida.gr/ news/415525/rekor-anomias-sta-aei-358-peristatika-vias-epitheseon-katalipseon-se-6-hronia-htypimata.

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The four cultural patterns could fall into two moral imperatives. The first one is the Manichaean moral imperative that characterizes the symbolic codes of the macro- and the micro-level of the political discourse. It entails the absence of middle-range goods that specify a way to reach the moral imperatives—the ideal vision of a just society. It cultivates a sense of a low-intensity endless civil war occurring inside the Parliament, precluding any bi-partisan agreements and sense of political normality. Moral ideals are understood by various political parties in such different and antithetical ways that morality itself becomes an insignificant factor of ‘politics as usual’. The second is the non-methodical, non-linear, apocalyptic way to materialize a political ideal. This moral imperative or moral modality demands to set the law aside, to ignore it, or to bypass it, for the sake of reaching a moral ideal in one stroke, without going into the trouble of cultivating, planning, or nourishing dull and tedious middle-ground goods; without going into the trouble of being self-disciplined, or demanding the others to be disciplined for this matter—the Junta regime had reverted the meaning of the term from something sacred to something profane. Thus, a relativity stance vis-à-vis law-and-order was cultivated, a stance that eventually became a standard, a matter of a peculiar common sense: the rights of the people are above the law, and to the extent that economic responsibility clashes with demands for pecuniary demands (e.g., salary increases to the public service sector, compensation increases to farmers, etc.), the motto became: ‘people before numbers.’ Both of these lines became the contested codes around which all political clashes and struggles unfolded after 1981, following the ascendancy of the new civil discourse with yellow journalism scorning formal procedures and Andreas Papandreou in power. The underlying cultural foundation of all of the earlier four aspects of cultural patterns and code orientations is the lack of methodical, long-­term, implementation of abstract and universal rules in the field of public administration; indirectly, it suggests lack of methodical substantive rationality. Thus, we can induce from available evidence that the cultural patterns and the ground-rules of the administrative system are informed by a cognitive mode that is a blend of individualist and collectivist prerogatives, and while the moral premises of the legal system seem to be rational-­individualistic, its details are particularistic, emotive, and piecemeal evaluative. Such an infiltration of rationality by emotive patterns functions as a Trojan horse that allows all kinds of pressures, external (clients, voters) and internal (guilt feelings, anxiety, empathy, fear), to infiltrate and distort the abstract rules

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and processes of the bureaucratic, formal, logic. For these reasons, public disobedience is not prosecuted, and when it does, it triggers major political reactions and public outcry as powerful ideological and political elites mobilize the cultural trauma of the Polytechnic Uprising to delegitimize the rule of law (street marches, occupation of public buildings and state facilities, revolutionary songs, inflammatory speeches, etc.). Public disobedience is seen as a symbol of volonté general, genuine enactment of the general will of the People manifested in specific time and place, just as religious ceremonies bring to life sacred moments of the past. The definite gap that exists between ideals and middle-range life-goods, and between formal and substantive rationality, constitute basic ingredients of the Greek political culture.

6.4   The Structural Effects of Populism The new civil religion penetrated and altered the code orientations and ground-rules of the old civil religion with great easiness. It managed to do so because it absorbed and incorporated the cultural patterns of the old civil religion turning them from pietistic to zelotic. The old civic religion was transformed into the new one through the PASOK political program, but ten years later, it had become autonomous, forcing not only PASOK but the rest of the parties as well to acknowledge its existence and its demands. There is nothing metaphysical in this process: The new source of political and economic power the country found as a member of the EEC/EU (1980) made it possible: the mystical civil religion was able to survive its internal contradictions and, actually, for a while to thrive, using the European institutions and funding as pressure and tension absorbents (Arambatzis et al. 1991). Three political institutions became the pinchers for the political implementation of the public life-goods that emerged out of the new Metapolitefsis ideals: The Parliament, the syndicates of state-owned corporations, and the local municipalities. Through them, the parties, from the various positions they held as government, major and minor opposition, and as trade-unionists and municipal council members, advanced particular legislative and practical measures and actions that radically altered social structures entrenching them in new symbolic and cultural frameworks.22 The various parties and social groups that emerged and 22  The percentage of the national vote the various parties held in the Parliament was not necessarily similar to the percentages the parties enjoyed in labor unions or in municipalities. The latter varied according to the regional or occupational specifics (Mavrogordatos 1993).

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were crystallized in the following years comprehended and internalized newly formed middle-range life goods differently, according to their particular location in the social division of labor, their cultural heritage, historical background, and ecological settings. Thus, they advanced rival constellations of middle-range moral goods, variations of the hegemonic ideals that were implemented through particular institutional means in the next three decades. Yet, their symbolic codifications remained similar, thus the extreme but also very peculiar type of rivalry that was developed among the parties23: The rivalry did not involve fights over antagonistic ideals (as in the previous period 1950–1967), but they were fights over a singular set of ideals that it boiled down to a catchphrase: to serve people’s needs and demands. Thus, the rivalry evolved into a mockery, a theatrical play of virtual brawls and accusations unfolding daily in the television studios: an all-out struggle between the ‘honest party’ and the rest, the ‘hypocrites’. This rivalry that started in earnest in 198524 unfolded as a pattern, with the government trying to maneuver between its election promises and governmental economic necessities, and the opposition outbidding the government in promises for benefits and provisions to the People. The new code orientations symbolically structured around the motto ‘People in Power’ managed to radically alter the contours of post-1981 collective identities, and of the social division of labor, such as solidarity, trust, and membership criteria, civility and its various orientations, by specifying new middle-range life-goods and labor organization and ethics, as well as means and ways to implement them. Paradoxically, even though the ideals the Myth promulgated were collective, the middle-range life-­ goods that were eventually produced were selective and exclusive: as the Myth favored the undifferentiated ‘people’ and its unspecified ‘power’ over less messianic and less emotive methodical principles of government, civil society, and public goods; any social group could claim to embody the

23  There were two exceptions to this rule in the Metapolitefsis era: the Mitsotakis’ New Democracy government (1990–1993) which promoted liberal policies, and the first Simitis’ PASOK government (1996–2000) which implemented modernization polities. In both cases, modernization was blocked by the governmental parties themselves. 24  Its starting point is symbolically identified with the famous incident, during the election campaign of 1985, whereas Papandreou ordered his minister of finances, Dimitris Tsovolas, live on air, to ‘give everything’ to the people (‘Τσοβόλα δώστα όλα’).

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People; and any particular demand could signify ‘people’s power’ (see Part II, Sect. 10.3.2).25 Thus, there were no normative sources able to specify criteria for the public distribution of private goods, no specificity over what constitutes public good, or whether the resources should be in immediate or long-­ term exchange. The only rule of prioritizing the satisfaction of various demands was the political leverage particular social groups could exert. The clientelistic networks (varying from family relatives to fellow-­ townsmen, voters, to befriended magnates and robber barons) and the political power syndicates enjoyed in running the monopolistic statist companies (electricity, telecommunications, railways, airlines, education, etc.) became the major means to achieve selective benefits.26 Thus, there developed a two-gear vertical social system comprising those with and those without access to the political center. Under these circumstances, short-term rationalization and mobilization of resources in moments of need were followed by widespread distribution of resources (in possession or borrowed) under the pressure various social groups could exercise. The system functioned smoothly for 35 years because of the deep cultural-­turned-political vision of right and wrong that united the vast majority of Greeks into a fatal moral trap that they are still caught into. It all comes down to Weber’s ‘psychological premiums’ (in Kalberg 1994, 39): decisions that ‘feel right’, as they refer to ideals that no-one questions, decisions such as ‘the rights of the workers are self-evidently just’, ‘the wish of the people is sacred’, ‘the tactics might be wrong but the cause is just’, and decisions that ‘feel wrong’, as they refer to moral evils, decisions such as ‘austerity measures hurt the weak and the innocent’, or ‘the haves should pay before the have nots’, and so on. Arguments of this kind were used by various social groups to justify or to condemn specific 25  Nikos Demertzis notes a basic institutional contradiction: While the citizen despises bureaucratic mediation, still accepts the state as the only valid redistributional mechanism and guarantor of his social status and economic security (Demertzis 1990, 81). 26  For example, union representatives became by law members of the executive board of directors of all statist enterprises. Only recently, after the economic crisis came down on Greece, high levels of corruption were identified among them. Also, union representatives became members of the ad hoc committees that were to examine cases of possible corruption among workers in these statist enterprises. Apparently, no such examination (in the few cases when indeed it took place) resulted in the serious punishment of the culprit. The actual realization of the constitutive good resulted into protecting the sectarian privileges of the syndicate against the wider public, or the labor movement itself.

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political decisions, usually with the ardent support of the opposition and the press: it was making sense. The loophole in the system was that the social groups that belonged to the statist sector were, as Michael Mann calls it, ‘organizationally outflanking’ the rest. The reason why the outsiders did not revolt against statism was, again, cultural: Having similar moral convictions, sharing the same ‘cultural codes’ with the insiders, they became victims of their own devise. They recognized their condition as a hellish one, and of the insiders as a heavenly one; they just needed to find a way, for them or their children, to pass over to the bliss offered to the lucky insiders. And statism was, for a generation, heaven on earth. This is not to say that governments could not see, or respond, when facing immediate and clear danger: austerity measures to respond to clear and present dangers were taken in 1984, 1991, and 1998. But they were, as they still are, urgent responses to economic crises with no strategic follow-­up. These austerity measures were seen as necessary evil, as a bitter medicine, that needed to be taken to exit, alas, temporarily, the danger zone. As soon as this was achieved, the people, the vast majority of the political world, the public opinion, and the press demanded economic relaxation for the ‘good of the people’. A few years ago, we experienced such a response under duress by a coalition government of moderate, left, and right-wing parties; thus, the necessary, though humiliating, presence of the troika. But this pragmatic urgency was weak, once again understood, and internalized as a matter of necessity. Thus, the moderate government was psychologically exhausted by 2014 under increased pressure from the ascending far-leftist party of Syriza. But this is the subject of the next chapter. For the moment let us capture in the scheme the ideal type of this configuration as a symbolic structure of moral imperatives and life-­goods (Fig. 6.2).

6.5   Conclusions Weak Greek civil society is not caused by the politics of nepotism, clientelism, and paternalism; this is a circular argument. Nor is it caused by absence of western civil society structures; this is a western-centric argument, as if only western symbolic and organizational structures achieve social development. Instead, its weakness lays in its civil religion: the almost unqualified symbolic transformation of a mystical, religious communitas, into a secular vision of collective martyrdom. It informs a vision

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Sharp distinction between out-worldly political, ideological and social purity vs. In-worldly pollution

Personal/Group Domination

Tricksters

Social Arenas The performativity of the sufferer/victim/hero

Loose institutional ground rules to be interpreted in ways fitting persona/group interest

Egoistic behavior No civil bonds–limited civic virtue

Cut-throat antagonisms

Spoils system in the public sector Arbitrary implementation of law-and-order

Fig. 6.2  The Metapolitefsis’ cultural system

of democracy which imposes low psychological premiums to obeying the rules of rational planning, self-discipline, and civil behavior. Yet, the post-junta civil religion is only the result of an historical contingency—not an organizational or cultural inevitability. The tendency to perceive the body politic completely in mystical-revolutionary terms and to ‘justifiably’ challenge law-and-order came to be only because of the legacy the dictatorship left behind it. In cultural terms the Junta regime was nothing more than a violent and desperate reaction of phobic traditionalism against the forces of modernization and liberalization already present and potent in the 1960s—what followed was an overwhelming reaction against it and anything that stood tall during it. It was not an inescapable development. One needs only to compare the cultural landscape of the

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mid-1960s with that of the mid-1970s to realize the enormous difference between the ante and post junta cultural landscapes. The former was increasingly civil: gentle, refined, reflecting, inclusive, and optimistically critical. The latter was resolutely populist: polemic, passionate, uncompromising, contentious, and ontologically pessimistic. Out of the same stock, two quite different civil configurations and two cultural outlooks were produced in only ten years. Historical contingencies destroyed the nascent civil and fueled the rise and consolidation of a populist ‘civil religion’ which was self-complacent and schismogenetic. Arguably, without the anomaly of the junta regime, the Greek civil religion and its political culture would be decisively different.

Bibliography Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy. Sociological Theory 22 (4): 527–573. Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Steven Sherwood. 2002. ‘Mythical Gestures’: Robert N. Bellah and Cultural Sociology. In Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity, and Self, ed. R. Madsen, W.M. Sullivan, A. Swindler, and S.M. Tipton. Berkeley: University of California Press. Alivizatos, Nikos. 2012. The Constitution and Its Enemies [Το Σύνταγμα και οι εχθροί του]. Athens: Politeia. Anthopoulos, Charalampos. 2007. The Greek Political System as Party-Rule. In Crisis of the Greek Political System? [Το ελλην ικό π ο λιτικό σύστημα ω ς κο μματο κρ ατία. Στο Κρ ίση το υ ελλην ικο ύ π ο λιτικο ύ συστήματο ς], ed. Xenophon Kontiadis and Charalampos Anthopoulos, 111–140. Athens: Papazisi. Arambatzis, Evangelos, Nikolaos Ventouris, and Thanos Veremis, eds. 1991. Liberalism in Greece [Ο φιλελευθερισμός στην Ελλάδα]. Athens: Vivliopolion tis Estia. Demertzis, Nikos. 1990. Comparative Political Analysis and Political Culture. Journal of Social Research. [Συγκριτική πολιτική ανάλυση και πολιτική κουλτούρα. Επιθεώρηση Κοινωνικών Ερευνών] 75 (75): 71–87. Gerodimos, Roman. 2013. The Ideology of Far Left Populism in Greece: Blame, Victimhood and Revenge in the Discourse of Greek Anarchists. Political Studies 63 (3): 608–625. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.12079. Hirschman, Albert O. 1972. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty - Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Horton, Andrew. 1999. The Films of Theo Angelopoulos; A Cinema of Contemplation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kalberg, Stephen. 1994. Max Weber Comparative-Historical Sociology. London: Polity Press.

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Karkatsoulis, Panagiotis. 2004. The State in Transition [Το Κράτος σε Μετάβαση]. Athens: Sideris. ———. 2017. Managing (in) the Crisis [Διοικώντας (σ)την κρίση]. Athens: Sideris. Marangudakis, Manussos, and Panagiotis Paschalidis. 2019. Greek Anarchism – A Cultural Analysis. Athens: Propompos. Mavrogordatos, George. 1993. Civil Society under Populism. In Greece, 1981–89, ed. Richard Clogg. London: The Macmillan Press. Papandreou, Nikos. 2014. Life in the First Person and the Art of Political Storytelling: The Rhetoric of Andreas Papandreou. GreeSE 85 (May): 1–31. Pappas, Takis. 2009. Patrons against Partisans; The Politics of Patronage in Mass Ideological Parties. Party Politics 15 (3): 315–334. ———. 2014. Populist Democracies: Post-authoritarian Greece and Post-­ communist Hungary. Government and Opposition 49 (1): 1–23. Veremis, Thanos. 2008. Andreas Papandreou, a Radical without Subject-Matter. In Networks of Power in Modern Greece  – Essays in Honor of John Campbell [Ανδρέας Παπανδρέου, ριζοσπάστης χωρίς αντικείμενο, στο Δίκτυα Εξουσίας στη νεότερη Ελλάδα], ed. Mark Mazower, 201–214. Athens: Alexandria. Voulgaris, Yiannis. 2001. Greece during the Metapolitefsis 1974–1990 [Η Ελλάδα της μεταπολίτευσης 1974–1990]. Athens: Themelio.

CHAPTER 7

The Discourses of the Second Metapolitefsis and of the Deep Crisis (1989–2015)

Contents 7.1  7.2  7.3  7.4  7.5  7.6  7.7 

 ystemic Frustrations, Symbolic Black Holes S Ethno-Populism: The Collectivist Offshoot Ethno-Romanticism: The Individualist Offshoot The Economic Crisis: A Brief Description The Perfect Storm The One Pro- and the Three Anti-­memorandum Narratives The Rise of Illiberal Radicalism and the Fall of the Sacred Communitas (2015–2018)  ibliography B

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The Metapolitefsis civil religion, being firmly anchored to the cultural traumas that Greece suffered during the junta period, in the 1980s gave birth to a dominant public discourse which intertwined parts of earlier narratives and symbolic representations of the cosmological and ontological visions of the good, the true, and the beautiful, to form a fundamental set of constitutive goods which, as the anti-dictatorship passions calmed down, became the bedrock of new discursive offshoots. Offshoots emerged not only because of elective affinities between particular social niches and code orientations, but also because of fundamental tensions that existed inside the dominant public discourse, tensions which we called schismogenetic in that they generate an endless flow of frustrations and ruptures

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Marangudakis, The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13589-8_7

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inside the body politic. Two of these low-intensity frustrations undermining cultural stability proved to be particularly critical and detrimental to the Metapolitefsis social system: the first was the ‘failed mourning’ of the death of the dictatorship and the second was the students’ frustrations that formed around the application of the schismogenetic Metapolitefsis’ constitutive goods, code orientations, and institutional rules to the educational system. We examine them in turn.

7.1   Systemic Frustrations, Symbolic Black Holes The first frustration was formed around discourses concerning the way the dictatorship was replaced by democracy in 1974; in fact, it was calmly replaced rather than violently overthrown. Apostolos Doxiadis, reflecting on the period, writes: You cannot transmit the intoxicating climate of meaning which the resistance provided to [us]. You cannot leave behind you this deep sense of meaning easily. I can only describe its loss, after the dictatorship, as delicately as possible, as the loss of a beloved person… Some people turned it into fanaticism, some others in a heavy mental illness. Very few, fortunately, took the guns. And many turned to indifference and cynicism. I consider all of these results of failed mourning. Mourning is successful when you go through the first four stages, as psychology records them, successfully: denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, and then you reach the fifth stage, acceptance. And in this case, acceptance means to place the beloved object you lost somewhere in your soul, a place that will neither delete, nor will it allow the object to rule your life. And in the context of resistance against the junta, the ‘beloved object’ was in a paradoxical way the hated object. We were provided by a high sense of meaning by the fact that we could hate completely, and without any guilt feelings, the dictatorship. And to fight something so hateful. And when the hated object was gone, the cause of the war was no longer available, and so was unavailable the source of meaning. Many, probably most, did not manage to complete the process of mourning, that is, to really accept the new situation without [using] any distorting lenses of the past. (Tsakirakis 2018, 12–14)

What for politics was a smooth and successful transition, for morality was an upsetting event. The feeling of incompleteness led to the development of the discourse that the newly established democracy, the Metapolitefsis, was not truly democratic. It was a deal between the military and the political elite for the continuation of a corrupted regime; the

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Metapolitefsis was not cleansed of the dictatorial pollution. It became a constant source of undermining the legitimation of authoritative law-and-­ order, the argument of various leftist groups and leftist terrorist organizations, and one of the main slogans of the anti-memorandum movement: ‘the junta did not end in 1973’.1 The sense of incomplete restoration of democracy gave rise to a series of discourses which claimed to represent ‘true democracy’ and which usually saw the Greek Third Republic with contempt, as the new docile servant of American imperialism and international capitalism. Paradoxically, this discourse was not developed by some communist intelligentsia for the consumption of the labor class but for the radicalized middle and upper class university students. Peculiar historical contingencies, such as the primarily left-wing resistance against the Axis powers in WWII (EAMELAS—National Liberating Front-National Peoples’ Liberating Army), and the anti-communist, ultra-conservative, and reactionary Post-war Greek political system, created an odd selective affinity between communism and nascent individualism: to be ‘communist’ or, alternatively, after the disgraceful Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, to be ‘leftist’ meant to be progressive, notwithstanding the fact that the Communist Party (KKE) never embraced liberal democracy or individualism. I lived the repetition of the phenomenon, probably as a caricature, in my student years. My friends from middle-class families, educated and snobbish, without any contact with the popular strata, reacted to the junta regime, ‘saw the light’ and became communists… During the Axis occupation, the universities, the Polytechnic and the high schools became the reservoir for recruiting members of the OKNE [communist youth organization] and, later on, of EPON [resistance communist youth organization]. This is where the greatest proselytism of bourgeois and middle-class students took place. The female factor also played a role. As for the psychological reasons for joining the communist doctrine I could mention the following: sense of intellectual superiority, ambition, sense of home security, contempt for the old age people, chance to change the world. There is also a sense of guilt about their social origins, which makes young people tougher than the ‘non-privileged’. Then came the cruel exploitation by the party, for it never really trusted them. Karvounis was proven right. As Mitsos Vladadas [a prominent communist] will later say, there were young people coming to us and we were turning them to our slaves….2 1  The junta regime actually ended in 1974. The wrong date is due to the rime of the full slogan. 2  Pagratis Antonis: ‘The Greek present through history’. Καθημερινή. [To ελληνικό παρόν μέσα από την Ιστορία’]. http://www.kathimerini.gr/875983/gallery/proswpa/synentey3eis/to-ellhniko-paron-mesa-apo-thn-istoria.

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Indeed, throughout the Metapolitefsis era, members of the upper-­ middle and middle class social strata were disproportionally joining the communist party’s youth (KNE—Communist Youth of Greece) wing and other communist variations. These people, though they were distancing themselves from leftists politics later in the life, remained of leftist inclinations and ‘sensitivities’ for the remaining of their life, placing high psychological premiums to issues they considered to be anti-systemic. Paradoxically, being of a privileged background and having received privileged education, holders of high cultural and material capital became the new managerial class that emerged in the 1990s and the 2000s which controlled, among others, the media and thus the public discourses.3 Thus, though they were, nominally, the new vibrant cultural and economic elite of the period, they never abandoned ‘the principles’, that is, the constitutive goods of their communist youth. Capitalism and parliamentary democracy was, in their mind, a necessary evil, the unavoidable consequence of a fallen world that cannot be changed. In a sense, it was a discourse that was modernizing the traditional worldview of the Fallen Creation Campbell discovered among the Sarakatsans, and de Boulay and Williams at Ambeli (see Chap. 2). In this context, wealth is accepted, if at all, as a valid middle-range life good, but it is not linked to some kind of constitutive goods—as a sign of ethical life—and parliamentary democracy is seen as a regime better than dictatorship but not as noble as ‘direct democracy’, or ‘people’s democracy’. Such life-goods remain foreign to morality and to ethical contact and thus an easy target for any collectivity (unions, professional associations, NIMBY (‘not in my back yeard’) organizations, social movements, etc.) ready to condemn profit making, private enterprises, deregulation, privatization, infrastructural development, and so on, in the name of eternal moral principles. The most revered Greek song-writer and singer, Dionysis Savvopoulos, reflecting on this public guilt-ridden feeling sang: … The charter of this state is a fraud which reaches the well-known brute-romios… of anything Greek in the world.4

The song provides us, in the most vivid way, the answer to why the left is still so strong in Greece: it has incorporated in its discourse the Paradise 3 4

 The leftist elite. [Η αριστερή ελίτ]. https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1072934/.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbz5TRzEEKg.

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Lost of Hellenism when Greece ‘decided’ to lose her soul and embrace materialism and consumption. In a nutshell, according to the lyrics, modern Greece is built on depravity as it has forsaken its roots and its purpose. This statement is not far away from the Church’s message about Greece having lost her way by adopting materialism and consumerism or from blatant populism which approves all things folkish without any moral justification: life is sinful, and there is no alternative—so enjoy it as much as you can. They are the two sides of the same coin. The absence of a social carrier ready to defend the constitutive goods of civil parliamentary democracy and to infuse moral meaning to ordinary life remains one of the detrimental features of the Third Greek Republic. In all, prominent journalists, public opinion makers, and high-profile politicians hardly ever became determined defenders and the gate-keepers of parliamentary, liberal, democracy. On the contrary, on the one hand, leftist/ populist journalists and political personnel and, on the other hand, disaffected leftists/populist activists became a factor of political instability and schismogenetic phenomena, which conservatives tolerated for lack of deep moral conviction and the fear of being called fascists. Such an ideological milieu ‘allowed’ various extremist and terrorist organizations to find a symbolic niche in the public sphere. Such was, for example, the rationale of the most notorious terrorist organization of the period of 17 November (1975–2002) which murdered 23 people in cold blood and planted hundreds of explosive mechanisms before its members were finally arrested. The growing anarchist movement shares this perception and so does a significant part of those people that protested against the austerity measures during the last economic crisis as the slogan ‘the junta did not end in 1973’ suggests. A second source of growing frustration and the development of concomitant discourses was the disaffection of the youth with the political system. When in the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s they came face to face with a ‘corrupt system’ that could not meet their expectations due to structural inefficiencies, the result was growing frustration. Unfulfilled expectations and disgust with the sleaze, the hypocrisy, and the moral confusion the regime exhibited were combined with their image of democracy as boundless freedom and resistance to authority, to produce a cynical discourse toward the establishment leading many of them to radicalization (Pantelidou Malouta 2012). Radicalization manifested itself in the prolonged occupation of many schools across the country as a reaction to educational reforms in 1990; extended riots that erupted in Athens in

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December 2008 following the murder of a 15-year-old student by an irritated policeman5; in the massive angry rallies against the memorandum policies in the period 2011–2015 (Papadakis et al. 2017); and in the production and reproduction of a multitude of anarchist organizations.6 An interview with a student who participated in the 1990 occupations of high schools all around Greece is suggestive: Tell us how it started: ‘Well, it was early December 1990, I was at the 3rd grade of the Lyceum, and the Law of Kontogiannopoulos [the minister of education] concerning an alleged reform in High Schools had already passed. Among other things, he reduced the hours of absences, justified or unjustified, he set up a point system for the bad behavior of the students and (here starts the funny part as if returning to the junta habits would save the poor state of Greek secondary education) the prayer and the raising of the flag, but also the obligation for students to be ‘decent’ even when not at school. It also abolished the direct election of the 15 members [students’ school committees], who would now be elected indirectly by the 5 members of the classes.’ Who had this idea originally? ‘Those I would call “the usual suspects”. The usual “troublemakers,” along with some female members of the communist party (‘knitises’), whose party, as we now know, was not unhappy for this development. This is how they recruit members for the Party anyway. And did they have an influence on the students to guess? The knitises not specially, although one was a fine chick and it always helps (laughs). But the ‘troublemakers’ of the school had a pretty serious influence, to me at least, even though, probably a ‘good kid’ myself, I always had a leeway to them. All of my friends were ‘troublemakers’, they were considered to be at least… Anyway, at some point, we started talking about reaction and then about occupation … what else could reaction be anyway? If we refused to enter the class and we marched, it would be forgotten in a couple of days … an occupation would make a lot of noise, and that was our purpose. We were sixteen and seventeen years old, our blood was boiling, the hormones, say it as you like, it didn’t take much. And so, a nice morning you occupied the school. 5  Greece riots: timeline. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/ dec/08/greece. 6  The anarchic domain—its print from the Metapolitefsis until today [Ο αναρχικός χώρος το στίγμα του από τη μεταπολίτευση μέχρι σήμερα]. https://athens.indymedia.org/ post/1542004/.

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‘As you say, a nice morning, although it was f*** cold (laughs)—I remember it as if it were yesterday. We the blocks gathered, and so the ‘right’ guys out of the school, and we were encouraged by other schools that had begun or planned to start squats and we just did. We picked up a few desks, chairs, locked the door, we actually installed an outpost, and we checked who was coming in and who was coming out, and at one time someone also made a banner that read ‘occupation’ and that was it! In the middle of the day we had our first meeting with almost all students, we had working groups (cleaning, coordination, etc.) all at an incredible speed and incredible appetite. Within a 24-hour period, the ‘occupation’ functioned perfectly and on a 24-hour basis and the most terrible? Without even having a clear hierarchy, we felt unnecessary. For such anarcho-autonomous situations we are talking and resuming, this whimsical model worked in general for 52 days, this is for how long so the occupation was kept going; I still remember this number!’7

The post-Metapolitefsis generations of students, being taught at school that true democracy lies somewhere between Athenian ‘direct’ democracy8 and Polytechnic Occupation/Uprising, became the worst enemies of the regime when the students’ ‘democratic’ expectations were frustrated by an  ‘authoritarian’ government. It was the unintended consequence of Metapolitefsis’ civil religion and its institutionalization by the PASOK governments, an institutionalization which aimed at securing the institutional ground rules of the socialist party as the valid canon for measuring democratic behavior in the country.9 Concerning the school celebrations to commemorate the Polytechnic Uprising, Kouris (2014, 80–81) comments: [T]he new leadership of the Ministry of Education was finding difficult to specify the way a school should organize an event to honor a generalized clash of a group of university students and citizens against the law enforcing mechanisms of the state, even though this happened during the dictatorship … the members of the school community were forced to deal with a domestic conflict which involved hints of a civil war. The Other was neither a foreigner, nor a conqueror. And the state for the first time in democratic 7  I was there as well! With Tsipras at the Occupations [‘Ήμουν και εγώ εκεί! Με τον Τσίπρα, στις καταλήψεις ‘90–‘91]’. http://orthografos.blogspot.gr/2013/09/90-91.html. 8  The Athenian democracy was not direct. But the cultural milieu wishes to see it as such. See Marangudakis (2016). 9  For a detailed presentation of the PASOK’s ‘democratization of education’, see Mpouzakis et al. (2001).

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conditions celebrated the memory of a conflict between Greeks … it was very awkward … to condemn in public the role of the army and the police notwithstanding the notification that they were under the control of a dictatorship… The music that accompanied the commemoration of the Polytechnic Uprising contributed to the introduction of the political song in schools, as it took shape in the 1960s… The lyrics of these songs were referring quite often to the events of the 1940–1950 [the German occupation and the civil war] and were banned during the dictatorship; thus listening to them during the dictatorship was considered to be a symbol of resistance. The historical confusion which this anachronism created was not unrelated to the uncomfortableness of celebrating a very recent event. Beyond that, it is clear that in this specific celebration the role of music has gone through new dimensions…. The celebratory hegemony of militant music of the ‘first Metapolitefsis’ had acquired new institutional characteristics and was officially educating the next generations. (Kouris 2014, 79–81)

A ‘second Metapolitefsis’ song written in the 1990s and routinely played at the Polytechnic commemorations goes like this: … I live alone in my present … and let me suffer the consequences of the lawbreaking … I will not be an accomplice in the murder.10

Lack of appropriate forms of civil rituals were replaced by reactionary, anchorite-like, and indeed mystical refutation of ordinary life in toto. For a student, to be a democrat meant to be alone against all. In 1990, when the conservative party did try to reverse these institutional ground rules for being counter-productive, but without challenging the corresponding constitutive goods, students and teachers violently reacted accusing the conservative government for being undemocratic and authoritarian. They were right in that these reforms were indeed undemocratic and authoritarian in the framework of the constitutive goods and internalized code orientations of the dominant civil religion. The end result was the institutionalization of anarchic defiance: We are a political generation. No one can deny this. We staffed the students’ movement—the great political achievement of the Metapolitefsis—and we organized the movement’s hegemony of high schools, intending its repro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuQM5VxWR6c.

10

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duction. The students of the 70s became teachers in the 80s and in the 90s, and the result was that during the next decades we were governed by their students. Or even by their parents; Flabouraris [an aged Minister of Syriza] for example, who, as a genuine father of our generation, believes that the child is always right.11

For 30 years these and other frustrations were intertwined in the fabric of the dominant public discourse, paradoxically combining everyday passive conformity with explosive instances of anomic defiance, in such routine and mundane ways that everyone, for a while, came to believe that this is the Greek late-modern normality. It came to be called ‘ethno-populism’.

7.2   Ethno-Populism: The Collectivist Offshoot Ethno-populism blended two pre-existing ideological discourses constructed for political purposes, to be turned to cultural elements of the moral self later on: first, born in the second half of the nineteenth century and provided with ideological cohesion of the nascent Greek nation, was the conservative-nationalist narrative of the ‘historical continuity of the nation’ which, in spite of its ups and downs, gave Hellenism an ecumenical, transcendental, and civilizing, quality. Second, born in the midst of the civil war, was the communist narrative of the heroic people which, in spite of its tribulations, still is the carrier of justice and goodness against internal and external enemies. In cold-war Greece and beyond, it was adopted by the wider left as the symbolic representation of its defiance to the political hegemony of the right as follows: Hellenism—the People—Spirituality—Authenticity—Collectivism— Socialism Vs. The West—the Elites—Materialism—Consumerism—Individualism/egoism— Capitalism

While then, ideologically speaking, the two narratives were opposing each other—the former symbolically reflecting the conservative notion of 11  Takis Theodoropoulos (2/4/2017). Cuckoo’s generation [Η Γενιά του Κούκου]. Kathimerini Newspaper. http://www.kathimerini.gr/956937/opinion/epikairothta/ politikh/h-genia-toy-koykoy.

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the Nation, the latter, the populist notion of the People—discursively speaking, they were not incompatible, since the Nation and the People were not mutually exclusive entities. Yet, the merging was not automatic; it could not be so as long as the two narratives reflected different political-­ ideological representations. The binding force that managed to bring them together was a third cultural force: the intellectual movement of ‘Mythical collectivism’ (Part I, Sect. 2.3) which in the 1960s became the lyrics of popular music compositions, compositions which, in turn, became the music theme of the Metapoliteusis’ symbolic representation and civil religion. In a nutshell, the two discourses, without losing their own integrity, gave birth to a third one, to Ethno-populism through a new set of symbolic representations that interweaved Mythical collectivism and the traumatic events of 1973 and 1974 that led to Metapoliteusis, that is, the current Third Greek Republic. As the symbolic representations of the Nation, the People, and Mythical collectivism were all imagistic, so was their synthesis, Ethno-populism. Tsoukalas argues: Indeed, the national self-representations reflect not rules or values, but attitudes, stereotypes, and feelings which emerge out of the timeless landscape, the ethereal light, and that unheard music that is planted in the air. It is not accidental that welcomed is not the productive entrepreneurial or collectively rational aspects of the Greek society, but the unique and post-rational, ‘spiritual’, mental, and sensual abilities of the individuals. Greeks consider themselves to be authentically ‘Greeks’ when they sing, dance, laugh, feel, offer, fall in love, or fight, and possibly when they are smart, successful, or canning at the expense of others, but never when they pursuit, materialize, or obey collective or social rational intentions. They might behave as heroes or as scums—or both—but not as citizens with sober and weighted behavior. The essence of Hellenism becomes perceivable as an eclectic and original synthesis of libertarian and anarchic individual capacities. In this framework, the western-type rules of behavior and self-images tend to be symbolically degraded to an insubstantial level … apparently, Toennies, Durkheim, and Sir Henry Maine were fooled. While the country is certainly not ‘gemeinschaft’ any more, there is no sign that is evolving to full ‘Gesellschaft.’ The shattered forms of estates are not replaced by forms of comprehensive contractual relations and the weakened bonds of ‘mechanical solidarity’ have not evolved to relations of ‘organic solidarity’. (Tsoukalas 1993, 24–26)

Then, under the socialist governments of Andreas Papandreou, libertarian-­anarchic ethno-populism went through a fatal mutation that,

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30 years later, brought Greece to its knees. This mutation was caused, first, by the entry of Greece to the European Union (European Communities then) and the endless flow of cheap capital in the country and, second, by the concomitant embracement of Western utilitarian individualism. The first factor, combined with an economy ruled by the state and its clientelistic networks of syndicates, unions, associations, and magnates, led to a grave paradox: Greeks became wealthy while the Greek economy remained non-competitive and relatively underdeveloped—the condition was called ‘stuck in the middle’. The important achievements of the post-war period (the founding of a social state, the formation of broader social consensus and political stability, improvement of infrastructure, upgrading human capital, etc.) are overshadowed by a crucial failure: the inability to disengage from the old and discredited productive model of the early postwar decades, which was governed by the logic of tariff protection, in particular the protection of the domestic industry, leading the country to fail to converge towards the emerging economy one of knowledge. This failure led, especially in the 1980s, to taking direct business from the state itself, unfortunately with the myopic goal of managing a declining productive structure. As a result, the Greek economy faced the phenomenon of widespread de-industrialization and was stuck in the middle, unable to compete with both the developed knowledge-innovation economies and the emerging economies of the low labor costs. Inclusion in the European Economic Community (EEC), made primarily on the basis of political criteria and without a national development strategy to address the risks involved, has rather aggravated than facilitated the productive upgrading of the country, sometimes concealing the problem through resource transfers. The ­cover-up also contributed equally and/or more decisively to the successive increases in public debt.12

The second factor, combined with a collectivist culture of victimhood and heroism, led to a second paradox: collective representations of the People’s defiance and authenticity reinforced anarchic individualism. It did so as the citizens were now able to justify their anomic, anti-social, self-serving roles in the social networks of power by declaring the moral 12  From the report of the Greek government to the EU. http://www.tovima.gr/2018/03/02/ finance/i-elliniki-oikonomia-apo-ti-metapoliteysi-ews-to-2010-kai-i-diethnis-sygkyria/. Also see A Growth Strategy for the future. http://www.tovima.gr/files/1/2018/04/30/GS_ Presentation_F.pdf (translated by the author, emphasis added).

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superiority not only of their familism, but also of their own sense of justice versus the cruel, ruthless, and cold ‘authoritarianism’ of the state which triggered delegitimizing discourses representing the junta regime. And they were able to explain away their selfish demands for selective benefits by the state (e.g., salary increases, tax exemptions, special allowances, preferential occupation mobility, and pardoned tax evasion) by homology: by symbolically identifying the demands of their own social group, union, or association with the sacred ‘People’. For example, GSEE, the General Confederation of Greek Workers, the overall union of Greek laborers, but chiefly of State-led companies, stated its demands using the following discourse: We are opposed to any talk of lowering wages, the 13th or 14th salary, and any benefits included in the National Collective Labor Agreement … there is no leeway to fall back … they have stepped not just on the sacred and the holy, but also on the bones.” (GSEE President Giannis Panagopoulos, 10/1/12; emphasis added. Translated by the author)13

The moral principles encapsulated in slogans such as People in Power, or ‘the politicians are the servants of the People’, understood in ethno-­ populist terms also prohibited the consolidation of law and its strict enforcement and the implementation of policies able to modernize the Greek economy. They did so by providing state functionaries with strong psychological premiums for not enforcing the laws and by providing, in an instrumental and manipulative way, ‘valid’ explanations for legislating in favor of various special interests at the expense of the public interest and rational-technocratic planning of economic policies (see Part II, Sect. 11.3). Crucial role for the consolidation of this generalized amoral anarchism played one particular ideological social network: the yellow printed and television Press. Being the direct and legitimate offspring of Avrianismos, it became the social carrier of ethno-populism as it became the way by which the latter’s constitutive goods were turned to tangible and authoritative internalized code orientations and institutional ground rules. Noted public personas and journalists, via their early morning television talk-­ shows, late night yellow-journalism programs, and extremely popular 13  https://tvxs.gr/news/ellada/oxi-se-kathe-syzitisi-gia-meioseis-i-pagoma-misthonapo-ti-gsee. Retrieved on 23/9/18. Panagopoulos probably refers to the National Anthem verse: ‘From the sacred bones, of the Hellenes arisen, and valiant again as you once were, Hail, o hail, Liberty’.

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comedians, hosted and directly supported all kinds of populist demands, grievances, and stereotypes, becoming in the process mighty gatekeepers of the populist regime. The principle ‘People in Power’ was interpreted as, and gave birth to the basic rule of, the government sharing power with privileged trade unions of state-owned enterprises (leading to unjustifiable high salaries and pensions, and refusal to adopt technological upgrading); the principle ‘politicians are the servants of the People’ was interpreted as, and gave birth to the basic rule of, various social requests having priority over established rules and regulations (leading to the fragmentation of civil rights and civil obligations); the principle ‘the democratic students’ movement’ was interpreted as, and gave birth to the basic rule of, ‘the least effort’ mentality and the loosening university rules and regulations; and ‘freedom’ was interpreted as, for example, the freedom of press to report unverified or fabricated news (leading to a general mistrust of the public sphere). Another social carrier or network of social power, ideological as well, was the secondary educational system. And if the informal institutionalization of populism in the press assured the institutionalization of high tensions and clashes in the midst of the public sphere, the institutionalization of those principles in high schools assured the unhindered social reproduction of the concomitant internalized code  orientations and institutional ground rules. Students are taught that to be democratic means to voice your grievances and voice your demands to the authorities—not to participate in civil activities; and students learn in school ceremonies that the iconic moment of democracy in action is the ‘spirit of the Polytechnic Uprising’, not to be civil and trustworthy. Huliaras (2014, 10–11) argues: Another factor that may explain the low associational density and the weak levels of activism is the lack of civic education. Schools are very important in fostering civic engagement. The 2009 Civic and Citizenship Education Study evaluated civil and citizenship education in the lower-secondary systems of 24 European countries. The results showed that Greece is one of the few European countries where civic and citizenship education is not offered as a specific and compulsory subject (IEA 2010: 35). Further, Greece is one of two European countries that are not offering training to teachers on civic education (IEA 2010: 41). Finally, it is no surprising that in Greece less than 10% of school principals cited the promotion of students’ participation in the local community as one of their three most important aims (in the UK the relative figure is over 40%) (IEA 2010: 127). So it could be argued that

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the lack of civic education is a factor that explains low levels of civic engagement in Greece. (Huliaras 2014)

More important, these ground rules nullified any concrete effort to modernize the Greek political system and the Greek economy, by becoming the legitimizing discourse for protecting selective privileges. By the early 1990s, and the proliferation of private television stations hosting countless populist programs, the politics of the public sphere was turned to an arena ruled by passions, rumors, and petty fights performed on the screen for a citizenry reduced to a passive audience; later, during the economic crisis, they were the core of opposition to memorandum’s austerity policies. For now, they accustomed citizens to perceive politics as a shadow play of moralistic public performances, behind which arbitrary deals were made, scandalous contracts were arranged, clientelistic legislation was passed, and everything was up for grabs. Eventually, the public sphere became a bazaar of emotions and deals, an arena wherein a Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes was taking place with the Leviathan being not an authoritarian guarantor of peace, but an overlord who was picking the winner of the scramble for privileged access to collective resources. Paradoxically then, collectivist collective representations and egotistic social action became organically interconnected in a vicious cycle of schismogenesis. It is worth recalling Bateson’s own definition of the concept: ‘A process of differentiation in the norms of individual behavior resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals’ (Bateson 1958, 175, emphasis added). It suggests that undifferentiated ­communities are bound to become schismogenetic for lack of identity differentiation— in Durkheimian terms, that mechanical solidarity invites struggles over the monopoly of meaning. We can presume a monopoly of privileges as well. Indeed, it gave impetus to an endless zero-sum power game that no one could escape, and no one could ignore, in spite of his own personal ethics, if he wished to remain an effective social actor.

7.3   Ethno-Romanticism: The Individualist Offshoot Ethno-populism remained a valid canon for the remaining of the period, up to today, as far as the state was concerned, since demands by various social groups, unions, associations, and syndicates were always accompa-

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nied by performances which incorporated its collective representations and its principles. But this was not all; ethno-populism, together with the dominant civil religion, also served as the background for the development of new cultural offshoots, of narratives that matched the cultural inclinations of social classes and groups that emerged or were reshaped in the following years. The liberal conditions that found fertile ground in Greece after the latter’s entry in the European Communities in 1980 and the capital that was injected in the Greek economy allowed for the development of a genuine social differentiation and diverted the self away from traditional hierarchies and corresponding notions of the self. Thus, out of the rather communalist narrative of ethno-populism emerged ethno-­ romanticism, proclaiming a new, self-confident, individualist self. Ethno-romanticism, coined so by Sevastakis (2004), while it accepted the general orientation and disposition of ethno-populism, that is, the emotive, expressive, anarchic, and ahistorical representations of the national self, nevertheless was oriented toward more materialistic constitutive goods, as it celebrated the actual and tangible personal experience and successes of the Greeks. And though it remained political, in that it informed the individual in terms of its place in the political sphere, it rejected traditional and modern social carriers of communalism, such as aggressive nationalism, mass politics, and the party system as being outmoded, banal, fake, and corrupted. Yet, instead of committing itself to the development of a modern civil self (e.g., by pointing to the absence of tangible civic virtue or civil involvement and proposing ways to address the issue), it updated, or ‘post-modernized’, to use Sevastakis’ terminology, the emotive, expressive, anarchic, and ahistorical self of the religious Greek Orthodox, and of the secular Mythical, collectivism of the nation. In the 1990s, ethno-romanticism became the new proposal for moral authenticity against utilitarian alienation and confusion—a weapon against the senseless frenzy that took hold of the Greek society as a result of its European integration and the new challenges to the Greek identity, the Yugoslavian civil war, and the subsequent prospects for the establishment of an independent Slavo-Macedonian nation, just on the other side of the northern borders of the Greek region of Macedonia. As all cultural modes, it started as an ideology, in this case, by drawing inspiration from both the Marxist anthropology of alienation and demands of liberal reformists to tackle parasitic statism. This ideology was then picked up by friendly journalistic networks which, through various symbolic representations, performances, and interpretations, explicated the internalized code orientations

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that it presumed, giving shape to a tangible ethno-romantic moral self. This was not a difficult endeavor, since its basic contours—the basic definitions of the good, the true, and the beautiful, and their opposites—were already in place: to be Greek means to be authentic, and Greek authenticity is the way to overcome nihilistic modernity. To be authentic Greek means to be self-sufficient, self-confident, independent, open-hearted, and to work and to enjoy life passionately, without guilt and without regrets. In effect, it heralded a new version of the old Greek self. Instead of mystical union with the divine, as the religious vision of the good suggested, and instead of frugality, as the 1930s’ Mythical collectivism promoted, ethno-romanticism justified and promoted a post-modern self of self-gratification and self-righteousness (see Part II, Sect. 10.3.2). It was post-modern in that it complied with the basic features of post-­modernism as defined by Jameson: (a) historic amnesia and ignorance; (b) fixation on a bloated present-time; (c) bricolage of life-styles, of thought, and theory; and (d) apotheosis of consumerism (in Sevastakis 2004, 26). But, on the other hand, it embraced the religious mystical experience of ‘emotional unity’ and the secular mythical credence of the trans-historical nation. In a sense, ethno-romanticism updated the basic contours of the Greek moral self to bring it in line with the western developments of post-modern individualism. By doing so, ethno-romanticism turned collectivism to an assemblage of individuals to the satisfaction of the members of the new entrepreneurial class, who could do without authoritative social sources of morality, such as the family, the State, and the Church. Thus, the ­ethno-­romantic narrative gave birth to a self-gratifying and celebratory self without a corresponding, organizational, authoritative moral source. This vision of the ‘entrepreneurial nation’ and the community of the ‘productive and the successful’ were not uttered in didactic terms, as it was in the moralistic and normative discourses of the past. Instead of being presented as a declaration, it was presented to the public as a ‘charming kaleidoscope of images and advertising tableau vivant’. Lighthearted and humorous, it exemplified the unique virtues and qualities of the nation in various sectors: in sexual life, in music and life-style, in longevity and health, and in cultural and intellectual qualities. While it celebrated ‘the most historic nation in the world’ it rejected militant nationalism and expansionism.

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When all worldviews of social and economic progress have collapsed, [Hellenism] remains the only component that can push us forward. It neither implies relics of the past, nor the dream of the pretentious who wished to be someone else. And of course [the modern Greek] is a fanatic enemy of xenophobia, of isolationism, and the syndrome of the eternally chased, the pitiful, and the puppet at the mercy of the moods of the mighty ones. (Sevastakis 2004, 118 translated by the author)

The Greek ethos is described as the most important art of the beautiful life where joy, generosity, sociability, and eros are found. Greeks are the carriers of multidimensional excellence: they have good friends, they are loose and gentle in work (not like Western workaholics), and they are people of today’s day, without postponing the pleasures for tomorrow, and so on. This ethos is found in all classes. The Greek way of life turns us all to an ‘endless middle class’ which dissolves social contradictions in the euphoric cohabitation of the Greek way of life and a symbiotic life-style. This new middle class is pronounced to be the social carrier of the new Greek self. Optimistic and scornful of the older narrations, it rejects the stiffness and authoritarianism of militant nationalism and the internationalism of the left. While it accepts the uniqueness of the nation, it rejects folklore; while it rejects the memetic adoration of the west, it rejects ethno-centric isolationism; and while it is proud of the Greek Orthodox religion (not stiff and moralistic like Catholicism and Protestantism), it rejects the backwardness of the Greek Orthodox Church (see Part II, Sect. 11.4). Ethno-romanticism was the last comprehensive set of constitutive goods that emerged out of the basic cosmological and ontological principles of the Greek worldview. It introduced an internalized code orientation, an ethos, comprising hard work without a methodical work ethic, a festive life-style without lust, egalitarianism without communalism, national pride without nationalism, and mystical euphoria without mystics. As successful as ethno-romanticism was in matters of internalized code orientations, it did not affect and did not transform the actual social networks of power. It did not do so because the internalized code orientations of ethno-romanticism intentionally ignored hegemonic party populism and the detrimental role of clientelism and familism. Dazzled by the surprising performance of the Greek economy of an annual growth rate higher than any other European country for more than a decade, ethno-­romanticism considered the problem to be the claustrophobic rather than the anarchic

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component of the Greek self. If it had targeted the latter component, it could have been a mighty force of shaking the ‘naturalness’ of anarchic and clientelistic institutional roles. It did not, since it was not suggesting a new set of constitutive goods, not even of new internalized code orientations, but only renovated discourses, rituals, and performances. Thus, ethnoromanticism became a sterile epiphenomenon of the actually existing social networks of power. In all, the development of the two civil religions is depicted in Fig. 7.1 below: The analysis shows that in Greece no civil society emerged during the last 40 years—even though the country experienced no hazardous external pressures—while its social structures were decisively modernized due to its EU membership. Instead, it was paternalism, clientelism, and anarchic individualism which were indeed modernized, becoming increasingly parasitical and unhampered. Also, in the framework of EU-led modernization, new cultural patterns emerged, derivatives of the basic cosmological and ontological principles of moral familism and of the collective representations of communitas. All this is to say that the Greek civil religion should not be seen as evidence of the persistence of traditionalism in the era of modernity; rather, it should be seen as an otherwise normal condition of modernity which in Greece runs amok. I explain, as Eisenstadt noted, that Western ‘restlessness’ is the result of frustration caused by salvationist impossibilities when political elites or social collectivities fail to see that the reason for their The Evolution of the Sponsored Civic Religion Social Movement: Metaxas Regime (1936-1941) Fatherland, ‘The New State–The Third Religion, Family Greek Civilization’ (1890)

1946-1967 Cold-war militaristic anti-communism Constitutional nationalism ‘The glory of the ancients’

The Genealogy of the Metapolitefsis Civic Religion 1930s Mythical Collectivism

1950s-1960s Popularization and radicalization of Mythical Collectivism

1940s The hidden narrative: The purity and the tribulations of the People

Junta Regime (1967-1974) Extreme anti-communism The militant Nation Glorification of folklore and consumerism

1970s The atemporal heroic communitas (Theodorakis) The authentic roots and fragile presence of the modern individual (Savopoulos)

Fig. 7.1  The trajectories of the two civil religions

(1974-today) ‘The Greeks when united do miracles’

1980s -today Institutionalization of anti-authoritarian communitas Offshoot: 1990s-today The celebration of the narcissistic/anarchic individual

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failures is not human incompetency but problematic spiritual modalities— problematic cultural visions cum political promulgations (Eisenstadt 2001). Greece is a country in which this endemic mechanism of restlessness is not a low key motivating factor that Weber exalted, nor a rare revolutionary phenomenon as Eisenstadt attested. Instead, in Greece it appears as an almost routine source of epidemic frustration and the underlying cause of political instability. This constant frustration acts as a genuine schismogenetic mechanism: It tears apart social cohesion since no stability can be achieved between basic bipolarities which define social orders such as hierarchy versus equality; authority versus solidarity; and individuality versus trust (Eisenstadt 1995, 340). Endless frustration for failing to achieve the democratic constitutive goods so defined invites all sorts of egotistic, exclusive, and paternalistic social structures and all sorts of messianic, revolutionary, and nihilistic social movements. The state, the upholder of these constitutive goods, can mobilize no account to establish order—neither to the public, nor to its personnel.

7.4   The Economic Crisis: A Brief Description In 2009, when the interest rates started increasing in prohibiting high levels, ethno-romanticism, together with the rest of the political discourses dominating the public sphere, were completely unprepared to come to terms with the bad news. Worst, they were not equipped—in discursive terms—to make sense of the subsequent economic bust and to provide the public with a constructive narrative of the crisis and how to exit it. But before we enter the subject of the discourses that unfolded in the last period of our inquiry, the so-called ‘memorandum period’, let us examine the actual economic and political events that constitute the collapse of the Metapolitefsis social system. The Greek predicament started as a government-debt crisis in late 2009, to escalate to a full-blown state and societal crisis two years later. It is widely accepted that the debt crisis was caused by a combination of structural weaknesses of the Greek economy coupled with the incomplete monetary, banking, and tax unification of the European Monetary Union. In late 2009, fears among institutional and private investors concerning the ability of Greece to meet is debt obligations led to a crisis of confi-

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dence and thus the widening of bond yield spreads and the rise of the cost of risk insurance on credit default swaps. The downgrading of Greek government bonds to junk bond status in April 2010 meant that private markets were no longer available as a funding source, thus forcing the Eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund (May 2010) to agree to a 110 billion bailout loan for Greece conditional on compliance with three rules: (a) implementation of austerity measures to reduce deficit; (b) privatization of state assets to keep the debt pile sustainable; and (c) implementation of economic structural reforms to improve competitiveness and growth. The European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the IMF designated a delegation of experts to negotiate, impose, and monitor the austerity measures and the structural changes in Greece through a ‘memoranda of understanding’; the delegation itself became known as the ‘troika’. Since the newly elected PASOK government won the 2009 elections on the promise of implementing an aggressive anti-austerity policy to combat economic recession, the government, when forced to take back its promises and instead to accept severe austerity measures, faced strong reaction and accusations of hypocrisy from both inside the party and the whole of the opposition in parliament. This, combined with the inability of the EU to develop a comprehensive plan to bring Greece out of the crisis, and measures that much later on the troika admitted were too harsh and indeed counter-productive,14 deteriorated the economic crisis, d ­ isorganized the government, and triggered massive and violent reactions of labor unions whose interests were threatened by the piecemeal, arbitrary, and hesitant policies the guilt-ridden government initiated meanwhile. As the economic condition deteriorated, salaries of the public sector were horizontally reduced by 10%, 20%, even by 30% in less than a year, while in the private sector the unemployment rates skyrocketed to a staggering 25% during 2011 alone. Massive demonstrations against the bailout memorandum agreement and against the troika started erupting with escalating frequency and violence. The country was violently shaken to its core as public opinion and the political parties were divided between memorandum and anti-memorandum supporters with the latter holding the vast majority in both respects. The parliamentary opposition and many MPs of ruling party opposed the series of agreements signed between the troika 14  IMF admits to errors in international bailout of Greece. Financial Times. https://www. ft.com/content/6924ee76-cdfb-11e2-8313-00144feab7de, retrieved 23/9/18.

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and the government signed between May 2010 and March 2012, arguing that Greece should not implement any policies that in effect will deteriorate the purchasing power of the Greek people and increase unemployment, while the few memorandum supporters argued that there is no other option but to comply with the troika as a means to modernize the Greek economy because without these agreements, Greece will run out of cash within a two-month period. Soon the political argument was reduced to the dilemma ‘defiance versus pragmatism’ in the midst of daily violent protests and strikes. Social unrest led to the collapse of the shaken ruling party PASOK and the resignation of George Papandreou as prime minister in November 2011. In its place a hastily assembled ‘national unity’ government under Loukas Papademos (ex-vice-Chair of the European Central Bank) was formed, with the understanding that it will resign after signing a renewed memorandum with the troika. Indeed, the government duly resigned, calling general elections. The elections took place on 6 May 2012, but after all attempts to form a new coalition government failed (no party had enough seats to form a one-party government), the newly elected parliament was dissolved, and the President of the Republic called for new elections on 17 June 2012. The elections result featured the conservative New Democracy (ND) as the largest party with 30% of the votes and 129 seats. The second party was the hitherto marginal far-leftist Syriza with 27% of the votes and 71 seats; the third party was PASOK with 12% of the votes and 33 seats; the ultra-conservative Independent Greeks (Anel) was with 7.5% of the vote and 20 seats; the Nazi-inspired Golden Dawn was with 7% of the vote and 18 seats; the Democratic Left (DIMAR) was with 6% and 17 seats; and the Communist Party (KKE) was with 4.5% and 12 seats. As the country was facing immediate collapse, the conservatives (Nea Democratia) and the two social-democratic parties (PASOK and DIMAR) formed a coalition government pledging to keep Greece in the Eurozone and renegotiate new terms—a second memorandum—with the troika. The coalition government under the (surprisingly) zealous conservative leadership of hitherto quasi anti-memorandum champion PM Antonis Samaras managed to restore trust to the international political and economic institutions and indeed stabilized Greece’s relationship with the EU, and civil unrest was not reduced significantly. Being constantly accused of treason and complacency to the troika, and having lost the trust of the parliament during the Presidential elections in December 2014, it resigned and announced gen-

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eral elections for 25 January 2015, elections that brought the anti-­systemic Syriza party, of communist and anarchist descent, sympathies and affiliations, to power. The social crisis, instead of receding, as in countries with apparently similar issues, reached new heights. Greece, instead of putting itself together, seemed as being drowned into a black hole of its own making. What went wrong?

7.5   The Perfect Storm Other European countries have also suffered from the latest capitalist crisis: Ireland, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Cyprus; in fact the whole of the EU ‘semi-periphery’ has been affected, bringing to the fore, once more, Wallerstein’s World-System theory. Yet, two qualifications to a systemic understanding of the crisis are in order: First, the causes of the economic crisis those states suffered are not similar. Second, the effects of the economic crisis on particular societies are not similar either.15 While the rest of the victims of the crisis suffered economic recession, Greece has suffered the worst possible collapse of its economy, its state functions, and its societal structures. By the summer of 2011, the Greek state had simply begun to lose its grip on the whole spectrum of the actual functions a modern state should perform. It had lost control of its economic policy, the trust of the people, the invisible authority of rule and the monopoly of violence, and the ability to collect taxes. Only the presence of bare pragmatism that dictates a functional routine allowed the state to perform its most basic functions. Why Greece? The economic collapse of the state as a whole is understandable for an economy which is virtually statist. In more detail, by 2010, the Greek economy was characterized by structural features that guaranteed the simultaneous collapse of the whole economy: • Reliance on ‘easy money’ (such as from the stock market or property), as well as on over-inflated private consumption, which has in turn relied on loans in recent years. • Particularly high public debt (but not private debt), which remained undiminished despite the privatizations of the last 20 years. 15  Report of the European Commission, Directorate-General for the Economic and Financial Affairs (2009). Economic Crisis in Europe: Causes, Consequences and Responses. http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/publications/publication15887_en.pdf.

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• Over-reliance on sectors directly affected by the international crisis, such as tourism and shipping. • A disproportionately expensive and scandalously ineffective public sector, in conjunction with a parasitical private sector controlled by a small number of entrepreneurial ‘insiders’ (ημέτεροι). • A market economy controlled by cartels that could raise prices, thus reducing the purchasing value of any increase in salaries. • A Minister of Finance ready to comply with any demands by various economic groups as long as the budget could ‘afford’ it until the next elections. • Exceptionally high tax evasion rates compared to the average rate of Western democracies (30% compared to 15%). State complacency, irresponsibility, and submissiveness to the ‘reasonable demands’ of various social and economic groups with access to political power or ability to put pressure on the government became the name of the game throughout the 2000s. Eventually, the country run amok.16 The inability of the various governments, or better, of successive governments, to rationalize state policies (any announcement of such an intention found the parliamentary opposition united in rejecting the proposed measures out of hand as ‘insensitive’, ‘corrupted’, ‘serving dark interests’, or ‘premature’) was not contained only on matters of economic policies. Being systemic, it embraced all matters of social policy, institutional structures, administrative procedures, and state-society relations. When the crisis erupted, the whole social system based upon such practices went down to its knees and out in the streets demanding the restoration of the good times: it became the anti-memorandum movement. But this was not all. In fact, as the crisis unfolded, it became clear that throughout the last two decades two issues had slowly but surely been fermented in the midst of public space, issues that the crisis transformed into a variety of social movements of momentous impact and severe consequences for the political and social system: first, the effect of illegal, or ‘atypical’, immigration, and second, social alienation and especially so, alienation of the youth. The issue of immigration that became urgent in the 1990s with waves of Albanian immigrants arriving in Greece after the collapse of the com16  Sotiris Hatzigakis, Agriculture Minister, in the last conservative government before the 2009 elections, in a rare moment of sincerity, reflecting on the situation just before the 2009 elections, stated: ‘the country was not governable any more’.

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munist regime in Albania escalated in the following decade with a second wave of immigrants from the Arab countries, central Asia, and Pakistan, who entered Greece as a midway point of reaching their final destination, Western Europe. As the Greek authorities and the administrative system were not able to cope with the sheer number of this wave of immigrants (more than half a million) and to process their request for asylum in due time, droves of human wrecks were literally dumped to inner-cities to be exploited by organized crime networks or become cheap labor in the construction and agricultural sectors of the economy. As the Greek economy slowed down after the Olympic Games of 2004, those people, instead of an economic asset, became an economic and social problem. Organized and petty crime skyrocketed, turning whole urban districts to no-go areas. As the police was unable to respond effectively, many residents welcomed the ‘protection’ offered by neo-Nazi gangs of the hitherto marginal and virtually unknown Nazi party Golden Dawn. These gangs virtually replaced the police force claiming to be the champions of law-and-order and protectors of the elders. In the process, they appropriated the motto ‘Greece for Greeks’ which since the late 1970s constituted the socialist PASOK banner against foreign imperialism. Symbolic homology and disenchantment turned frustration to support those who promulgated ‘foreigners get out of Greece’. Nationalism, which throughout the Metapolitefsis era was diffused in both the conservative and the social democratic camps in various forms, and thus legitimated, now became affiliated with xenophobia and the latter with racism. Out of these homologies, a new reactionary and phobic discourse emerged. The second, more widespread and profound social issue that emerged as a series of related movements during the crisis was that of civic alienation. The inability of the state to remain semi-autonomous vis-à-vis civil society defending its role as the provider of public goods, and the various pressures that special or selective interests successfully exercised over it, eventually took their toll. The average citizen came to perceive the state, its institutions, the political system, and not least the ruling parties (PASOK and New Democracy) not as ‘policy implementers’ but as ‘favor expediters’. While the sentiment was widespread, it was comprehended differently by different social strata: while those attached and depended on statism (e.g., public sector employees, subsidized farmers, etc.) continued to tolerate it in a love-hate relationship, those who by profession are not depended on the state started to turn their back and reject what they considered to be the source of civic wickedness.

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The third one was the frustration of the youth. As mentioned before, a new generation of Greeks, raised in the Metapolitefsis era, having enjoyed an unprecedented high level of prosperity and personal freedoms, came to depreciate and devalue the state apparatus as a cheater and a liar. They were not exaggerating: paradoxically, while Greeks were indeed living, up until recently, a wealthy life, the public services and the public goods the state provided were poor. The public system of education this generation experienced firsthand was corrupted and disenchanting. In this system they were accustomed to expect the least from the educational system and from themselves, but there were high expectations from the state for their well-being; they learned to expect everything from a state they despised. What they demanded more from the state was well-paid and secured jobs: in a statist economy, such as the Greek one, the university-educated young people could find employment primarily in state-controlled companies or in the state administration and services sector. It all went well as long as the state could absorb the thousands of graduates the university system was producing every year, but the memoranda agreements stopped the steady flow of public sector jobs. Now they faced the clear and present threat of unemployment. The ‘graduate without future’ became reality (Mason 2012, 66). Thus, when the economic crisis erupted, the state did not have to face one but three quite distinctive social unrests, three discourses promulgated by various sectors of the social division of labor: The ‘laborers’ rights’, the ‘xenophobic’, and the ‘direct democracy’ discourse. All three discourses, and the various movements they inspired, are the consequences of a failed state and its paternalistic, clientelistic, and short-sighted polities; all three of them developed specific versions of civic morality against which stood the corrupted Metapolitefsis political system. It was the perfect storm: It brought down the old dual party system and brought to government a populist, non-democratic, and authoritarian Syriza government; it shook the world with images of Athens on fire, blood covering the pavement, and teargas hovering over the center of the city for days, and it radically reshaped the political landscape and the nature of the post-election political parties. In effect, the Metapolitefsis era, disgraced, came down in those Syntagma Square massive gatherings in the summer days of 2011; literally, it ended in tears.

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7.6   The One Pro- and the Three Anti-­memorandum Narratives During the period 2010–2015, three militant discourses were formed, to be used in various proportions by a multitude of ‘anti-memorandum’ social movements, performed in rallies, sit-ins, demonstrations, squats, and so on. The cradle of all three of them was the ‘indignant citizens’ movement’ (2011), which occupied the central square of Athens, Syntagma Square, just facing the Parliament House, abusing the MPs, demanding the end of austerity measures, and advocating a more ‘true’ democracy (Marangudakis 2016; Marangudakis et al. 2013; Simiti 2014; Tsaliki 2012; Leontidou 2012). It was the first time in modern history that constitutional democracy was challenged by visibly large crowds who demanded the dismantling of the political system. The ‘indignants’ as they were called, imitators of the Spanish ‘indignados’ movement, exemplified the ideological syncretism of the anti-memorandum social reaction as it brought together supporters of ideologies supposedly hostile to each other. Yet, rage against the regime brought these people together, and rage led them develop unifying moral arguments at the expense of the dividing ideological discourses. In this vein, the anti-memorandum movement demanded the deconstruction of the immoral system and the construction of a new, virtuous polity. Focus on the moral aspects of democracy and the democratic self unveiled underlying moral worldviews lurking underneath ideological convictions; suddenly, moral images of the self, of citizenship, and of civic institutions were there at the open, inviting inspection and analysis. In all, three such worldviews, three sets of constitutive goods, made themselves visible. Each one of them constituted a version of the basic cosmological and ontological vision of the Greek communitas. More important, they were not reflections of specific party ideologies (they were constructed outside party headquarters), and they spread in the public sphere before they were embraced and institutionalized as ideologies of particular parties during the following elections. In other words, they are genuine products of grass-roots symbolic interactions of social actors that communicated their personal experience, worries, and frustrations before they were crystalized in solid discourses. They constitute internally coherent free-floating discursive resources that were constructed in an hermeneutical way as they attracted and repelled, by the rules of homology and antinomy, signs, codes, symbols, images, artifacts, arguments, and visions.

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The means of their construction were face-to-face interactions, social networks, and last, but not least, social media; no traditional, centralized, media—still following the old rules of party politics and debates—played any significant role in this process. Below we present the three cohesive discourses that were voiced in thousands of marches, sit-ins, and clashes that took place in the years 2011–2015. We present, briefly, the ‘final’, comprehensive, form that we extrapolated following their internal logic, assumptions, and binary logic. We are aware that they reflect only a surface image of the discourses, since such an analysis ‘from a distance’ cannot be certain of either how the discourse is meaningfully constructed or how concrete individuals comprehend the discourses which they voice nevertheless. These issues, centered on how these visions are constructed as a bottom-up process, are the subject of the following quantitative-structuralist analysis. For the moment let us examine the three anti-memorandum, and the one pro-memorandum, discourses as final public products. We start with the latter. The discourse that was constructed by moderate public voices, by intellectual and political networks who perceived the memorandum agreement as an opportunity to modernize the state as much as civil society, developed a civil discourse—not by any social movement. Accordingly, the old system was seen as irrational and responsible for the crisis. The post-­memorandum, post-crisis, state structures and the administrative system should be characterized by modern-technocratic bureaucratic rationale that will curtail spending and will encourage sound economic ­development and opportunities for all.17 In this discourse, populism and clientelism were considered to be the cause of Metapolitefsis irrationality which did not allow the individual to develop its skills and become productive and prosperous. Instead, it bred hypocrisy, malevolence, and spite which are the true enemies of ‘Greece as an ordinary country’, a motto which stands for a virtuous state that obeys the law and does not succumb to clientelistic and populist practices. Though it did manage to carry with it half of the voters, this discourse underplayed morality, as it stresses the significance of practical and formal rationality to overcome the crisis at the expense of the substantive rationality and constitutive goods that such a discourse invites: a methodical and restrained self. Yet, pragmatic it was. 17  Liargovas: The Memoranda are an opportunity to implement reforms [Ευκαιρία τα μνημόνια για να περάσουν μεταρρυθμίσεις] (5/9/2015). https://www.voria.gr/article/ liargkovas-efkeria-to-mnimonio-gia-na-perasoun-metarrithmisis.

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Apparently, faced with the uncertainty of the Manichean discourses, a light majority preferred to stick to this pragmatism and voted for the moderate parties that incorporate it into their political program, irrespective of the grave losses these citizens had suffered by the austerity measures. It was enough to produce a stable government for the moment but not enough to secure a new set of constitutive goods for the future. As essentially practical, it could not rule out the possibility of a setback as soon as the crisis had passed,18 while its morality was based on casuistic justice and not on an internalized, methodical one.19 Eventually, in 2015, it lost the elections. The final winners of the memorandum struggle were the anti-­memorandum discourses: the xenophobic, the labor-class, and the direct-­democracy ones. In detail: The xenophobic discourse, in close proximity to traditional nationalism and to the sponsored, ante Metapolitefsis, civil religion, but also to the recently emerged racial nationalism, comprehends its ‘democratic’ ideals as the ‘soul of the Greek people’, to be understood as the ‘simple folk’ against the ‘treacherous elites and the foreigners’. According to this ­discourse, Greeks are an honest, proud, hardworking people envied by their enemies for their cultural achievements and the wealth of the country. Greece plumed into chaos because the political elite instead of serving the will and the interest of the people served their ‘masters’, that is, the Americans, the Jews, the Germans, the bankers, the capitalists, and so on. For this reason, they should pay for their crimes, jailed or worse: The gang of the coalition government, the representatives of the New Order, which met at the secret clubs of Bilderberg thought that Orthodox Greece will bend the knee. (Pantazopoulos 2013, 159)

As for the People, it should defy those foreigners who bring impoverishment and should nullify the national debt since the latter was made up by a treacherous clique and serves only the interests of the local and the  http://www.kathimerini.gr/4dcgi/_w_articles_kathpolitics_1_13/03/2013_487497.  A very interesting example of the pragmatic discourse is found in the interview of a civil servant who uncovered a clique of perjurers who embezzled €12 million from the coffers of the National Insurance Foundation (IKA). According to the newspaper, the civil servant recalled that in the long hours of monitoring their steps ‘… the only thing she had in mind was that she might not get her pension in spite of her 30 years of work, not even the lump sum, and that “my children will not be able to find jobs, and my colleagues who work so hard and get paid so little … and I said, f**k not!”’ http://www.protothema.gr/greece/ article/?aid=259910. 18 19

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international parasitical elites. Accordingly, Greece is a victim of an international conspiracy of capitalists who wish to buy the country and turn the Greeks into slaves in their own country: Greece does not surrender, the Parthenon will not be mortgaged, Acropolis is not for rent … we will not surrender to the money lenders’. (Pantazopoulos 2013)

Thus, we should not rely on those dark networks of globalization but on our own capacities and potential, cultivating new alliances, particularly so with Russia, and stand independent and strong in the international arena. Its constitutive good is the militant ethnic community based upon the heroic self whose presence guarantees national sovereignty and pride. The workers’ rights discourse was structured by labor unions, especially the well-organized unions of the public sector, and radical leftist parties of Marxist inclinations, rather than grassroots social movements such as the ones that structured the direct democracy discourse. It comprehends the democratic ideal as a system that responds to, and serves, ‘the worker’ who constitutes the People. Laborers are honest, hardworking, and sincere. The People are not responsible for the national debt, the dishonesty, and the parasitism of the political system but the political leadership that manipulated the popular vote to establish itself in power. [T]he long-term struggle against the memorandum policies is our only hope. We accuse the government of reproducing the propaganda about the supposedly huge and wasteful public sector. At the same time, society is at a dead end. The storm of availability and redundancies in the public and private sector, the new unprecedented tax measures that lead to several cases of home confiscation, the upcoming new reductions in pensions, the almost complete overthrow of labor regulations, which at this stage is marked by the abolition of the Sunday holiday, exacerbate social impasse.20

The political elite are traitors: they conspire to enslave the people to the international capitalist system by undermining and smashing its institutional power and its political rights. Any contraction of these institutional rights such as collective bargaining and any cut-back in salaries and benefits mean contraction of democracy itself. 20  Proclamation of the public sector employees’ union (ΑΔΕΔΥ) ‘ΑΔΕΔΥ: Αγώνας διαρκείας απέναντι στα ψεύδη της κυβέρνησης και το μνημόνιο’. http://www.aftodioikisi.gr/ergasiakaypallilwn-ota/adedi-agonas-diarkeias-apenanti-sta-psevdi-tis-kivernisis-kai-to-mnimonio/.

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The passing of the bill on the third memorandum and the Eurogroup agreement of 26 November 2012 come to complete the crime against the workers and the country. It was confirmed that the path of memorandums and barbaric measures in the name of the next installment of unbearable loans is catastrophic… The new loans will feed the ‘closed accounts’ of bankers and international usurers. General overdrafts of public service, mass lay-offs, new plunder of insurance funds, and privatizations and extortionary cuts for the people to feed the minotaur of the debt are imposed. The people are charged to pay the bills of every Siemens [the company was bribing politicians and political parties], the defective submarines, the tens of billions of equipment, the mega-profits of the Olympic Games, the billions of subsidies for ‘developmental purposes’ to the oligarchy, the scandalous tax evasion. The tripartite government, the EU and the IMF in an effort to pass the measures seek to establish an emergency state. Besides the economic coup, there are added presidential decrees and acts of Legislative Acts, support for unprecedented mechanisms of repression, employers’ terrorism and ideological violence, a racist circular prohibiting the granting of citizenship to the children of immigrants, strengthening of the Golden Dawn fascists.21

The country belongs to the people, and thus any effort to sell Greek assets to foreign ‘investors’ constitutes a crime, since it will turn the Greeks to slaves in their own country. Greece has become a guinea-pig, whereas various experiments are performed to test the resilience and the ability of a people to resist neoliberal coercion. Thus, we should not succumb to foreign (e.g., German) threats but to call their bluff. Defiance is the only way to protect our decency. Its constitutive good is the toil of the labor class based upon the revolutionary self whose presence guarantees workers’ rights and rule. The direct democracy discourse, as the previous ones, dissociates the political and economic elites from the People, identifying the former with various immoral interests and the latter with the virtuous democratic community. Yet, they understand the People not as some primordial racial or ethnic ‘imagined’ community, nor with the metaphysics of the vague ‘labor-class’. Instead, in line with the anarchist tradition and the legacy of the alleged ‘direct’ Athenian democracy, they identify the democratic people with the sum of small, solidary, and transparent communities which

21  Newspaper Το Βήμα. ‘Βολές κατά πάντων από την ΑΝΤΑΡΣΥΑ’ [A workers’ radical party proclamation]. http://www.tovima.gr/politics/article/?aid=490613.

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practice direct democracy, as smallness permits direct contact and eliminates the need for political representation which breeds corruption. For a long time now, decisions have been made for us, without us. We are workers, unemployed, pensioners, youth who came to Syntagma to struggle for our lives and our futures. We are here because we know that the solution to our problems can only come from us. We invite all Athenians, the workers, the unemployed and the youth to Syntagma, and the entire society to fill up the Squares and to take life into their hands. We say that the debt is not ours. Direct Democracy Now! Equality—Justice—Dignity! The only defeated struggle is the one that was never fought!22

Also following the direct-democracy principles, the movement espouses social economy and juxtaposes virtue to evil free markets: economic activity must be subordinated to direct-democracy social and political ends. It follows that responsible for the crisis is the regime itself: the representative democracy and neo-liberal capitalism, and its concomitant pathologies: alienation, isolation, and egotism. Community should come before the individual and communal needs before individual desires. Its constitutive good is civic virtue, based upon the altruist self whose presence unites the disjoined spheres of public life in a comprehensive whole. Selective affinities, homologies, and antinomies that comprised the structural relationship of those discourses’ codifications (hatred for neo-­ liberalism, for Merkel and the German EU hegemony, for the Greek political elite, and for ‘those who stole the money’) were not without political and ideological consequences. In the elections of June 2012 the three anti-memorandum discourses upset and radically altered the political landscape by boosting the electoral percentages for three up till now small or non-existing parties (the far-leftist Syriza, ultra-conservative Independent Greeks, and neo-Nazi Golden Dawn) at the expense of the once prominent moderate parties. Of these, the xenophobic discourse was mainly adopted by the Independent Greeks and the Golden Dawn which together won 14.5% of the vote. The direct democracy discourse was embraced most successfully by Syriza. In fact, Syriza managed to present itself as the political means by which various new social movements of radical inclinations voice their demands and concerns to a wider audience. Syriza also adopted full heart22  Minutes kept from the first direct-democracy open assembly held at Syntagma Square on May 25, 2011. In Marangudakis (2016, 782).

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edly the leftist class-discourse, without adopting the classic communist program of overthrowing parliamentary democracy, capitalism, and so on. Thus, while the core of the party cadres is in fact ex-members of the communist party, the party presented itself as ‘left-wing radical’ (its initials stand for Coalition of the Radical Left), without unpopular communist connotations. As a result, while the communist party KKE lost almost one-third of its votes during the crisis (from 7.5% in the 2009 elections to 4.5%), Syriza’s share of votes increased sixfold, from 4.6% to 27% in 2012, since it was voted primarily by the communist and the socialist party’s ex-­ voters. As for the moderate parties that accepted the memorandum, the conservative New Democracy and the socialist PASOK in 2012 elections together received 48% of the vote, losing 40% of their previous electorate. A third moderate party of the left won 5% of the votes. They were matched by the four anti-memorandum parties, two of the far right and two of the far left, who were demanding extreme measures against the foreign yoke. One out of two Greeks had rejected ‘the system’, and they did so in a drastic way. Three years later, in December 2014, the coalition of the three moderate parties (ND, PASOK and DIMAR) withered away, and early general elections were announced. The ‘old political system’ had reacted too slowly, and when it did, its clientelistic nature, combined with the culture of populist defiance, did not allow for decisive action. An LSE report squarely attributed the failure of the first and second Greek memorandum ­programs to this strong clientelistic character of the Greek political system. Comparing and contrasting the Portuguese to the Greek case the report claims: In Greece, by contrast, the need to satisfy tightly connected clienteles exchanging their electoral support for public spending has ruled out open support for austerity from the main parties, and therefore delayed cross-­ party agreements. Hence, adversarial politics has been the leading feature of economic retrenchment reforms in Greece. More recently, the two traditional mainstream parties, New Democracy and PASOK, agreed to support reforms, but these parties are more unpopular than ever… For Greek mainstream parties, agreeing to economic retrenchment or openly supporting such policies undermined their own organisational base, which drew on the distribution of rents, notably to the unions. Unlike Portugal, Greek public sector unions have been closely tied to the parties alternating in power, ensuring channels of clientelistic exchange. This was

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not the case for Portuguese parties, who did not rely to such an extent on public sector expansion in the run-up to the crisis… This significant divergence between two similar countries can be explained by the extent of clientelistic links, which tend to be both tighter and more volatile than ideological links. Since clientelistic exchange involves the distribution of resources that are possibly more important to clients than mere ideological affinity (e.g. jobs and incomes), they tend to create a closer connection and interdependence between patrons and clients. If the patrons’ ability to supply resources is undermined by austerity, there is nothing left that ties voters and parties, and clients may quickly desert their patron to find another one promising to supply resources. (Afonso et al. 2014; italics added)

The critical phrase is the last one: ‘… may quickly desert their patron to find another one promising to supply resources’. The authors give the impression that this is self-evident or a kind of rational decision. Actually it is deeply cultural, since ‘to find’ is a decision which presumes not a rational process of decision making but the presence of internalized code orientations which (a) will simplify a very complex and technical issue, (b) will choose a valid-trustworthy source of information, (c) will order the continuous flow of information to important and unimportant facts, (d) classify the engaged protagonists into good and evil, (e) visualize the social arena and consequently the appropriate performativity, (f) define the demands to be voiced, and (g) suggest a certain course of action to achieve the desirable outcome: renewed access to the interrupted resources. This process, structured by code orientations and patterned orders (let us call it the ‘demand’ side), needs to be attached or be locked in public spaces to compatible discourses performed by party leaders and other public personae (the ‘supply’ side) which will convince the ‘client’ that they are the ‘patron-heroes’ they are looking for—the patron their code orientations specified as an ideal-type projection and urged them to look for. This is where political culture, discourses, and performances kick in. Outraged Greeks, instead of choosing parties, programs, and leaders who advocated virtuous-rational action as a means of escaping the vicious cycle of corruption-recession-borrowing chose the most convincing leader who promised to restore the system by showing defiance to the debtors—convincing through performance, not through rational argument. To this effect, they chose the marginal until then radical left-wing party Syriza, led by young, self-confident, and dashing Alexis Tsipras.

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Syriza was a minor party (4% of the popular vote in 2011) whose political program was fully in line with the Metapolitefsis civil religion. During the decade of 2000 internal power struggles led it from being the Greek version of euro-communism to the political advocate and parliamentary representative of a series of radical ultra-leftist movements and sympathetic to anarchist violence and organizations.23 Yet, the economic crisis and the simultaneous demolition of the social networks of power that comprised the two-party governmental system until then shaped the conditions for its ascendancy. Syriza exploited the conjuncture by becoming the angry voice of those in danger of losing their jobs and income, embraced street politics, encouraged violent verbal and physical assaults against any action against the state and against any politician who supported the memoranda deals, and clashed in public debates with cawed main-stream politicians, politicians who were too disheartened and too guilt-ridden to fight back the accusations thrown against them. Between 2011 and 2014, the plateaus of the various television chat shows were turned into a spectacle of pro-memorandum members of the Parliament slashed relentlessly by their opponents. The defeated faces of those people convinced the audience of the moral superiority of the enemies of the memoranda. Ironically, these ‘opponents’ for years were advocating policies which were more reckless and more costly than the economic policies of the ruling parties (Chatzipadelis 2017). Yet, not being the ones in power, they could claim that they were innocent of the economic collapse. Thus, first in the May 2012 general elections, Syriza rose from 4% to 16% and one month later, in the June repeat, to 26%. Constantly assaulting its opponents as thieves and traitors, while at the same time developing and performing a heroic public persona, it succeeded in the 2014 European elections to take the lead. Having cultivated over-expectations for solving the crisis, in the January 2015 general elections, it managed to prevail and formed a government consisting of professional street-fighting agitators and inexperienced left-leaning academics led by pompous and vain Yanis Varoufakis—a Game Theory professor with a very limited knowledge of 23  In December 2008 the party’s newspaper Avgi offered its readers a provocative 2009 Seasons’ Calendar which glorified the infamous December 2008 Athens riots as a generalized revolt against the state. The Calendar was signed with a paraphrased New Year Carrols verse: ‘Oh, spruce tree, how nicely you catch fire, on Syntagma square how nicely you catch fire, and police squads lined up, Oh, spruce tree, you will not escape from me, I’ll burn you one night, and let there be cops on the branches.’ http://www.report24.gr/to-imerologio-iperenisxisis-twn-koukouloforwn-apo-ton-siriza-ke-ta-antikalanta-tis-avgis-to-2009.htm.

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economics but full of himself. After hopelessly colliding for six months with the Troika and the rest of the EU ministers of finance, and after a referendum which asked the voters to decide whether to reject the Troika’s painful offer, and which the government won but did not dare to implement (5 July 2015), Tsipras was forced to a painful compromise, a compromise which cost Greece 100 billion euros24 and did not include any of the promises Syriza had given to its voters only six months earlier. Yet, Syriza and its ‘charismatic’ leader again won the following elections Tsipras called for in September 2015, promising this time to the Greeks a plan to counterbalance the detrimental effects of the new, third memorandum agreement he was forced to sign due to the damage he caused to the Greek economy meanwhile. Half of his party decided not to follow him and founded a new anti-EU party which did not manage to even cross the 3% threshold needed to enter parliament. Clearly, it was not radicalization that made one third of the popular vote go to Syriza; it was Tsipras’ promise of restoring the Metapolitefsis political system. Those voters, trapped in the Metapolitefsis discourse, went on to offer one more time their votes for their last chance of restoration. The rest, it had already been decided, were traitors to the cause. To sum it up, Syriza, and particularly so Tsipras, won the European Parliament elections of May 2014, the Greek general elections of January 2015, the June referendum, and another general elections in September of the same year, not just because he promised to restore the good old times but because he did so convincingly.25 And he did so by staging a most successful performance, borrowing heavily from the mannerisms and speeches of his role-model, Andreas Papandreou, adding his personal touch, a dash of youthful joyfulness, and innocence. Following to the letter the guidelines for authoritative presentation of the self in well-staged performative acts, he managed to embody the structural elements of a charismatic leader 24  Regling argues that Varoufakis ‘cost Greece 100 billion euros’. http://www.tovima. gr/2016/06/23/international/regling-argues-that-varoufakis-cost-greece-100-billioneuros/. Retrieved 20/9/2018. 25  Tsipras has adopted the voice intonation of Papandreou and the gestures of Kostas Karamanlis Jr., the two most popular politicians of the Metapolitefsis era. No one really understands why sometimes he speaks Greek in a Greek audience with an American accent. h t t p s : / / w w w. f a c e b o o k . c o m / o m a d a a l i t h i a s / v i d e o s / 1 4 0 8 3 4 8 1 7 9 2 5 4 6 0 6 / UzpfSTEyNzA4ODg0ODU6MTAyMTc2NTA0Mzk5MTQwNTU/; https://thecaller. gr/callers-choice/video-oute-se-komodies-tou-mister-mpin-tsipras-milai-ellnikame-aggliki-profora/.

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and presented himself as self-confident, honest, optimistic, and an outsider—the personification of purity as against the corrupted old system. The narrative he constructed combined the three anti-memorandum discourses (leaving out only the racist and anti-immigrant elements) enriched with Marxist overtones. He did so by placing the anti-memorandum discourses in the framework of the cultural traumas incorporated in the Metapolitefsis civil religion, a morally meaningful political framework of struggle and deliverance that his audience could recognize and relate to: All the generations of the unifying struggles of our people meet again here, in Omonοia square, on this crossroad of Greece. The generations that lived through the millstones of History; the National Resistance [resistance against the German occupation]; the National Liberation Front [the left-­ wing resistance organization during the German occupation]; the Gorgopotamos [the guerilla operation for the demolition of a vital to the German supply network bridge during German occupation]; the generation of the democratic struggles of 1-1-4 [the civil rights cold-war movement]; the Unified Democratic Left; the defiant demand for Democracy; the generation of the struggle against the Dictatorship; of leaving behind the cold-­ war dividing lines; of the political radicalism and the unmaterialized subversion. But the younger generations too, the present and the future of this land, that we have an obligation to get them out of the muddy grounds… Due to this debt we meet today here, [us] the key holders of history. (Pantazopoulos 2013, 152–153)

This narrative was appreciated and welcomed by a public already immersed in the Metapolitefsis’ civil religion and discourses of victimhood and defiance, a culture which had already welcomed conspiracy theories such as the belief that ‘the crisis was a fabrication by foreign powers to take advantage of our country,’ a belief which was, and still is, accepted by a staggering 70% of the population.26 Such a discourse, by nature, or for reasons of structural necessity, seeks of a hero, someone ‘to kill the beast’

26  Even three years after the 2015 crisis and the disillusionment with Tsipras’ administration, and after Tsipras himself has admitted that the crisis is the result of mismanagement, more than 60% of Greeks still believe that the crisis was a conspiracy, exactly the same percentage as it was three years ago. Εφημερίδα Τα Νέα. Η τριπλή θυματοποίηση [The triple victimhood]. http:// www.tanea.gr/opinions/all-opinions/article/5536148/h-triplh-thymatopoihsh/.

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as the famous 1970s’ song wished for and liberate the innocent victims. No wonder Tsipras was seen as and was venerated like a Messiah.27 Defiance toward predatory foreign powers, restoration of the pre-crisis benefits and salaries, virtuous political personnel, eradication of the ‘brutality of the police force’, support for the causes of the new social movements, and institutional legitimation of direct-democracy practices attracted 35.36% of the popular vote and allowed Tsipras to form a coalition government together with the xenophobic and homophobic party of Independent Greeks.28 The three altogether 2015 electoral victories of Syriza heralded the radicalization of the Metapolitefsis or, to be precise, the extremization of familism, generalized clientelism, and its schismogenetic civil religion; it was the dying gasp of the Third Greek Republic.

7.7   The Rise of Illiberal Radicalism and the Fall of the Sacred Communitas (2015–2018) In 2015 Greece was blown up to smithereens by a violent outburst of the pathologies that characterized its 40-year-old political system. The January and then the September general elections brought to power an anti-­ memorandum coalition of the far-leftist Syriza and the ultra-conservative Independent Greeks (‘Anel’ hereafter). They proved to be the carriers of the most extreme amoral familism, generalized clientelism, and schismogenetic civil religion the country ever experienced. Failing to ‘blackmail’ the troika to nullify the running memorandum agreement (January–June 2015), they cost the Greek economy €100 billion29 and eventually came to accept the implementation of a much harsher updated memorandum agreement—‘or else’. More interestingly, they started to implement (July 2015 onward) the latter agreement in the most determined, cynical, and brutal way. Many observers believed that the uncompromising and defiant coalition was becoming reasonable and moderate, that after realizing the true might and logic of the European Union, the ‘Greek radicals’ were forced 27  Famous graffiti depicting Tsipras as Christ the Savior. http://www.lifo.gr/now/politics/75588; a worshipper kissing the hand of Tsipras. http://www.ksipnistere. com/2015/09/blog-post_3584.html. 28  http://left.gr/news/diavaste-programma-toy-SYRIZA; http://www.enet.gr/?i=news. el.politikh&id=346668. 29  Regling argues that Varoufakis “cost Greece 100 billion euros”. https://www.tovima. gr/2016/06/23/international/regling-argues-that-varoufakis-cost-greece-100-billion-euros/.

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to accept ‘the system’ and be integrated into it.30 But the deeds and the discourse of the Syriza-Anel government proved to be anything but virtuous: brutal force, widespread nepotism and corruption, and short-lived plots became its trademark. How can we make sense of this? One explanation is that the substantive rationality the two parties exhibited was not genuine, they are hypocrites and opportunists, driven by practical rationality and desiring nothing else but political power and all the good things that come with it. This, in fact, fits well the moral outlook of ultra conservatives, the Anel, whose political program is reactionary populism without any real political vision. Instead, it is a mixture of base conspiracy theories, moralistic-chiliastic promulgations, and a strong affiliation with the Church (Part II, Sect. 11.5). In this framework, their promulgations proved to be blatant lies: they broke all their promises and crossed all their ‘red lines’ without any hesitation. Yet, this cannot be said as easily about the leading partner of the coalition, Syriza, even though many of its current cabinet’s members are PASOK defectors who joined Syriza after they realized that their party is withering away; these are indeed opportunists, happy to have found a new political shelter. But the leadership and nucleus of the party are not, though they know how to detect an opportunity; they are cultural Marxists. In detail, Syriza is a blend of die-hard communists disguised as New Left ­post-­materialists.31 The core of the party is made of ex-members of the Communist Party of Greece (Tsipras himself joined the Communist Party in 1990 and for a while was the leader of the Communist Party’s youth) who abandoned it later on to form, together with less dogmatic ‘Euro-­ communists’, the ‘Synaspismos’ party (Coalition of the Left, of the Movements, and of Ecology). Soon later, in a series of clashes with the moderate wing of the same party they managed to bring Synaspismos under their control, push aside the Euro-leftists (i.e., not Stalinists), and redefine the Party as the representative of anything radical and thus its new title Coalition of the Radical Left. 30  For a discussion of the integration of Greek radicalism into the EU system, see: Aslanidis and Kaltwasser 2016; Mavrozacharakis et al. 2017. 31  According to the analysis of Professor Alivizatos of the 90 persons who until today (September 2018) took up cabinet seats since 2015, 50 are ex-members of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), the euro-leftist communist party, and the extra-parliamentary radical Left; only 22 in the past were members of PASOK or the conservative New Democracy party. https://www.liberal.gr/arthro/220663/politiki/2018/oii-kommounistes-pou-maskubernoun.html.

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They became the organizational center of all kinds of anti-systemic far-­left fringe organizations on the rise32 such as of various anarchist movements affiliated with terrorist organizations, Trotskyist, Maoist, ecological, feminist, anti-globalization, open-border, and radical communitarian groups.33 Out of this pell-mell a very definite ideological profile slowly was formed, a profile which combines libertarian identity politics with a Marxist understating of history, an Althousserian understanding of social structures,34 a Gramscian understanding of hegemony of the public sphere, and a Leninist understanding of political power.35 As for their governance role-model, this is Maduro’s Venezuela. All in all, Syriza is a paradigmatic case of an authoritarian, anti-systemic, Jacobin party36 and thus the easiness of forming a coalition with the authoritarian ultra-rightist party of Independent Greeks and not with the liberal-centrist party Potami, as many had expected.37 It was not ideology that brought them together but authoritarianism: the ruthlessness of dealing with their political adversaries, as well their cynical approach to matters of accountability and corruption. As Part II reveals, their worldviews, though not identical, match quite well (see Part II, Sect. 11.7). It is only through the analysis of this combination that we can understand the true raison d’êtres of Syriza and its political strategy: having secured its acceptance by the EU authorities and the Troika overlords as nothing more than a yes-man,38 it attempts to install an authoritarian, 32  For the rise and the consolidation of anarchism in Greece, see Marangudakis with Paschalidis (2019, forthcoming). 33  Οι 12 φυλές του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ [The 12 tribes that constitute Syriza]. https://www.newsbeast.gr/oldcategories/ekloges2012/arthro/354094/oi-12-fules-tou-suriza. 34  https://www.liberal.gr/arthro/79574/apopsi/a-zampoukas/O-mpaltas-omologise. html. 35  Πολάκης: Προσπαθούμε να πάρουμε την πραγματική εξουσία [Polakis: We try to take the real power]. https://www.newsit.gr/politikh/polakis-prospathoyme-na-paroyme-tin-pragmatiki-eksoysia-vids/1069507/; Βενεζουέλα: O Μαδούρο ευχαριστεί ΣΥΡΙΖΑ και Τσίπρα για την στήριξη [Venezuela: Maduro thanks Syriza for its support]. https://www.athensvoice.gr/politics/361931_venezoyela-o-madoyro-eyharistei-Syriza-kai-tsipra-gia-tin-stirixi. 36  Αυταρχισμός και αντιδημοκρατικές πρακτικές από την κυβέρνηση [Authoritarianism and anti-democratic practices by the government]. http://www.tanea.gr/2018/09/23/politics/government/aytarxismos-kai-antidimokratikes-praktikes-apo-tin-kyvernisi/. Retrieved 24/9/18. 37  The Communist Party of Greece refused to cooperate with Syriza as the latter is not revolutionary enough. 38  After the disastrous negotiations of 2015, Tsipras and its governments came to accept without questions any demands of the troika. The constant explanation is: ‘they asked us to do so’. This is probably the reason the EU turns a blind eye to the unconstitutional and authoritarian actions of the Greek government.

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‘illiberal’39 democracy in the midst of a liberal European Union according to its complex ideological principles. To achieve this, Syriza immediately after its election in office developed a series of unprecedented and shocking, even for the Greek political tradition, strategies to directly control what could be controlled, that is, the state apparatus, the Judiciary, mainstream television and social media, the printed press, and the economic elite, and throw into disarray what cannot be controlled in the framework of a liberal EU: The parliamentary opposition, Municipal authorities, universities, and the public sphere itself. To this purpose the party has placed all available party members and their kin in lucrative governmental posts; it constantly intimidates and harasses the Judiciary to pass constitutionally questionable bills and to adjudicate favorably in cases concerning the government’s deeds; it favors and assists financially and legislatively phony entrepreneurs to buy in favorable terms media organizations while it forces opposing, ‘systemic’ media enterprises to close down; it confuses the public by announcing ‘alternative’ political programs to its own official programs which are never implemented40; through plans by an army of party-paid trolls, it bullies and hushes the most influential sources of electronic opposition to the government; it prosecutes reporters and editors who criticize the government; it plots against the party’s main political and economic opponents; and it has turned the public television and radio broadcasting corporation to a closely controlled party station obliged to use a ‘new vocabulary’ in line with the party propaganda.41 On the other hand, the government has voted ‘direct democracy-­simple proportional representation’ bills concerning municipal councils in ways that the function of the councils and of the municipalities will become volatile and will depend on the good will of the smaller parties (such as Syriza is at the municipal level); it has abolished all types of distinction, merit, and assessment in the educational system as anti-democratic42; those parliamentary parties in opposition not friendly to the government are  Pappas (2014).  Eleni Stergiou: The party of the parallel universe. https://www.protothema.gr/blogs/ eleni-stergioy/article/826851/to-komma-tou-parallilou-subados/. 41  SYRIZA’s Black Bible. http://booksjournal.gr/slideshow/item/2548-the-black-bibleof-Syriza. 42  https://thecaller.gr/politiki/77919-i-aristeia-einai-retsinia-symfona-me-ton-SYRIZAo-nikos-filis-ekopse-ta-1-500-euro-os-epaino-stou-foitites/; http://marketnews.gr/article/1847451/dhmosio-dixws-aksiologhsh-to-2018. 39 40

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constantly harassed and accused for conspiring against the government and the country43; the civil war cultural trauma is constantly mobilized to gain the sympathy and the support of the left-leaning public44; blatant short-lived lies are used routinely to disorient public concern45; it has treated the hundreds of thousands of refugees and illegal immigrants, after inviting them in the country, in the most callous and inhuman way46; and schismogenesis is intentionally designed and executed by implementing two ‘passive’ policies installing liminality in the midst of the public sphere: The first policy is to display excessive leniency to violent acts of far-­ leftists groups against civilian targets in Athens—acts that undermine the ordinary flow of social life—such as assaults against police and army personnel, regular interruption of legal procedures, occupation of university buildings, interruption of academic procedures,47 and violent riots in the center of Athens48; it is in contact with convicted terrorists in symbolic gestures of verifying its anti-systemic spirit,49 gestures recently, even the Parliament and the Council of the State were interrupted by anarchists. Members of these groups usually are not arrested as the police are ordered not to interfere.50 The second passive policy which started in February 2015 and lasted for two years was to turn a blind eye on migrants entering the country illegally. The international borders of Greece were a crucial symbolic and organizational landmark of the systemic social order. By ignoring the formal procedures of entry into the country, and practically encouraging such 43  http://www.kathimerini.gr/949349/opinion/epikairothta/politikh/anti-ka8arshslasph-ston-anemisthra?platform=hootsuite. 44  http://www.protagon.gr/apopseis/editorial/44341572812-44341572812. 45  https://thecaller.gr/callers-choice/ta-3-lepta-pou-isopedonoun-ta-3-xronia-sirizaola-ta-psemata-mazemena-se-ena-video/. 46  Amnesty International: Tell the Greek Prime Minister that refugees deserve a future. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2018/02/tell-the-greek-prime-minister-thatrefugees-deserve-a-future/. 47  http://www.tanea.gr/opinions/all-opinions/article/5559083/2-700/. 48  https://www.liberal.gr/arthro/203649/apopsi/arthra/ekloges-isonkrotou-lampsissin.html; https://www.protothema.gr/greece/article/791055/nuhta-epeisodionpolemos-me-molotof-stin-patision/. 49  http://www.capital.gr/arthra/3146371/oi-desmoi-aimatos-stelexon-tou-suriza-metin-enopli-pali; http://www.iefimerida.gr/news/235002/oi-dialogoi-fotia-stelehon-toySyriza-me-tromokrates-ti-apantoyn. 50  http://www.iefimerida.gr/news/325074/poasy-gia-katalipseis-i-astynomia-den-epemvaineigiati-den-tin-afinoyn.

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an entry, Syriza challenged the totality of the status quo and reaffirmed its commitment to radical egalitarianism: the dissolution of power, identity, and trust structures—both in Greece and in the rest of the EU. In effect, the radical-left government not only initiated but in fact perpetuated the migrant crisis as a way to impose liminality (Marangudakis 2019). If the government could not openly declare the exit of Greece from the ‘neo-­ liberal’, ‘pro-globalization’ system, perhaps the migrant population, the modern ‘damned of the earth’, could challenge the established structures in Greece and the EU, according to the party’s stated political proclamations, and initiate an order-transforming process.51 Thus, Syriza is not simply opportunistic—practical-rational in Weberian terms—as some public commentators have suggested. Its unquestionable opportunism and corruption is located in a moral framework shaped by the arrogance of the self-righteous guerilla fighter as well as the spite for his eternal enemies, the arrogance of the holder of Jacobin truth, and the vengeance thereof for those who for so many years oppressed him. This conviction runs through the veins of the left political culture, which considers its members to be pure and innocent due to its post-war persecution, not unlike the sacralized Christian martyrs. Having being purified by tribulation and prosecution they are cleansed; they cannot do wrong.52 As the government they face all the issues of the day not as such but as a test of their determination to remain pure against the evils of the mundane world. A key-figure of the government reflected on this as follows: In these almost four years of our journey as government, we have met with all the great dilemmas that can be put on the Left that governs. We did not regret it: theory and practice, the state and its role, capitalism, fascism, refugees, [social] movements, power, bureaucracy, labor, banks, and it goes on and on … here and now, today, we are conducting the left-wing experiment of the 21st century.53

51  www.SYRIZA.gr/pdfs/politiki_apofasi_idrytikou_synedriou_SYRIZA.pdf in http:// www.viadiplomacy.gr/pia-politiki-protini-o-siriza-gia-metanasteftiko-tou-gianni-kolovou/. 52  When the Syriza youth secretary was accused for appointing his relatives in governmental positions, in effect he responded to the ‘ruffians’ that his family members are leftist heroes and he does not feel obliged to explain himself. http://www.tovima.gr/politics/ article/?aid=769704. Retrieved 19/1/2017. 53  They are conducting the left-wing experiment. Kathimerini. http://www.kathimerini. gr/990172/opinion/epikairothta/politikh/dienergoyn-to-peirama-ths-aristeras.

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Yet, this cosmological vision and moral discourse of an uneven struggle between pure versus evil, a mixture of Jacobin ideology and Oriental fatalism, is mute on matters of personal ethics (Part II, Sect. 10.3); how do you conduct your own life and what should be your ethics, during this ‘experiment’? This existential vacuum is filled by another set of code orientation close at heart, the code orientation of amoral familism and of the constitutive good of the entrenched Eden. Thus, Jacobin ideology is combined with the culture of amoral familism and egotism to produce extreme levels of ‘righteous corruption’.54 The hybridity that emerged out of this combination apprehends the body politic as a sinful society in the midst of which lays the true communitas, the rank-and-file of Syriza, an antinomian vigilant community of ‘living saints’, who by definition cannot err and are condemned to live in a treacherous world as defenders of the eternal truth.55 This is not the Metapolitefsis’ civil religion of a heroic people, and it is not a Marxist-­ communist civic religion of proletariats against capitalism and foreign conspirators. This is a religious-like vision of a frustrated band of puritans in a war against everyone else. If the enemy of the Metapolitefsis’ communitas was the international capitalist system and its internal cronies (but never the People), Syriza’s declared enemies are large parts of the population: the bourgeoisie, the culturally conservative strata, the members of opposing parties, the ‘nationalists’ who oppose the recognition of Former Yugoslavic Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) as Northern Macedonia, the oppositional and critical media, and so on. Anyone opposing the party’s policies is called a fascist and an instigator of ‘regime destabilization’, and argumentum ad hominem is constantly used to dismiss specific accusations of foe embellishment, clientelism, and corruption: ‘by accusing us, as the opposition does, you betray our struggle’.56 This is the reason why Syriza has not constructed a new civil religion, 54  https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/eu-investigates-corruption-claims-linked-torefugee-funds-for-greece-z0ntn2bxp. 55  In this vein, Syriza does not accept new members unless they have proven their commitment and devotion after serving the party for years. Thus, the number of its members remains the same as it was before they came to power—around 30,000. Most of them have been absorbed in governing posts. Χρυσόγονος στο Reader.gr: 30.000 μέλη είχε ο ΣΥΡΙΖΑ το ’13, 30.000 έχει και σήμερα [Chrisogonos on Reader: in ’13 Syriza had 30,000 members, as many as today]. Uploaded 20/10/2017. https://www.reader.gr/news/politiki/ hrysogonos-sto-readergr-30000-meli-eihe-o-Syriza-13-30000-ehei-kai-simera. 56  Ν. Φίλης: Κρίμα για τον Νίκο Παππά… https://www.liberal.gr/arthro/222820/ politiki/2018/n-filis-krima-gia-ton-niko-pappa.html.

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even though they have declared the end of the ‘corrupted past’: the party already possesses its own civil religion, performed in party activities and private socialization, invisible and unapproachable to the many unworthy of it. Nikolas Sevastakis, the political philosopher we have already encountered in the previous chapter, commending on the leftist notion of solidarity, argues: Solidarity in Greece is often interpreted as omerta, political cover, miserable communalism that abolishes individual responsibility of distinguishing, but also political responsibility for public denunciations. Thus, the atrophic anti-­ integrative consciousness in the Greek anti-fascist, progressive and left-wing post-1974 (apart from its more pro-European and western versions) legitimized the silence of those who knew hypocrisy, the easy and blurry provocatology (sic). The bad guys were always, or as a rule, muddy, alien, dark forces. They could not be anti-capitalists, friends of equality, expressers (these too) of ‘fair’ social anger. The root of many tribulations is the euphemisms for ‘analysis’, the political approach to the ‘essential’, the inhumane offsetting, and the idea that the anti-system is inherently moral—even if it has some immature or unworthy zealots.57

In other words, Jacobin ideology, in principle ecumenical and egalitarian, has not affected the culture of amoral familism. In fact, the notion that this close and insular community constitutes an avant-garde, with a special civilizing mission, probably intensified the feeling of their uniqueness and togetherness; by symbolic association, Greek communists were tuned into a large amoral family. The social effects of Syriza’s implementation of power on the Metapolitefsis’ internalized code  orientations are visible in the public sphere as friends and relatives are broken apart by controversies they are drawn into unwillingly but are obliged to respond to, thus becoming an unwilling part of the schismogenesis process. The moral support Syriza offers to aggressive anarchist groups, the open-borders immigration policy, the flow of unverified accusations against various political enemies, the public verbal assaults and insults against citizens who oppose its policies, the quasi-official demographic policy of replacing emigrating Greek citizens with immigrants from the Middle and the Far East keeps civil society in constant insecurity and ambivalence, turning them into a matter of rou Sevastakis Nikolas. Personal fb account. Uploaded 1/9/2018.

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tine everyday life58; even the local community of Mati which suffered 99 killed in the wildfires of the summer of 2018 was accused by Syriza ministers for being responsible for their ordeal. Indeed, the horrendous Mati disaster, whereas no actual (only ‘political’) responsibility was accepted by the government, Tsipras was hidden from the public eye, and a series of ineffectual theatrical acts and lame excuses were fabricated to wash clean the government of the disaster, stands as a paradigmatic example of this cynical attitude. Those who are not members of the small communitas of living saints mean nothing; they are expendable sinners to be used instrumentally to achieve the greater goal: the perpetuation of the New Left puritans in power.59 And there is no other instrumental deal greater than the one Tsipras achieved with the great survivor of Hellenism, the Church. The Church, habitually, never had a problem supporting its political overlord as long as its privileges were guaranteed. The Byzantine emperors, the Ottoman Sultans, the Greek governments (democratic or not) belong to the long list of Church partners. Now, it was time to do the same with the atheist left and a, by definition, sinful (out of wedlock) Prime Minister. Tsipras accepted the arrangement, and for this purpose he did not hesitate to sack one of the most prominent members of the party and staunch supporter of secularism, Minister of Education Nikos Filis, and to forget any idea of curtailing the role of the Church in the educational system—even though the separation of Church from the State, and full state secularization, was one of the main pillars of Syriza’s political program. The Church was delighted, since that informal agreement between Tsipras and the Archbishop of Greece, the ecclesiastic privileges, educational and economic, indeed, has not been touched, and so no voice of content has been uttered by the Church against Syriza, not even against the deal with FYROM concerning the name ‘Macedonia’ which in the past was a matter of life and death for the Church. Instead, in an interview, the Archbishop expressed his deep sympathies for the ‘young Prime Minister’.… ‘I love, I respect and I have good cooperation with the Prime Minister and as a father to a son I feel  https://www.athensvoice.gr/politics/478661_otan-feygei-o-nomos-erhetai-i-friki.  This New Left strong belief of moral superiority and redemptive mission is not confined in Greece. A similar attitude is identified in the US. Yet, the Greek schismogenetic civil religion magnifies and justifies it in ways that the American civil religion does not. See ‘Why the Left Is Consumed With Hate’. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/whythe-left-is-consumed-with-hate-1537723198?mod=e2fb. Retrieved 25/9/2018. 58 59

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sorry for him, because he is willing, he struggles, he tries, but the foreigners are like a thorny bush’.60 Together, Syriza and Anel constitute an explosively extreme combination of the most pathological elements of the modern Greek political culture. No ‘egalitarian discourse’ is to be found here and no ‘civil ethics’. Even worse, no egalitarian discourse and no civil ethics are secured and guaranteed in the public sphere, as continuous contestations invite, if not demand, response in kind. Consequentially, the public dialogue today has been reduced to a series of vile accusations irrespective of the significance of the subject.61 Everything is contentious; everything is a matter of a struggle between good and evil. The various issues that in the framework of Metapolitefsis’ civil religion constituted the moral foundations of the People as a whole, in the Syriza-Anel era, have been turned to a mechanism of producing constant divisions and rifts in the midst of the once and now long-gone sacred communitas. Surprisingly, the new social movements which for so long protested against the misdeeds of the previous governments, and for many of us were a glimpse of hope for a more civil, a more gentle society, now remain silent. There has been not a single protest for the naval accident which two years ago polluted most of the coastline close to Piraeus port, not a single word for the horrible conditions of the refugee camps, and not a word for the blatant efforts of the government to hush the opposing press and reporters by prosecuting them. The new social movements seem to be part of the schismogenesis process rather than a means to renew the political community and social order. In our Weberian framework of rationalisms, Anel represents an extreme case of practical, indeed unethical, rationality. As for Syriza, it represents, contra Weber, an exemplary case of theoretical rationality whereas all decisions are taken, or not taken,  with the aim  of destroying the opposing parties and neutralizing civil society. In both cases the rank and file of the coalition exhibit no sign of value postulates. The interweaving of the two has produced an extreme case of ruthless imposition of authoritarian and arbitrary exercise of naked force. 60  https://www.newsbeast.gr/politiki/arthro/2655386/ieronimos-gia-tsipra-san-pateraspros-pedi-ton-ponao-ton-lipame. 61  See, for a number of issues falling on this pattern: Yiannis Sideris: One way or another, the country is rolling down. [Έτσι κι αλλιώς η χώρα καθεύδει]. https://www.liberal.gr/ arthro/221148/politiki/2018/etsi-ki-allios-i-chora-katheudei.html.

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If this is the overall case, then how can we explain the still strong presence of Syriza in the polls? Why has there no been any violent reaction against the party that instigated and supported violence in the period up until 2015? The answer is to be found not only on the benefits the recipients of Syriza’s policies enjoy but the charismatization of Tsipras and the symbolic structures around this process. To analyze this condition we need to employ an analysis of charisma. Let us examine it in detail. This anti-memorandum identity was formed through the repetitive and ritually structured assemblies in public squares and elsewhere, assemblies that functioned as rituals of passage, that is to say, as a passage from a former, polluted condition (the old party system) to a state of purity (the redemptive struggle for truth and the restoration of the purity of the civil religion which corrupted politicians polluted). This transition to a space where all social identities lose their significance and are meaningless is a moment conducive to forging a new identity and a new self (Szakolczai 2009; Thomassen 2014).62 In this state of liminality, the participants, ritually or psychologically isolated from the rest, lose their former identity and temporarily are placed out of their normal social identity. In this emotionally charged condition the familiar cultural forms are recombined under the guidance of the charismatic leader, the ‘master of the ceremony’, and relationships of intimacy and companionship develop among the initiates turning a crowd of unconnected people into what we have called ­communitas, a community which in normal times develops strong undifferentiated bonds but in moments of crisis they also develop a strong predisposition to identify with the ‘initiator’, in our case, Alexis Tsipras. Intense, systemic crises, that is, liminal periods when certainties evaporate, invite populist, divisive, cultural pragmatics and similarly populist political actors, that is, ‘exceptional’ individuals able to captivate their audience and invite them to reconstruct society according to their vision (Gidron and Bonikowski 2013). But ‘to captivate’ is not far away from ‘mesmerizing’, and ‘vision’ is not far away from ‘illusion’—they all belong to the same theatrical genre. If the individual is a blatant reflector of the public sentiment but otherwise void of any concrete vision and healing abilities, charisma becomes trickstery, and liminality becomes the means for the establishment of personal gains at the expense of the body politic. In this case, the way to remain in power is to perpetuate liminality.  For a thorough discussion of this framework, see: Szakolczai (2009), Thomassen (2014).

62

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Liminality is no longer an unpleasant condition to be overcome as quickly as possible but a welcomed condition which perpetuates his rule. Under trickster’s rule, liminality will not be a temporary crisis followed by a return to normality but will be artificially perpetuated since ambiguity, insecurity, and consequentially the loss of ‘marks of certainty’ are the only ways the trickster can retain his mesmerizing effect and hegemony. In this framework, the ‘initiated’ does not attribute governmental mistakes, deviations, or failures to the trickster himself but instead to his incompetent cronies or to the dark forces opposing his rule. Accordingly, the logic goes, things would be worse if these dark forces were to take power. In the aforementioned words of the Archbishop, ‘he [Tsipras] is willing, he struggles, he tries, but the foreigners are like a thorny bush’. Is Tsipras a trickster? A comparison with his role-model, Andreas Papandreou (Chap. 6, Sect. 6.1) strongly suggests that he is. In theory, a trickster is an outsider who takes advantage of liminality to impose his own authority as an end to itself (Szakolczai 2009), since his authority utterly lacks meaning and vision. This is what makes the trickster the reverse mirror of a charismatic personality. Compared to indeed charismatic Papandreou, Tsipras is not an educated cosmopolitan. Rather he is a representative sample of complacent but frustrated Metapolitefsis youth, who emerged out of the  ranks of the students’ reactionary movement  to become its front-runner before he became the leader of Syriza. This was consequential: accustomed, as any  Metapolitefsis syndicalist, to demand everything without committing himself to achieving anything, he became the personification of ‘protest-and-demand politics’. When in office, and having failed to achieve his goals by using this mode in his 2015 negotiations with the troika, he had nothing to fall back to. He remained a reflector of others’ wishes, desires, and visions but this time these ‘others’ were not the Greek anti-memorandum masses asking for a return to the good old days but the international and national power milieu. Thus, his governance became the aggregation of the rule of others: of the troika, of the German government, of the Church, of the anarchist movement, of various immigration-NGOs, and of his ministers who follow their own personal agenda. In his international contacts, he becomes what his interlocutor expects him to be: a staunch admirer of Trump in his visit to the US, a determined revolutionary at Castro’s funeral, a converted social-­ democrat in Brussels, a staunch radical in his party’s gatherings, and a passionate populist in his public speeches. In all, his behavior suggests a person without an inner self. If there is a matter which is distinctly his, this

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is a relentless effort to subvert internal opposition. Subversion, instead of being a means to neutralize opponents to implement a vision, for Tsipras, became an end in itself (Marangudakis 2019, 149–151). Either as a structural condition or as a voluntary and intentional action, the perpetual insecurity, the ambivalent policies, and the moral tensions instigated purposefully by the Syriza-Anel coalition government and which tear apart Greece today as a series of mini civil wars erupt ever so often only make sense in terms of cultural pragmatics, trickstery as reversed charisma, and intentional perpetuation of the liminal condition. The government breeds on these conditions as they become its excuse for not delivering what it promised, thus avoiding accountancy. What is the reaction to this new reality? Anti-leftist sentiments have been strong for the first time in 40 years. But this time reaction does not come from the far right as would be expected. On the contrary, the far right exhibits a strong sympathy for the far left as being equally populist, anti-Western, statist-paternalistic, as well as admirers of ‘strong popular The Leftist Communitas as the Source of Truth Total war against the profane system Tsipras as Trickster Various trolls and fake-news journalists

The performativities of the Anti-systemic Movements (anarchist, immigrants, etc.)

Liminality

Generalized clientelism, Unconcealed corruption Blatant nepotism

Manifest disregard of laws, rules and regulations as the domain of the profane system

Fig. 7.2  The Syriza governance

The Antinomian Living Saint

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leaders’ such as Maduro and Putin.63 Instead, it is the liberal center which raises its voice against the radical left, the ultra-conservative right, and the Nazis, fighting a two-front war against authoritarianism. Yet, civil liberalism is weak: it lacks a solid symbolic center and a solid social carrier. With no sacral body politic anymore, no charismatic center, and weak liberalism, Greece is drifting to an unknown destination (Fig. 7.2). It is time to move on to the quantitative part of the analysis of the Greek symbolic configuration. In the following Parts we present the findings of the survey.

Bibliography Afonso, Alexandre, Sotirios Zartaloudis, and Yannis Papadopoulos. 2014. Lower Levels of Clientelism in Portuguese Politics Explain Why Portugal Handled Austerity Better than Greece During the Crisis. LSE Report. http://blogs.lse. ac.uk/europpblog/2014/10/27/lower-levels-of-clientelism-in-portuguesepolitics-explain-why-portugal-handled-austerity-better-than-greece-duringthe-crisis/. Aslanidis, Paris, and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2016. Dealing with Populists in Government: The SYRIZA-ANEL Coalition in Greece. Democratization 23 (6): 1077–1091. Bateson, Gregory. 1958. Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chatzipadelis, Theodore. 2017. What Really Happened: Party Competition in the January and September 2015 Parliamentary Elections. European Quarterly of Political Attitudes and Mentalities 6 (2): 8–39. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 1995. Power, Trust, and Meaning: Essays in Sociological Theory and Analysis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 2001. The Civilizational Dimension of Modernity. International Sociology 16 (3): 320–340. Gidron, Noam, and Bart Bonikowski. 2013. Varieties of Populism: Literature Review and Research Agenda. Harvard University, No. 13-004.

63  Interestingly enough, the Syriza-Anel government has delayed the court hearing of the murder of a leftist activist, Pavlos Fyssas, by a member of the Golden Dawn for five years (!). Of course the government is accused for leniency to the Nazi party in return for friendly voting in crucial Parliamentary decisions and in the hope that Golden Dawn will remain strong and will continue to absorb potential voters of the conservative party of New Democracy. https://www.naftemporiki.gr/story/1392760/nd-protofanis-kathusterisi-stidiki-tis-xrusis-augis.

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Huliaras, Asteris. 2014. The Dynamics of Civil Society in Greece: Creating Civic Engagement from the Top. The Jean Monnet Papers on Political Economy 10: 1–21. Kouris, Giannis. 2014. The Polytechnic Celebration  – the Uprising as an Educational Institution. In Greece in the 1980 [‘Γιορτή του Πολυτεχνείου – Η εξέγερση ως σχολικός θεσμός’ στο Η Ελλάδα στη Δεκαετία του ’80], ed. Vamvakas Vasilis and Panagis Panagiotopoulos, 79–81. Thessaloniki: Epikentro. Leontidou, Lila. 2012. Athens in the Mediterranean ‘Movement of the Piazzas’ Spontaneity in Material and Virtual Public Spaces. City 16 (3): 299–312. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2012.687870. Marangudakis, Manussos. 2016. Visions of Brotherhood: A Comparative Analysis of Direct Democracy in Ancient and Modern Greece. Política y Sociedad,. Special Issue: The Social Knowledge of the Old Greeks. Remembering Enrique Gómez Arboleya, ed. Juan A. Roche Cárcel 53 (3): 773–793. ———. 2019. Breaching Fortress Europe: The Liminal Consequences of the Greek Migrant Crisis. In Walling, Boundaries and Liminality; A Political Anthropology of Transformations, ed. Agnes Horvath, Marius Ion Benţa, and Joan Davison, 136–154. London: Routledge. Marangudakis, Manussos, and Kostas Rontos. 2016. Civility and Citizenship. A Political Study of the Island of Lesvos. Social Cohesion and Development 21: 51–72. Marangudakis, Manussos, Kostas Rontos, and Maria Xenitidou. 2013. State Crisis and Civil Consciousness in Greece. GreeSE: Hellenic Observatory Papers on Greece and Southeast Europe 77 (October): 1–34. Mason, Paul. 2012. Why It’s Kicking off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions. London: Verso. Mavrozacharakis, Emmanouil, Dimitrios Kotroyannos, and Stylianos I.  Tzagkarakis. 2017. Mediterranean Left-Wing Populism: The Case of SYRIZA. European Quarterly of Political Attitudes and Mentalities EQPAM 6 (2): 40–54. Mpouzakis, Sifis, Gerasimos Koustourakis, and E. Mperdousi. 2001. Educational Policy and Comparative Argumentation [Εκπαιδ ευτική π ο λιτική και Συγκριτική Επ ιχειρ ηματο λο γία]. Athens: Gutenberg. Pantazopoulos, Andreas. 2013. The Left-Wing National Populism [Ο Αριστερός Εθνικολαϊκισμός]. Thessaloniki [Θεσσαλονίκη]: Epikentro [Επίκεντρο]. Pantelidou Malouta, Μ. 2012. Political Behavior [Πολιτική Συμπεριφορά]. Athens: Savvalas. Papadakis, Nikos, Antonis Papargyris, Vassilis Dafermos, Maria Basta, Argyris Kyridis, Maria Drakaki, and Sifis Plymakis. 2017. Youth and NEETs in Greece, within the Crisis Era. Social Vulnerability, Unemployment, Public Trust and Issues of Political Behavior. In Youth in Crisis Countries - Life Situations and Political Attitudes of Adolescents in Southern/Eastern Europe and North Africa,

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ed. M.  Harring and Kl. Hurrelmann, 1–16. Springer Publishing House. http://neets2.soc.uoc.gr/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Papadakis-et-al_ revised-final.pdf. Pappas, Takis. 2014. Populist Democracies: Post-authoritarian Greece and Post-­ communist Hungary. Government and Opposition 49 (1): 1–23. Sevastakis, Nikolas. 2004. Mundane Country  – Aspects of the Public Space and Values’ Antinomies in Today Greece [Κοινότυπη χώρα  – όψεις του δημόσιου χώρου και αντινομίες αξιών στη σημερινή Ελλάδα]. Athens: Savvalas. Simiti, Marilena. 2014. Rage and Protest: The Case of the Greek Indignant Movement. GreeSE 82 (February): 1–30. Szakolczai, Arpad. 2009. Liminality and Experience: Structuring Transitory Situations and Transformative Events. International Political Anthropology 2 (1): 141–172. Thomassen, Bjorn. 2014. Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between. New York: Routledge. Tsakirakis, Stavros. 2018. How Come All Struggles Are Just? A Discussion with Apostolos Doxiadis for Democracy in Greece in Metapolitefsis [Από πού κι ως πού όλοι οι αγώνες είναι δίκαιοι; Μία συζήτηση με τον Απόστολο Δοξιάδη για την Δημοκρατία στην Ελλάδα της Μεταπολίτευσης]. Athens: Metechmio. Tsaliki, Liza. 2012. The Greek ‘Indignados’: The Aganaktismenoi as a Case Study of the ‘New Repertoire of Collective Action’. Paper Delivered at the “In/Compatible Publics: Publics in Crisis-Production, Regulation and Control of Publics” pANEL, Transmediale Media Art Festival, Berlin. http://www2.media.uoa. gr/people/tsaliki/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Tsaliki_The_Greek_ Indignados.pdf. Tsoukalas, Constantine. 1993. Free Riders in the Land of Miracles – About Greeks in Greece [Τζαμπατζήδες στη Χώρα των Θαυμάτων. Περί Ελλήνων στην Ελλάδα]. Greek Review of Political Sciences 1 (1): 9–52.

PART II

The Symbolic Structure of the Greek Public Sphere

We have examined thus far the structuration of the Greek political culture, as it is shaped by traditional and modern, as well as religious and secular, social forces and historical contingencies, which are perpetuated, and thus continue to exert influence, through rituals, performances, and narratives, and above all through a steady production of cultural traumas incorporated in the country’s civil religion and institutional structures. And we have seen how these cultural imprints could turn into powerful sources of condensation, frustration, fragmentation, and structural schismogenesis to the detriment of the Greek society. Yet, such an analysis is unable to examine the specific, analytic, impact of each of the constitutive cultural factors that we have identified as causes of the current conundrum. Is Greek Orthodox mystical religiosity responsible for populist politics? What is the impact of amoral familism on social cohesion and civil trust? Is anarchic individualism the cause of violence and strife? And what is the impact of ethno-populism, ethno-romanticism, and the Metapolitefsis civil religion on the Greek crisis? These and other similar questions can be answered neither by ethnographic research nor by theoretical reference to the model we constructed and followed thus far. The model guides us to identify various symbolic constructions as ‘constitutive goods’, ‘code orientations’, ‘institutional ground rules’, and ‘rituals and performances’, but it cannot tell us how significant each one of their constitutive parts is, how are they interconnected, which cultural phenomenon affects which particular social networks, and what their actual impact is. It could not, since in actual life all

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these symbolical and structural elements of social life are intertwined without any clear and visible cultural mark on social action. To answer these questions in a comprehensive manner we proceed to the quantitative part of our analysis. In the following pages we examine how constitutive goods are symbolically and meaningfully structured according to their importance in the life of individuals; the structure of the major code orientations; the patterned order of institutional ground rules, or ethics; and last, the impact of collectivist patterns of social behavior on these ethics. To do so, instead of using the usual method of asking the sample about their preference concerning particular ‘cultural’ statements and then examining their relative importance and intensity in terms of class, religion, education, and so on, we used a complex quantitative method capable of ‘following’ the logic of the analytical model (Chap. 1): Geometric Data Analysis. To our knowledge, this is the first time this type of analysis is used for the purpose of depicting the structure of a culture—the structure of a moral system. We start with the detailed description of the method.

CHAPTER 8

Data and Methods

Contents

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The method that was used throughout the analysis is the ‘Geometric Data Analysis’ (Analyse des données). It refers to a group of techniques that aim to visualize, classify, and interpret the data. This includes methods such as Correspondence Analysis (simple and multiple), Principal Component Analysis, Canonical Correlation Analysis, Multidimensional Scaling, and Multiple Factor Analysis. The primary goal of Geometric Data Analysis methods is to transform a table of numerical information into a graphical display so as to reveal the underlying latent structure in the data, removing redundant information. This process makes it easier to interpret structures and patterns in the data. The distinct advantages of Geometric Data Analysis techniques are the following: 1. The methods do not make strict a priori assumptions about the distribution of the data, in contrast with probabilistic modeling approaches. In other words, their aim is primarily to reveal features in the data rather than confirm or reject hypotheses regarding generating underlying processes.

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2. The methods are relational in the sense that they allow the simultaneous treatment of multiple variables, revealing relationships that would not be detected in a series of pair-wise comparisons between variables. 3. They generate a visual representation of the relationships between individuals and variables in a multidimensional coordinate system, designating a ‘space’. This makes it easier to interpret structures and patterns in the data. 4. Due to their exploratory nature, the methods are well suited to uncover the patterns and structures of big and complex datasets. For the purpose of this study Geometric data analysis is better suited than the research carried out by cross-national surveys like the World Value Survey (WVS)  and the International  Sosial  Survey  Program (ISSP), and other socio-psychological scientific initiatives (Schwartz 2011, 2013; Triandis 2001), that measure and compare values that are cross-national and cross-time for the following reasons. First, these surveys measure values and attitudes following a strictly cognitive, Kantian reading of the Weberian argument of ‘rational mind chooses and arranges values/norms/opinions— and  action is comprehensive and rational’, without taking in account the symbolic-hermeneutic aspects of moral imperatives. Second, they usually measure values with sets of attitude questions in specific domains of life such as religion, politics, economy work etc. As a result, most empirical studies of values provide less integrated and more piecemeal understandings of socially meaningful issues. Third, they ‘force’ the respondent to fall in line with the researcher’s choice of items assuming that in the mind of the respondent there exists a neatly arranged set of values that only need to be transferred to the data sheet of the researcher. Fourth, by seeking ‘choices’ they end up with a list of more/less high/low percentages reducing cross-national and cross-time cultural differences into quantitatively different, but ‘qualitatively’ homogeneous worldviews where some cultures ‘show higher preference to…’ than other cultures. Fifth, the above approaches, in fact, do not measure values but norms, which the researchers decide to call values quite arbitrarily. Values as moral meaning, in the autonomous sense of structured and independent symbolic patterns of the sacred and the profane, are ignored for the sake of focusing on comparable and unqualified observable attitudes and social action. Our cultural analytic model, applied to the Geometric Data Analysis, designed to uncover patterns and to reveal hidden relationships between

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items, allows us to do what mainstream ‘value analysis’ ignores: to follow in detail the construction of the moral symbolic patterns as a bottom-up process, from elementary units (i.e., basic preferences concerning key political and moral orientations which the self cannot ignore and through which the political-moral self is constructed), to complex discourses which reflect fundamental worldviews not preconceived or predetermined by the researchers. To test this hypothesis we could not rely on large scale data collections such WVS or ISSP,1 since the relevant items found there measure ‘beliefs, values, and motivations’ rather than symbolic meaning; thus, there is the necessity to construct an original questionnaire able to be used in a variety of modern ‘democratic’ (in the Toquevillian sense) political cultures. We assume that as far as political culture is concerned, these elementary bits are of limited number, but their combinations are numerous and quite unpredictable; it is these emerging combinations which allow us to look into the worldviews of the respondents without forcing them to choose constructions preconceived and decided by the researchers. Equally important, such a bottom-up approach ‘allows’ the respondents to be sincere and to expose worldviews which otherwise they would have chosen to hide from the researchers or from themselves. Furthermore, Geometric Data Analysis allows us to use pictures to bring forward internalized but not necessarily cognitively elaborated, collective representations which are not only meaningful to the responded but constitute the ground-base, the moral reference point, of observable attitudes. More important, Geometric Data Analysis can carry our multileveled and complex theoretical approach. Our working hypothesis is that ‘culture’ is not a compact and fixed cognitive construction which people follow in a mechanical, reflexive, way but a multi-layered and flexible construction in constant interaction with the social environment and the reflective inner-self and that identical cosmological and ontological visions usually lead to different sets of constitutive goods, which in turn lead to even more combinations of internalized code orientations, ground rules, personal ethics, and so on. The identification of these combinations is of crucial importance: it allows us to examine selective affinities among different sets of cultural orientations and thus to explain otherwise strange or paradoxical social actions and political affiliations and preferences. Thus, our model allows ‘seeing’ how the moral self is constructed in vitro and 1

 http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp; http://w.issp.org/menu-top/home/.

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comparing the process with the descriptive, in vivo, analysis, thus verifying or not-verifying historical description as such. Last, but not least, Geometric Data Analysis makes possible the construction of the semantic map of a political culture, that is, it allowed us to reveal the moral meaning of the political self and the political social relations in the framework of civil religion and thus to visualize the political community as moral community. In a sense, it allowed us to observe the different ways people perceive democracy itself, as a moral vision of the good in the presence of hegemonic public discourses. Data analysis was based on Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) and Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) in two steps (Chadjipadelis 2015). In the first step, HCA was used to assign subjects to distinct groups according to their response patterns. The main output of HCA was a group or cluster membership variable, which reflects the partitioning of the subjects into groups. Furthermore, for each group, the contribution of each question (variable) to the group formation was investigated, in order to reveal a typology of behavioral patterns. To determine the number of clusters, we use the empirical criterion of the change in the ratio of between-cluster inertia to total inertia, when moving from a partition with r clusters to a partition with r − 1 clusters. In the second step, the group membership variable, obtained from the first step, was jointly analyzed with the existing variables via Multiple Correspondence Analysis on the so-called Burt table (Greenacre 2007). The Burt table is a symmetric, generalized contingency table, which cross-­ tabulates all variables against each other. The main MCA output is a set of orthogonal axes or dimensions that summarize the associations between variable categories into a space of lower dimensionality, with the least possible loss of original information contained in the Burt table. HCA is then applied on the coordinates of variable categories on the factorial axes. Note that this is now a clustering of the variables, instead of the subjects. The groups of variable categories can reveal abstract discourses. Bringing the two analyses together, behavioral patterns and abstract discourses are used to construct a semantic map for the variables and the subjects.2 Τhe original sample consists of 883 students from Greek universities. The final sample used for data analysis included the responses of 883 stu2  See Greenacre (2017), Benzécri (1973, 1980), Lebart et al. (1982), Morineau (1992), Roux (1985).

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dents obtained during the academic year 2014–2015, from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki [692/700], the University of the Aegean [154/160] and the Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki [37/40]. Students aged 18 to 25 years comprised 95% of the sample. With regard to gender, 254 were males and 629 females. Before it was distributed in earnest, the questionnaire was administered to seventy (70) undergraduate and forty five (45) graduate students of the University of the Aegean and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The students were asked to examine the questionnaire and then discuss in class its coherence and their understating of the items. Their responses have been taken into account. Interestingly enough, the subjective meanings attributed to the items in the questionnaire were surprisingly similar. While our sample is made only of university students, we argue that the analysis reflects the wider orientations of the Greek political culture and thus could be used for the purpose of our study, for three reasons. First, the population of Greek university students derives from the totality of the Greek social strata, and thus it constitutes the younger age cohort of the general population. Second, not being incorporated in the workforce yet, the Greek youth reflects the symbolic orders of the Greek political culture in their purest form, ‘uncontaminated’ by the organizational routinization of the self; a representative sample of the general population would have complicated and would have distorted the structuralist analysis of the cultural codes, increasing the level of ambiguity. Third, and most important, the methods used in our data analysis have been developed precisely to examine the internal structure of the responses rather than actual percentages. In all, we argue that our sample constitutes an uncontaminated ‘vessel’ of the various political discourses which characterize the public sphere in Greece conducive to our data analysis. The working hypothesis of this endeavor is that while the percentages of the responses may be different in older age cohorts, the internal structure of the responses, and thus the emerging complex discourses our analysis allows to emerge, will be very similar.

Bibliography Benzécri, Jean-Paul. 1980. Introduction a la classification automatique d’ après un exemple de donnees medicales. Les cahiers de l’analyse des données 5 (3): 311–340. Benzécri, Jean-Paul, et al. 1973/1976. L’analyse des données. Tome 1: La taxinomie. Tome 2: L’analyse des correspondances. 2nd ed. Paris: Dunod.

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Chadjipadelis, Theodore. 2015. Parties, Candidates, Issues: The Effect of Crisis. Correspondence Analysis and Related Methods. CARME 2015. Napoli, Italy. Greenacre, Michael. 2007. Correspondence Analysis in Practice. Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall/CRC. ———. 2017. Correspondence Analysis in Practice. London: Chapman and Hall/ CRC Press. Lebart, L., A.  Morineau, and J.P.  Fenelon. 1982. Traitement des données statistiques. Paris: Dunod. Morineau, A. 1992. L’ analyse des donnees et les tests de coherence dans les donnees d’ enquete. In La qualite de l’ indormation dans les enquetes. ASU. Paris: Dunod. Roux, M. 1985. Algorithmes de classification. Paris: Masson. Schwartz, Shalom H. 2011. Studying Values: Personal Adventure, Future Directions. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 42 (2): 307–319. ———. 2013. National Culture as Value Orientations: Consequences of Value Differences and Cultural Distance. In Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, ed. Victor Ginsburgh and David Throsby, vol. 2, 547–586. Oxford: Elsevier. Triandis, Harry C. 2001. Individualism-Collectivism and Personality. Journal of Personality 69 (6): 907–924.

CHAPTER 9

Constitutive Goods

Contents

9.1  Choosing Constitutive Goods 9.2  Frequencies 9.3  The Patterned Orders of the Constitutive Goods 9.4  Concluding Remarks Bibliography

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As stated in the first chapter, our model is based on the axiomatic assumption that individual worldviews of the good and the evil, and of the sacred and the profane in political matters, derive (analytically, not temporally) from hegemonic cosmological and ontological principles which constitute the more abstract level of meaningful self-reflection. These principles define a given political culture, though they do not need to be internally cohesive or comprehensive. Modern and post-modern ‘polytheism’, syncretism, diversity, and variability impose a myriad of possible principles someone could choose to follow. To bring some order out of such a universe of meanings, and to be able to capture a wide variety of possible prominent visions of the good found in Greek public discourses, we included a theoretically informed selection of moral principles as follows.

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9.1   Choosing Constitutive Goods The search for underlying moral imperatives, which Shmuel Eisenstadt presumed but left unspecified, leads us back to Charles Taylor’s constitutive goods which set the stage for our moral and aesthetic judgments (Taylor 1989). Accordingly, moral action is possible because human beings are morally embedded. Since every human being is situated in a certain context of meanings, nobody can simply ‘choose’ his/her own moral imperatives; rather, there is always already ‘something as basic and inescapable to us as a sense of identity depends on taking some [moral] goods seriously’ and thus our personal and collective identities are inevitably aligned with certain constitutive goods. In other words ‘human life is only conceivable within a contextual horizon of motivational values’ (Taylor 1994, 206). Taylor suggests that being embedded in a moral framework means that we cannot overstep certain limits of existing values since they are constitutive for us. Overstepping would mean moving in a sphere where nothing makes sense. Even though modernity, and indeed, post-modernity, has given rise to conflicting values and demands (Weber’s ‘polytheism’), these conflicts are nevertheless still embedded within an ‘inevitable framework’ and a ‘common cultural continuum’ which minimize internal contradictions of the moral self (Taylor 1989, 487–490, 504; 1991, 67–69). Taylor identifies two major moral sources of modern life: naturalism and expressivism (1989, 495–496). Naturalism consists of the rational self-interpretation of the ‘affirmation of ordinary life’, which designates those aspects of human life concerned with ‘production and reproduction, that is, labor, the making of the things needed for life, and our life as ­sensual beings, including marriage and the family’ (Taylor 1989, 211). Expressivism, on the other hand, stands against the one-sided rationality of naturalism since the moral source of a meaningful life lays in the deep inwardness of human feelings and emotions, and is expressed through language, gestures, and art. Here, the moral source is an inner voice, a creative imagination of the individual or of the community which needs to be articulated (Taylor 1989, 368–390). Expressivism, in contrast to naturalism, describes the individual as embedded in a greater moral unity (God, nature, cosmos, and community). Certainly, this unity is not certain and stable as it was in premodern societies; rather, the individual is called upon to establish such a unity through his creative imagination (Taylor 1989, 375) and, in effect, through this authenticity to bridge the gap

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between the mundane world of naturalism and the transcendental. Expressivist forms might have had their origins in high culture, but processes of social equalization and cultural osmosis have allowed them to infiltrate popular culture and to infuse everyday life thereof (Taylor 1991, 66). As Reckling (2001) indicates [T]hese forms of life have in common the refusal of the instrumentalization of all spheres of life. Leading an authentic life, searching for original expressions and living in harmony with higher sources are the common landmarks of expressivism. All these forms—including their destructive sides—from the erotic, the aesthetic and the political to environmental movements, are penetrated by these ideas. The idea of an expressive and authentic fulfillment of personal and collective life is nowadays a common landmark in western societies. It concerns the culture of adventures in leisure time, sports, sensuality, fashion or local and regional political movements, etc. (Reckling 2001, 168)

Following the logic of the above arguments we chose twelve (12) aspects of naturalism and expressivism that our study has indicated to be or might be significant factors in shaping the Greek public sphere and civil religion (see below). In our study, these manifestations are not represented by statements but by pictures. The reason we chose to depict pictorial representations of ultimate values rather than statements is because people do not always choose values reflectively and articulacy. Instead, as Taylor admits, values are typically hidden behind a veil of inarticulacy woven by the modern understanding of selfhood. ‘Inarticulacy’ suggests the presence of a latent pattern which acts as a moral lens through which individuals judge and measure their social environment as well as their own self. In structuralist terms these pictographic manifestations of expressivism make sense to the cultural actor by becoming parts of a patterned order that individuals feel obliged to follow. Considering the Greek political culture as we identified it in the previous chapters, as well as the schismogenetic nature of the Greek civil religion at large, Taylor’s naturalism and expressivism, the intentional struggle for originality, provides us with a valuable theoretical tool to analyze in their own terms the moral sources of the Greek political culture. For this purpose, twelve pictures were chosen to represent twelve manifestations of naturalism and expressivism. Taking into account the multiplicity and

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­eterogeneity of the cultural-moral sources found in Greece today, h imported as well as indigenous, religious as well as secular, we arranged a sort of western, eastern, and oriental cultural symbols, of various qualities, in an effort to identify those ones who are selectively affiliated to one or more political orientations. Since political discourses always incorporate a moral component of political arguments, proclamations, and accusations, as well as the importance of moral discourses in affecting political action and electoral behavior, there is a good chance that such affiliations will emerge, even though certainly will not exhaust the subject matter as such. Could these values be connected to deeper moral convictions, and if so, do they constitute value postulates connected to distinct substantive rationalities? If these discourses have a life of their own, being independent of social structures as much as from ideology, they need provide different meaning to symbols that are present in a given culture, thus forming particular ‘cultural orders’, systemic arrangements of cultural symbols according to certain ontological principles, part of which are the political discourses we have identified in previous chapters. Having these issues and debates in mind, we decided to test the above hypotheses by asking our sample to choose three pictures that identify with, that ‘represent’ him/ her. The emerging combinations allow us to read them as a text, thus minimizing the chance of misrepresentation due to idiosyncratic interpretation: 1. Three Naturalist goods

03. Money (Numbers indicate numbering in the questionnaire)

04. Sensuality

10. Family Life

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Examples of images similar to those used in the study We start with three pictures of the basic naturalistic constitutive goods, as defined by Taylor, of Money (3), Sensuality (4), and Family (10). They test the significance of Taylor’s ‘affirmation of the ordinary life’. Two of them, Money and Sensuality, always appear strong in the celebratory individualism which we identified as a strong feature of the second Metapolitefsis’ popular discourses (see Sect. 7.3). We test their significance and their symbolic affinities. Five items of Expressivist goods follow: 2. Violence Since Greece is torn apart by violent acts of civil disobedience not only by ‘ordinary’ enemies of the state (far leftist and far rightist extremism) but by ordinary citizens as well, we decided to use four pictures of different types of protest, violence, and force:

01. We Are Anonymous

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08. Militarism

09. Anarchist Violence (Credit for this image goes to Josephine Pedersen)

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11. Protest/Uprising

Examples of images similar to those used in the study First: ‘We are Anonymous’ (01): An oxymoron as it might be, it represents, one might say, ‘liberal extremism’, since it is the stated goal of the Anonymous to seek ‘truth, freedom and the removal of censorship’. It is a form of extremism that does not resort to physical violence and fights against authoritarian governments and covert operations that undermine citizens’ rights. It tests the hypothesis of mistrust for the government, sinister power networks, and demand for more individual freedoms.1 Second: ‘Militarism’ (08): The picture stands for militarism and physical prowess. It tests the hypothesis of militarism and brute force being connected or correlated with various forms of civil discontent or civic pride. Third: ‘Anarchist Rioter’ (09): The picture presents anarchists who express their defiance to the state and civil society by resorting to violent extremism against the police, as well against private and public property. This phenomenon is quite widespread in Greek cities, particularly so in Athens, to the extent that parts of the city are virtually controlled by organized anarchists groups (e.g., Exarcheia Square). It examines whether political anarchism and violent nihilism participate to any significant extent in mainstream constellations of constitutive goods. 1  http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/16308/1/we-are-anonymous-wedo-not-forgive-we-do-not-forget.

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Fourth: ‘Protest/Uprising’ (11): This picture is not as specific as the previous ones. Its meaning ranges from ‘mass protest’ and ‘mass defiance’ to ‘mass uprising’ and ‘revolution’. In all cases it denotes a popular action against authority. The picture tests the hypothesis of the Metapolitefsis’ civil religion: that protest, defiance, and demands from an authoritarian state constitute a basic political, or expressivist, constitutive good. 3. Two Christian religiosities

02. Western, naturalist, style Resurrection of Christ

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06. Eastern, mystical, style, Image of Christ (Credit for this image goes to Dianelos Georgoudis. To see a full copy of the license, go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en. No changes were made to this image. Find the original at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Christ_Pantocrator_mosaic_from_Hagia_Sophia_2744_x_2900_pixels_3.1_MB.jpg)

Examples of images similar to those used in the study First: ‘The Resurrection of the Christ’ (02): In this icon, Jesus is being depicted bright and triumphant defeating death. The naturalist style situates the event in this world, stressing the liberating and joyous effects of Resurrection in this life. Second: ‘The Image of the Christ’ (06): Contrary to the above, this icon is squarely Eastern Orthodox, a classical example of mystical theology. It is otherworldly oriented suggesting the worthlessness of this world (no naturalist surrounding here, but only the golden grace of God). The relative preference of our sample to icons will allow us to draw valuable insights on the relationship of the symbolic qualities of the icons with the rest of the pictures attached to the same group.

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4. Two items-types of individualist growth and spirituality

07. Wondered Above the Sea of Fog (Caspar David Friedrich)

05. Meditation

Examples of images similar to those used in the study First: The ‘Wanderer’ (7): The romantic self constitutes a bedrock of western individuality and creativity. It stands for an original self, rebellious and defiant of social conventions. As Taylor defines it as ‘…an inner voice or impulse, the idea that we find the truth within us and in particular in our feelings’ (1989, 368). Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (ca. 1818) with the heart of the person being ‘the center of

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the universe’ is a powerful image of this companionship with nature as well as the solitude of the man that radiates confidence and determination. Second: ‘Meditation’ (5): Oriental influences, such as Mediation, have spread in Greece as much as the rest of the West. It is another popular form of self-reflection, but contrary to the Romantic Wanderer it does not seek originality but inner harmony. The image downplays rebellion and, instead, encourages restriction of impulsive desires.

05. Space Exploration

12. Space Exploration

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Examples of images similar to those used in the study ‘Space Exploration’ (12): It represents the adventurous and heroic individual who explores nature in a rational-modern way part of the otherwise rudimentary and morally dangerous complex of techno-science. While it belongs more to science fiction rather than reality, space exploration is a symbol of trust of modernity and the rational capacities of humankind.

9.2   Frequencies The sample was asked to choose three pictures that ‘represent’ them. The results are as follows. For each picture the percentage (%) of the student responses is given (Table 9.1).

Table 9.1  Pictures according to selection frequency (in descending order) Code

Picture (symbolic representation of)

(10) (04) (07) (06) (05) (12) (11) (02) (01) (03) (08) (09)

[Family] [Sensuality] [The Wanderer] [The Passion of the Christ] [Meditation] [Space Exploration] [Protest/Uprising] [The Resurrection of the Christ] [We are Anonymous] [Money] [Militarism] [Anarchist Rioter]

NOT SELECTED

SELECTED

25.0% 41.6% 70.6% 75.8% 76.1% 79.5% 80.4% 81.0% 87.3% 90.5% 96.1% 96.1%

75.0% 58.4% 29.4% 24.2% 23.9% 20.5% 19.6% 19.0% 12.7% 9.5% 3.9% 3.9%

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More than half of the sample chose Family (75%), and/or Sensuality (58.4%). Above 50%

Examples of images similar to those used in the study Between 30% and 24% From a distance follows a second constellation of pictures which starts with the Wanderer (29.4%) and finishes with Christ Resurrected (19%). The Wanderer indicates a strong familiarity with, and an affinity to, a prominent western type of secular individuality. It is followed by the

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Eastern Orthodox symbol of divine suffering and by the oriental symbol of serenity and inner growth. The triplet balances between traditional, modern, and post-modern spirituality, reflecting, quite vividly, the divert expressivist sources of morality that Greeks encounter and internalize.

2

2  Credit for this image goes to Dianelos Georgoudis. To see a full copy of the license, go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en. No changes were made to this image. Find the original at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christ_Pantocrator_ mosaic_from_Hagia_Sophia_2744_x_2900_pixels_3.1_MB.jpg.

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Examples of images similar to those used in the study Around 20% It is immediately followed by Space Exploration (20.5%), Protest/ Uprising (19.6%), and Christ Resurrected (19%), that is, the technological, one of the anti-systemic political (the first that appears on the list), and the western religious one.

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Examples of images similar to those used in the study Around 10% Two more items, each one chosen by roughly one-tenth of what our sample follows, consisted of the Anonymous (12.7%) and, rather surprising low on the list, Money (9.5%).

Examples of images similar to those used in the study Around 4% The least popular pictures are these which depict blatant force and violence, Militarism (3.9%), and/or the Anarchist  Rioter (3.9%), both of them chosen by the 1/25th of the sample.

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3

Examples of images similar to those used in the study But popularity is not able to detect or suggest the syntax of the pictures, their inner symbolic structure, and selective affinities. To identify discursive structures and affinities we employed Analyse Factorielle des Correspondances (AFC) and Classification Ascendante Hiérarchique (CAH) as follows.

3

 Credit for this image goes to Josephine Pedersen.

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9.3   The Patterned Orders of the Constitutive Goods The two phase analysis using AFC and CAH partitions the 12 pictures into 4 groups. In the following figure (Fig.  9.1), the dendrogram of the analysis is given. The labels in the first columns stand for selecting or not selecting the corresponding pictures. For picture i (i = 1, 2, …, 12) j  =  2  ×  i stands for selecting, while j  =  2  ×  i  −  1 stands for not selecting (i.e., 4 stands for selecting picture 2, and  3 stands for not selecting picture 2). To determine the number of clusters, we use the empirical criterion of change in the ratio of between-cluster inertia to total inertia, when moving from a partition with r clusters to a partition with r  −  1 clusters. According to that (represented by the vertical line in Fig.  9.1), four groups formed. The groups are, namely, Group Α (node 44) = {3, 4, 10, 11}, Group Β (node 38) = {2, 6}, Group C (node 42) = {5, 7, 12}, and Group D (node 41) = {1, 8, 9}. The numbers in each group refer to the picture codes. The detail description of each group follows. Group A: The protesting affirmation of ordinary life

Examples of images similar to those used in the study Group A comprises Money, Sensuality, Family, and Protest/Uprising. The first three ones (03, 04, and 10) are the naturalistic symbols of the confirmation of ordinary life, thus their structural interconnection is not surprising. What is indeed surprising is the presence of the fourth item in this patterned order, the symbol of Protest/Uprising. It appears as rather intrusive, in that it is not linked with the rest through any short of obvious selective affinity. Its presence makes sense only if we take into account the first and second Metapolitefsis’ civil religions

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1 5 27 15 26 17 25 29 21 20 9 23 3 28 11 8 13 22 6 4 12 7 14 24 10 2 19 18 16 0.0

30 32 31 35 33

34 43 44 45

38 36

39

46

42 37

40

47

41 5.0

10.0

Fig. 9.1  Dendrogram of the twelve pictures’ selection

(Chap. 6: The affirmation of Protest/Uprising, and  Sects. 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3: The affirmation of Money and Sensuality), and consider the whole complex as the symbolic reflection of the hegemonic discourses since 1974, plus the affirmation of the traditional constitutive good of Family and the intimacy of familial relations. In effect, the patterned order of Group A confirms the schismogenetic nature of expressivity in the Greek patterned order of constitutive goods.

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Group B: Christian religiosity

4

 Credit for this image goes to Dianelos Georgoudis. To see a full copy of the license, go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en. No changes were made to this image. Find the original at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christ_Pantocrator_ mosaic_from_Hagia_Sophia_2744_x_2900_pixels_3.1_MB.jpg. 4

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Examples of images similar to those used in the study Closer to Group A, the reference point of the Greek normative order is Group B. It consists of the two icons, the western-naturalistic resurrection of Christ and the Greek Orthodox, mystical, the depiction of the suffering Christ. The reasoning of including two different icons of Christ was that they symbolize different aspects of religiosity, and thus our sample might have placed them in different patterned orders. Instead, our analysis suggests that they are understood in similar terms and placed in a distinct group of constitutive goods. Interestingly enough, this religious constellation is the closest to Group A, suggesting a strong, yet ‘external’, relationship to the core of the Greek patterned order of constitutive goods. Group C: Secular self-actualization and scientific exploration

Examples of images similar to those used in the study The third patterned order consists of Meditation (05), the Wanderer (07), and Space Exploration (12). They are distinguished from the previous group in that they are not religious and from the next group in that they are not symbols of violence. Symbolically, they are joined together by underlying notions of personal growth and individual worth, as internal processes of self-actualization and as affirmation of the capacity of the individual to explore and affirm his/her individualist presence in the world. Group D: Physical violence and subversion

5

5

 Credit for this image goes to Josephine Pedersen.

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Examples of images similar to those used in the study This group, characterized by violence and subversion, is the most remote from, and the least relevant to, Group A suggesting that violent confrontation is the most remote patterned order of Greek constitutive goods. Consequently, it suggests that the widespread physical violence that consummated Greece during the crisis is epidemic rather than endemic. It confirms the sharp distinction the Greek public makes between protest and physical violence which a recent study of Greek attitudes toward state enforcement of law-and-order identified. While protest and disobedience is indeed perceived as a democratic right, and indeed as a manifestation of democracy, physical violence is condemned (Aporelli 2017).

9.4   Concluding Remarks In all, analysis of relevant to Greek political culture patterned order of constitutive goods reveals constellations of meaning which are arranged in a way that confirms the descriptive analysis and observations. Central features are the triplet of naturalist items plus Protest/Uprising, followed by religious items, those of self-actualization and formal (technical) rationality, and last symbols of raw violence and subversion. The emerging patterned order suggests (a) the ‘naturalization’ and centrality of Protest/Uprising as an ordinary condition; (b) the peripheral but still very strong presence of religion; (c) the distant but clear presence of self-reflective individualism; and (d) the clear distinction between the accepted ‘symbolic violence’ of Protest/Uprising and the rejected symbols of violence and brutal force.

Bibliography Aporelli, Aliki. 2017. The Meaning of State Monopoly of Violence to Political Parties and Civil Society Institutions in Greece. PhD Dissertation, University of the Aegean. Reckling, Falk. 2001. Interpreted Modernity – Weber and Taylor on Values and Modernity. European Journal of Social Theory 4 (2): 153–176. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1991. The Malaise of Modernity. Concord, Ontario: Anansi Press. Republished as Taylor, Charles. 1992. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1994. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 10

Internalized Code Orientations

Contents

10.1  Description of Moral Imperatives 10.2  Data Analysis of Moral Imperatives 10.3  The Three Code Orientations of the Greek Political Culture 10.3.1  The Amoral Familism Code Orientation 10.3.2  The Populist Code Orientation 10.3.3  The Egalitarian Code Orientation 10.4  Conclusions Bibliography

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We have defined internalized code orientations as an internalized codification of moral imperatives, in line with Weber’s ‘value postulates’ (Chap. 1), as they provide a unique standard against which reality’s flow of empirical events may be selected, measured, and judged. Code orientations suggest that various social settings and circumstances are judged by, hypothetically speaking, one moral canon. Simply put, code orientations function as an algorithm to provide an instant moral evaluation of a situation yet without determining the action of the social actor. We capture this stance of the moral self (a) vis-à-vis his/her own sense of civility, (b) toward his/her fellow citizens, and (c) toward the law in the following set of statements (E23). The primary aim of our data analysis is to capture the moral orientation of the political self in discursive terms.

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To do this we follow the hermeneutical tradition, which suggests that meaning can be considered as a text, as well as semiotics and post-­ structuralism, as they have been operationalized by Alexander and Smith (1993, 156–160), to argue that moral imperatives can be thought as structures composed of symbolic binary sets. In our analysis these sets are made of statements of contestation which inform public debates, party promulgations, and political slogans and were exemplified during the Greek crisis. These statements reflect not various choices of middle-range life goods, but of the moral imperatives of political life writ large, of what constitutes a ‘natural’ political order of things.

10.1   Description of Moral Imperatives Communalism: (23a.) Social justice is more important than individual rights. This imperative disassociates ‘justice’ and ‘rights’, considering justice to be not only of a different quality vis-à-vis rights but of a superior quality as well. In this context, superiority is either of the ‘social’, vis-a-vis, the ‘individual’, or of ‘justice’, vis-a-vis, ‘rights’. In the first case the community has priority over the individual; in the second case justice is different from, and superior to, rights. In either case, aspects of the communitas, of the undifferentiated and egalitarian community, are superior to statements of individual sovereignty (see Chaps. 2, 4, and 6, Sects. 2.4, 4.10, and 6.0). Populism: (23b.) The interest of the people is more important than institutions and laws. The imperative  reflects the predisposition of the individual toward the most basic populist dictum: the priority of ‘the people’ vis-à-vis democratic institutions and procedures. This statement is in line with populism as it was institutionalized and promulgated in the framework of the Greek civil religion (see Chap. 6, Sects. 6.0 and 6.4). Egotism: (23c.) When following my personal interests I do not consider the law. It reflects the purely egoistic perception of interest, of the Weberian practical rationality, that defies institutional norms and procedures as well as civil responsibility. This imperative is in line with the anarchic individualism and the free-rider ideal types of Greek individual behavior, as well as the perennial issue of generalized clientelism (see Chaps. 2 and 3, Sects. 2.2 and 3.2). Passions above interests: (23d.) I experience the world around me mainly through my feelings rather than through my intellect. The imperative captures the Weberian type of affectual social action, which is in line with the mystical orientation of Greek Orthodox religiosity (see Chap. 4, especially Sect. 4.7).

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Fatalism: (23e.) I believe that the destiny of each person is predetermined. It corresponds to popular ‘little’ traditions, especially the ones which derive their moral contours from Eastern sources, as well as particular strains of mystical religiosity which underlie the futility of the world (see Chap. 4, Sects. 4.9 and 4.10). Salvationist revolution: (23f.) When the People come to power, the most important problems would be solved in a mere matter of time. The imperative reflects the collective representation of uprising as an eschatological rapture with the past and the establishment of a virtuous society, wherein the People play the role of the catalyst, a messianic force which can alter reality just by its presence. It implicitly considers social problems to reflect immorality and impurity and that their revolutionary banishing will guarantee the eternal reign of justice and goodness (see Chaps. 2, 6, and 7, Sects. 2.3, 6.0, and 7.1). Messianic, ex macina,  deliverance: (23g.) I believe in the miraculous intervention of God in the world. In this statement the messianic force is God. It reflects a condition whereas a social actor tends to ‘hope someone will come and save us’ rather than depending on his/her own faculties and ability to change things by planning and action. In a political framework, this state of mind seeks for a ‘savour’, a Messiah-like charismatic figure who, as if by miracle, will save the day (see Chaps. 6 and 7, Sects. 6.1 and 7.6). Social trust: (23h.) In general, I trust my fellow citizens, irrespective of how well I know them personally. Trust is widely considered to be the bond that allows liberal politics, horizontal social action, and active participation in politics. It expresses a general predisposition toward fellow citizens, at the expense of clientelistic hierarchical social structures (see Chaps. 3 and 6, Sects. 3.2, 3.3, and 6.4). Self-mastery: (23i.) At the end of the day, I am responsible for what happens to me. This moral imperative measures the readiness of the individual to take responsibility for his/her actions and to attribute free will and responsibility (or irresponsibility) to others as well. The item measures both the wider imprint of modernity on the individual and the more personal sense of either being a free agent or a passive component of a potent social structure that cannot be controlled (see Chaps. 4 and 7, Sects. 4.6 and 7.1). Self-determination: (23j.) I feel that my life is controlled by sinister powerful networks. The statement measures the ability of the individual to comprehend and analyze the wider social forces that affect his/her social condition. Vis-à-vis the previous item (23i), this one measures not the

288 

M. MARANGUDAKIS

presence of powerful social forces as such, but the way the individual recognizes them either as powerful social structures or as immoral and detrimental agents (see Chap. 7, Sect. 7.6). Racism: (23l.) Immigrants pose a threat to our national identity. This imperative  reflects the fear of the presence of foreigners, of the actual immigrants, in the country. It takes for granted the presence of a national identity and measures the assumption that the latter is an entrenched entity that needs to be protected from external contamination (see Chap. 5, Sects. 5.1 and 5.2). Civility: (23n.) Physical violence does belong in political life. It  measures the actual or potential presence of violence in the public sphere, either as a constitutive good (e.g., the necessity of class struggle) or as a pathological condition (sectorial antagonism and fracture) of civil society (see Chap. 6, Sect. 6.3). Clientelism: (23o.) The role of politicians is to do favors to their constituency. This imperative directly addresses the issue of clientelism as a matter of political principle rather than as a matter of egoistic behavior as item 23c (see Chaps. 2, 3, and 7, Sects. 2.2, 3.2, and 7.2). Xenophobia: (23p.) Foreigners are jealous and conspire against us. This imperative refers to the belief that, due to the innate moral qualities of the Greek People, foreigners (not just deprived immigrants) are hostile to the country. It refers to conspiracies that are circulated in moments of crisis and attributes traumatic events to various dark powers who wish to keep the People subdue (see Chaps. 6 and 7, Sects. 6.0, 6.1, and 7.6). This item tests the hypothesis that fear of immigrants (23l) and fear of the foreigners are two distinct issues and are understood as different by the respondents. Collectivism: (23q.) If I had to choose between individual freedoms and social equality, I would choose social equality. This statement differs from Communalism (23.a) in that it implies a readiness to restrict the freedom of the individual (either of the respondent or of a third party) for the sake of equality. In this vein, it expresses secular authoritarianism and ideologies of radical egalitarianism. Last, we have included three variations of Moral authenticity vis-à-vis the self, the fellow citizens, and the Law (see below). Moral authenticity is a key element of Weber’s social action informed by strong moral ­convictions, as captured in Weber’s ‘Lutheran moment’ (‘here I stand, I can do no other’). It is the space and time that legitimates the actions that

  INTERNALIZED CODE ORIENTATIONS 

289

are undertaken, and it legitimates them by reference to strong moral convictions above any human convention and, in some particular context, the ideal-type of the mystic: the strong and uncompromising belief in the truthiness of his/her convictions. Together, and in the context of the ethnographic analysis of the Greek self, they represent the code orientation of anarchic individualism. (23r.) I stick to my beliefs and values, even if this harms my personal interests. (23k.) If I consider something to be right, I will act on that basis, irrespective of its consequences to others. (23m.) I am ready to fight for what I believe is right, even by breaking the Law.

10.2   Data Analysis of Moral Imperatives In Table 10.1 and in the preceding figure (Fig. 10.1), we present the frequencies of the responses for each statement according to the degree of agreement (in descending order). The majority of the respondents is in agreement with the statements {b, h, j, q, r} and in disagreement with the statements {a, c, d, e, f, g, I, k, i, m, n, o, p}. For the analysis, because the participating variables (from E23a to E23r) are measured on an ordinal scale, ACP (Analyse en composantes principals) was used. Then, the coordinates of the extracted axes were analyzed through Cluster Analysis. The outcome of the analysis reveals three discourses. The schematic representation of the hierarchy is given (Fig. 10.2). The three code orientations that emerge out of the individual moral imperatives are 1. [31] Phobic/Egoist {(e,g,l,p), (c,o)}; 2. [32] Egalitarian/ Populist {(a,q), (h,i,n)}; and 3. [33] Messianic/Self-righteous {(b,d,f,j), (k,m,r)}. Note that each is divided in two, leading to six foundational code orientations. More specifically, node [35] (all statements) is partitioned into nodes [34] and [31]. Node [34] is partitioned further into nodes [32] and [33]. Node [31] is partitioned into groups {c, o} and {e, g, l, p}, node [32] into groups {a,q}, {h,i,n} and node [33] into groups {b,d,f,j}, {k,m,r}. In the following tables (Tables 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4), the correlation coefficient between the variables that form each code orientation, ­emerging as complexes of moral imperatives, is given. Note that all statements are in the same direction, with the exception of 23h; also, that * stands for p ≤ 0.05, ** for p ≤ 0.01, *** for p ≤ 0.001.

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Table 10.1  Statements’ responses (%) in descending order E23 code

Statements of Moral Imperatives

h.

In general I DON’T trust my fellow citizens, irrespective of how well I know them personally. I stick to my beliefs and values, even if this harms my personal interests. The interest of the people is above institutions and laws. Between individual freedoms and social equality, I prefer social equality. I feel that my life is controlled by sinister power networks. I am ready to fight for what I believe is right, even by breaking the Law. Social justice is more important than individual rights. I believe in the miraculous intervention of God in the world. When the People come to power, the most important problems would be solved in a mere matter of time. I sense the world around me mainly through my feelings rather than through my intellect. If I consider something to be right, I act on that basis, irrespective of its consequences to others. At the end of the day, I am NOT responsible for what happens to me. I believe that the destiny of each person is predetermined. Immigrants impose a threat to our national identity. Foreigners are jealous and conspire against us. The role of politicians is to do favors to their constituency. Physical violence does belong to political life. When dealing with my personal interests I do not consider the Law.

r. b. q. j. m. a. g. f.

d.

k.

i. e. l. p. o. n. c.

Strongly agree

Agree

Disagree

Strongly disagree

18.3%

63.8%

16.8%

1.2%

11.0%

56.2%

29.0%

3.7%

17.5%

46.4%

33.4%

2.7%

6.7%

51.9%

38.1%

3.3%

13.3%

41.1%

33.1%

12.6%

9.1%

37.6%

47.3%

6.1%

6.0%

39.6%

49.9%

4.6%

10.0%

32.1%

34.3%

23.6%

8.5%

32.0%

47.1%

12.3%

5.8%

34.4%

51.2%

8.5%

4.8%

31.8%

53.8%

9.7%

5.6%

29.9%

45.4%

19.1%

3.5%

19.8%

51.2%

25.6%

6.1%

16.6%

48.8%

28.4%

4.3%

15.0%

51.5%

29.2%

3.0%

11.1%

47.1%

38.8%

2.9%

8.2%

40.1%

48.8%

1.9%

7.9%

63.3%

27.0%

  INTERNALIZED CODE ORIENTATIONS 

h. r. b. q. j. m. a. g. f. d. k. i. e. l. p. o. n. c. 0%

10%

20%

30%

strongly agree

40% agree

50%

60%

disagree

70%

80%

90%

291

100%

strongly disagree

Fig. 10.1  Moral imperatives according to the degree of agreement—strongest to weakest Fig. 10.2  Schematic representation of the hierarchy for the eighteen statements of moral imperatives

35 34 32

31 33

{a, q}

{b, d, f, j}

{h, i, n}

{k, m, r}

{c, o} {e, g, l, p}

10.3   The Three Code Orientations of the Greek Political Culture The resulting combinations are complex discourses that emerge out of a process whereby selective affinities between moral imperatives are revealed and constellations of statements are formed. The emerging discourses

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M. MARANGUDAKIS

Table 10.2  Correlation coefficients between the variables from phobic/egoistic code orientation

28 28 28 28 21 21

28

28

28

28

21

21

31

E23e

E23g

E23l

E23p

E23c

E23o

E23e E23g E23l E23p E23c E23o

0.303**

0.221** 0.314**

0.222** 0.293** 0.447**

0.166**

0.303** 0.221** 0.222** 0.166** 0.269**

0.269** 0.191** 0.185** 0.304** 0.346**

0.314** 0.293** 0.191**

0.447** 0.194** 0.185**

0.194** 0.223**

0.223** 0.304**

0.346**

Table 10.3  Correlation coefficients between the variables from egalitarian/ populist code orientation

32 23 23 30 30 30

E23a E23q E23h E23i E23n

23

23

30

30

30

E23a

E23q

E23h

E23i

E23n

0.250**

−0.080*

0.250** −0.080* 0.114**

0.114**

0.145** 0.145**

constitute ‘unintentional’ combinations of imperatives which were constructed not by choice but according to the syntactic homological and antinomian composition of the respondents’ moral convictions. In other words, they constitute structures which organize elementary moral  persuasions into patterns which reveal the code orientation of the respondent even though the respondent is unaware of it. The emerged six discourses allow us to look into the moral lens through which the respondent judges and measures him/herself as a political entity. In effect, the emerging discourses constitute various manifestations of Weberian substantive ­rationality, the ‘valid canon and unique standard against reality’s flow of events that may be selected, measured and judged’ (Max Weber [1946] 1958f, p. 294 [266], in S. Kalberg 1980). The data analysis reveals the presence of six discourses organized in three pairs. Each pair is animated by a distinct definition of the political sphere, a definition which organizes, measures, and judges the flow of

  INTERNALIZED CODE ORIENTATIONS 

293

Table 10.4  Correlation coefficients between the variables from messianic/self-­ righteous code orientation

29 29 29 29 26 26 26

29

29

29

29

26

26

26

33

E23b

E23d

E23f

E23j

E23k

E23m

E23r

E23b E23d E23f E23j E23k E23m E23r

0.153**

0.261** 0.203**

0.212** 0.105** 0.151**

0.129**

0.274** 0.131** 0.169** 0.126** 0.297**

0.088*

0.153** 0.261** 0.212** 0.129** 0.274** 0.088*

0.203** 0.105** 0.131**

0.151** 0.127** 0.169**

0.103** 0.126**

0.127** 0.103** 0.297** 0.142**

0.142** 0.240**

0.240**

political events and debates in an authoritative way, determining the expressed preference. This stance is extracted by examining the inner logic of each statement and then the inner logic of the combinations of statements. In turn, this inner logic is determined by extrapolating the sacred and the profane embedded in the sentence, or if the moral quality is not apparent (statements 23.e, 23.i, 23.d, 23.j), we extrapolate it by relating its meaning to the overall meaning of the discourse. The methodology detects and orders the affiliation of responses and turns these affiliations into distinct groups. These groups indicate patterned responses: it identifies concrete orientations and meaning consistency. While cohesion and consistency are clearly stated, this consistency could be either embraced or rejected. While the code orientations are statistically acknowledged by all, not everyone accepts and approves them. Thus, while the analysis reveals the political code orientations, it does not reveal their approval or disapproval. The latter is a matter of choice. Simply put, while an individual is structurally predisposed to follow the symbolic pattern of the discourse, he/she is not obliged to act accordingly. In all, while the structure is present, its acceptance is not; it remains a matter of choice. Here caution is advised: rejecting the statement does not necessarily mean that the opposite is embraced; for example, someone who believes that foreigners are not jealous of Greece does not imply the belief that foreigners are lovers of Greece. The affirmative version of the discourse is stronger than its rejection, in that it is more probable of the rejecting respondent to think of the statements as insignificant or wrong, rather than to find them antithetically important. The answer to whether the

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discourse is important in the affirmative, or in the negative form, is not so much a matter of the actual percentages of Agree versus Disagree responses, as it is to identify and locate the discourse in the public sphere, examining its width and centrality in public debates and political declarations. The three code orientation  pairs and their moral orientations are as follows. 10.3.1  The Amoral Familism Code Orientation a. The Phobic Code Orientation 23e. I believe that the destiny of each person is predetermined. 23g. I believe in the miraculous intervention of God in the world. 23l. Immigrants impose a threat to our national identity. 23p. Foreigners are jealous and conspire against us. We call the code orientation  ‘phobic’ in that it describes the world as irrational, capricious, and dangerous, made of incomprehensive and hostile forces. Belief in predestination suggests a self who is not the master of itself and does not believe that his/her action determines the desirable outcome. Such a belief predisposes the individual to understand events beyond his/ her immediate reach not in rational-causal ways, but as arbitrary occurrences, and even as conspiracies; thus, as far as the individual is concerned, they are arbitrary and as a rule dangerous. Belief in miracles could also reinforce a sense of helplessness and the predisposition of the self to seek out ‘extra-systemic’, ex machina, intervention, such as a messianic figure, to save the day (see Chaps. 6 and 7, Sects. 6.1 and 7.6). In this context, the members of the political community are those who have similar characteristic, who look alike. The rest are considered to be outsiders and are perceived either as intruders (e.g., immigrants) or as aggressors (e.g., foreigners). Sacred: the habitus Profane: the unfamiliar and the outsiders b. The Egoistic Code Orientation 23c. When following my personal interests I do not consider the law. 23o. The role of politicians is to do favors for their constituency. The combination represents the basic contours and moral principles of clientelism: the ignoring of the laws and the perception of politics as a game of interpersonal gains. In this context, political structures are useful to the extent that tangible benefits are extracted and they are valued to the extent that they contribute to this purpose. The Egoistic code orientation

  INTERNALIZED CODE ORIENTATIONS 

295

captures the inner logic of the furious reaction of the public to the austerity measures the troika imposed on Greece in the period 2010–2015 and is in line with the clientelistic nature of Greek political structures (see Chaps. 2 and 7, Sects. 2.1, 2.4, and 7.6, especially p.  175).  The moral bipolarity that emerges is: Sacred: personal, egoistic, interest. Profane: Society at large, a morally indifferent realm. Together, the Phobic and the Egoistic code orientations  reflect two aspects of Amoral Familism; the basic symbolic code orientation of traditional Greece while each one of them constitutes amoral familism’s evolution or mutation in a modern framework. In this modern environment, it stands for the affirmation of the insular world and the condemnation of the wider world of intriguing challenges, opportunities, and affordance as a dangerous place in which a zero-sum game of survival is plaid out. Sacred: the habitus Profane: the world as affordance 10.3.2  The Populist Code Orientation a. The Self-Righteousness Code Orientation 23k. If I consider something to be right I will act on that basis, irrespective of its consequences to others. 23m. I am ready to fight for what I believe is right, even by breaking the law. 23r. I stick to my beliefs and values even if this harms my personal interests. This is a clear manifestation of anarchic individualism. In this code orientation, the self is perceived as a vessel of justice and in this form, it is placed above institutions, social norms, or procedural justice. It projects an absolute moral conviction onto the world and a struggle for its materialization through psychological detachment from daily interests and social obligations. As such, it constitutes a cognitive process whereas self-reflection is insulated and magnified. Decisively, the code orientation is clearly dissociated from egotism (23c) and clientelism (23o), and thus it is placed squarely in the framework of Weber’s ‘substantive rationality’ (see Chap. 1, Sect. 1.3). As such, it orders action by referring to an unyielding inner voice, the Lutheran moment of ‘here I stand, I can do no other.’ Its intensity (it concentrates all three versions of moral authenticity) brings it very close to the Weberian ideal-type of the religious mystical illumination and

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to his Ethics of Moral Conviction, both of which are utterly blind to the social consequence of one’s moral actions (see Chaps. 4 and 6, Sects. 4.2 and 6.0). The bipolarity that emerges is: Sacred: the inner voice of justice Profane: the injustice in/of the world b. The Messianic Code Orientation 23b. The interest of the people are more important than institutions and laws. 23d. I experience the world around me mainly through my feelings rather than through my intellect. 23f. When the People come to power, the most important problems would be solved in a mere matter of time. 23j. I feel that my life is controlled by sinister powerful networks. This code orientation  perceives the self as powerless and feeble, viz., sinister forces which oppress the self and the People with whom the self is identified with. The law, being in the hands of these sinister forces, does not represent the People who are seen as being exploited by elites. Social problems are caused by the distortion of the People’s will. These problems will be eradicated when oppression and inauthenticity are eradicated by the People in power. This is how it ‘feels’ and no analysis of facts is necessary. Yet, in this code orientation the self remains inactive, an onlooker. Instead of acting toward it, he/she expects the uprising to happen in an apocalyptic way. In effect, this code orientation  reminds us of Weber’s theoretical rationality (see Chap. 1, Sect. 1.3) wherein the world is understood as a conscious mastery of reality through the construction of precise abstract concepts without being patterned action.  The bipolarity that emerges is: Sacred: the exploited People Profane: the enemies of the People The strong conviction of the Messianic  code orientation, combined with that of Self-righteousness, forms a powerful populist-collectivist code orientation, which crystallizes nothing less but the hegemonic discourse of the Metapolitefsis civil religion, generating in the process a volatile blend of defiance and stasis of any social group or individual against any conceivable formal arrangement of state authority or declared ‘enemy of the people’ (see Chaps. 6 and 7, Sects. 6.0 and 7.1). The bipolarity that emerges is: Sacred: The righteous People Profane: The elites

  INTERNALIZED CODE ORIENTATIONS 

297

10.3.3  The Egalitarian Code Orientation a. The Civil Code Orientation 23h. In general, I trust my fellow citizens irrespective how well I know them personally. 23i. At the end of the day, I am responsible for what happens to me. 23n. Physical violence does not belong in political life. This code orientation brings together the basic ingredients of the liberal, civil, society: trust, responsibility, and civility. It corresponds to the Western ideal of civil society and as such it represents the individualist-civil aspect of Greek political culture. It could echo the pro-memorandum civil discourse (see Chap. 7, Sect. 7.6), which, contrary to the symbolic violence of the anti-memorandum discourses, put the blame on the irresponsible political system, rather than on conspiratorial foreigners and their indigenous cronies. Yet, this possibility is hindered by the other half of the pair, the Communitas code orientation (see below) which neutralizes the individuality of the ‘Civil’ code orientation. But as such, the bipolarity that emerges out of this foundational code orientation is: Sacred: The civil society Profane: The egoist b. The Communitas Code Orientation 23a. Social justice is more important than individual rights. 23q. If I had to choose between individual freedoms and social equality, I would choose social equality. This code orientation  exemplifies the collectivist vision of communitas. It is in line with the hegemonic collectivist aspects of the Greek Orthodox religion, as much as the collectivist aspects of the State-andChurch sponsored and of the Metapolitefsis civil religion of the country (see Chaps. 5 and 6, Sects. 5.2 and 6.0). It celebrates social equalization at the expense of individual freedoms which are usually identified as egoistic behavior. The Communitas code orientation of the undifferentiated members of a sacral community constitutes the critical eye, the valid canon of ­egalitarianism, and the unique standard of the egalitarian vision against which political statements, and political action, are selected, measured, and judged accordingly. The bipolarity that emerges out of this foundational code orientation is: Sacred: egalitarianism Profane: egoistic individualism

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It is nothing short of fascinating that communitas, the egalitarian and undifferentiated community code orientation, which was hegemonic for most of the twentieth century, both in its religious and in its secular versions, today evolves by becoming affiliated with the civil code orientation of the twenty-first century, probably turning the undifferentiated communitas to differentiated and horizontal communities; even then,  civility remains a collective matter. The bipolarity that emerges is: Sacred: the collective community Profane: the atomized society

10.4   Conclusions The data analysis revealed that the responses fall into three distinct code orientations, each one characterized by its own moral condours, its own sense of the sacred and the profane, and, to use Anderson’s terminology, its own ‘imagined community’1: the ‘Amoral Familism’, the ‘Populist’, and the ‘Egalitarian’ ones, valid canons, or value postulates, which filter and judge reality’s flow of events. Politics then is understood through three quite distinct and comprehensive ways: Amoral Familism structures and orders reality in terms of familiarity  and selfish interest; the Egalitarian code orientation in terms of civility and communalism; and the Populist code orientation  in terms of self-righteousness and  messianic uprisings. They are comprehensive, not because elementary codes belonging to other discourses could not be transferred and ‘lock’ on to other code orientations, but because their presence is structurally unnecessary; the code orientation does not ‘need’ extra elements to make sense to the inner self. Each one of these code orientations is a product of the cultural genealogy of Greece. The Amoral Familism code orientation derives from the religiosity of rural communities that were Greece until a couple of generations ago (see Chap. 2, Sect. 2.2)  before it ‘mutated’ to anarchic ­individualism in an urban environment; the Populist one originates from religious and secular visions embedded in the Metapolitefsis civil religion (see Chaps. 2, 4, 5, and 6, Sects. 2.3, 4.10, 5.2, and 6.0); and as for the Egalitarian code orientation, its communitas element derives directly from Greek Orthodox religiosity, while its civil element is more closely associated with the later ethno-romanticism (see Chap. 7, Sect. 7.3), that is, the more 1  Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. (1991). Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Revised and extended. ed.). London: Verso. pp. 6–7.

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299

individualist and the least political offshoot of post-Metapolitefsis civil narratives, and the last public narrative to emerge before the crisis of 2010. All three of them and their constitutive parts separately are recognizable ‘ad hocing’ assumptions  lying behind major public debates and clashes that engulfed Greece in the current memorandum crisis. Indeed, the three anti-memorandum discourses we have discerned (see Chap. 7, Sect. 7.6), the ‘xenophobic’, the ‘direct democracy’, and the ‘workers’ rights’, constitute particular  manifestations of these three generic code orientations.

Bibliography Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Phillip Smith. 1993. The Discourse of American Civil Society: A New Proposal for Cultural Studies. Theory and Society 22: 151–207. Kalberg, Stephen. 1980. Max Weber’s Types of Rationality: Cornerstones for the Analysis of Rationalization Processes in History. The American Journal of Sociology 85 (5): 1145–1179.

CHAPTER 11

The Patterned Orders of Ethics

Contents

11.1  The Hobbesian Ethics 11.2  The Egoistic Ethics 11.3  The Schismogenetic Ethno-Populist Ethics 11.4  The Schismogenetic Ethno-Romantic Ethics 11.5  The Clientelistic Ethics 11.6  The Civil Ethics 11.7  Concluding Remarks Bibliography

 305  307  308  309  312  313  315  316

In the two previous parts of our data analysis, we examined the patterned orders of the constitutive goods and code orientations as self-referential phenomenological structures. But these structures, notwithstanding their importance as ordering principles of moral standards, do not necessitate specific patterns of ethical action. To identify not the moral self, but the ethical actor, we need to shift from analysis of structural patterns to analysis of individuals. In the following data analysis the eighteen (18) statements (E23), which in the previous section were used to identify distinct code orientations, are now used to identify groups of respondents, that is, individuals who share similar political attitudes and similar ethics. Then, we can examine the affiliation of the twelve (12) constitutive goods (E25) with these groups of individuals, thus identifying the elective affinity between constitutive goods © The Author(s) 2019 M. Marangudakis, The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13589-8_11

301

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and political attitudes, an affinity which will reveal the ethical stance of the sample, understood as something which approximates Weber’s Worldview (Weltbilder): ‘the systematization of apparently fragmented and disparate statements and practices into a relationship of consistency with a comprehensive ultimate and integrated position’ (Kalberg 2004). Hierarchical Cluster Analysis is applied to the matrix with subjects in rows and variables in columns. This matrix is transformed into a 0-1 matrix, where each variable is replaced by a set of 0-1 variables, one for each variable category, taking value 1 if the corresponding category has been observed and 0 otherwise. To determine the number of clusters, we use the empirical criterion of change in the ratio of between-cluster inertia to total inertia, when moving from a partition with r clusters to a partition with r − 1 clusters. Next, we calculate cluster weights, that is, the percentage of subjects that belong to each cluster, and investigate the variables that characterize each cluster via a series of chi-square tests with a significance level of 5%. The two-phase analysis for the 18 statements (from variables e23_1 to e23_18) reveals seven groups of respondents [1534, 1538, 1549, 1554, 1560, 1561, and 9999] and their connection to each statement. In group [9999] belong respondents who answer ‘don’t know/don’t answer’. For each group, the relative frequency (line 2) is given in Table 11.1. Also for each group, the corresponding levels for each statement are described. For example, in cell (e23_5, 1549) value D means that respondents belonging to group 1549 disagree with the statement e (e23_5). The third column of the table refers to the three-code orientation formation mentioned above. The fourth column refers to the six-code orientation formation (see Sect. 2.2). Next, we give for each group defined in the previous step for e23 the percentage of their members that choose each picture. For example, for cell (10, 1538) percentage 46.7% means that 46.7% of the members of group 1538 choose picture 10 [family]. Note that the code 9999 for group membership stands for the students not belonging to any of the groups. The data are sorted according to the percentage of students choosing each picture (last column). Rows 4 and 5 (below, Table 11.2) include all the statements with which each group is accordingly in disagreement (Table 11.2, row 4) and agreement (Table 11.2, row 5). For example, group 1534 is in disagreement with item {8} and group 1549 is in agreement with {2,8}.

  THE PATTERNED ORDERS OF ETHICS 

303

Table 11.1  Contingency matrix for groups of people and code orientations for the E23 question 3c-o

3 15 5 7 12 16 1 17 8 9 14 11 13 18 2 4 6 10

c o e g l p a q h i n k m r b d f j

31 31 31 31 31 31 32 32 32 32 32 33 33 33 33 33 33 33

6c-o

21 21 28 28 28 28 23 23 30 30 30 26 26 26 29 29 29 29

e23_3 e23_15 e23_5 e23_7 e23_12 e23_16 e23_1 e23_17 e23_8 e23_9 e23_14 e23_11 e23_13 e23_18 e23_2 e23_4 e23_6 e23_10

1534

1538

1549

1554

1560

1561

9999

1%

2%

37%

17%

11%

21%

11%

SA

D D D D D D

SA/A A A SD A A

SD

SA

A D

D A

SA/A A A A A A

A

SA

SD SD SD SD SD SD SD

NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA

Hierarchical Cluster Analysis is applied to the matrix with subjects in rows and variables in columns. In the second step, the group membership variable, obtained from the first step for e23, was jointly analyzed with the existing variables for e25 via Multiple Correspondence Analysis on the so-­called Burt table (Greenacre 2007). The Burt table is a symmetric, generalized contingency table, which cross-tabulates all variables against each other. The main MCA output is a set of orthogonal axes or dimensions that summarize the associations between variable categories into a space of lower dimensionality, with the least possible loss of the original information contained in the Burt table. HCA is then applied on the coordinates of variable categories on factorial axes. To determine the number of ­clusters, we use the empirical criterion of change in the ratio of between-­ cluster inertia to total inertia, when moving from a partition with r clusters to a partition with r − 1 clusters. We get six groups:

3 9 8

1

5 12 11 2

10 4 7 6

[Family] [Sensuality] [The Wanderer] [The Passion of the Christ] [Meditation] [Space Exploration] [Protest/Uprising] [The Resurrection of the Christ] [We are Anonymous] [Money] [Militarism] [Anarchist Rioter]

E25 E25 description code

15

N 9 e23 SD/D {8}

1549 36.9%

1554 16.9%

20.0% 20.0% 13.3% 33.3% 12.5%

24.3% 21.4% 20.1% 19.4%

11.1% 46.7% 6.9% 22.2% 20.0% 2.3% 22.2% 0.0% 2.0%

22.2% 6.7%

33.3% 33.3% 22.2% 0.0%

7.1% 4.3% 7.1%

15.7%

22.1% 17.1% 22.9% 19.3%

326 149 {3, 5, 7, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18} e23 A/SA {3} {2, 8} {1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18} 44.4% 46.7% 79.9% 72.1% 55.6% 60.0% 57.9% 59.3% 22.2% 6.7% 33.2% 25.7% 11.1% 26.7% 20.1% 27.1%

1538 1.7%

e23 group 1534 weight (%) 1.0%

12.8% 4.3% 5.3%

14.9%

14.9% 17.0% 20.2% 22.3%

{4, 14, 15, 17} 71.3% 60.6% 23.4% 33.0%

98

1560 11.1%

Table 11.2  Contingency matrix for groups of people for E23 question and E25 pictures

11.3% 2.8% 3.4%

10.2%

26.6% 25.4% 20.9% 15.3%

74.6% 55.4% 29.4% 24.9%

23.9% 20.5% 19.6% 19.0%

75.0% 58.4% 29.4% 24.2%

9.0% 6.4% 3.8%

9.5% 3.9% 3.9%

11.5% 12.7%

29.5% 14.3% 9.0% 20.5%

75.6% 62.8% 33.3% 24.4%

883

9999 11.3% 100%

186 100 {4, 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 18}

1561 21.1%

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  THE PATTERNED ORDERS OF ETHICS 

. Pictures {1, 8, 9} and group 1534 1 2. Picture {3} and group 1538 3. Pictures {4, 10} and groups {1549, 9999} 4. Picture {11} and group 1554 5. Pictures {2, 6} and group 1560 6. Pictures {5, 7, 12} and group 1561 The emerging ethical orders read as follows.

11.1   The Hobbesian Ethics (Nine respondents, 1.1%)

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1

Examples of images similar to those used in the study with group [1534] which comprises the statement: Strongly Disagree: 8. In general, I trust my fellow citizens, irrespective of how well I know them personally. This is a very small group of respondents and thus insignificant as a percentage of our sample. Yet, as we primarily wish to analyze emerging semiotic structures, it is worth looking into it, as it is the group which is characterized or, better, is formed around the mistrust of fellow citizens. The constitutive goods which animate such a social formation (all Expressivist) are the three out of the four items which denote violence and strife; the ‘missing’ picture is the one of Protest/Uprising which is located, both metaphorically and statistically, at the core of the Greek political culture. In other words, mistrust for fellow citizens is directly linked to moral visions that exemplify a violent social life or, as Hobbes would state it, ‘a solitary, brutish and short life’. The interconnection of the above brings together and polarizes civility, Christian religiosity, and the romantic self, vis-à-vis violence, contemplation, and scientific inquiry. What we see here is civil mistrust shaping the meaning of the above items of expressivist morality, in an original way, as 1

 Credit for this image goes to Josephine Pedersen.

  THE PATTERNED ORDERS OF ETHICS 

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suggested by Taylor (1989, 487–490, 504; 1991, 67–69). Mistrust embeds these items in an ‘inevitable framework’ of egoistic solitude with violent overtones. It turns these items into constituent bits of solitary life and suspicious life.

11.2   The Egoistic Ethics (15 respondents, 1.9%)

Example of image similar to those used in the study with group [1538] which comprises the statement: Strongly Agree: 3. When following my personal interests I do not consider the law. This group also constitutes a minuscule percentage of the respondents formed by a single statement: the absolute supremacy of the unlawful material interest. It does not correlate with any other statement which suggests that is a conviction that could stand alone, as a decision, irrespective of other subjects that theoretically could be deeply related to it, such as trust of fellow-citizens and clientelism. It is an ethical stance which rejects civil engagement and civic responsibility altogether.

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11.3   The Schismogenetic Ethno-Populist Ethics (149 respondents, 17%)

Example of image similar to those used in the study with group [1554] which comprises the statements: Strongly Agree: 10. I feel that my life is controlled by sinister power networks. 13. I am ready to fight for what I believe is right, even by breaking the Law. 18. I stick to my beliefs and values, even if this harms my personal interests. Agree:   1. Social justice is more important than individual rights.   4. I experience the world around me mainly with through my feelings rather than through my intellect.   5. I believe that the destiny of each person is predetermined.   6. When the people truly get power, the most important problems would be solved in a mere matter of time.   7. I believe in the miraculous intervention of God in the world.

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11. If I consider something to be right, I will act on that basis, irrespective of its consequences to others. 17. If I had to choose between individual freedoms and social equality, I would choose social equality. This group of respondents is amassed under the symbol of Protest/ Uprising, carrying with it the statements of each and every code orientation we identified in the previous section, except of the statements which constitute the Civil and the Egoistic code orientations. The end result is a very turbulent and passionate ethical order made of fear of strangers and suspicion of conspiracies, chiliastic outbursts and apocalyptic uprisings, mystical defiance, and suppression of individualism. It suggests a defiant and uncompromising ethical stance, vis-a-vis  the orderly worldly realm, fueled by the certainty of absolute truth the individual possesses and operationalizes whenever he/she feels the urgency to do so. The emerged patterned order is a deeply felt conviction and stance toward to the world, devoid of selfish interest as much as peaceful civility. Apparently, It reflects the ‘ethno-populist’ discourse of anarchic individualism which engulfed Greece since the 1990s and turned the country to a battleground of egoistic demands and identity insecurities thinly disguised under a veil of noble intentions and moral imperatives (see Sect. 7.2).

11.4   The Schismogenetic Ethno-Romantic Ethics (326 respondents, 37%)

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Examples of images similar to those used in the study with group [1549] which comprises the statements: Strongly Agree: 2. The interests of the People are more important than institutions and laws. Agree: 8. In general I trust my fellow citizens, irrespective of how well I know them personally. Strongly Disagree:   5. I believe in the miraculous intervention of God in the world.   7. I believe that the destiny of each person is predetermined. 12. Immigrants pose a threat to our national identity.

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14. Physical violence does not belong to political life. 16. Foreigners are jealous and conspire against us. Disagree:   3. When following my personal interests I do not consider the law. 15. The role of politicians is to do favors for their constituency. 18. I stick to my beliefs and values, even if this harms my personal interests. This group’s ethical order is made of items which, most of them, represent ordinary civility: trust, personal responsibility, openness to strangers, lawfulness, uncorrupted politics, and balance between interest and morality. This set of civil attitudes is related to two basic naturalistic constitutive goods, intensifying the overall affirmation of ‘ordinary life’. As such, the ethical order appears as the reverse image of the previous one, of schismogenetic ethno-populism. Yet, while it tends to be civil by embracing a series of appropriate responses, it is not. The two remaining statements about the interests of the People being above the Law, and the acceptance of physical violence in political life, constitute intrusions to the affirmation of ordinary life and function as the affirmation of Protest/Uprising in ordinary life, thus making the ethical order intrinsically schismogenetic. This combination very strongly resembles the patterned order of the constitutive goods Group A, wherein the picture of Protest/Uprising is placed in the midst of the naturalistic constitutive goods. It also corresponds to the basic elements of ethno-romanticism (see Sect. 7.3), the last of Metapolitefsis’ narratives; that is, it corresponds to the constitutive goods and the code orientations of a confident, optimistic, and liberal individual who is a member of a confident and egalitarian brotherhood. But this narrative, as we have pointed out, never challenged the primacy of Protest/Uprising which constituted the core of the Metapolitefsis’ civil religion; it only challenged the primacy of the State in controlling the economy and stifling chances of entrepreneurial activity. The apparent result is a worldview which explicitly associates ordinary-­ civil life with violent demands-protests-Uprising of the people as its equally ordinary components. In other words, this group adheres to a schismogenetic form of ordinary civil life wherein violent protests and demands are ordinary expressions of routine social life. In other words, the two worldviews are the two sides of the same coin: of schismogenetic civil instability.

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11.5   The Clientelistic Ethics (98 respondents, 11%)

2

Examples of images similar to those used in the study with group [1560] which comprises the statements: 2  Credit for this image goes to Dianelos Georgoudis. To see a full copy of the license, go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en. No changes were made to this image. Find the original at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christ_Pantocrator_ mosaic_from_Hagia_Sophia_2744_x_2900_pixels_3.1_MB.jpg.

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Strongly Agree:   4. I experience the world around me mainly with through my feelings rather than through my intellect. 17. If I had to choose between individual freedoms and social equality, I would choose social equality. Agree: 14. Physical violence does not belong in political life. 15. The role of politicians is to do favors to their constituency. In a previous chapter, we related clientelism to amoral familism and the religious distinction between moral habitus and immoral society, a distinction which turns clientelism to a moral exchange since the exchange supports the moral life-world (see Chap. 2, Sect. 2.2, and Chap. 3). This group of people adheres to a distinct ethical order which is characterized by a peaceful and communal ‘traditional’ social setting wherein personal life is experienced emotively rather than rationally.

11.6   The Civil Ethics (186 respondents, 21%)

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Examples of images similar to those used in the study with group [1561] which comprises the statements: Strongly Disagree:  2. The interests of the people are more important than institutions and laws. 10. I feel that my life is controlled by sinister power networks.

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315

Disagree:  4. I experience the world around me mainly through my feelings rather than through my intellect.   6. When the people truly get power, the most important problems would be solved in a mere matter of time. 11. If I consider something to be right, I will act on that basis, irrespective of its consequences to others. 12. Immigrants pose a threat to our national identity. 13. I am ready to fight for what I believe is right, even by breaking the Law. 18. I stick to my beliefs and values, even if this harms my personal interests. This group of people shares an ethical order which is unreservedly civil: Socially sensitive, law-abiding, rational, and able to deal will contingencies without resorting to conspiracy theories or xenophobia. This raises the question: what makes them civil, and what is the inspiration behind it? The answer apparently is to be found at the chosen three expressivist constitutive goods, which represent secular self-actualization, individual worth, and ruling capacity: Meditation (05), the Wanderer (07), and Space Exploration (12). Critically, they are not collective representations but ‘private’ depictions of the self-reflecting self. They are neither religious symbols, nor secular symbols of communitas or the People, but an affirmation of the desire of the individual to ‘be thrown into the world to affirm his/her worth. As such, this ethical order has turned its back on all Greek civil religions, and to all claustrophobic populist-collectivist narratives, embracing instead a humanistic-ecumenical stance of civility.

11.7   Concluding Remarks In all, five out of six ethical orders constitute variations of the hegemonic political culture in Greece. All five of them incorporate, in various combinations of preferences, the major themes we have identified as forming the symbolic outlook of Greek politics: amoral familism and clientelism, schismogenetic mixtures of civility and contention, and anarchic individualism. These ethical orders constitute distinct blends of particular constitutive goods and piecemeal political attitudes whereas the former arranges the later into a relationship of morally meaningful consistency.

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The last ethical order of self-reflective civility constitutes the exception that proves the rule: it is the only one which is not carried by collective representations which we have linked to pathological aspects of the Greek political culture and the only one which embraces foolhardily the civil outlook. A clear indication that public discourses have a direct and visible impact on political behavior, and that if we wish to erase schismogenetic political life, these discourses need to be changed.

Bibliography Greenacre, Michael. 2007. Correspondence Analysis in Practice. Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall/CRC. Kalberg, Stephen. 2004. The Past and Present Influence of World Views – Max Weber on a neglected Sociological Concept. Journal of Classical Sociology 4 (2): 139–163. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1991. The Malaise of Modernity. Concord, Ontario: Anansi.

CHAPTER 12

The Ethics of the Collectivist Self and Conclusions of Part II

Contents

12.1  T  he Primacy of the Collectivist Self 12.2  The Communicating Vessels of Collectivist Social Behavior 12.3  Concluding Remarks

 319  324  327

Anarchic individualism is the most widespread term used to denote the boundless individualism ethnographers have identified as the dominant pattern of social behavior in Greece (Chap. 2), an individualism which is not characterized by strict standards of behavior and thus does not refer to a self-disciplined self. While this is considered to be a standard of social behavior in Greece, another set of studies preoccupied with social sources of the self suggest a shift of reference, from what Harry Triandis (1998) calls allocentric sources of morality such as tradition and community to the individual self (idiocentric). In this part of the analysis, we examine the state of self vis-à-vis allocentric and idiocentric sources of morality and their behavioral effects. For this purpose, we use a set of statements (see below E26) based on Harry Triandis’ measurement of ‘Horizontal and Vertical Individualism and Collectivism’ (Triandis 1985). The set measures the collectivist and individualistic components of someone’s social behavior, that is  patterns of social interaction, and attitudes toward the immediate social environment. It is fortunate that all of Triandis’ studies, and most of the relevant studies

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Marangudakis, The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13589-8_12

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other than Triandis’, have been applied to university students, making our study compatible with them. To this effect, we have included four different types of items which reflect four different types of social behavior: horizontal and vertical individualism, and horizontal and vertical collectivism. In general, horizontal patterns assume that one self is more or less like every other self. By contrast, vertical patterns assume hierarchies and that one self is superior to one other self. The ways in which these relative emphases combine with individualism and collectivism produce four distinct patterns: Horizontal Individualism (HI), Vertical Individualism (VI), Horizontal Collectivism (HC), and Vertical Collectivism (VC) (see table later). More specifically, in Horizontal Individualism, people want to be unique and distinct from groups, are likely to say ‘I often do my own thing’, and are highly self-reliant, but they are not especially interested in becoming distinguished or in having high status. In Vertical Individualism people often want to become distinguished and acquire status, and they do this by competing with others. They are likely to say ‘Competition is the law of nature’ and thus they legitimize their own competitive behavior. In Horizontal Collectivism, people see themselves as being similar to others and emphasize common goals with others, interdependence, and sociability, but they do not wish to submit to authority. Thus, they enter groups voluntarily while they dislike authoritarianism and thus traditional collective groups such as the family or the Church. In Vertical Collectivism people are submissive, emphasize group cohesion and group identity, are willing to sacrifice their own priorities for the sake of in-group goals, and, consequently, they support competitions of their in-groups with out-groups. To Triandis’ questionnaire, two changes were made. First, the number of questions in each pattern has been reduced to three (from four in the original questionnaire) for simplification. Second, one of the three remaining questions in the Vertical Collectivism pattern changed to ‘An individual should sacrifice his/her own interests for the team,’ increasing the number of items not referring to family life and family obligations. Thus the set of questions on social behavior is formed as such: Horizontal Individualism 1. I prefer to rely on myself rather than on others. 5. I often do ‘my own thing’. 9. Being who I am, regardless of what others believe, is very important for me.

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Vertical Individualism   2. It is important for me to perform better than others in my job.   6. Accomplishing my goals means everything to me. 10. Competition is the law of nature. Horizontal Collectivism   3. When a co-worker or friend gets a prize, I feel proud of them.   7. The well-being of my coworkers is important to me. 11. It is very important for me to spend time with my friends. Vertical Collectivism   4. It is my duty to take care of my family, even when I have to sacrifice what I want.   8. It is important for me to accept the decisions of the team that I belong to. 12. An individual should sacrifice his/her own interest in the team. In Table  12.1 and in Fig.  12.1, we present the frequencies of the responses for each statement according to the degree of agreement (in descending order). The majority of the respondents is in agreement with almost all statements.

12.1   The Primacy of the Collectivist Self In this part, we analyze students’ opinion toward social behavior statements. For this analysis of social behavior patterns, because the participating variables (E26a–E26l) were measured on an ordinal scale, ACP (Analyse en Composantes Principals) was used. In Table 12.2 the numerical output from ACP analysis is given. For each axis (first column), the principal inertia (eigenvalue), the total inertia, the percentage of inertia, the cumulative percentage, and histogram are given. In Table 12.3 we present the decomposition among the rows (E26 statements) along the first four axes. [Gi: coordinates for I axis (i = 1, …, ww4),

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Table 12.1  Statements’ responses (%) in descending order E26 code

Wording (H/V & I/C)

11

It is very important for me to spend time with my friends. (HC) Being who I am, regardless of what others believe, is very important for me. (HI) When a co-worker or friend gets a prize, I feel proud for them. (HC) The well-being of my co-workers is important for me. (HC) I prefer to rely on myself rather than on others. (HI) It is my duty to take care of my family, even if I have to put aside my personal desires. (VC) It is important for me to accept the decisions of the team that I belong to. (VC) An individual should sacrifice their own interest for the team. (VC) Accomplishing my goals means everything to me. (VI) It is important for me to perform better than others in my job. (VI) Competition with others is the law of nature. (VI) I often “do my own thing”. (HI)

9

3 7 1 8

12

4 6 2 10 5

Strongly Agree (%)

Agree (%)

Disagree (%)

Strongly Disagree (%)

51.0

45.6

2.7

0.7

45.4

50.9

3.3

0.4

20.9

72.4

6.1

0.6

10.1

82.1

7.5

0.4

41.1

49.8

8.8

0.4

37.6

51.5

10.4

0.5

15.2

63.0

20.3

1.5

10.6

66.4

21.6

1.4

25.3

49.9

23.2

1.5

14.7

59.0

25.1

1.2

11.6

54.7

29.9

3.9

9.8

48.1

38.7

3.5

It is very important for me to spend time with my friends. (HC) Being who I am, regardless of what others believe, is very important for me. (HI) When a co-worker or friend gets a prize, I feel proud for them. (HC) The well-being of my co-workers is important for me. (HC) I prefer to rely on myself rather than on others. (HI) It is my duty to take care of my family, even if I have to put aside my personal desires. (VC) It is important for me to accept the decisions of the team that I belong to. (VC) An individual should sacrifice their own interest for the team. (VC) Accomplishing my goals means everything to me. (VI) It is important for me to perform better than others in my job. (VI) Competition with others is the law of nature. (VI) I often “do my own thing”. (HI) 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Strongly Agree

Agree

Fig. 12.1  The self: collectivist or individualist?

Disagree

Strongly Disagree

Inertia

2.24 1.98 1.06 0.96 0.84 0.83 0.8 0.73 0.7 0.65 0.63 0.52

Axis

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

18.76 16.58 8.88 8.04 7.04 6.95 6.70 6.11 5.86 5.44 5.28 4.36

% Inertia 18.76 35.34 44.22 52.26 59.30 66.25 72.95 79.06 84.92 90.37 95.64 100.00

Cumulative inertia

Table 12.2  Output for ACP analysis for E26 statements

|********************************************** |***************************************** |********************** |******************** |****************** |***************** |***************** |*************** |*************** |************** |************* |***********

| Histogram

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Table 12.3  Table of the factors (axes) on the set of E26 statements E26 1st axis

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

1st axis

2nd axis

2nd axis

#G1 COR CTR

#G2

COR CTR

556 567 286 128 359 668 109 385 605 547 302 129

138 364 −541 −546 432 157 −633 −365 −134 301 −461 −424

310 322 82 16 129 447 12 148 367 299 92 17

1st axis

138 144 37 7 58 199 5 66 164 134 41 8

19 133 292 298 187 25 400 133 18 91 212 179

2nd axis

10 67 147 150 94 12 201 67 9 46 107 90

3rd axis

3rd axis

#G3 −199 284 −317 276 −242 65 −220 −15 −366 354 78 625

3rd axis

4th axis

4th axis

COR CTR

#G4

COR CTR

40 81 100 76 59 4 48 0 134 126 6 391

−102 10 9 0 −206 42 477 228 −31 1 −23 0 −92 8 584 342 80 6 −5 0 −504 253 −267 71

37 76 94 72 55 4 45 0 126 118 6 367

4th axis

11 0 44 237 1 1 9 355 7 0 263 74

COR: correlation of the axis to the point, and CTR: contribution of the point to the formation of the axis]. Looking at the second axis we see a polarization between Individualism (+coordinates) and Collectivism (−coordinates), I =  {1,2,5,6,10}, C  =  {3,4,7,8,9,11,12}, and along the third axis a polarization between Horizontal (−coordinates)/Vertical (+coordinates), H  =  {1,3,5,7,9}, V = {2,4,6,8,10,11,12}. Note that −/+ coordinates have only symbolic meaning. It simply defines that minus coordinates are in the opposite part of the axis from the positive coordinates. According to the CTR coefficients for the second axis, we see that the effect of C statements is stronger than the I statements. Also, we see that along the third axis the effect of H statements is stronger than the effect of V statements. Then, the coordinates of the extracted axes were analyzed through Cluster Analysis. The outcome of the analysis reveals two discourses. Note that each is divided in two, leading to four discourses. The discourses formed are Α = [A1 = {1,9}, A2 = {2, 5, 6, 10}] και Β = [B1 = {3,7,11,12}, and B2 = {4,8}].

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A1:   1. prefer to rely on myself rather than on others (HI).   9. Being who I am, regardless of what others believe, is very important for me (HI). A2:   2. It is important for me to perform better than others in my job (VI).   5. I often ‘do my own thing’ (HI).   6. Accomplishing my goals means everything to me (VI). 10. Competition with others is the law of nature (VI). B1:   3. When a co-worker or friend gets a prize, I feel proud of them (HC).   7. The well-being of my co-workers is important for me (HC). 11. It is very important for me to spend time with my friends (HC). 12. An individual should sacrifice his/her own interest in the team (VC). B2:   4. It is my duty to take care of my family, even when I have to sacrifice what I want (VC).   8. It is important for me to accept the decisions of the team that I belong to (VC). In all, the analysis suggests the following: First that as the ACP analysis suggests (tables above), Collectivism is stronger than Individualism as a general and basic orientation of the moral self of the sample. Second that horizontal ties have priority over the vertical ones. Thus, the result of this analysis suggests that, compared to earlier quantitative findings and ethnological suppositions, at least what the younger cohort of the Greek population retains is collectivist orientation yet it withdraws from traditional hierarchical structures of socialization to horizontal voluntaristic ones: the collectivist self is modernized.

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12.2   The Communicating Vessels of Collectivist Social Behavior How does the social behavior, collectivist or individualist, egalitarian or antagonistic, correlate with the self as a moral entity? Do these binary oppositions, individualism-collectivism, and egalitarianism-antagonism correlate with moral constitutive goods and ethical orders? Does the priority of collectivism over individualism, or the priority of horizontal bonds over vertical ones, have anything to do with these moral patterned orders? To answer these questions we linked the patterned orders of the moral self with the social behavior patterns using as a bridge the constitutive goods groups (E25) that emerged in Part I, since the same patterns participate and shape the patterned orders as ethics. To this purpose, Hierarchical Cluster Analysis was applied to the matrix with subjects in rows and variables (from E26_1 to E26_12) in columns. The result is to get a group membership variable (Gr_e26) with five levels {1645, 1640, 1647, 1641, 1648}. For each level (group) the relative frequency (line 3) is given in Table 12.4. In the second step, the group membership variable, obtained from the first step for E26, was jointly analyzed with the existing variables for E26 via Multiple Correspondence Analysis on the so-called Burt table. HCA is Table 12.4  The corresponding levels for each statement (rows) for the groups (columns) Grouping

e26_1 e26_2 e26_3 e26_4 e26_5 e26_6 e26_7 e26_8 e26_9 e26_10 e26_11 e26_12

Variables

88

94

96

100

101

People

1645

1640

1647

1641

1648

9999

Weight (%)

2%

2%

12%

59%

17%

11%

SA

NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA

HI VI HC VC HI VI HC VC HI VI HC VC

SD SD

D

A

D SD D

A A

D

A

SD SD SD SD SD SD

SA SA SA SA SA SA SA SA SA

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then applied on the coordinates of variable categories on factorial axes. To determine the number of clusters, we use the empirical criterion of the change in the ratio of between-cluster inertia to total inertia, when moving from a partition with r clusters to a partition with r − 1 clusters. We get five groups: {88, 94, 96, 100, 101}, connecting the grouping variable to the statements E26_1–E26_12. For each group, the corresponding levels for each statement are described. For example in cell (E26_1, 1640) value SD means that respondents belonging to group 1640 strongly disagree with the statement E26_1. Next the grouping variable for E26, the grouping variable for E23, and the twelve  statements of E25 are jointly analyzed via MCA and then CAH (see Table  12.5). The analysis reveals five patterns: ({E26_1645}, {E26_1640, E23_1534&E23_1538}, {E26_1647, E23_1561}, {E26_1641, E23_1549&E23_1554}, and {E26_1648, E23_1560}). The analysis is schematically represented in Fig.  12.2. Node 45 (all) is partitioned into node 44 and the group is characterized by no answer. Following the node partitioning we get five aforementioned patterns. Also, in Table 12.5 the connection between the groups of E23 (second row), the groups of E26 (second column), and the groups of E25 is given. Note that in the first line and in the first column the relative weight for E23 groups and the weight for E26 groups are given, respectively. In the last line the corresponding pictures (E25) are given. By writing X in a cell we mean that the responding groups (E26 in the row and E23 in the column) and the responding pictures (last line) are connected to form a pattern. In the case where a group of E26 is connected with two groups of Table 12.5  Interconnections of E23, E26, and E25 Weight

1%

2%

37%

17%

11%

21%

11%

Weight

26\23

1534

1538

1549

1554

1560

1561

9999

2% 2% 12% 59% 19% 7%

1645 1640 1647 1641 1648 9999 E25

X

X X

X

X X {1, 8, 9}

{3}

{4, 10}

{11}

{2, 6}

{5, 7, 12}

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M. MARANGUDAKIS

45

44

E25_1620, E25_1623, E25_1625, E23_1549, E26_1641, E25_1622, E23_1554

E25_9999, E26_9999, E23_9999

43

E25_1609, E23_1538, E23_1534, E26_1640

42

41

E25_1607, E26_1647, E25_1624, E23_1561

e25_1616, E23_1560, E26_1648

E25_1591, E26_1645

Fig. 12.2  Schematic representation of CHA for E25/E23/E26 variables

E23 we notice the primary connection by bold X. For cell (1641, 1549) bold X means that group 1641 for E26, group 1549 for E23, and pictures {4, 10} are closely connected. The findings suggest a very strong correlation between social behavior and groups of constitutive goods. In detail three distinct patterns have emerged. First, Horizontal Collectivism [group E26_1641: respondents who agree to E26 statements 3,7,9, and 11] characterizes the large majority of the sample (close to 60%) and decisively shapes the moral imperatives of two groups, E23_1549 and E23_1554, which derive from the same constitutive goods Group A (The Protesting Affirmation of Ordinary Life) and here are divided over the constitutive good Protest/Uprising. While group 1549 (37% of the sample) aspires to two naturalistic goods, sensuality and family, group 1554 (17%) is inspired by Protest/Uprising. The close proximity of the two groups suggests that the core of political ­culture

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in Greece follows the behavioral patterns of Collectivism and is sensitive to discourses which underline the morality of Family and of Protest. Second, ‘opposing’ this axis of Collectivism stands group E23_1561, which comprises 21% of the sample and belongs to constitutive goods Group C (Secular Self-actualization and Scientific Exploration), and we have already identified as the Civil Ethics group (see Sect. 11.6) of our inquiry of ethical orders  (Chap. 11). Interestingly enough, this group of individuals, through their connection to E26_1647, does not support Individualism, but it disagrees with all three items of Horizontal Collectivism and one item of Horizontal Individualism and strongly disagrees with one Vertical Collectivism item (see Table 12.4). Furthermore, it remains neutral vis-à-­vis the rest. In other words, group 1561, which embraces Group C constitutive goods, knows what they are not, but they do not know what they are. Negation of collectivism is not the same as embracement of individualism—or the self-awareness of it. As Charles Taylor suggests, the inner moral sources of individuality need to be intentionally constructed. In other words, behavior is not identical with awareness of it. The former is a matter of the social division of labor, or the social networks of power, and the latter is a matter of symbolic construction. Third, group E23_1560 (11%), which adheres to the moral imperatives of the Orthodox religion, that is, Group C (Christian Religiosity), strongly agrees with all the Collectivist items, Vertical and Horizontal, as well as two Vertical Individualism and two Horizontal Individualism through their connection to group E26_1648. In other words, those individuals inspired by the Orthodox moral imperatives do not follow any behavioral pattern. It might not be a coincidence; being out-worldly oriented, Greek Orthodox religiosity pays much more attention to mystical visions and humility rather than on tangible ethics. It might as well be the pattern of anarchic individualism: a behavioral pattern of shifting between collectivist and individualist, and between horizontal and vertical lines of communication—most probably at the same time. In any case, as they share strong, affirmative, affinity with Collectivism, they empathize with issues which also attract the determinedly Collectivists of groups 1549 and 1554.

12.3   Concluding Remarks In all, the collectivist social behavior is much stronger, widespread, and visible than latent individualist social behavior. It is also the one which is closer connected with the core constitutive goods of the Confirmation of

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Ordinary Life and of Protest/Uprising. Collectivist social behavior is also clearly linked to the two schismogenetic and the clientelistic ethical orders, thus providing an ‘existential’ basis to these ethical stances. More important, the collectivist ethical orders, while they are compartmentalized by different moral orientations, are compatible. They resemble communicating vessels which could be concentrated in one social action if need be; if and when a protest mobilizes collectivist social dramas, or performances, to promote its demands, quite likely it will sensitize all the collectivist compartments. Such was the case of anarchists who rioted in Athens demanding the restoration of the wages of state employees.1 In contrast, the only group that opposes collectivism, group 1561, does not have a distinctive type of social behavior. Visions of inner growth and accomplishment are, apparently, only visions. A social behavior that is truly individualistic needs distinct moral sources and foundations which in our case are absent.

1  Washington Post, In Greece, austerity kindles deep discontent. May 13, 2011. http:// www.blemilo.com/2011/05/blog-post_9936.html.

PART III

The Formation of the Greek Political Self

On Constructing a Model of the Political Self The Internalization of Political Discourses We have seen thus far how constitutive goods inform code orientations, and how they inform patterned orders of ethical political contact, and patterns of social behavior, by organizing whole sets of symbols into internally coherent sets of complex codes. This methodology has allowed us to examine the centrality or the peripheral role symbols play in structuring, by analogy and metaphor, various discourses seen from a top-down perspective. Yet, this methodology does not inform us of the process by which discourses are constructed at the individual level, before they become part (analytically speaking) of the public discourse and the political arenas. How do individuals orient themselves to a specific path of signs and meaning to construct their moral self, rather than another? What is a person’s guidance to building up complex symbolic codes? When an apparently cohesive and homogeneous set of codes are available and in use—let us say of describing the civil, liberal, society—does it mean that all members of this society share the political culture in identical ways? If not, are there limits in the orientations they could potentially follow, or is there a limitless number of alternative paths?

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This part of the study examines this process, the process by which actual individuals construct their personal symbolic universe from elementary combinations of binary oppositions to complex discourses of the good and of the evil political society. Our methodology is inspired by Alexander and Smith’s (1993) discursive analysis of American civil-democratic political narratives, an analysis which we have elaborated and turned into a quantitative comparative model to examine the Greek political culture. It is conceptualized so as to capture the full process of building up a symbolic order of a democratic society, in a bottom-up way: from the elementary to the complex and from the immediate to the societal and the institutional. It allows us to examine the phenomenological process by which individuals, by analogy and homology, construct symbolic representations of (a) themselves as ‘democratic citizens’ (b) ‘democratic relations’, and (c) ‘democratic institutions’. We take Alexander and Smith’s description of ‘civil, democratic, society’ as one of the two poles of our comparison and call it the ‘civil-liberal’ democratic model. According to their own definition, the ‘civil, democratic, society’ is characterized: [B]y the distinction between the state and an independent, legally-regulated civil order. Because we conceive the goal of civil society to be the moral regulation of social life, it is a concept that lends itself particularly well to our project per se. …it certainly has institutions of its own—parliaments, courts, voluntary associations and the media—through which this regulation is administered. These institutions provide the forum in which crises and problems are resolved. Their decisions are not only binding but also exemplary. Most important from our perspective, however, is the fact that the institutions of civil society, and their decisions, are informed by a unique set of cultural codes. (Alexander and Smith 1993, 161)

We contrast this civil-liberal ideal-typical democracy with populism-­ collectivism by which we refer to notions of mass democracy that stresses resemblance rather than distinction, un-differentiation rather than differentiation, communitas rather than individualism, similarity of emotions (homothymia) rather than compatibility of intellect (homonoia), and ethical self-determination rather than ethical regulation. As such, the populist-­ collectivist ideal-type we have constructed is the inverted image of the civil-liberal model. Yet, it remains ‘democratic’, in the Toquevilllian or Comtian sense, as it reflects symbolic representations of volonté générale in

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its most egalitarian form. In its three aspects, the personal, the social, and the institutional, the populist-collectivist model reflects the hegemonic political discourses in Greece as they are crystalized in Metapolitefsis’ various cultural narratives and social structures we have analyzed in Part I of our study, as well as the dominant collectivist behavior of our sample we have identified in Part II. Following Alexander and Smith’s model, and using the sets of binary codes constructed by them to represent the American civil society, we constructed equivalent sets of elementary binary codes which represent the populist-collectivist counterparts and asked the respondents to choose three items per set as representing their convictions. We then examined the structures of their responses and the way they attached themselves to visions of the democratic society, thus making democracy morally meaningful in particular ways. In a sense, our analysis brings forward what individuals really mean when they speak about ‘democracy’. The entire methodology is based on the phenomenological assumption that elementary codes are comprehended differently by different individuals, and thus a series of distinct symbolic representations of (a) the democratic self, (b) the democratic relations, and (c) of democratic institutions will be constructed and exposed. We use this methodology for one more reason. That this ‘exposure’ of cognitive processes will allow us to construct what Eisenstadt has called ‘semantic map’ (1995, 281, 298), that is, a visual representation of the moral contours of a given social configuration—in this case of Greece. The analysis addresses questions we consider crucial in understanding the ways our sample processes moral codification and orientation: how does differentiation of opinions and beliefs take place if we take for granted the presence of a cohesive and internally homogeneous ‘systemic’ set of codes which describe and symbolize a given body politic? What kinds of organizational paths a political discourse affords? Are there pre-political general moral orientations, or does a set of ‘political’ codes determine the emergence and the orientation of the moral self? Last, since analogy and homology are subjective, individuals should combine elementary codes in idiosyncratic ways and construct complex discourses of different political orientations; which are these political orientations, and what do they tell us about the self? In our case, we have made the matter a little more complex, and perhaps a little more intriguing. We have exposed our culturally homogeneous sample (our rather collectivist Greek sample) to two very different sets of political codes, describing two quite different political societies.

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What kinds of meaning will be produced in such a situation? Do political patterns absorb the given cultural individual, or is there a definite cultural orientation which will ignore the potential political patterns? If political patterns do indeed incorporate the cultural individual in their own inner logic, then patterns of both the populist-collectivist and the civil-liberal political visions should emerge; if not, then there should be meaningful patterns emerging out of only one set of political codes but not the other, since the other, the culturally foreign, would not be meaningful enough to develop a definite organizational and moral orientation. This is the subject matter of this, last, part of our inquiry into the Greek political culture. Data and Method The following part of the study consists of three separate analyses which are brought together in a fourth stage to construct the semantic map of political culture in Greece today. We start with the analysis of the ‘democratic self’. Data analysis was based on Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) and Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) in two steps (Chadjipadelis 2015). In the first step, HCA was used to assign subjects to distinct groups according to their response patterns. The main output of HCA was a group or cluster membership variable, which reflects the partitioning of the subjects into groups. Furthermore, for each group, the contribution of each question (variable) to the group formation was investigated, in order to reveal a typology of behavioral patterns. In the second step, the group membership variable, obtained from the first step, was jointly analyzed with the existing variables via Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) on the so-called Burt table (Greenacre 2007). The Burt table is a symmetric, generalized contingency table, which cross-tabulates all variables against each other. The main MCA output is a set of orthogonal axes or dimensions that summarize the associations between variable categories into a space of lower dimensionality, with the least possible loss of the original information contained in the Burt table. HCA is then applied on the coordinates of variable categories on the factorial axes. Note that this is now a clustering of the variables (the categories of the variables) instead of the subjects. The groups of variable categories can reveal complex discourses. Bringing the two analyses together, behavioral patterns and complex discourses are used to construct a semantic map for the variables and the subjects.

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Using CAH we get a grouping variable for each set of variables [Ε16Α, Ε17], [Ε16Β, Ε17], [Ε18Α, Ε19], [Ε18Β, Ε19]. Next, we jointly analyze the grouping variables for the set of variables {[Ε16A, E17], [Ε16Β, Ε17], and E17} by Multidimensional Correspondence Analysis. The same analysis was used and for the grouping variables for the set {[Ε18Α, E19], [Ε18Β, Ε19], and E19}. Finally, an index variable was computed from the data of variables Ε20. The index variable was recoded into three categories and jointly analyzed with the grouping variables for E16A, E16B, E18A, E18B via Multidimensional Correspondence Analysis and consequently by Cluster Analysis. Following this methodology, we can detect ways the individual perceives itself and the public sphere in moral terms, that is, in terms of good and evil and just and the unjust. We argue that the political sphere, and to a large extent the public sphere, is to be explained not in terms of ideological preferences, but primarily as a culture that is prior to ideology and affects the ways ideological and political programs are perceived and implemented.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Phillip Smith. 1993. The Discourse of American Civil Society: A New Proposal for Cultural Studies. Theory and Society 22: 151–207. Chadjipadelis, Theodore. 2015. Parties, Candidates, Issues: The Effect of Crisis. Correspondence Analysis and Related Methods. CARME 2015. Napoli, Italy. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 1995. Power, Trust, and Meaning: Essays in Sociological Theory and Analysis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Greenacre, Michael. 2007. Correspondence Analysis in Practice. Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall/CRC.

CHAPTER 13

Analysis of the ‘Democratic Self’

Contents

13.1  A  nalysis of the ‘Populist-Collectivist Democratic Self’ 13.1.1  Discourse Clusters and Groups of Respondents 13.1.2  Internal Constellations and Juxtapositions 13.2  Analysis of the ‘Civil-Liberal Democratic Self’ 13.2.1  Discourse Clusters and Groups of Respondents 13.2.2  Internal Constellations and Juxtapositions Bibliography

 336  336  342  351  353  357  366

This chapter analyzes the elements that comprise the democratic identity of an individual as constitutive parts of a comprehensive discourse. In other words, it examines the moral components of a democratic self by asking the sample to identify the constitutive elements of a democratic and an anti-democratic person. In Table 13.1, we present the two questions (E16 and E17) used in the questionnaire for the analysis. According to our framework ‘SET A’ statements represent populist-collectivist ideals while the statements in ‘SET B’ represent civil-liberal ideals. These ideals are depicted as binary oppositions of good and evil following the structuralist analysis of Alexander and Smith (1993) as it has been explained previously.

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Marangudakis, The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13589-8_13

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Table 13.1  Questions E16 (E16A: SET A, E16B: SET B) and E17 E16. Which of the following describes you better as a democratic citizen? Choose three pairs from SET A and three pairs from SET B SET A

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

SET B

DEMOCRATIC

– ANTIDEMOCRATIC

Unconventional Defiant Authentic Altruist Oppressed Victim Sensitive Independent

– – – – – – – –

Conventional Compromised Hypocrite Egoist Oppressor Offender Calculative Depended

DEMOCRATIC – ANTIDEMOCRATIC 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Active Autonomous Rational Reasonable Controlled Calm Realistic Sane

– – – – – – – –

Passive Dependent Irrational Hysterical Excitable Passionate Unrealistic Mad

E17. Which group do you think describes you better as a democratic citizen? 1. SET A

2. SET B

3. NO DIFFERENCE

13.1   Analysis of the ‘Populist-Collectivist Democratic Self’ In Table 13.2, for every level of E17 (column), we give the percentage (%) of respondents selecting the corresponding binary opposition statement (row). In the last column, the percentage (%) for the total sample is given. Also, the last row refers to the percentage (%) of the sample for the values of E17. For example, the entry 43.5% in cell (iii., A) means that 43.5% of the respondents who choose A for question E17 (25.0% of the total ­sample) choose also statement iii. The table refers to the eight statements for E16A (SET A). The three top selections for each level of E17 and for total are marked in bold. Figure 13.1 presents the bar chart for E16 items (i–viii) and the total sample according to the three levels of E17. 13.1.1   Discourse Clusters and Groups of Respondents Hierarchical Cluster Analysis is applied to the matrix with subjects in rows and variables in columns. This matrix is transformed into a 0-1 matrix, where each variable is replaced by a set of 0-1 variables, one for each variable category, taking value 1 if the corresponding category has been

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Table 13.2  Frequency distribution table for E16 items (i.–viii.) and the total sample according to the three levels of E17 and total sample E16A [SET A]

E17

DEMOCRATIC – ANTIDEMOCRATIC i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii. Total

Unconventional Defiant Authentic Altruist Oppressed Victim Sensitive Independent

– – – – – – – –

Conventional Compromised Hypocrite Egoist Oppressor Offender Calculative Dependent

Total

Α

Β

C

30.6% 41.2% 43.5% 42.6% 26.9% 16.7% 27.3% 58.8% 25.0%

26.5% 32.5% 46.1% 51.6% 17.4% 11.7% 30.3% 63.2% 48.6%

26.3% 28.5% 51.3% 42.5% 25.4% 15.8% 29.8% 63.2% 26.4%

27.5% 33.6% 46.8% 46.9% 21.9% 14.0% 29.4% 62.1% N = 863

Binary opposition statements E16A TOTAL Independent-Dependent Sensitive-Calculative Victim-Offender Oppressed-Oppressor Altruist-Egoist Authentic-Hypocrite Defiant-Compromised Unconventional-Conventional 0%

10%

20%

C

B

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

A

Fig. 13.1  Bar chart for E16 items (i.–viii.) and the total sample according to the three levels of E17

observed and 0 otherwise. To determine the number of clusters, we use the empirical criterion of the change in the ratio of between-cluster inertia to total inertia, when moving from a partition with r clusters to a partition with r − 1 clusters (Papadimitriou and Florou 1996). In Fig. 13.2, the hierarchy is schematically represented. From the total sample (883 respondents) we exclude the incomplete answers (i.e., respondents who don’t choose exactly three statements: percent 7.25% of total).

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1637/819

1624 [16GA1]/121

1636/698

1634/354

1635/344

1629 [16GA2]/136

1631 [16GA3]/168

1633 [16GA5]/218

1632 [16GA4]/176

Fig. 13.2  Schematic representation of the hierarchy

Finally, the data for 819 were analyzed. In italics we give the number of respondents belonging to each group (the groups are written in bold). Next, we calculate cluster weights, that is, the percentage of subjects that belong to each cluster, and investigate the variables that characterize each cluster via a series of chi-square tests with a significance level of 5%. For each variable representing a statement the last digit in the notation means choosing (last digit: 1) or not choosing (last digit: 0) it, respectively. The analysis for eight statements (from variables e16a1 to e16a8) and variable E17 reveals five groups of respondents [1629, 1633, 1631, 1632, 1624] and their connection to each statement and each level of E17. For each group, the relative frequency (line 3) is given in Table 13.3. Also for each group, the corresponding levels for each level of the variables (statements and E17) are noted. By marking a cell with X we noted that there is a significant contribution of the variable (row) to the formation of the group (column). For example, in cell (e16a11, 1629), X means that the

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Table 13.3  Contingency matrix for groups of people (columns) and discourses for E16 and E17 questions (rows) NODE

1629

1633

1631

1632

1624

GROUP

16GA2

16GA5

16GA3

16GA4

16GA1

Weight

16.61%

26.62%

20.51%

21.49%

14.77%

X

X

X

X

X

e16a10 e16a11 e16a20 e16a21 e16a30 e16a31 e16a40 e16a41 e16a50 e16a51 e16a60 e16a61 e16a70 e16a71 e16a80 e16a81 e171 e172 e173

X X

X X

X X

X X

X

X X

X X

X

X

X

X X

X X

X

X

X

X

X

X X

X X

X

X

X X

X X

X

percentage of respondents that belong to group 1629 and select e16a1 is statistically significantly different than the percentage of the respondents not belonging to group 1629 and selecting e16a1. Five groups of people and five types of ‘democratic self’ in the form of discourses emerge out of our analysis connected amongst them by ‘discoursive sellective affinities’. In Table 13.4 and in Fig. 13.3, we summarize the results, while in Fig. 13.4 we represent the five types schematically. If we represent each group as a set with elements of the binary statements that contribute to its formation, a schematic representation gives the intersection of each group of the groups, 16GA1:16GA5, with each other based on the binary opposition statements that contribute to the formation of the group. The intersection of two sets 16GAi and 16GAj is the set of all objects that are members of both 16GAi and 16GAj (i, j = 1, …, 5, i ≠ j).

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Table 13.4  Weight (%) for the five types of populist-collectivist democratic self (E16A Grouping variable), E16A items, and E17 levels connected to each type E16A

Type

(Items)

(E17)

v, vi i, viii iii, iv, vii ii, iii, iv, viii i, ii, v

A B B A

Weight (%)

E16A Gr Variable

“The sufferer” “The anti-conformist” “The altruist” “The hero” “The rebellious”

14.7% 16.6% 20.5% 21.5% 26.6%

16GA1 16GA2 16GA3 16GA4 16GA5

{16GA1,A} 14,7% VicmOffender

{16GA5, A} 26,6% OppressedOppressor

{16GA2} 16,6%

{16GA3, B} 20,5%

Unconvenonal Convenonal

SensiveCold calculator

Defiant Compromised Independent Dependent

AuthencHypocrite

Altruist-Egoist

{16GA4, B} 21,5%

Fig. 13.3  Schematic representation of the five types of democratic self (intersections)

Type GA5, the type of the highest weight, comprises three elements that constitute the archetype of the Rebellious self: An ‘oppressed’ individual who is nevertheless ‘defiant’ but does not belong necessarily to a collectivity thus defines him/herself as ‘unconventional’. The individual perceives him/herself as a ‘lone ranger’ who struggles against oppressive forces with no suggestion as to whether he/she accepts the priority of the community over personal morality. The placing of such an outlook in SET  A allows us to assume that this type of a democrat envisions the democratic condition as of perpetual struggle against personal oppression.

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16GA1 (14.7%)

16GA2 (16.6%)

16GA3 (20.5%)

“Sufferer” v. Oppressed-oppressor vi. Victim-Offender A

“Anti-conformist” i. Unconventional-conventional viii. Independent-dependent

“Altruist” iii. Authentic-Hypocrite iv. Altruist-Egoist vii. Sensitive-Calculative B

16GA4 (21.5%)

16GA5 (26.6%)

“Hero” i. Unconventional-Conventional iii. Authentic-Hypocrite iv. Altruist-Egoist viii. Independent-Dependent B

“Revolutionary” v. Oppressed-Oppressor ii. Defiant-Compromised i. Unconventional-Conventional A

Fig. 13.4  Schematic representation of the five types of democratic self

The second most frequent type of democratic self is the GA4 which stands as the backbone of the constellation of democratic self which emerges out of our analysis. This self comes close to constitute the collectivist version of the previous ‘revolutionary’ self, the Hero. It is ‘defiant’ but it is also ‘altruistic’ (a sacrificial dimension), thus introducing the community as a reference point of identity. It rejects ‘dependency’ and embraces the ‘authentic’ that could be understood as either obeying an individualistic inner voice or following a communally inspired conviction. The fact that this democratic self is affiliated with SET B since he/she chooses this as the most representative of the democratic self allows us to suggest that he/she perceives the public sphere more as a civil community rather than a civic communitas. Next in weight is the GA3 type which perceives the democratic self to be an Altruist. In this constellation of items the collective self is vivid in both the items that are ‘sensitive’ and ‘altruist’. ‘Authenticity’ situates the collective-oriented self in a framework of inner conviction that could be interpreted as a condition contusive to a communitas. Yet, the fact that this self is also affiliated with SET B allows us to assume that this self situates itself not in a communitas but in the framework of a civil community. GA2 brings together two closely related items, ‘unconventional’ and ‘independent’, thus we name it Anti-conformist. The fact that this self rejects both civil-liberal (SET B) and populist-collectivist (SET A) ideals reinforces the assumption that this self refuses to see democracy as any

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kind of communal or social arrangement. This democratic type is anti-­ conformist being loyal only to his/her inner voice. Last, GA1, the least weight type, still represents almost 15% of the sample. It comprises two items, ‘victim-offender’ and ‘oppressed-­ oppressor’ as the core features of a democratic self, which is seen as a Sufferer. The fact that this representation is situated in the SET A framework allows us to suggest that they constitute the passive aspect of a populist-collectivist discourse which has been molded by cultural trauma. They follow one of the major discourses, both of the Metapoliteusis period and of the ongoing crisis, that the democratic self is a sufferer of injustice. Yet, the isolation of the Sufferer from pro-active (e.g., ‘defiant’) or collective-­oriented (e.g., ‘altruist’) items suggests both passivity and atomism. This is an isolated self that refuses to reveal its pro-active side, that is, what needs to be done to escape or alleviate suffering. For this to be revealed we need to wait until we examine this group vis-à-vis democratic and undemocratic institutions, the third part of this comparative study. In all, we observe that populism-collectivism (preference for SET A) attracts the most and the least popular visions of the democratic self, the Rebellious and the Sufferer, which are locked in a dialectic interaction: In the core of this dialecticism we find the oppressed individual who, having identified this condition, either accepts it in an almost Christian understanding of suffering as normality or tries to eradicate it in a perpetual struggle for freedom. This is a tension of significant importance as further analysis reveals (see later). On the other hand, the Hero and the Altruist situate themselves in the civil-liberal framework (preference for SET B), having in common two, seemingly, divergent items: ‘authentic’, which denotes an inner voice, and ‘altruist’, which denotes readiness to sacrifice personal interest for the benefit of a third party. Yet, it is this combination that holds together the rest of the items (‘sensitive’, ‘defiant’, and ‘independent’) that comprise this set of democratic types that are oriented toward a civil-liberal understanding of democracy. And it is interesting that items that express strong feelings situate themselves in SET B.  Yet, as we see below, the items that comprise these two types co-exist in a condition of inner tension. 13.1.2  Internal Constellations and Juxtapositions In the following two contingency tables (and in the two figures, respectively) of variables (rows) and groups (columns), the row percentage (Table 13.5, Fig. 13.5) and the column percentage (Table 13.6, Fig. 13.6)

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Table 13.5  Contingency table of variables and total sample (rows) and groups (columns) [row percentage %] 16GA1/1624 e16a1 e16a2 e16a3 e16a4 e16a5 e16a6 e16a7 e16a8 e171 e172 e173 Total

7.5% 6.1% 9.8% 9.0% 26.8% 100.0% 7.1% 11.1% 17.4% 12.6% 16.2% 14.8%

total e173 e172 e171 e16a8 e16a7 e16a6 e16a5 e16a4 e16a3 e16a2 e16a1 0%

10%

16GA1/1624

20%

16GA2/1629

16GA3/1631

16GA4/1632

16GA5/1633

56.9% 16.3% 10.1% 9.0% 0.0% 0.0% 7.8% 23.3% 15.0% 17.4% 16.7% 16.6%

0.0% 7.1% 23.1% 27.6% 0.0% 0.0% 65.9% 20.0% 17.9% 22.3% 19.8% 20.5%

0.0% 32.7% 30.5% 32.2% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 32.5% 14.0% 25.6% 21.2% 21.5%

35.6% 37.8% 26.5% 22.2% 73.2% 0.0% 19.2% 13.1% 35.7% 22.1% 26.1% 26.6%

30%

16GA2/1629

40%

50%

60%

16GA3/1631

70%

80%

16GA4/1632

90%

100%

16GA5/1633

Fig. 13.5  Variable by Group [row percentage (%)]

are given. Percentage 56.9% for cell (e16a1, 1629) in Table 13.5 means that percentage 56.9% of the respondents selecting e16a1 belongs to group 1629. In the last row of the table, the profile of the sample (the relative frequency of the groups) is given. Percentage 100% for cell (e16a1, 1629) in Table  13.6 means that percentage 100% of the respondents belonging to group 1629 selects e16a1. In the column of the table the percentage (%) of the sample that selects each statement is given.

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Table 13.6  Contingency table of variables (rows) and groups and total sample (columns) [column percentage %] 16GA1/1624 16GA2/1629 16GA3/1631 16GA4/1632 16GA5/1633 Total e16a1 e16a2 e16a3 e16a4 e16a5 e16a6 e16a7 e16a8 e171 e172 e173

14.9% 14.9% 33.1% 30.6% 42.1% 100.0% 14.9% 49.6% 29.8% 40.5% 29.8%

100.0% 35.3% 30.1% 27.2% 0.0% 0.0% 14.7% 92.6% 22.8% 50.0% 27.2%

0.0% 12.5% 56.0% 67.3% 0.0% 0.0% 100.0% 64.3% 22.0% 51.8% 26.2%

0.0% 54.5% 70.5% 75.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 100.0% 16.5% 56.8% 26.7%

39.0% 50.9% 49.5% 41.7% 63.8% 0.0% 22.5% 32.6% 33.9% 39.4% 26.6%

29.2% 35.9% 49.7% 50.1% 23.2% 14.8% 31.1% 66.1% 25.3% 47.6% 27.1%

e173 e172 e171 e16a8 e16a7 e16a6 e16a5 e16a4 e16a3 e16a2 e16a1 0.0% Total

10.0% 20.0% 30.0% 40.0% 50.0% 60.0% 70.0% 80.0% 90.0% 100.0% 16GA5/1633

16GA4/1632

16GA3/1631

16GA2/1629

16GA1/1624

Fig. 13.6  Variable by Group [column percentage (%)]

In the preceding step, Hierarchical Cluster Analysis is applied to the matrix with subjects in rows and variables in columns. In the second step, the group membership variable, obtained from the first step for E16A, was jointly analyzed with the existing variables for E16A via Multiple Correspondence Analysis on the so-called Burt table (Greenacre, 2017). The Burt table is a symmetric, generalized contingency table, which cross-­ tabulates all variables against each other. The main MCA output is a set of orthogonal axes or dimensions that summarize the associations between

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345

variable categories into a space of lower dimensionality with the least possible loss of the original information contained in the Burt table. The numerical output from AFC analysis is provided. First the principal inertias (eigenvalues), total inertia, the percentages of inertia, cumulative percentages, and histogram are provided; then the decomposition among the rows (E16A statements, E17, grouping variable for E16A) along the first four axes is provided. Gi: coordinates for i axis (i = 1, …, 4), COR: correlation of the axis to the point, and CTR: contribution of the point to the formation of the axis. Recall that COR stands for the correlation coefficient that measures the statistical relationship, or association, between two variables. In Table 13.7, COR is the squared correlation coefficient between row variable and axis. Note that it is expressed as a number from 0 to 1000 instead as a number from 0 to 1. It signifies the contribution of the axis to the variable. According to Benzécri (1980), for COR > 200, the contribution of the axis to the variable is significant. On the other hand, CTR signifies the contribution of the variable to the inertia of the axis. Accordingly, if for a variable CTR is greater than 1000 divided by the number of variables +1 [CTR > (1000/(#variables + 1))], there is a significant contribution of the variable to the axis. In Table  13.8, we present the decomposition among the rows along the first four axes [Gi: coordinates for I axis (i = 1, …, 4), COR: Table 13.7  Output for AFC analysis for E16A statements, variable E17, and E16A grouping variable Total Inertia 0.22534 Axis

Inertia

Cumulative | Histogram

% Inertia

1

0.0578304 25.66

25.66

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

0.0504903 22.41 0.0340733 15.12 0.0285259 12.66 0.0146697 6.51 0.0118046 5.24 0.0098086 4.35 0.0087180 3.87 0.0074093 3.29 0.0008410 0.37 0.0006599 0.29 0.0003305 0.15

48.07 63.19 75.85 82.36 87.60 91.95 95.82 99.11 99.48 99.77 99.92

|************************************ ***** |*********************************** |************************ |******************** |*********** |********* |******* |******* |****** |* |* |*

COR

81 81 11 11 141 141 295 295 547 547 555 555 231 231 111 111 79 92 4 555 0 448 214 153

#F1

−78 187 −30 53 134 −137 202 −203 −168 554 −145 835 138 −307 181 −94 157 −104 35 835 10 −575 −363 265

IND

e16a10 e16a11 e16a20 e16a21 e16a30 e16a31 e16a40 e16a41 e16a50 e16a51 e16a60 e16a61 e16a70 e16a71 e16a80 e16a81 e171 e172 e173 16GA1 16GA2 16GA3 16GA4 16GA5

8 18 1 2 16 16 36 36 38 123 31 178 22 50 19 10 10 9 1 178 1 117 48 32

CTR 198 −482 160 −287 −72 72 −116 115 −45 145 −89 512 −184 404 253 −131 −18 −10 33 512 −715 505 −196 −71

#F2 531 531 332 332 40 40 95 95 37 37 209 209 403 403 218 218 0 0 4 209 584 347 62 10

COR 56 133 33 59 6 6 13 13 3 10 13 76 45 101 43 22 1 1 1 76 167 103 16 3

CTR 79 −194 21 −39 −38 38 −30 29 88 −294 −85 488 118 −262 −335 172 −119 51 20 488 −20 −180 482 −511

#F3 85 85 5 5 11 11 6 6 153 153 189 189 168 168 380 380 45 22 1 189 0 43 380 566

COR 14 32 1 2 3 3 2 2 17 58 17 103 28 62 111 57 10 4 1 103 1 19 147 203

CTR 130 −318 −127 226 −85 85 −83 82 −73 239 35 −207 107 −238 68 −36 39 −14 −14 −207 −580 −272 441 329

#F4 231 231 208 208 55 55 48 48 102 102 34 34 138 138 16 16 5 1 0 34 384 100 317 235

COR

43 103 37 65 13 13 12 11 14 46 4 22 27 61 6 3 2 1 1 22 195 52 146 101

CTR

Table 13.8  Table of the factors (axes) on the set of E16A statements, variable E17, and E16A grouping variable

346  M. MARANGUDAKIS

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347

correlation of the axis to the point, CTR: contribution of the point to the formation of the axis]. HCA is then applied on the coordinates of variable categories on the factorial axes. To determine the number of clusters, we use the empirical criterion of change in the ratio of between-cluster inertia to total inertia, when moving from a partition with r clusters to a partition with r  −  1 clusters. In Fig. 13.7, the hierarchy is represented. The symbol ~ stands for not selecting the respecting statement. For example, node 38 connects GA5, selecting statement 5 [Oppressed-Oppressor] and not selecting statement 8 [Independent-Dependent]. The outcome of the analysis, presented in Table  13.9, reveals three classes [discourses] (44, 45, 25). Note that class 44 is divided into two (42, 26) and class 45 in two (43, 38). Also for each class, the corresponding levels for each level of the variables (statements, E17, and grouping variable for E16A) are noted. By marking the value X in a cell we noted that there is a significant contribution of the variable (row) to the formation of the class (column). For example, in cell (e16a11, 43) X means that the percentage of respondents that are affected by class (abstract discourse)

47 44

42/{16GA4, E16A3, E16A4, E16A8, ~E16A1, ~E16A2, ~E16A5, ~E16A6, E17B, E17C}

26/{16GA3, E16A7}

46

45

25/{16GA1, E16A6}

38/{16GA5, E16A5, ~E16A8} 43/{16GA2, E16A1, E16A2, ~E16A3, ~E16A4, ~E16A7, E17A}

Fig. 13.7  Schematic representation of the hierarchy

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M. MARANGUDAKIS

Table 13.9  Contingency table of E16A, E17, and E16A grouping variable and extracted discourses 44

44

45

45

25

IND

42

26

43

38

25

e16a10 e16a11 e16a20 e16a21 e16a30 e16a31 e16a40 e16a41 e16a50 e16a51 e16a60 e16a61 e16a70 e16a71 e16a80 e16a81 e171 e172 e173 16GA1 16GA2 16GA3 16GA4 16GA5

X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X

43 and those who select e16a1 is statistically significantly different than the percentage of the respondents not affected by 43 and select e16a1. If we rewrite the preceding table as a contingency table of the grouping variable extracted in phase one (columns) and E16A, E17 variables, we get Table 13.10. In the fifth row the relative frequency (weight) of each group is given. In cell (i,j), value X means that the i-th group (column) is connected to the j-th variable (row). To conclude with our analysis we bring together the respondents grouping (see Table 13.3 and Fig. 13.2) and the abstract discourse grouping (see Table 13.9 and Fig. 13.7). From Fig. 13.2, we see that node 1637 is divided into node 1624 and node 1636 revealing the antithesis of GA1

E16A – – – – – – – – –

DEMOCRATIC Unconventional Defiant Authentic Altruist Oppressed Victim Sensitive Independent

Ε17 “Populist-collectivist” “Civil-liberal” “No difference”

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Α Β C

ANTI-DEMOCRATIC Conventional Compromised Hypocrite Egoist Oppressor Offender Calculative Dependent

SEE [TABLE 13.4]

(RESPONDENTS)

GROUPS 16GAi Weight

SEE [TABLE 13.9]

(VARIABLES)

GROUPS

Χ

Χ Χ

45 43 1629 16GA2 16.6%

Χ

45 38 1633 16GA5 26.6%

Χ

44 26 1631 16GA3 20.5%

Table 13.10  Contingency table of E16A, E17 (rows), and E16A grouping variable and discourses

Χ Χ

Χ

Χ Χ

44 42 1632 16GA4 21.5%

Χ

25 25 1624 16GA1 14.8%

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350 

M. MARANGUDAKIS

to the other four groups. Furthermore node 1636 is divided into node 1634 [GA2 & GA5] and node 1635 [GA3 & GA4]. In Table 13.3, the binary statements connected to each group are given. For example, the fact that GA1 is connected to statements 5 and 6 means that GA1 consists of people choosing statements 5 and 6. On the other hand from Fig. 13.7 we see that node 47 is divided into nodes 44 and 46. Node 46 is further divided into nodes 25 and 45. Node 25 defines an abstract discourse that is demarcated exclusively by statement 6 and affects mainly GA1. Placing these five types of democratic self (i.e., GA1–GA5) in a relational framework of abstract attitudes (in bold) rather than of individuals, as we did beforehand, plus their preferred SETS (A, or B, or C), we can detect their juxtapositions (see Fig. 13.8). The analysis shows that the eight democratic items of SET A, the five democratic types which we use as a single item for the demands of the {16GA1, A} Sufferer Victim-Offender Oppressed-oppressor vi. Victim (Diffused Pattern)

“Individualist”

“Collectivist”

{16GA2} Anti-conformist Unconventional-conventional Independent-dependent {16GA5, A} Rebellious Oppressed-oppressor Defiant-compromised Unconventional-conventional

{16GA4, B} Hero Unconventional-Conventional Independent-Dependent Authentic-Hypocrite Altruist-Egoist {16GA3, Β} Altruist Sensitive-Cold calculator Authentic-Hypocrite Altruist-Egoist

i. Unconventional-conventional ii. Defiant-compromised v. Oppressed-oppressor Α

Fig. 13.8  16A Greece

iii. Authentic-Hypocrite iv. Altruist-Egoist vii. Sensitive-Cold calculator viii. Independent-Dependent B, C

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analysis, and the three SET preferences (A, B, or C) are structured into three juxtaposed groups, allowing us to detect internal tensions inside the discourse of SET A, that is, the populist-collectivist discourse. Thus we can identify three poles: The ‘Collectivist’, the ‘Atomist’, and the ‘Sufferer’. The Collectivist pole is shaped around the two socially oriented selves ‘hero’ and ‘altruist’, preference for SETS B and C, and the items ‘authentic’, ‘altruist’, ‘sensitive’, and ‘independent’, that, due to this connection, are comprehended by our sample as also belonging to the social self. In other words, our analysis reveals an eclectic affinity between these individual items and the overall depiction of civil society. In this case, then, civil society is seen as made of independent, active, and integral individuals who are devoted to the well-being of the community. The Atomist pole is made of the two individually oriented selves ‘anti-­conformist’ and ‘rebellious’, preference for SET A, as well as the items ‘unconventional’, ‘defiant’, and ‘oppressed’ which, due to this connection, are comprehended by our sample as belonging to the individual-­oriented self which is eclectically attached to the communitas framework. Paradoxically, then, individualism is not attached to visions of civil society, but to the undifferentiated and emotive collectivity, a situation which resembles the Toquevillian analysis of authoritarian/mass democracy. The third pole which contrasts with the other two poles is made of the ‘sufferer’ and the individual item ‘victim’. It is not related to any specific SET preference (meaning it is diffused in both civil-liberal and populistcollectivist visions of democracy). The passivity of the pattern contrasts with the active character of the other two patterns, thus the emerging juxtaposition.

13.2   Analysis of the ‘Civil-Liberal Democratic Self’ In Table  13.1, we present the two questions (E16, E17) used in the questionnaire for the analysis. We recall that according to our framework SET A represents populist-collectivist ideals while SET B represents civil-­liberal ideals. Next we present the results for SET B following the methodology we use analyzing the ‘populist-collectivist democratic self’ (see Sect. 13.1).

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M. MARANGUDAKIS

In Table 13.11, for every level of E17 (column), we give the percentage (%) of respondents selecting the corresponding binary opposition statement (row). In the last column, the percentage (%) for the total sample is given. Also, the last row refers to the percentage (%) of the sample for the values of E17. For example, the entry 38.9% in cell (i., A) means that 38.9% of the respondents who choose A for question E17 (25.0% of the total sample) choose also statement i. The table refers to the eight statements for E16B (SET B). The three top selections for each level of E17 and for the total are marked in bold. Figure 13.9 presents the bar chart of E16B items (i–viii) and the total sample according to the three levels of E17. Table 13.11  Frequency distribution table for E16B items (i.–viii.) and the total sample according to the three levels of E17 and total sample E16B [SET B]

i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii. Total

E17

Total

DEMOCRATIC – ANTI-DEMOCRATIC

Α

Β

C

Active Autonomous Rational Reasonable Controlled Calm Realistic Sane

58.8% 45.4% 38.9% 24.5% 21.3% 25.9% 43.1% 25.5% 25.0%

63.2% 24.8% 39.9% 37.5% 21.2% 30.3% 37.0% 30.3% 48.6%

66.7% 30.7% 30.7% 36.0% 19.7% 29.4% 46.5% 28.5% 26.4%

63.0% 31.5% 37.2% 33.8% 20.9% 29.0% 41.0% 28.6% N = 863

50%

60%

70%

– – – – – – – –

Passive Dependent Irrational Hysterical Excitable Passionate Unrealistic Mad

TOTAL Sane-Mad Realistic-Unrealistic Calm-Passionate Controlled-Excitable Reasonable-Hysterical Rational-Irrational Autonomous-Dependent Active-Passive 0%

10%

20% C

30% B

40%

A

Fig. 13.9  Bar chart for E16B items (i. to viii.) and total sample according to the three levels of E17

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353

13.2.1  Discourse Clusters and Groups of Respondents Hierarchical Cluster Analysis is applied to the matrix with subjects in rows and variables in columns. This matrix is transformed into a 0-1 matrix, where each variable is replaced by a set of 0-1 variables, one for each variable category, taking value 1 if the corresponding category has been observed and 0 otherwise. To determine the number of clusters, we use the empirical criterion of the change in the ratio of between-cluster inertia to total inertia, when moving from a partition with r clusters to a partition with r − 1 clusters (Papadimitriou and Florou 1996).

1651/826

1643 [16GB3]/121

1650/643

1639 [16GB2]/136

1649/507

1648/303

1647 [16GB5]/204

1637 [16GB1]/ 109

1646 [16GB4]/ 194 Fig. 13.10  Schematic representation of the hierarchy

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M. MARANGUDAKIS

In Fig. 13.10, the hierarchy is schematically represented. From the total sample (883 respondents) we exclude the incomplete answers (i.e., respondents who did not choose exactly three statements are 6.46% of the total). Finally, the data for 826 were analyzed. In italics we give the number of respondents belonging to each group (in bold). Next, we calculate cluster weights, that is, the percentage of subjects that belong to each cluster, and investigate the variables that characterize each cluster via a series of chi-square tests with a significance level of 5%. For each variable representing a statement the last digit in the notation means choosing (last digit 1) or not choosing (last digit 0) it respectively. The analysis for eight statements (from variables e16b1 to e16b8) and variable E17 reveals five groups of respondents [from 16GB1 to 16GB5 according to nodes 1637, 1639, 1643, 1645, 1647] and their connection to each statement and each level of E17. For each group, the relative frequency (line 3) is given in Table 13.12. Also for each group, the correTable 13.12  Contingency matrix for groups of people (columns) and discourses for E16B and E17 items (rows) NODE

1637

1646

1647

1639

1643

GROUP

16GB1

16GB4

16GB5

16GB2

16GB3

Weight e16b10 e16b11 e16b20 e16b21 e16b30 e16b31 e16b40 e16b41 e16b50 e16b51 e16b60 e16b61 e16b70 e16b71 e16b80 e16b81 e171 e172 e173

13.2%

23.5% X

24.7%

16.5%

22.2% X

X

X X

X

X

X

X

X

X X

X X X

X

X X

X X

X

X

X

X

X

X X

X

X X

X

X

X

X X X

X X

X

X X

X

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355

sponding levels for each level of the variables (statements and E17) are noted. By marking a cell with X we noted that there is a significant contribution of the variable (row) to the formation of the group (column). For example, in cell (e16b11, 1637) X means that the percentage of respondents that belong to group 16GB1 [node 1637] and select e16b1 is statistically significantly different than the percentage of the respondents not belonging to group 16GB1 and those who select e16b1. From the preceding table, the profile of each group emerges. It consists of the items that the members of each group select. The group 16GB1 (1637) is characterized by items {1, 3, 4, 8} and SET Β (for E17). That is, the respondents belonging to 16GB1 select items 1, 3, 4 και 8 and also select SET B for E17. Group 16GB2 (1639) is characterized by items {1, 6} and SET C, group 16GB3 (1643) by item {5}, group 16GB4 (1646) by items {3, 7, 8}, and SET A and group 16GB5 (1647) by items {1, 2} and SETS A and C. When our sample was asked to choose three bipolar items of the civil-­ liberal SET B, five types of democratic citizen emerge out of our analysis. In Table 13.13, we summarize the results. If we represent each group as a set with elements of binary statements that contribute to its formation, a schematic representation gives the intersection of each group of the groups 16GB1:16GB5 with each other based on the binary opposition statements that contribute to the formation of the group. We recall that it holds P(16GBi ∩ ITEMj) ≠ P(16GB ≠ i ∩ ITEMj). The intersection of two sets 16GBi and 16GBj is the set of all objects that are members of both 16GBi and 16GBj (i,j = 1, …, 5, i ≠ j). Table 13.13  Weight (%) for the five types of civil-liberal democratic self (E16B Grouping variable), E16B items, and E17 levels connected to each type E16B

Type

(Items)

(E17)

i, iii, iv, viii i, vi v iii, vii, viii i, ii

B C A Α&C

Weight (%)

E16B Gr Variable

“The Moderate Activist” “The Calm Activist” “The Controlled” “The Sober Onlooker” “The Autonomous Activist”

13.2% 16.5% 22.2% 23.5% 24.7%

16GB1 16GB2 16GB3 16GB4 16GB5

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M. MARANGUDAKIS

{16GB3} 22%

{16GB2, C} 16%

Controlled

Calm

Active

Reasonable

Rational

Sane

{16GB1, B} 13%

Autonomous 16GB5, A,C} 25%

Realistic 16GB4, A} 24%

Fig. 13.11  16B Greece

Schematically we represent the five types in Fig. 13.11. We observe that the most frequent type 16GB5 (24.7% of the sample) concentrates the two most political items of the group, the ‘active’ and the ‘autonomous’, thus the title Autonomous Activist. Together, they describe the active citizen who is not depended on any other political power than his/her own. Interestingly enough, this type of democratic self is attracted, in principle, to the populist-collectivist framework. The second most frequent type GB4 (23.5% of the sample), the Sober Onlooker, also situates his/herself in the populist-collectivist framework and is not interested in being active. Instead, attention is paid to the state of mind of the self. Thus, the Rational Onlooker is conscious of being of sound mind rather than of being ‘political’ as the previous type is. The third most frequent type is 16GB3 which is consisted of one item, Controlled. According to this type the only person who cannot be called

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357

a democrat and is a threat to democracy, is the ‘excitable’ person, the one who loses control. It is interesting that this item stands alone and without Group preferences, that is, it is diffused in both frameworks. Fourth, most frequent, is the democratic type 16GB2, the Calm Activist. It constitutes an interesting variation of the dominant theme of the SET B, as it combines political action with a psychological item, ‘calm’. It suggests an active stand that is characterized not by a political quality such as ‘autonomous’ but, we could say, by civil manners. The least frequent with 13.2% of the sample choosing this type of ‘democratic self’ is 16GB1, the Rational Activist comprising four items of which one denotes a political quality (‘active’) and three psychological predispositions (‘reasonable’, ‘rational’, and ‘sane’). This type underlines more than any other type the significance of the right state of mind that promotes not only reason but moderation (i.e., ‘reasonable’) in the public sphere. Significantly, enough, this overwhelming stress on rational moderation is accompanied by a preference of SET B as the most representative of the democratic self. 13.2.2  Internal Constellations and Juxtapositions In the following two contingency tables (and in the two figures, respectively) of variables (rows) and groups (columns), the row percentage (Table 13.14, Fig. 13.12) and the column percentage (Table 13.15, Fig. 13.13) are given. Table 13.14  Contingency table of variables and total sample (rows), and groups (columns) [row percentage %]

e16b1 e16b2 e16b3 e16b4 e16b5 e16b6 e16b7 e16b8 e171 e172 e173 Total

16GB1/1637

16GB2/1639

16GB3/1643

16GB4/1646

16GB5/1647

14.8% 0.7% 23.2% 25.8% 0.0% 6.0% 0.3% 30.9% 5.9% 19.9% 8.0% 13.2%

23.9% 13.6% 9.3% 10.2% 0.0% 54.0% 7.9% 6.4% 13.2% 16.1% 20.0% 16.5%

13.5% 14.3% 13.3% 19.3% 100.0% 23.8% 16.1% 14.5% 22.5% 22.4% 21.3% 22.2%

17.9% 8.1% 37.8% 18.6% 0.0% 12.3% 51.5% 28.5% 28.4% 21.7% 22.2% 23.5%

29.9% 63.4% 16.4% 26.1% 0.0% 4.0% 24.2% 19.7% 29.9% 19.9% 28.4% 24.7%

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M. MARANGUDAKIS

total e173 e172 e171 e16b8 e16b7 e16b6 e16b5 e16b4 e16b3 e16b2 e16b1 0%

10%

20%

30%

16GB1/1637 16GB4/1646

40%

50%

60%

16GB2/1639 16GB5/1647

70%

80%

90%

100%

16GB3/1643

Fig. 13.12  Variable by Group [row percentage (%)] Table 13.15  Contingency table of variables (rows) and groups and total sample (columns) [column percentage %] 16GB1/1637 16GB2/1639 16GB3/1643 16GB4/1646 16GB5/1647 Total e16b1 e16b2 e16b3 e16b4 e16b5 e16b6 e16b7 e16b8 e171 e172 e173

74.3% 1.8% 68.8% 69.7% 0.0% 13.8% 0.9% 70.6% 11.0% 72.5% 16.5%

96.3% 27.2% 22.1% 22.1% 0.0% 100.0% 20.6% 11.8% 19.9% 47.1% 33.1%

40.4% 21.3% 23.5% 31.1% 100.0% 32.8% 31.1% 19.7% 25.1% 48.6% 26.2%

50.5% 11.3% 62.9% 28.4% 0.0% 16.0% 94.3% 36.6% 29.9% 44.3% 25.8%

80.4% 84.8% 26.0% 37.7% 0.0% 4.9% 42.2% 24.0% 29.9% 38.7% 31.4%

66.3% 33.1% 39.1% 35.7% 22.2% 30.5% 43.0% 30.1% 24.7% 48.1% 27.2%

Percentage 14.8% for cell (e16b1, 16GB1/1637) in Table 13.15 means that percentage 14.8% of the respondents selecting e16b1 belongs to group 16GB1. In the last row of the table, the profile of the sample (the relative frequency of the groups) is given. Percentage 74.3% for cell (e16b1, 16GB1/1637) in Table 13.15 means that percentage 74.3% of the respondents belonging to group 16GB1 selects e16b1. In the last column of the table the percentage (%) of the sample that selects each statement is given.

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359

e173 e172 e171 e16b8 e16b7 e16b6 e16b5 e16b4 e16b3 e16b2 e16b1 0.0%

10.0% 20.0% 30.0% 40.0% 50.0% 60.0% 70.0% 80.0% 90.0% 100.0% Total

16GB5/1647

16GB4/1646

16GB3/1643

16GB2/1639

16GB1/1637

Fig. 13.13  Variable by Group [column percentage (%)]

In the preceding step Hierarchical Cluster Analysis is applied to the matrix with subjects in rows and variables in columns. In the second step, the group membership variable, obtained from the first step for E16B, was jointly analyzed with the existing variables for E16B via Multiple Correspondence Analysis on the so-called Burt table (Greenacre 2017). The Burt table is a symmetric, generalized contingency table, which cross-­ tabulates all variables against each other. The main MCA output is a set of orthogonal axes or dimensions that summarize the associations between variable categories into a space of lower dimensionality, with the least possible loss of the original information contained in the Burt table. Numerical output from AFC analysis is provided. First the principal inertias (eigenvalues), total inertia, the percentages of inertia, cumulative percentages, and histogram are provided; then, the decomposition among the rows (E16B statements, E17, grouping variable for E16B) along the first four axes is given. Gi: coordinates for i axis (i  =  1, …, 4), COR: ­correlation of the axis to the point, CTR: contribution of the point to the formation of the axis. Recall that COR stands for the correlation coefficient that measures the statistical relationship, or association, between two variables. In Table 13.16, COR is the squared correlation coefficient between row variable and axis. Note that it is expressed as a number from 0 to 1000 instead

360 

M. MARANGUDAKIS

Table 13.16  Output for AFC Analysis for E16B statements, variable E17, and E16B grouping variable Total Inertia 0.21463 Axis Inertia

Cumulative | Histogram

% Inertia

1

0.0500578 23.32

23.32

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

0.0431103 20.09 0.0352152 16.41 0.0295330 13.76 0.0150624 7.02 0.0130716 6.09 0.0093297 4.35 0.0086619 4.04 0.0072317 3.37 0.0015810 0.74 0.0010606 0.49 0.0006261 0.29

43.41 59.82 73.57 80.59 86.68 91.03 95.07 98.43 99.17 99.67 99.96

|************************************ ***** |*********************************** |***************************** |************************ |************* |*********** |******** |******* |****** |** |* |*

as a number from 0 to 1. It signifies the contribution of the axis to the variable. According to Benzécri (1992), for COR > 200 the contribution of the axis to the variable is significant. On the other hand, CTR signifies the contribution of the variable to the inertia of the axis. Accordingly, if for a variable CTR is greater than 1000 divided by the number of variables +1 [CTR > (1000/(#variables + 1))], there is a significant contribution of the variable to the axis. In Table 13.17, we present decomposition among the rows along the first four axes [Gi: coordinates for I axis (i = 1, …, 4), COR: correlation of the axis to the point, CTR: contribution of the point to the formation of the axis]. HCA is then applied on the coordinates of variable categories on the factorial axes. To determine the number of clusters, we use the empirical criterion of the change in the ratio of between-cluster inertia to total ­inertia, when moving from a partition with r clusters to a partition with r − 1 clusters. In Fig. 13.14, the hierarchy is represented. Symbol ~ stands for not selecting the respecting statement. For example, node 28 connects 16GB2, selecting statement 6 [Calm-Passionate]. The outcome of the analysis presented in Table  13.18 reveals three classes (44, 45, 25). Note that class 45 is divided into two (43, 28) and

COR

274 274 101 101 48 48 1 1 929 929 96 96 25 25 28 28 4 6 0 42 4 929 91 302

#F1

−276 139 −91 183 −65 100 11 −22 239 −842 84 −192 −56 73 −41 92 36 −28 16 207 63 −842 220 391

IND

e16b10 e16b11 e16b20 e16b21 e16b30 e16b31 e16b40 e16b41 e16b50 e16b51 e16b60 e16b61 e16b70 e16b71 e16b80 e16b81 e171 e172 e173 16GB1 16GB2 16GB3 16GB4 16GB5 51 25 11 22 6 8 1 1 89 313 10 22 4 5 3 6 1 0 0 11 1 313 22 75

CTR 279 −142 154 −313 −159 246 −89 158 −4 11 167 −381 −191 252 −71 162 −32 51 −62 312 −679 11 521 −222

#F2 282 282 292 292 290 290 109 109 0 0 380 380 302 302 88 88 3 22 13 96 532 0 510 97

COR 61 31 37 75 36 56 11 20 1 1 44 102 47 63 9 18 1 3 3 29 175 1 148 28

CTR 92 −47 −183 369 58 −91 67 −122 −47 161 114 −261 −159 210 84 −197 259 −164 52 −714 −420 161 91 429

#F3 30 30 409 409 39 39 64 64 34 34 177 177 211 211 128 128 205 228 9 505 203 34 15 363

COR 9 5 64 127 6 11 9 15 5 16 25 58 40 54 14 33 47 36 3 190 82 16 6 129

CTR

COR 8 8 85 85 14 14 148 148 19 19 258 258 329 329 155 155 5 26 12 283 229 19 325 174

#F4 −49 24 −84 168 35 −56 −103 184 −36 123 137 −314 198 −264 −94 216 −45 55 −58 534 −446 123 −417 297

3 2 16 32 3 5 22 41 4 11 44 101 76 101 20 47 2 6 4 127 110 11 138 74

CTR

Table 13.17  Table of the factors (axes) on the set of E16B statements, variable E17, and E16B grouping variable

  ANALYSIS OF THE ‘DEMOCRATIC SELF’ 

361

362 

M. MARANGUDAKIS

47

25/{16GB3, E16B5}

46

44

45

28/{16GB2, E16B6}

43/{16GB5, E16B1, E16B2, ~E16B3, ~E16B4, ~E16B5, ~E16B6, ~E16B7, ~E16B8, E17A, E17C}

29/{16GB4, E16B7}

42/{16GB1, E16B1, E16B3, E16B4, E16B8, ~E16B1, ~E16B2, E17B}

Fig. 13.14  Schematic representation of the hierarchy

class 45 also in two classes (42, 29). Also for each class, the corresponding levels for each level of the variables (statements, E17, and grouping variable for E16B) are noted. By writing the value X in a cell we note that there is a significant contribution of the variable (row) to the formation of the class (column). For example, in cell (e16b11, 43) X means that the percentage of students affected by class (abstract discourse) 43 and select e16b1 is statistically significantly different than the percentage of the students not affected by 43 and select e16b1. If we rewrite the preceding table as a contingency table of the grouping variable extracted in phase one (columns) and E16B, E17 variables, we get Table 13.19. In the second row, the relative frequency (weight) of each group is given. In cell (i,j), value X means that the i-th group (column) is connected to the j-th variable (row).

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363

Table 13.18  Contingency table of E16B, E17, and E16B grouping variable and extracted discourses

e16b10 e16b11 e16b20 e16b21 e16b30 e16b31 e16b40 e16b41 e16b50 e16b51 e16b60 e16b61 e16b70 e16b71 e16b80 e16b81 e171 e172 e173 16GB1 16GB4 16GB5 1GGB2 16GB3

44

44

45

45

25

42

29

43

28

25

X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X

In conclusion, we bring together the respondents’ grouping (see Table  13.12 and Fig.  13.10) and the abstract discourse grouping (see Table  13.18 and Fig.  13.14). In Fig.  13.10 we see that node 1651 is divided into node 1643 and node 1650, revealing the antithesis of 16GB3 to the other four groups. Furthermore node 1636 is divided into node 1639 [16GB2] and node 1649. Node 1649 is divided into node 1647 [16GB5] and node 1648 which is divided into 1637 [16GB1] and 1646 [16GB4]. In Table 13.12, the binary statements connected to each group are presented. For example, the fact that 16GB1 is connected to statements 1, 3, 4, and 8 means that 16GB1 consists of people choosing statements 1, 3, 4, and 8. On the other hand from Fig. 13.14 we see that node

DEMOCRATIC Active Autonomous Rational Reasonable Controlled Calm Realistic Sane

Ε17 “Populist-collectivism” “Civil-liberal” “No difference”

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Α Β C

E16B – – – – – – – – – ANTI-DEMOCRATIC Passive Dependent Irrational Hysterical Excitable Passionate Unrealistic Mad

(RESPONDENTS) SEE [TABLE III.5.13]

GROUPS 16GBi Weight

SEE [TABLE III.5.18]

(VARIABLES)

GROUPS

Χ

Χ

Χ Χ

44 42 1637 16GB1 13.2%

Χ

44 29 1646 16GB4 23.5%

Χ

Χ

Χ Χ

45 43 1647 16GB5 24.7%

Table 13.19  Contingency table of E16B, E17 (rows), and E16B grouping variable and discourses

Χ

45 28 1639 16GB2 16.5%

Χ

25 25 1643 16GB3 22.2%

364  M. MARANGUDAKIS

  ANALYSIS OF THE ‘DEMOCRATIC SELF’ 

365

47 is divided into nodes 25 and 46. Node 46 is further divided into node 44 and node 45. Node 25 defines at discourse that is demarcated exclusively by statement 5 and affects mainly 16GA3. Placing these five types of democratic self (i.e., 16GB1–16GB5) in a relational framework of abstract attitudes (in bold) rather than of individuals, as we did beforehand, plus their preferred SET (A, or B, or C), we can detect their juxtapositions (see Fig. 13.15). The scheme suggests that there are two juxtapositions in all: (a) The Controlled versus The Political Activist and The Rational Civilian and (b) The Political Activist versus The Rational Civilian. The first juxtaposition reveals a basic tension between a controlled democrat and the rest of the features, considering lack of aggression to be a critical prerequisite of a democratic person.

{16GB3} The Controlled Controlled-Excitable v. Controlled-Excitable (Diffused)

The Political Activist {16GB2, C} The Calm Activist Active-Passive Calm-Passionate {16GB5, A,C} The Autonomous Activist Active-Passive Autonomous-Dependent vi. Calm-Passionate i. Active-Passive ii. Autonomous-Dependent A,C

Fig. 13.15  16Β Greece

The Cerebral Civilian {16GB1, B} The Moderate Acvist Active-Passive Rational-Irrational Reasonable-Hysterical Sane-Mad {16GB4, A} The Sober Onlooker Rational-Irrational Realistic-Unrealistic Sane-Mad iii. Raonal-Irraonal iv. Reasonable-Hysterical vii. Realisc-Unrealisc viii. Sane-Mad B

366 

M. MARANGUDAKIS

The second juxtaposition reveals a tension between the democratic self as primarily an active person versus the democrat primarily as a rational person. As expected, the Political Activist prefers the populist-­ communitarian framework (SET A, C), while the Cerebral Civilian to the liberal-civil framework (SET B).

Bibliography Benzécri, Jean-Paul. 1980. Introduction a la classification automatique d’ après un exemple de donnees medicales. Les cahiers de l’analyse des données 5 (3): 311–340. ———. 1992. Correspondence Analysis Handbook. London: CRC Press. Greenacre, Michael. 2017. Correspondence Analysis in Practice. London: Chapman and Hall/CRC Press. Papadimitriou, Giannis, and Giannoula Florou. 1996. Contribution of Euclidean and X Square Metrics to Determining the Most Ideal Classification in Ascending Hierarchy. In Annals in Honor of Professor I. Liakis, 546–581. Thessaloniki: University of Macedonia.

CHAPTER 14

Analysis of the ‘Democratic Relations’

Contents

14.1  A  nalysis of the Populist-Collectivist Democratic Relations 14.1.1  Discourse Clusters and Groups of Respondents 14.1.2  Internal Constellations and Juxtapositions 14.2  Analysis of the Civil-Liberal Democratic Relations 14.2.1  Discourse Clusters and Groups of Respondents 14.2.2  Internal Constellations and Juxtapositions Bibliography

 367  369  374  385  385  390  399

This chapter analyzes the elements that comprise the identity of ‘democratic relations’ as perceived by the respondents, as constitutive parts of a comprehensive moral discourse. In other words, it examines the moral components of a ‘democratic relation’ as well as an ‘anti-democratic’ one. In Table 14.1, we present the two questions (E18, E19) used in the questionnaire for analysis. According to our framework SET A represents populist-communitarian ideals while SET B represents civil-liberal ideals.

14.1   Analysis of the Populist-Collectivist Democratic Relations In Table 14.2 for every level of E19 (column) we give the percentage (%) of respondents selecting the corresponding binary opposition statement (row). In the last column, the percentage (%) for the total sample is given. © The Author(s) 2019 M. Marangudakis, The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13589-8_14

367

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M. MARANGUDAKIS

Table 14.1  Questions E18 (E18A: SET A, E18B: SET B) and E19 E18. E19. Which of the following do you think better describes democratic and counter-­ democratic social relationships? Choose three pairs from group A and three pairs from group B. GROUP A

i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi.

GROUP B

DEMOCRATIC

– ANTIDEMOCRATIC

Authentic Solidaristic Genuine Interpersonal Brotherly bond Affective

– – – – – –

Hypocritical Egotist Manipulative Mediated Stranger Formal

DEMOCRATIC – ANTIDEMOCRATIC i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi.

Open Trusting Critical Truthful Straightforward Citizen

– – – – – –

Secret Suspicious Deferential Deceitful Calculating Enemy

E19. Do you believe that group A or group B better describes democratic social relationships? 1. GROUP A

2. GROUP B

3. NO DIFFERENCE

Table 14.2  Frequency distribution table for E18A questions (i.–vi.) and total according to the three levels of E19 and total E18A [SET A]

E19

DEMOCRATIC – ANTIDEMOCRATIC i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. Total

Authentic Mutual support Genuine Interpersonal Brotherly bond Affective

– – – – – –

Hypocritical Egotist Manipulative Mediated Stranger Formal

Total

Α

Β

C

57.5% 71.9% 67.3% 37.9% 24.2% 33.3% 35.4%

56.2% 69.4% 70.2% 36.2% 28.9% 21.3% 27.2%

58.6% 67.0% 62.3% 38.0% 26.2% 34.0% 37.5%

57.6% 69.4% 66.2% 37.5% 26.2% 30.3% N = 865

Also, the last row refers to the percentage (%) of the sample for the values of E19. The table refers to the eight statements of E18A (GROUP A). The three top selections for each level of E19 and for the total sample are marked in bold (Fig. 14.1).

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369

Binary opposition statements E18A Total Affective-Formal Brotherly bond-Stranger Interpersonal-Mediated Genuine-Manipulative Mutual support-Egotist Authentic-Hypocritical 0%

10%

20%

C

30%

Β

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

Α

Fig. 14.1  Presents the bar chart for E18A items (i.–vi.) and the total sample according to the three levels of E19

14.1.1  Discourse Clusters and Groups of Respondents Hierarchical Cluster Analysis is applied to the matrix with subjects in rows and variables in columns. This matrix is transformed into a 0-1 matrix, where each variable is replaced by a set of 0-1 variables, one for each ­variable category, taking value 1 if the corresponding category has been observed and 0 otherwise. To determine the number of clusters, we use the empirical criterion of the change in the ratio of between-cluster inertia to total inertia, when moving from a partition with r clusters to a partition with r − 1 clusters (Papadimitriou and Florou 1996). In Fig. 14.2, the hierarchy is schematically represented. From the total sample (883 respondents) we exclude the incomplete answers (i.e., respondents who don’t choose exactly three statements: percent 6% of total). Finally, the data for 830 were analyzed. In italics we give the number of respondents belonging to each group (written in bold). Next, we calculate cluster weights, that is, the percentage of subjects that belong to each cluster, and investigate the variables that characterize each cluster via a series of chi-square tests with a significance level of 5%. For each variable representing a statement the last digit in the notation means choosing (last digit 1) or not choosing (last digit 0) it, respectively.

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M. MARANGUDAKIS

1659/830

1658/602

1657/404

1655/228

1653 18GA6]/198

1648 18GA3]/123

1647 18GA1]/104

1652 18GA2]/124

1650 1BGA4]/119

1654 18GA5]/162

Fig. 14.2  Schematic representation of the hierarchy

The analysis for six statements (from variables E18A1 to E18A6) and variable E19 reveals six groups of respondents [from 18GA1 to 18GA6: according nodes 1647, 1652, 1648, 1650, 1654, 1653] and their connection to each statement and each level of E19. For each group, the relative frequency (line 3) is given in Table 14.3. Also for each group, the corresponding levels for each level of the variables (statements and E19) are noted. By marking a cell with X we note that there is a significant contribution of the variable (row) to the formation of the group (column). For example, in cell (e18a11, 1647) X means that the percentage of r­ espondents that belong to group 18GA1 [node 1647] and select e18a1 is statistically significantly different than the percentage of the respondents not belonging to group 18GA1 and selecting e18a1. Six types of democratic relationship emerge out of our analysis (Table 14.4).

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371

Table 14.3  Contingency matrix for groups of people (columns) and discourses for E18A and E19 questions (rows) NODE

1647

1652

1648

1650

1654

1653

GROUP

18GA1

18GA2

18GA3

18GA4

18GA5

18GA6

Weight e18a10 e18a11 e18a20 e18a21 e18a30 e18a31 e18a40 e18a41 e18a50 e18a51 e18a60 e18a61 e191 e192 e193

12.5%

14.9%

14.8% X

14.3% X

19.5% X

23.9%

X X

X X

X X

X X X

X X

X

X

X X X

X X

X

X X X

X

X X X

X X

X

X

X

X X

X

X X

X

Table 14.4  Weight (%) for the six types of populist-collectivist democratic self (E18A Grouping variable), E18A items, and E19 levels connected to each type E18A

Type

(Items)

(E19)

i, iii, v, vi i, iii, iv, vi ii, v ii, vi ii, iv i, ii, iii

Β C C A B

Weight (%)

E18A Gr Variable

12.5% 14.9% 14.8% 14.3% 19.5% 23.9%

18GA1 18GA2 18GA3 18GA4 18GA5 18GA6

Furthermore, by visually inspecting the dendrogram, we decided to reduce to three the number of clusters to be kept and further interpreted. In any case, a good cluster solution depends on the characteristics-profile of the clusters, the interpretability of the solution, and the homogeneity of the clusters. The close association of the individual items, as well as the large number of the types that were statistically produced vis-à-vis the number of

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M. MARANGUDAKIS

individual items (six types out of six items), does not allow the extrapolation of distinctive types of democratic relations using the six-­group scheme. Instead, the types that are produced statistically could be understood as orientations toward particular themes using the three-­group scheme. There are two such orientations, the Political and the Religious, with a third type falling in the middle of this pattern. Interesting enough, these two types aligned situate themselves closer to the civil-liberal pattern of democratic relations. We start with the Religious and the Political, and thus with the description of the two orientations, before we describe the intermediate, and most important, type. The analysis for six statements (from variables e18a1 to e18a6) and variable E19 reveals three groups of respondents {Religious, Political, Intermediate} [nodes 1655, 1657, 1653 accordingly], and their connection to each statement and each level of E19. In Tables 14.5 and 14.6, we summarize the results while in Fig. 14.3, the six types are presented schematically. If we represent each group as a set with elements of the binary statements that contribute to its formation, a schematic representation gives the intersection of each group of the groups 18GA1:18GA6 with each other based on the binary opposition statements that contribute to the Table 14.5  Contingency matrix for groups of people (columns) and discourses for E18A and E19 questions (rows) NODE

1655

1657

1653

GROUP

Religious

Political

Intermediate

Weight e18a10 e18a11 e18a20 e18a21 e18a30 e18a31 e18a40 e18a41 e18a50 e18a51 e18a60 e18a61 e191 e192 e193

27.4%

48.6% X

23.9%

X X

X X X

X

X X X

X X X

X

X

X

X

X

  ANALYSIS OF THE ‘DEMOCRATIC RELATIONS’ 

373

Table 14.6  Weight (%) for the three types of populist-collectivist democratic self (E18A Grouping variable), E18A items, and E19 levels connected to each type E18A

Type

(Items)

(E19)

i, iii, v, vi ii, iv, v, vi i, ii, iii

Title

Weight (%)

E18A Gr Variable

Religious Political Intermediate

B

27.4% 48.6% 23.9%

18GA1, 18GA2 18GA3, 18GA4, 18GA5 18GA6

ii 18GA6-B

18GA3-

18GA5-A

18GA4-C

iv

18GA2-C

i

vi

iii

v 18GA1-B

i. Authentic-Hypocritical ii. Mutual Support-Egoist iii. Genuine-Manipulative iv. Interpersonal-Mediated v. Brotherly bond-Stranger vi. Affective-Formal

Fig. 14.3  18A Greece

formation of the group. The intersection of two sets 18GAi and 18GAj is the set of all objects that are members of both 18GAi and 18GAj (i,j = 1, …, 6, i ≠ j). Three general types of people emerge. First, the ‘religious’ types: types 18GA1 and 18GA2 share three out of four individual items: ‘authentic-hypocritical’, ‘genuine-manipulative’, and

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M. MARANGUDAKIS

‘affective-formal’ while they divert on their fourth item, which for 18GA1 is ‘brotherly bond-stranger’ and for 18GA2 is ‘interpersonal-­mediated’, which could be seen as two versions of face-to-face relations. In sociological terms, these two types pay attention to what Weber calls ‘Johannine love’, that is, the undifferentiated and authentic love between similar individuals. Interesting enough, the two types lean toward the civil-liberal type. If we see their joining in the three-group scheme the overall ‘religious type’ is correlated with the ‘authentic-­hypocritical’, the ‘genuinemanipulative’, the ‘brotherly bond-stranger’, and the ‘affective-formal’. Then is the ‘political’ types: 18GA3, 18GA4, and 18GA5 are oriented toward a more political understanding of democratic relations since they share the most political item of the list, that is, ‘mutual support-egoist’, which is combined with ‘brotherly bond-stranger’ (18GA3), ‘affective-­ formal’ (18GA4), and ‘interpersonal-mediated’ (18GA5) items. The political types, in contrast to the religious ones, tend to lean toward populism-collectivist. In their joined three-group scheme the overall ‘political type’ is correlated with the ‘mutual support-egoist’, the ‘interpersonal-­ mediated’, the ‘brotherly bond-stranger’, and the ‘affective-formal’ items. Lastly, the most frequent type, 18GA6, falls somewhere between the two aforementioned types since it combines the ‘political’ item ‘mutual support-egoist’ with two items which are shared by the more ‘religious’ notions of democratic relations, ‘authentic-hypocritical’ and ‘genuinemanipulative’. The ‘communal-behavioral’ aspect of the religious tradition is related to civility, while the ‘individualist-political’ aspect is inspired by the vision of communitas. In other words, visions of the communitas inspire a mystic-­ like, egoistic, propensity to action, while the emotive and benevolent ­individual is linked to the civil-liberal framework. This paradox echoes a flabby civil society and an agitated individualism. 14.1.2  Internal Constellations and Juxtapositions In the two contingency tables (and in the two figures, respectively) of variables (rows) and groups (columns), the row percentage (Table 14.7, Fig. 14.4) and the column percentage (Table 14.8, Fig. 14.5) are given. Percentage 14.4% for cell (e18a1, 18GA1/R1) in Table 14.7 means that percentage 14.4% of the respondents selecting e18a1 belongs to group 18GA1. In the last row of the table, the profile of the sample (the relative frequency of the groups) is given. The columns marked in italics (columns R, P, I) represent the three-group configuration, while in

14.4% 0.0% 14.1% 5.2% 45.8% 14.5% 10.5% 14.5% 11.7% 11.8%

18GA1/R1

GROUP

e18a1 e18a2 e18a3 e18a4 e18a5 e18a6 e191 e192 e193 Total

1647

NODE

22.2% 0.0% 19.0% 21.8% 0.0% 30.9% 13.7% 14.5% 14.5% 14.0%

18GA2/R2

1652

36.7% 0.0% 33.0% 27.1% 45.8% 45.4% 24.2% 28.9% 26.2% 25.8%

Religious

1655

5.4% 20.4% 6.6% 10.5% 54.2% 9.2% 15.0% 9.8% 15.4% 13.9%

18GA3/P1

1648

8.0% 19.8% 6.6% 12.6% 0.0% 45.4% 15.0% 10.2% 16.7% 13.5%

18GA4/P2

1650

10.2% 26.9% 19.3% 49.8% 0.0% 0.0% 21.2% 25.5% 21.9% 18.3%

18GA5/P3

1654

23.6% 67.1% 32.5% 72.9% 54.2% 54.6% 51.3% 45.5% 54.0% 45.8%

Political

1657

39.5% 32.7% 34.3% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 21.9% 19.1% 15.1% 22.3%

18GA6/ Intermediate

1653

Table 14.7  Contingency table of variables and total sample (rows) and groups (columns) [row percentage %]

  ANALYSIS OF THE ‘DEMOCRATIC RELATIONS’ 

375

376 

M. MARANGUDAKIS

total e193 e192 e191 e18a6 e18a5 e18a4 e18a3 e18a2 e18a1 0%

10%

20%

18GA1/R1

30%

18GA2/R2

40%

50%

18GA3/P1

60%

70%

18GA4/P2

80%

18GA5/P3

90%

100%

18GA6/I

Fig. 14.4  E18A and E19 by group [row percentage (%)] Table 14.8  Contingency table of variables (rows), and groups and total sample (columns) [column percentage %] NODE

1647

1652

1648

1650

1654

1653

GROUP 18GA1/ R1

18GA2/ R2

18GA3/ P1

18GA4/ P2

18GA5/ P3

18GA6/I

e18a1 e18a2 e18a3 e18a4 e18a5 e18a6 e191 e192 e193

89.5% 0.0% 87.9% 57.3% 0.0% 65.3% 37.1% 19.4% 43.5%

22.0% 100.0% 30.9% 27.6% 100.0% 19.5% 34.1% 27.6% 38.2%

33.6% 100.0% 31.9% 34.5% 0.0% 100.0% 38.7% 19.3% 42.0%

31.5% 100.0% 68.5% 100.0% 0.0% 0.0% 41.4% 27.8% 30.2%

100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 33.0% 30.5% 36.0%

69.2% 0.0% 77.9% 16.3% 100.0% 36.5% 30.8% 32.7% 36.5%

Total

56.5% 68.2% 65.1% 36.8% 25.7% 29.7% 34.7% 26.6% 36.7%

Fig. 14.5 the six-group configuration is given. Percentage 69.2% for cell (e18a1, 18GA1/R1) in Table 14.8 means that percentage 69.2% of the respondents belonging to group 18GA1 selects e18a1. In the last column of the table the percentage (%) of the total sample that selects each statement is given. In the preceding step Hierarchical Cluster Analysis is applied to the matrix with subjects in rows and variables in columns. In the second step, the group membership variable, obtained from the first step for E18A, was jointly analyzed with the existing variables for E18A via Multiple

  ANALYSIS OF THE ‘DEMOCRATIC RELATIONS’ 

377

e193 e192 e191 e18a6 e18a5 e18a4 e18a3 e18a2 e18a1 0%

10%

Total

20%

18GA6/l

30%

40%

18GA5/P3

50%

18GA4/P2

60%

70%

18GA3/P1

80%

18GA2/R2

90%

100%

18GA1/R1

Fig. 14.5  E18A and E19 by group [column percentage (%)]

Correspondence Analysis on the so-called Burt table (Greenacre 2007). The Burt table is a symmetric, generalized contingency table, which cross-­ tabulates all variables against each other. The main MCA output is a set of orthogonal axes or dimensions that summarize the associations between variable categories into a space of lower dimensionality, with the least possible loss of the original information contained in the Burt table. Numerical output from AFC analysis: first the principal inertias (eigenvalues), total inertia, the percentages of inertia, cumulative percentages, and histogram are provided; then, the decomposition among the rows (E18A statements, E19, grouping variable for E18A) along the first four axes is provided. Gi: coordinates for i axis (i = 1, …, 4), COR: correlation of the axis to the point, and CTR: contribution of the point to the formation of the axis. Recall that COR stands for the correlation coefficient that measures the statistical relationship, or association, between two variables. In Table 14.9, COR is the squared correlation coefficient between the row variable and axis. Note that it is expressed as a number from 0 to 1000 instead of as a number from 0 to 1. It signifies the contribution of the axis to the variable. According to Benzecri (1980) for COR > 200 the contribution of the axis to the variable is significant. On the other hand, CTR signifies the contribution of the variable to the inertia of the axis. According to

378 

M. MARANGUDAKIS

Table 14.9  Output of AFC Analysis for E18A statements, variable E19, and E18A grouping variable Total Inertia 0.34952 Axis Inertia

Cumulative | Histogram

% Inertia

1

0.0902710 25.83

25.83

2

0.0844466 24.16

49.99

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

0.0637762 18.25 0.0481720 13.78 0.0180154 5.15 0.0155976 4.46 0.0137598 3.94 0.0127625 3.65 0.0016829 0.48 0.0009935 0.28 0.0000180 0.01 0.0000087 0.00

68.24 82.02 87.17 91.63 95.57 99.22 99.70 99.99 99.99 100.00

|************************************ ***** |************************************ ** |***************************** |********************** |******** |******* |******* |****** |* |* |* |*

Benzecri, if for a variable CTR is greater than 1000 divided by the number of variables +1 [CTR > (1000/(#variables + 1))] there is a significant contribution of the variable to the axis. In Table 14.10 we present the decomposition among the rows along the first four axes. [Gi: coordinates for I axis (i = 1, …, 4), COR: ­correlation of the axis to the point, and CTR: contribution of the point to the formation of the axis]. HCA is then applied on the coordinates of variable categories on factorial axes. To determine the number of clusters, we use the empirical criterion of change in the ratio of between-cluster inertia to total inertia, when moving from a partition with r clusters to a partition with r − 1 clusters. In Fig. 14.6, the hierarchy is represented. Symbol ~ stands for not selecting the respecting statement. For example, node 37 connects 18GA6, selecting statements {1, 2, 3} [Authentic-Hypocritical, Mutual support-­ Egotist, Genuine-Manipulative] and not selecting statements {4, 5, 6} [Interpersonal-Mediated, Brotherly bond-Stranger, Affective-Formal]. The outcome of the analysis, presented in Table 14.11 and Fig. 14.6, reveals three classes (discourses) [39, 37, 35]. Note that class 39 could be divided into three classes (36, 27, 28) leading to an alternative pattern of

COR

396 396 706 706 149 149 395 395 114 114 36 36 8 0 5 505 271 37 110 556 14

#F1

−359 237 722 −274 −260 115 240 −375 −110 290 −63 135 −45 13 32 892 580 −219 −369 −711 107

IND

e18a10 e18a11 e18a20 e18a21 e18a30 e18a31 e18a40 e18a41 e18a50 e18a51 e18a60 e18a61 e191 e192 e193 18GA1 18GA2 18GA3 18GA4 18GA5 18GA6 72 48 198 76 29 12 48 75 12 31 4 8 1 1 1 138 69 10 27 136 4

CTR 338 −225 198 −76 467 −208 −70 108 −234 620 −178 384 −4 −62 46 523 −74 702 358 −163 −748

#F2 352 352 53 53 486 486 33 33 525 525 293 293 0 10 10 173 4 386 103 29 725

COR 68 45 16 7 99 44 5 7 58 155 31 68 1 2 2 50 2 108 27 8 197

CTR

COR 0 0 105 105 10 10 126 126 351 351 450 450 14 82 20 52 458 375 275 5 116

#F3 −8 4 278 −106 67 −31 −137 211 190 −508 −220 476 57 −172 66 −289 754 −692 583 70 −300 1 1 42 16 3 2 23 35 51 137 64 140 3 15 4 20 166 139 95 2 41

CTR 97 −65 315 −120 −175 77 −245 379 −28 72 141 −307 −12 85 −51 313 316 −131 −718 558 −308

#F4 29 29 134 134 67 67 406 406 7 7 186 186 0 20 11 62 80 13 417 343 122

COR

11 7 71 27 25 10 94 146 2 4 35 76 1 6 3 31 38 7 191 157 58

CTR

Table 14.10  Table of the factors (axes) on the set of E18A statements, variable E19, and E18A grouping variable

  ANALYSIS OF THE ‘DEMOCRATIC RELATIONS’ 

379

380 

M. MARANGUDAKIS

41

39

36/{18GA5, E18A4, ~E18A1, ~E18A3}

40

37/{18GA6, E18A1,E18A2,E18A3, ~E16A4,~E16A5,~E16A6, E19A, E19B, E19C}

27/{18GA4, E18A6} 35/{18GA1, 18GA2, ~E18A2} 28/{18GA3, E18A5}

Fig. 14.6  Schematic representation of the hierarchy

five classes. Also, for each class, the corresponding levels for each level of the variables (statements, E19, and grouping variable for E18A) are given. By writing the value X in a cell we noted that there is a significant contribution of the variable (row) to the formation of the class (column). For example, in cell (e18a11, 37) X means that the percentage of respondents that were affected by class 37 and select e18a1 is statistically significantly different than the percentage of the respondents not affected by 37 and select e18a1. If we rewrite the preceding table as a contingency table of the grouping variable extracted in phase one (columns) and E18A, E19 variables, we get Table 14.12. In the fifth row the relative frequency (weight) of each group is given. In cell (i,j), value X means that the i-th group (column) is connected to the j-th variable (row). To conclude with our analysis we bring together the respondents’ grouping (see Table 14.3 and Fig. 14.2) and the abstract discourse grouping (see Table  14.11 and Fig.  14.6). From Fig.  14.2 we see that node 1659 is divided into node 1658 and node 1655 revealing the antithesis of 18GA1 and 18GA2 (Religious types) to the other four groups. Furthermore

  ANALYSIS OF THE ‘DEMOCRATIC RELATIONS’ 

381

Table 14.11  Contingency table of E18A, E19, and E18A grouping variable and extracted discourses 39

39

39

37

35

IND

36

27

28

37

35

e18a10 e18a11 e18a20 e18a21 e18a30 e18a31 e18a40 e18a41 e18a50 e18a51 e18a60 e18a61 e191 e192 e193 18GA1 18GA3 18GA4 18GA2 18GA6 18GA5

X X X

Χ

X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X

node 1658 is divided into node 1653 [18GA6] (Intermediate type) and node 1657 [18GA3, 18GA4, and 18GA5] (Political types). In Table 14.3 the binary statements connected to each group are presented. For example, the fact that 18GA1 is connected to statements 1, 3, 5, and 6 means that 18GA1 consists of people choosing statements 1, 3, 5, and 6. On the other hand from Fig. 14.6 we see that node 41 is divided into nodes 39 and 40. Node 40 is further divided into node 37 (Intermediate type) and node 35 (Religious types). Node 39 (Political types) is divided into nodes 27, 28, and 36. Placing these six types of democratic relations (i.e., 18GA1–18GA6) in a relational framework of abstract attitudes (in bold) rather than of individuals, as we did beforehand, plus their preferred SET (A, or B, or C), we can detect their juxtapositions (see Fig. 14.7). Two juxtapositions emerge out of the analysis:

DEMOCRATIC Authentic Mutual support Genuine Interpersonal Brotherly bond Affective

Ε19 “Populist-communitarian” “Civil-liberal” “No difference”

1 2 3 4 5 6

Α Β C

E18A – – – – – – – NOT DEMOCRATIC Hypocritical Egotist Manipulative Mediated Stranger Formal

(RESPONDENTS) SEE [TABLE III.6.3]

GROUPS 18GAi Weight

SEE [TABLE III.6.11]

(VARIABLES)

GROUPS 35 35 1647 18GA1 12.5%

35 35 1652 18GA2 14.9%

Χ

39 28 1648 18GA3 14.8%

Χ

39 27 1650 18GA4 14.3%

Table 14.12  Contingency table of E18A, E19 (rows), and E18A grouping variable and discourses

Χ

39 36 1654 18GA5 19.5%

X X X

Χ Χ Χ

37 37 1653 18GA6 23.9%

382  M. MARANGUDAKIS

  ANALYSIS OF THE ‘DEMOCRATIC RELATIONS’ 

383

Religious Outlook Political Outlook 18GΑ4 -C Mutual support-Egotist Affective-Formal vi. Affective-Formal 18GΑ5-A Mutual support-Egotist Interpersonal-Mediated iv. Interpersonal-Mediated

18GΑ1-Β Authentic-Hypocritical Genuine-Manipulative Brotherly-Detached Affective-Formal 18GΑ2-C Authentic-Hypocritical Genuine-Manipulative Interpersonal-Mediated Affective-Formal No individual items

Intermediate Outlook Political Outlook 18GA3Mutual support-Egotist Brotherly bond-Stranger v. Brotherly bond-Stranger

18GA6-B Authentic-Hypocritical Mutual support-Egotist Genuine-Manipulative i. Authentic-Hypocritical ii. Mutual support-Egotist iii. Genuine-Manipulative

Fig. 14.7  18A Greece

The differences in groups of people between the ‘political’, the ‘religious’ and the ‘intermediate’ type of democratic relations we detected in the previous section indeed form the major tensions inside the populistcollectivist binary oppositions. In particular, two out of the three ‘political’ groups that are now turned into variables (18GA4-C and 18GA5-A), plus the individual items ‘affective-formal’ and ‘interpersonal-­mediated’, are in antithesis to the two ‘religious’ groups (18GA1-B and 18GA2-C), while the third political group (18GA3-) plus the individual item ‘brotherly bond-stranger’ is contrasted to the intermediated group (18GA6-B) plus the individual items the type is made of originally. In this way, we identify which group of people is closer to which individual items, allowing us to complete the analysis of ‘classes’, that is, placing groups of people and single items into exclusive and coherent discourses. Accordingly, three classes emerge out of the analysis (see  Fig.  14.8),

384 

M. MARANGUDAKIS

Direct Democracy

Political GA3Mutual support-Egotist Brotherly bond-Stranger v. Brotherly bond-Stranger GΑ4 -C Mutual support-Egotist Affective-Formal vi. Affective-Formal GΑ5-A Mutual support-Egotist Interpersonal-Mediated iv. Interpersonal-Mediated

Communitas Religious GΑ1-Β Authentic-Hypocritical Genuine-Manipulative Brotherly bond-Stranger Affective-Formal GΑ2-C Authentic-Hypocritical Genuine-Manipulative Interpersonal-Mediated Affective-Formal Not ii. Mutual Support-Egoist

Intermediate GA6-B Authentic-Hypocritical Mutual support-Egotist Genuine-Manipulative i. Authentic-Hypocritical ii. Mutual support-Egotist iii. Genuine-Manipulative

Fig. 14.8  Greece 18A

classes which are shaped around two political ideals: (a) Direct Democracy characterized by a tight interaction between individual participants, (b) Communitas ideal of undifferentiated individuals (thus the explicit rejection of mutuality which is in effect a rejection of individuality), and (c) the intermediate class which lies between the two. Communitas is roughly espoused by a quarter of the sample, the Direct Democracy class by half of the sample, while the remaining quarter is represented by the Intermediate class. The analysis of the classes allows us to take a closer look at the paradox of  the relative preference the ‘religious’ groups-variables show for the

  ANALYSIS OF THE ‘DEMOCRATIC RELATIONS’ 

385

c­ivil-liberal framework and the ‘political’ groups-variables show for the populist-collectivist framework. It implies that the vision of direct democracy (see above) is inspired by the pattern of the closed community of intense rational interaction, while the vision of undifferentiated democracy is inspired by the pattern of a wider, imagined, society, not of liberal communication (as it would be if framework B was chosen) but of intense feelings of ‘similars’. Each class, then, is actually the reversed image of the other.

14.2   Analysis of the Civil-Liberal Democratic Relations In Table 14.13, for every level of E19 (column) we give the percentage (%) of respondents selecting the corresponding binary opposition statement (row). In the last column, the percentage (%) for the total sample is given. Also, the last row refers to the percentage (%) of the sample for the values of E19. The table refers to the eight statements of E18B (GROUP B). The three top selections for each level of E19 and for total sample are marked in bold (Fig. 14.9). 14.2.1   Discourse Clusters and Groups of Respondents Hierarchical Cluster Analysis is applied to the matrix with subjects in rows and variables in columns. This matrix is transformed into a 0-1 matrix, where each variable is replaced by a set of 0-1 variables, one for each Table 14.13  Frequency distribution table for E18B items (i.–vi.) and total sample according to the three levels of E19 and total E18B [SET B]

E19

DEMOCRATIC – COUNTER DEMOCRATIC i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. Total

Open Trusting Critical Truthful Straightforward Citizen

– – – – – –

Secret Suspicious Deferential Deceitful Calculating Enemy

Total

Α

Β

C

40.2% 69.9% 48.4% 52.3% 40.2% 34.3% 35.4%

52.8% 48.9% 56.6% 48.9% 39.1% 40.9% 27.2%

42.9% 70.7% 46.9% 49.1% 38.0% 37.7% 37.5%

44.6% 64.5% 50.1% 50.2% 39.1% 37.3% N = 865

386 

M. MARANGUDAKIS

Fig. 14.9  Presents the bar chart of E18B items (i.–vi.) and total sample according to the three levels of E19

v­ ariable category, taking value 1 if the corresponding category has been observed and 0 otherwise. To determine the number of clusters, we use the empirical criterion of the change in the ratio of between-cluster inertia to total inertia, when moving from a partition with r clusters to a partition with r − 1 clusters (Papadimitriou and Florou 1996). In Fig. 14.10, the hierarchy is schematically represented. From the total sample (883 respondents) we exclude the incomplete answers (i.e., respondents who don’t choose exactly three statements: percent 6% of total). Finally, the data for 827 were analyzed. In italics we give the number of respondents belonging to each group (in bold). Next, we calculate cluster weights, that is, the percentage of subjects that belong to each cluster, and investigate the variables that characterize each cluster via a series of chi-square tests with a significance level of 5%. For each variable representing a statement the last digit in the notation means choosing (last digit 1) or not choosing (last digit 0) it respectively. The analysis for six statements (from variables e18b1 to e18b6) and variable E19 reveals four groups of respondents [1646, 1648, 1650, 1649] and their connection to each statement and each level of E19. For each group, the relative frequency (line 3) is given in Table 14.14. Also for each group, the corresponding levels for each level of the variables (statements and E19) are noted. By writing the value X in a cell we noted that there is a significant contribution of the variable (row) to the formation of

  ANALYSIS OF THE ‘DEMOCRATIC RELATIONS’ 

387

1653/827

1652/608

1651/388

1649 [18GB4] /219

1650 [18GB3]/220

1646 [18GB1]/154

1648 [1BGB2]/234

Fig. 14.10  Schematic representation of the hierarchy Table 14.14  Contingency matrix for groups of people (columns) and discourses for E18B and E19 questions (rows) NODE

1646

1648

1650

1649

GROUP

18GB1

18GB2

18GB3

18GB4

Weight e18a10 e18a11 e18a20 e18a21 e18a30 e18a31 e18a40 e18a41 e18a50 e18a51 e18a60 e18a61 e191 e192 e193

18.6%

28.3% X

26.6% X

26.5%

X X

X X X X

X X

X X X X

X X

X X

X X

X X

X X

X

388 

M. MARANGUDAKIS

Table 14.15  Weight (%) for the four types of rational-civil democratic relations (E18B Grouping variable), E18B items, and E19 levels connected to each type E18B

Type

(Items)

(E19)

i, ii, iii, v ii, iv ii, vi i, iii, iv, vi

C, A B

Title

Weight (%)

E18B Gr Variable

Civil-critical Civic-direct Civil Civil-suspicious

18.6% 28.3% 26.6% 26.5%

18GB1 18GB2 18GB3 18GB4

the group (column). For example, in cell (e18b11, 1646) X means that the percentage of respondents that belong to group 18GB1 [node 1646] and select e18b1 is statistically significantly different than the percentage of the respondents not belonging to group 18GB1 and selecting e18b1. In Tables 14.14 and 14.15, we summarize the results, while in Fig. 14.11, we represent the four types schematically. If we represent each group as a set with elements of the binary statements that contribute to its formation, a schematic representation gives the intersection of each group of the groups 18GB1:18GB4 with each other based on the binary opposition statements that contribute to the formation of the group. The intersection of two sets 18GBi and 18GBj is the set of all objects that are members of both 18GBi and 18GBj (i,j = 1, …, 4, i ≠ j). When our sample is asked to choose three bipolar items out of the six which comprise the rational-civil GROUP B, four types of Democratic Relations emerge out of our analysis. Group 18GB1 comprises two basic to civil society bipolar items ‘open-­ secret’ and ‘trusting-suspicious’, one individualist item ‘critical-­ differential’, and one attitudinal item ‘straight forward-calculating’, that is, a manner by which relationships should be contacted. This type of democratic relations is based upon honest individuals who are willing to meet in the open (not exclusive) public sphere and form relations based upon frankness and outspokenness. Group 18GΒ2 comprises two items: ‘trusting-suspicious’ and ‘truthful-­ deceitful’. The absence of any other item denoting openness, i­ ndividualism, and critical mind, or formal credentials such as citizenship suggests that this combination reflects a more informal, and more closed, image of

  ANALYSIS OF THE ‘DEMOCRATIC RELATIONS’ 

389

ii

18GB1-

v

iii

18GB3-A,C

iv

i

18GB2

vi

18GB4-B i. Open-Secret ii. Trusting-Suspicious iii. Critical-Differential iv. Truthful-Deceitful v. Straight forward-Calculating vi. Citizen-Enemy

Fig. 14.11  Greece 18B

democracy, which resembles the classic (Greco-Roman and Renaissance) democratic ideal of civic bonds rather than of civil relations. Group 18GΒ3 also comprises two items, ‘trusting-suspicious’ and ‘citizen-­enemy’. Together, they constitute the corner-stone of civil society, and thus we call this type of democracy and the group which aspires to it ‘civil’. Yet, we should pay attention to the fact that this ideal of democratic relations is placed primarily inside Framework A, the populist-collectivist democratic vision. Last, but not least, 18GΒ4 comprises four items, ‘open-secret’, ‘critical-­ differential’, ‘truthful-deceitful’, and ‘citizen-enemy’. This type of democracy, which attracts 26.5% of our sample, certainly belongs to the civil constellation since it espouses crucial elements of civil society such as openness, citizenship, and a critical attitude to others. Such a plurality of items hinders our ability to characterize this type of democratic relations. To do so, we looked at the absent items to see if we could discover its

390 

M. MARANGUDAKIS

Table 14.16  Contingency table of variables and total sample (rows) and groups (columns) [row percentage %] NODE

1646

1648

1650

1649

GROUP

18GB1

18GB2

18GB3

18GB4

e18b1 e18b2 e18b3 e18b4 e18b5 e18b6 e191 e192 e193 Total

29.5% 28.0% 24.7% 0.0% 29.3% 0.0% 20.4% 19.5% 16.4% 18.5%

14.8% 40.3% 20.1% 53.6% 21.7% 4.1% 27.7% 24.7% 27.8% 26.6%

14.9% 31.3% 13.8% 16.3% 23.5% 68.6% 26.0% 18.2% 31.4% 24.5%

40.4% 0.3% 40.9% 30.1% 25.4% 26.8% 22.0% 33.5% 20.8% 25.7%

character by default. The missing items are ‘trusting-suspicious’ and ‘straight forward-calculating’. Both of these items point to frankness, and their absence allows us to call this type of civility ‘civil-suspicious’. 14.2.2   Internal Constellations and Juxtapositions In the two contingency tables of variables (rows) and groups (columns), the row percentage (Table 14.16) and the column percentage (Table 14.17) are given. Percentage 29.5% for cell (e18b1, 18GB1) in Table  14.16 means that percentage 29.5% of the respondents selecting e18b1 belongs to group 18GB1. In the last row of the table, the profile of the sample (the relative frequency of the groups) is given. Percentage 71.6% for cell (e18b1, 18GB1) in Table  14.17 means that percentage 71.6% of the respondents belonging to group 18GB1 selects e18B1. In the column of the table the percentage (%) of the sample that selects each statement is given. In the preceding step Hierarchical Cluster Analysis was applied to the matrix with subjects in rows and variables in columns. In the second step, the group membership variable, obtained from the first step for E18B, was jointly analyzed with the existing variables for E18B via Multiple Correspondence Analysis on the so-called Burt table (Greenacre 2007). The Burt table is a symmetric, generalized contingency table, which cross-­ tabulates all variables against each other. The main MCA output is a set of

  ANALYSIS OF THE ‘DEMOCRATIC RELATIONS’ 

391

Table 14.17  Contingency table of variables (rows), and groups and total sample (columns) [column percentage %] NODE

1646

1648

1650

1649

GROUP

18GB1

18GB2

18GB3

18GB4

e18b1 e18b2 e18b3 e18b4 e18b5 e18b6 e191 e192 e193

71.6% 100.0% 66.0% 0.0% 62.4% 0.0% 39.3% 28.9% 31.8%

25.0% 100.0% 37.2% 100.0% 32.0% 5.8% 37.1% 25.5% 37.4%

25.9% 80.2% 26.5% 31.4% 35.9% 100.0% 35.9% 19.4% 43.6%

74.0% 0.8% 82.4% 61.0% 40.8% 41.1% 31.9% 37.4% 30.4%

Total

44.9% 65.9% 49.3% 49.6% 39.2% 37.5% 35.5% 27.4% 35.7%

orthogonal axes or dimensions that summarize the associations between variable categories into a space of lower dimensionality, with the least possible loss of the original information contained in the Burt table. Numerical output from AFC analysis. First the principal inertias (eigenvalues), total inertia, the percentages of inertia, cumulative percentages, and histogram are provided; then the decomposition among the rows (E18B statements, E19, grouping variable for E18B) along the first four axes is provided. Gi: coordinates for i axis (i = 1, …, 4), COR: correlation of the axis to the point, and CTR: contribution of the point to the formation of the axis. Recall that COR stands for the correlation coefficient that measures the statistical relationship, or association, between two variables. In Table 14.18, COR is the squared correlation coefficient between row variable and axis. Note that it is expressed as a number from 0 to 1000 instead of as a number from 0 to 1. It signifies the contribution of the axis to the variable. According to Benzecri, for COR > 200, the contribution of the axis to the variable is significant. On the other hand CTR signifies the contribution of the variable to the inertia of the axis. According to Benzecri, if for a variable CTR is greater than 1000 divided by the number of variables +1 [CTR > (1000/(#variables + 1))] there is a significant contribution of the variable to the axis. In Table 14.19, we present the decomposition among the rows along the first four axes. [Gi: coordinates for I axis (i = 1, …, 4), COR: correlation of the axis to the point, CTR: contribution of the point to the formation of the axis].

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Table 14.18  Output for AFC Analysis for E18B statements, variable E19, and E18B grouping variable Total Inertia 0.27279 Axis Inertia

Cumulative | Histogram

% Inertia

1

0.0844628 30.96

30.96

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

0.0618892 22.69 0.0542476 19.89 0.0218415 8.01 0.0190465 6.98 0.0152331 5.58 0.0134433 4.93 0.0018408 0.67 0.0004793 0.18 0.0001241 0.05 0.0000915 0.03 0.0000484 0.02

53.65 73.53 81.54 88.52 94.11 99.04 99.71 99.89 99.93 99.97 99.98

|************************************ ***** |****************************** |************************** |*********** |********** |******** |******* |* |* |* |* |*

To continue, Figs. 14.12 and 14.13 show the row and the column percentages respectively of the four groups (Table 14.17) which are formed by the items of E18B and E19. Two major juxtapositions emerge out of the analysis as shown in Fig. 14.14. In Fig. 14.14 the first juxtaposition, ‘civic-direct’ opposes ‘civil-truthful’. Also, the items that comprise these two types also oppose each other both positively and negatively, emphasizing the gap between the populist-collectivist character of the former vis-à-vis the civil-liberal character of the latter. In terms of items, ‘trusting-suspicious’ opposes ­ ‘critical-­ differential’, an opposition that underlies the fundamental difference between the two cultural understandings of democratic relations, one based on prescription, the other based on contract. In the second juxtaposition ‘civil-critical’ and ‘civic-direct’ contrast with ‘civil’ and the individual item ‘citizen-enemy’. The grouping of civilcritical with civic-direct is rather surprising and could be understood only apophatically, that is, as rejection of the item ‘citizen-enemy’. For these two types of democracy, the binary opposition ‘citizen-enemy’ is insignificant or outright wrong. According to it democratic relations should not be formally defined but open to any person that complies with civil-specific characteristics.

COR

332 332 807 807 371 371 190 190 0 0 80 80 56 216 43 0 628 764 8

#F1

−231 261 660 −315 −274 247 216 −194 7 −11 −111 171 −116 282 −97 −15 −610 733 −73

IND

e18b10 e18b11 e18b20 e18b21 e18b30 e18b31 e18b40 e18b41 e18b50 e18b51 e18b60 e18b61 e191 e192 e193 18GB1 18GB2 18GB4 18GB3

42 47 208 99 52 47 32 29 1 1 11 17 7 32 6 1 155 210 3

CTR 124 −142 −27 12 157 −143 107 −97 70 −102 −371 572 −16 −75 68 −401 −296 −179 772

#F2 97 97 1 1 123 123 46 46 45 45 897 897 1 15 21 180 148 45 957

COR 17 18 1 1 23 21 11 10 6 9 168 259 1 4 4 60 50 17 320

CTR 118 −135 274 −131 11 −11 −427 382 115 −168 −39 60 −28 89 −40 −831 333 340 −113

#F3 87 87 139 139 0 0 739 739 123 123 9 9 3 21 7 777 188 164 20

COR 17 19 56 26 1 1 198 177 18 26 3 4 1 6 2 296 72 70 7

CTR 96 −109 150 −72 146 −134 −17 14 −296 428 21 −34 50 37 −75 −62 −54 60 39

#F4 57 57 42 42 107 107 1 1 810 810 3 3 10 3 26 4 4 5 2

COR

28 31 42 20 58 53 1 1 296 428 2 3 6 3 11 5 5 5 2

CTR

Table 14.19  Table of the factors (axes) on the set of E18B statements, variable E19, and E18B grouping variable

  ANALYSIS OF THE ‘DEMOCRATIC RELATIONS’ 

393

394 

M. MARANGUDAKIS

total e193 e192 e191 e18b6 e18b5 e18b4 e18b3 e18b2 e18b1 0%

10%

20% 18GB1

30%

40% 18GB2

50%

60%

18GB3

70%

80%

90%

100%

80% 90% 18GB1

100%

18GB4

Fig. 14.12  E18B and E19 by group [row percentage (%)] e193 e192 e191 e18b6 e18b5 e18b4 e18b3 e18b2 e18b1 0%

10%

20% 30% 40% Total 18GB4

50% 60% 70% 18GB3 18GB2

Fig. 14.13  E18B and E19 by group [column percentage (%)]

In the final stage of our analysis, we bring together types of democratic relations, individual items, and discursive frameworks into ‘classes’ to delineate the internal dynamics and affinities that emerge out of the rational-­civil discourse. HCA is then applied on the coordinates of variable categories on factorial axes. To determine the number of clusters, we use the empirical criterion of the change in the ratio of between-cluster inertia to total inertia, when moving from a partition with r clusters to a partition with r  −  1

  ANALYSIS OF THE ‘DEMOCRATIC RELATIONS’ 

18GΒ2 Civic-direct Trusting-Suspicious Truthful-Deceitful ii. Trusting-Suspicious Not iii. Critical-Differential

18GB1 Civil-critical Open-Secret Trusting-Suspicious Critical-Differential Straight forward-Calculating 18GΒ2 Civil-direct Trusting-Suspicious Truthful-Deceitful Not vi. Citizen-Enemy

395

18GB4-Β Civil-truthful Open-Secret Critical-Differential Truthful-Deceitful Citizen-Enemy i. Open-Secret iii. Critical-Differential Not ii. Trusting-suspicious

18GΒ3-A,C Civil Trusting-Suspicious Citizen-Enemy vi. Citizen-Enemy

Fig. 14.14  Greece 18B

clusters. In Fig. 14.15, the hierarchy is represented. Symbol ~ stands for not selecting the respecting statement. For example, node 20 connects 18GB4 and not selecting statement {2} [Trusting-Suspicious]. The outcome of the analysis, presented in Table  14.20 (and in Fig. 14.15), reveals four classes [abstract discourses] (33, 34, 20, 21). Also for each class the corresponding levels for each level of the variables (statements, E19, and grouping variable for E18B) are noted. By marking a cell with an X we indicate that there is a significant contribution of the variable (row) to the formation of the class (column). For example, in cell (e18b11, 33) X means that the percentage of respondents that were affected by class (abstract discourse) 33 and select e18b1 is statistically significantly different than the percentage of the respondents not affected by 33 and select e18b1. If we rewrite the preceding table as a contingency table of the grouping variable extracted in phase one (columns) and E18B, E19 variables, we get Table  14.21. In the fourth row the relative frequency (weight) of each group is given. In cell (i,j), value X means that the i-th group (column) is connected to the j-th variable (row).

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M. MARANGUDAKIS

37

36

33/{18GB2, E18B2, E18B4, E18B5, ~E16B1, ~E16B3, ~E16B6, E19A, E19C}

21/{18GB3, E18B6}

35

20 /{18GB4, ~E18B2}

34/{18GB1, E18B1, E18B3, ~E18B4, ~E18B5, E19B}

Fig. 14.15  Schematic representation of the hierarchy Table 14.20  Contingency table of E18B, E19, and E18B grouping variable and extracted discourses IND

33

e18b10 e18b11 e18b20 e18b21 e18b30 e18b31 e18b40 e18b41 e18b50 e18b51 e18b60 e18b61 e191 e192 e193 18GB1 18GB2 18GB4 18GB3

X

34

20

21

X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X

E18B – – – – – – –

DEMOCRATIC Open Trusting Critical Truthful Straightforward Citizen

Ε19 “Populist-collectivist” “Civil-liberal” “No difference”

1 2 3 4 5 6

Α Β C

ANTI-DEMOCRATIC Secret Suspicious Deferential Deceitful Calculating Enemy

SEE [TABLE 14.20] SEE [TABLE 14.14]

(VARIABLES) (RESPONDENTS)

GROUPS GROUPS 18GBi Weight

X

X

X

34 1646 18GB1 18.5%

X

X

X X

X

33 1648 18GB2 26.6%

20 1649 18GB4 25.7%

Table 14.21  Contingency table of E18B, E19 (rows), and E18B grouping variable and discourses

Χ

21 1650 18GB3 14.9%

  ANALYSIS OF THE ‘DEMOCRATIC RELATIONS’ 

397

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M. MARANGUDAKIS

To conclude with our analysis we bring together the respondents’ grouping (see Table  14.14 and Fig.  14.10) and the abstract discourse grouping (see Table 14.20 and Fig. 14.15). From Fig. 14.10 we see that node 1653 is divided into node 1652 and node 1649, revealing the antithesis of 18GB4 to the other three groups. Furthermore node 1652 is divided into node 1650 [18GB3] and node 1651 which is divided into node 1646 [18GB1] and into node 1648 [18GB2]. In Table 14.14 the binary statements connected to each group are presented. For example, the fact that 18GB1 is connected to statements 1, 2, 3, and 5 means that 18GB1 consists of people choosing statements 1, 2, 3, and 5. On the other hand from Fig. 14.15 we see that node 37 is divided into nodes 36 and 33 [18GB2]. Node 36 is further divided into node 21 [18GB3] and into node 35, which is divided into nodes 20 [18GB4] and 34 [18GB1]. Placing these four types of democratic relations (i.e., 18GB1–18GB4) in a relational framework of abstract attitudes (in bold) rather than of individuals, as we did beforehand, plus their preferred SET (A, or B, or C), we can detect their juxtapositions (see Fig. 14.16). Roughly, all discourses correspond to the four groups of individuals that comprise the aforementioned Groups but with the addition of individual items that stress the affinity of these groups-turned-into-items with

Civil-Direct 18GΒ2 Trusting-Suspicious Truthful-Deceitful A,C ii. Trusting-Suspicious iv. Truthful-Deceitful v. StraightforwardCalculating

Fig. 14.16  Greece 18B

Civil-truthful 18GB4-Β Open-Secret Critical-Differential Truthful-Deceitful Citizen-Enemy Civil-Critical 18GB1 Open-Secret Trusting-Suspicious Critical-Differential Straight forward-Calculating Β i. Open-Secret iii. Critical-Differential

Civil 18GΒ3-A,C Trusting-Suspicious Citizen-Enemy vi. Citizen-Enemy

  ANALYSIS OF THE ‘DEMOCRATIC RELATIONS’ 

399

particular binary items. Thus, civil-critical is particularly affiliated with ‘open-secret’ and ‘critical-differentiated’ and it complies with the civilliberal framework, forming in effect a discourse genuinely civil. Civic-direct aligns with its own two constituent items plus the extra item ‘straight forward-calculating’, thus stressing the inter-personal and immediate character of democratic relations of this discourse. Absence of the rest of the items denotes aversion for procedural and reflective processes that guarantee societal functions wider than those of a homogenous community. The civil discourse, with its emphasis on ‘citizen-enemy’, appears as the most straightforward one, as it only recognizes citizens as the foundation of democratic relations. Yet, this civility is situated in the communitas framework of expressiveness and familiarity. It suggests a civil discourse sensitive to affectual bonds, and thus sensitive to various prescriptive, traditional, or parochial images of civility, since ‘citizenship’ is realized, or recognized, under expressionistic conditions. Last, the civil-truthful discourse is made of the identical group-turned-­ into-item with no individual item be aligned with it, since its constituent items have been aligned with the other discourses, meaning that no particular item enjoys prominence. Like civil-critical discourse, it also situates itself in the civil-liberal framework. For this discourse, it is important not to be deceitful. On the other hand, a relationship could be democrat even if it is characterized by suspiciousness or calculation.

Bibliography Benzécri, Jean-Paul. 1980. Introduction a la classification automatique d’ après un exemple de donnees medicales. Les cahiers de l’analyse des données 5 (3): 311–340. Greenacre, Michael. 2007. Correspondence Analysis in Practice. Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall/CRC. Papadimitriou, Giannis, and Giannoula Florou. 1996. Contribution of Euclidean and X Square Metrics to Determining the Most Ideal Classification in Ascending Hierarchy. In Annals in Honor of Professor I. Liakis, 546–581. Thessaloniki: University of Macedonia.

CHAPTER 15

Civil-Liberal and Populist-Collectivist Democratic Institutions

Contents

15.1  T  he Vertical Groups 15.1.1  The Democratic Self 15.1.2  The Democratic Relations 15.2  The Horizontal Discourses 15.2.1  The Civil-Liberal Discourses 15.2.2  The Intermediate Discourses 15.2.3  The Populist-Collectivist Discourse Bibliography

 411  411  412  414  414  415  416  417

In this chapter we detect the respondents, preferences for ‘democratic institutions’–whether the respondents ‘recognize’ the necessity modern bureaucracy to be formal and impersonal as the foundations of civil society, or instead, they confuse bureaucracy will collectivist patrimonialism: as the means by which the state serves various interests in an arbitrary fashion. Moreover, whether those who chose civil-liberal ‘democratic self’ and ‘democratic relations’ binary oppositions also prefer formal and impersonal bureaucracy over patrimonial versions of it. The issue is of crucial importance since preference for the former denotes a bottom-up individualist process of public support of certain types of ‘democratic institutions’; if not, preference for institutions will proved to be a matter of institutional hegemony to which individuals comply without self-reflection.

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Marangudakis, The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13589-8_15

401

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M. MARANGUDAKIS

Table 15.1  Questions E20 E20. Of the following list, please mark three institutional characteristics you consider to be Democratic and three you consider to be Anti-Democratic, by marking (+) and (−), respectively +/− a. b. c. d. e. f. g. h. i. j. k. l.

C-L P-C C-L P-C P-C C-L P-C C-L C-L C-L P-C C-L

…they regulate the activities of various interest groups …they primarily care for the ‘human being’ …they deal with and care about numbers and statistics …they guarantee egalitarianism …they take into consideration the particular circumstances of citizens …they are impersonal …they are sensitive to social needs …they are stern and non-negotiable …they are based on rules and procedures …they are based on a contract between the state and citizens …they are malleable and flexible …they prioritize the duties of an office over the power of individuals to make decisions

In Table 15.1, we present the set of questions (E20) used in the questionnaire for the analysis. The respondents were asked to mark three ­institutional characteristics they consider to be democratic and three they consider to be counter-democratic. The purpose of the specific questioning is to detect whether the sample ‘recognizes’ the necessity modern bureaucracy to be formal and impersonal as the foundation of civil society, or instead, the sample confuses bureaucracy with collectivist patrimonialism: as the means by which the state serves various interests in an arbitrary fashion. If constitutive goods reflect ultimate sources of meaning, then they should be structurally connected to visions of the good society and thus to institutions that shape the moral community of citizens. Certainly, visions of the good society are ideologically informed, and for this reason, they are influenced by non-symbolic sources of conviction such as calculation, power, and interest. Yet, moral persuasions, internalized as cultural orientations, could still be visible if they are strong enough to affect decisively visions of the proper relationship between state institutions and society. The set above (Table 15.1) is made of statements which comprise the binary ‘democratic’ and ‘anti-democratic’ institutions in Alexander and Smith (1993, 163). The items which in the original article defined the ‘democratic institutions’ in this list represent the civil-liberal model of democracy and are marked as C-L in the second column; the items which

  CIVIL-LIBERAL AND POPULIST-COLLECTIVIST DEMOCRATIC… 

403

represented the counter-democratic institutions in our list represent the populist-communitarian democratic model and are marked as P-C.  The populist-collectivist statements constitute the core of the populist political discourses which derive from the moral orientations of the Metapolitefsis civil religion and the ethno-­populist narrative of the 1990s onward. We decided to include a larger number of C-L statements (seven) than P-C ones (five) to make sure that preference for P-C is less than accidental. The respondents were asked to choose three ‘democratic’ and three ‘anti-democratic’ institutions marking + for the ‘democratic’ and − for the ‘counter-democratic’. In Table 15.2, we give the percentage (%) of respondents selecting the corresponding opposition statement (row) as democratic or non-­ democratic. Note that every subject selects three institutions’ characteristics as democratic and three as anti-democratic. In the sixth column, the difference (%) between the two percentages is given. The statements are ranked in descending order according to the difference. In Fig. 15.1, the statements are ranked in descending order according to the difference of the percentage (%) of respondents selecting the statement as democratic and the percentage (%) of respondents selecting it as non-democratic. A composite index of ‘populist-collectivist’ (P-C) and ‘civil-liberal’ (C-L) was constructed, taking into account only those who scored 3+ and 3− in the above set of questions. We count as (+) the selection of a ‘C-L’ statement as democratic, or the selection of a ‘P-C’ statement as anti-democratic. Also, we count as (−) the selection of a ‘C-L’ statement as anti-democratic, or the selection of a ‘P-C’ statement as democratic. Next we compute an index for each respondent by subtracting the number of – from the number of + (#+−#−). The index runs from [−6: ‘populist-collectivist’] to [6: ‘civil-liberal’]. The distribution of the sample according to the index is given in Table 15.3. Next we construct a new variable (P_C) recoding the index variable in three categories: {populist (−6:−3), intermediate (−2:2), and civil (3:6)}. Hierarchical Cluster Analysis is applied to the matrix with subjects in rows and variables in columns. This matrix is transformed into a 0-1 matrix, where each variable is replaced by a set of 0-1 variables, one for each variable category, taking value 1 if the corresponding category has been observed and 0 otherwise. To determine the number of clusters, we use the empirical criterion of the change in the ratio of between-cluster inertia to total inertia, when moving from a partition with r clusters to a partition with r − 1 clusters.

Table 15.2  Frequency distribution table for E20 questions (a–l) and total according to the selection as democratic (DE) or anti-democratic (AntiDe). The items are ranked according to the De-AntiDe difference in descending order E20 Model E20 item phrasing item d

P-C

b

P-C

g

P-C

e

P-C

k

P-C

i

C-L

j

C-L

l

C-L

f a

C-L C-L

c

C-L

h

C-L

…they guarantee egalitarianism …they primarily care for the human being …they are sensitive to social needs …they take into consideration the particular circumstances of citizens …they are malleable and flexible …they are based upon rules and procedures …they are based on a contract between the state and citizens …they prioritize the duties of an office over the power of individuals to make decisions …they are impersonal …they regulate the activities of the different interest groups …they deal with and care about numbers and statistics …they are stern and non-negotiable

Counter Not Democratic De-AntiDe Rank Democratic sel. 5.3

36.3

58.4

53.60%

1

4.7

38.4

56.9

52.60%

2

3.7

53.7

42.6

39.20%

3

4.7

67.4

27.9

23.30%

4

7.7

77.1

15.2

7.50%

5

7.4

81.5

11.2

3.90%

6

14.1

80

6

−8.00%

7

18.9

72.2

8.9

−9.90%

8

37.9 43.6

55 43.7

7.1 12.7

−31.10% −31.10%

9 10

49.7

44.5

5.9

−43.80%

11

54.7

40.7

4.6

−50.50%

12

Fig. 15.1  E20 statements (De-AntiDe)

  CIVIL-LIBERAL AND POPULIST-COLLECTIVIST DEMOCRATIC… 

405

Table 15.3  Frequency distribution of populist-collectivist and civil-liberal institutions (PC_CL index) Populist-Civil

−6.00 Populist-collectivist −4.00 −3.00 −2.00 −1.00 0.00 1.00 2.00 3.00 4.00 +6.00 Civil-liberal No answer Total

Frequency

Percentage

373 198 22 61 15 54 4 17 3 19 20 97 883

47.5% 25.2% 2.8% 7.7% 1.9% 6.9% 0.5% 2.2% 0.4% 2.4% 2.5% — 100%

PC_CL Populist-collectivist Populist-collectivist Populist-collectivist Intermediate Intermediate Intermediate Intermediate Intermediate Civil-liberal Civil-liberal Civil-liberal

Next, we calculate cluster weights, that is, the percentage of subjects that belong to each cluster, and investigate the variables that characterize each cluster via a series of chi-square tests with a significance level of 5%. The analysis for the four grouping variables for E16A, E16B, E18A, E18B together with variable P_C reveals eight groups of respondents [nodes 1552, 1553, 1559, 1560, 1562, 1564, 1530, 1546]. The hierarchy is schematically represented in Fig. 15.2. The outcome of the analysis, presented in Table 15.4 (and in Fig. 15.2), reveals eight groups. For each group, the relative frequency (line 2) is given in Table 15.4. Also for each group the corresponding levels for each level of the variables (grouping variables for E16A, E16B, E18A, E18B, and P_R) are noted. By marking a cell with an X we indicate that there is a significant contribution of the variable (row) to the formation of the class (column). The eight classes define four groups of respondents: percentage 5.2% are coded as ‘civil’ (node 1530), percentage 23.5% (nodes 1552, 1560) as ‘intermediate’ [the ratio of the percentage of populism/intermediate is 2/1 (66% P, 33% I)], percentage 9.5% (node 1559) as ­‘strong-populist’ [the ratio of the percentage of populism/intermediate is 4/1 (80% P, 20% I)], while the rest (percentage 61.8% of the sample) are coded as ‘populist’ [the ratio of the percentage of populism/intermediate is 3/1 (75% P, 25% I)].

406 

M. MARANGUDAKIS

1571/786 1570/745 1569/653

1568 /560 1567/485

1566/404

1565/294

1530/41

1552/92

1560 /93

1559/75

1546/81

1562/110

1564/233

1553/61 Fig. 15.2  Schematic representation of the hierarchy

For every group we give in Table 15.5 the percentage (%) of members of the group (row) that belong to the corresponding level of P_C (column). In the fifth column the percentage (%) for the total sample is given. In the last column the loading to the P_C variable according to the CAH analysis is given. In the preceding step Hierarchical Cluster Analysis was applied to the matrix with subjects in rows and variables in columns. In the second step, the group membership variables for E16A, E16B, E18A, and E18B were jointly analyzed with the existing variable for E20 (P_C) via Multiple Correspondence Analysis on the so-called Burt table (Greenacre 2007). The Burt table is a symmetric, generalized contingency table, which cross-­ tabulates all variables against each other. The main MCA output is a set of

  CIVIL-LIBERAL AND POPULIST-COLLECTIVIST DEMOCRATIC… 

407

Table 15.4  Contingency matrix for groups of people (columns) and discourses for E16A, E16B, E18A, E18B, and P_C index (rows)

16GA1 16GA2 16GA3 16GA4 16GA5 16GB1 16GB2 16GB3 16GB4 16GB5 18GA1 18GA2 18GA3 18GA4 18GA5 18GA6 18GB1 18GB2 18GB3 18GB4 P_R [P] P_R [I] P_R [R]

1530

1552

1560

1559

1546

1562

1564

1553

5.2%

11.7%

11.8%

9.5%

10.3%

14.0%

29.6%

7.8%

X

X X

X X

X

X

X

X X

X X

X X X

X X X

X X

X

X

X

X X X

X

X X

X

X

X X

X

X X

X

X

X X

X

X X X

X

X

X X X

X

X X

X

X

X

X

Table 15.5  Frequency distribution for the eight groups and total sample (row) according to the P_R index and total sample (column) P_C Node

P

I

C

Total

1530 1546 1552 1553 1559 1560 1562 1564 Total

0.00% 74.07% 66.30% 75.41% 81.33% 67.74% 73.64% 75.54% 69.72%

0.00% 25.93% 33.70% 24.59% 18.67% 32.26% 26.36% 24.46% 25.06%

100.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 5.22%

52% 10.3% 11.7% 7.8% 9.5% 11.8% 14.0% 29.6%

R I P P I P

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M. MARANGUDAKIS

orthogonal axes or dimensions that summarize the associations between variable categories into a space of lower dimensionality, with the least possible loss of original information contained in the Burt table. HCA is then applied on the coordinates of variable categories on the factorial axes. To determine the number of clusters, we use the empirical criterion of the change in the ratio of between-cluster inertia to total inertia, when moving from a partition with r clusters to a partition with r − 1 clusters. The outcome of the analysis reveals three classes. Each one is divided into two sub-classes. The hierarchy is schematically represented in Fig. 15.3. T1–T6 are the six distinct discourses presented in Table 15.6. Table 15.6 brings together the two ‘dimensions’ of our analysis, the groups of people that are formed around the items specific individuals choose from each and every discourse category (the vertical axis), and the particular discourses that emerge when they are combined to denote the preference of ‘democratic institutions’ (the horizontal axis), and arranges

45

43/P [POPULIST]

44

40/R [CIVIL]

42/I [INTERMEDIATE]

T1: 39/{16GA1, 18GB3, civil}

T3: 35/{16GA2, 18GA1, 18GB1, intermediate}

T2: 32/{16GB2, 18GA3}

T4: 37/{16GA3, 16GB3, 18GA4}

Fig. 15.3  Schematic representation of the hierarchy

T5: 41/{16GA4, 16GA5, 16GB4, 16GB5, 18GA2, 18GA6, 18GB2, populist}

T6: 38/ {16GB1, 18GA5, 18GB4}

E16 Β Groups (weight)

T4 GA16_3 B (20.5%) ‘Altruist’ Sensitive-­Calculative Authentic-­Hypocrite Altruist-Egoist

GB16_3- (22%) ‘Controlled’ Controlled-­Excitable

T1 GA16_1-A (14%) ‘The Sufferer’ Oppressed-­Oppressor Victim-Offender T2 GB16_2-C (16%) ‘Calm Activist’ Active-Passive Calm-­Passionate T3 GA16_2 (16.6%) ‘Anti-conformist’ Unconventional-­Conventional Independent-­Dependent

E16Α Groups (weight)

GA18_3-B (14.8%) ‘Brotherly Mutuality’ Mutual support-Egotist Brotherly bond-Stranger GA18_1-B (12.5%) ‘Brotherly expressivity’ Authentic-­Hypocritical Genuine-­Manipulative Brotherly bond-Stranger Affective-­Formal GA18_4-C (14.3%) ‘Affective Mutuality’ Mutual support-Egotist Affective-­Formal

E18Α Groups (weight)

Civil-liberal 4.4%

P_R Groups (weight)

(continued)

GB18_1 (18.6%) Intermediate ‘Civil-­Critical’ 20.1% Open-Secret Critical-­Differential Trusting-­Suspicious Straight forward-­Calculating

GB18_3-­A,C (26.6%) ‘Civil’ Trusting-­Suspicious Citizen-­Enemy

E18 Β Groups (weight)

Table 15.6  Contingency table of T1:T6 discourses (rows) according to E16A, E16B, E18A, E18B grouping variables and P_C index

GB16_5-Α, C (25%) ‘Autonomous Activist’ Active-Passive Autonomous-Dependent GB16_4-Α (24%) ‘Rational Onlooker’ Rational-Irrational Realistic-Unrealistic Sane-Mad

GB16_1-Β (13%) ‘Rational Activist’ Active-Passive Rational-Irrational Reasonable-Hysterical Sane-Mad

T6

E16 Β Groups (weight)

T5 GA16_4 B (21.5%) ‘Hero’ Unconventional-Conventional Authentic-Hypocrite Altruist-Egoist Independent-Dependent GA16_5 A (26.6%) ‘Rebel’ Oppressed-Oppressor Defiant-Compromised Unconventional-Conventional

E16Α Groups (weight)

Table 15.6  (continued)

GA18_2-C (14.9%) GΑ2-­C ‘Interpersonal expressivity’ Authentic-Hypocritical Genuine-Manipulative Interpersonal-Mediated Affective-Formal GA18_6-­Β (23.9%) ‘Authentic Mutuality’ Authentic-Hypocritical Mutual support-Egotist Genuine-Manipulative GA18_5-Α (19.5%) ‘Interpersonal Mutuality’ Mutual support-Egotist Interpersonal-Mediated

E18Α Groups (weight)

GB18_4-Β (26.5%)‘Civil-Truthful’ Open-Secret Critical-Differential Truthful-Deceitful Citizen-Enemy

GB18_2 (28.3%)‘Civic-Direct’ Trusting-Suspicious Truthful-Deceitful

E18 Β Groups (weight)

Populist-collectivist 67.2%

P_R Groups (weight)

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them according to their orientation toward alternative visions of democratic institutions, populist-collectivist or civil-liberal. We consider institutional structures to be of primary importance, compared to democratic self and democratic relations, since it is the former that crystallizes the latter in legitimate, long-lasting, structures. Each and every entry is simultaneously a group of people when examined vertically and a part of a composite discourse when examined horizontally. To decipher the overall structure of the table, we need to examine not only the obvious horizontal combination of individual discourses according to their specific orientation toward the three types of democratic institutions but also the arrangement of groups of people inside individual frameworks (Groups 16A, 16B, etc.) vis-à-vis these institutions. We start with the former.

15.1   The Vertical Groups 15.1.1  The Democratic Self Examining the group arrangements inside framework 16A we detect an inverse (from populist-collectivist to civil-liberal) escalation of more to less ‘restless self’. The most restless of all, Hero and Rebellious, are aligned with the collectivist institutions. They consider themselves to have a strong sense of their worth and uniqueness, while there is intentionality and action in the perception of their individuality: the Hero is altruist, while the Rebellious is defiant. Less restless, and more unperturbed, are the self discourses aligned with the intermediate pattern of institutions. The Altruist is active but at peace with him/herself, while the Anti-conformist is not active at all, but at ease with the certainty that he/she is different. Last is the introvert Sufferer. This self is the least restless of all, and it is this discourse that aligns itself with the civil-liberal ideal. In a nutshell, discourses that exemplify the struggling super-ego, notwithstanding the noble intentions of the struggle, thrive by aspiring to a collectivist vision of democracy. The ‘exceptional’ individual, in the form of either the Hero or the Rebellious self, considers the undifferentiated People to be the source of morality, and it is this feeling of righteousness, either in defense of the people, or as a member of the oppressed people, that defines the democratic self. Moving now to the second column, 16B, we are faced with a paradoxical association. Here four out of the eight discourses of the civil-liberal individualistic framework of the democratic self are linked with populismcollectivism. This is not an arbitrary constellation. Instead, all four bipolar

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items that refer explicitly to rationality are concentrated here, accompanied by the items ‘autonomous-depended’ and ‘active-passive’, which refer explicitly to the collectivist ideal, while only the item ‘controlled-excitable’ aligns with the intermediate type, and only ‘active-passive’ and ‘calm-­ passionate’ are linked with the civil-liberal ideal of democratic institutions. This is a strange alignment altogether since someone should expect at least one of the ‘rational’, ‘reasonable’, ‘realistic’, and ‘sane’ items to be located in frameworks other than collectivism. But they are not. These individuals consider populism-collectivism to be the framework in which their personal rational faculties belong, that populist-collectivist institutions are as rational as they are, and that liberal-civil are irrational by default. 15.1.2  The Democratic Relations The third column, 18A, constitutes the distribution of relevant discourses over the three types of institutional frameworks (populist-collectivist, intermediate, civil-liberal). The distribution of the three types of these discourses, the ‘political’, the ‘intermediate’, and the ‘religious’, are equally divided among the three frameworks, showing no obvious selective affinities among them. Yet, the populist-collectivist framework concentrates three discourses which stress personal proximity. In other words, the way this part of the sample understands ‘the People’ is not as an abstract entity but as a myriad of interpersonal relations whose interests are served in a give-and-take fashion. In this cognitive scheme, individuals stand for ‘the People’ and individual needs for ‘People’s’ needs. These selective affinities with populism-collectivism reveal the meaning of items and discourse combinations under certain circumstances: ‘I promote my genuinely just interests in rationally laid out, mutual ways so that both parties are satisfied’. When this discourse is oriented toward state institutions, it becomes the moral foundations of clientelism. Moving to the Intermediate institutional framework, we find two discourses attached to it, a Political one and a Religious one. The attached political discourse is made of the items ‘mutual-egoistic’ (also to be found in the populist-collectivist framework) and ‘affective-formal’, which replaces the item ‘interpersonal-mediated’. This is combined with a Religious discourse in which the ‘interpersonal-mediated’ item has been replaced by a ‘brotherly bond–stranger’, and framework C has been replaced by framework A. Thus, the removal of item ‘interpersonal-mediated’ and a generalized propensity to situate expressivity in the civil-liberal

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framework B were enough to drag the rest of the items from the fully populist-collectivist framework, to the Intermediate one. In other words, absence, or rejection, of face-to-­face interaction, and its replacement with a more abstract understanding of relations (i.e., ‘brotherhood’) as democratic ones, are enough to allow some civil-liberal aspects to creep into the populist-collectivist vision of institutions. Last, the civil-liberal institutional framework is linked to only one Political discourse consisting of the items ‘mutual support–egoist’ and ‘brotherly bond–stranger’ oriented toward the civil-liberal framework Β. It suggests that the civil-liberal ideal is an enemy to both strong emotive convictions of good and interpersonal relations as a symbolic substitute for communal relations. Contrary to these, civil-liberal institutions are related to detached and sober notions of communal relations which are neither egoistic nor consisted of strangers; instead, they function for the mutual benefit of the members of a brotherhood. The last column, 18B, consists of four groups that emerged out of the civil-liberal set of democratic relations, two of which are aligned with populist-collectivist institutions, while the rest is divided equally between the Intermediate and civil-liberal institutions. The distribution of groups in this row suggests subtle differences among the groups’ preferences. Aligned with populism-collectivism are the groups ‘civil-truthful’ (so-called for concentrating a larger number of political items and for stressing truthfulness as a rule for judging a relationship as democratic but being indifferent at the same time to items expressing cautiousness [‘trusting-suspicious’ and ‘straight forward–calculating’]) and ‘civic-direct’ (so-called for its emphasis on moral relations of frankness). In terms of components, they share the item ‘truthful–deceitful’ which is at the same time absent from the rest of the groups, signifying a rather central role in attracting these two groups to populismcollectivism. It suggests mistrust for civil-liberal institutions as deceitful, next to being secretive and attracting differential behavior. Yet, these two groups are not similar; they do not constitute two variations of the same subject. Instead, they reflect two quite different approaches to populism-collectivism, one moral (‘civic–direct’) and the other political (‘civil–truthful’). Aligned with the Intermediate institutional framework is the group ‘civil–critical’ with two political and two moral items, with the latter referring not to truthfulness, but to trust between the members of the group. As for the political ones, they are the same we find in the ‘open–critical’ group. Other than this, there are no apparent items that can explain the positioning of the group in the Intermediate position. For an interpretive

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explanation of the group’s position, we should look into the horizontal composition of the Intermediate framework as a whole (see below). Last, we examine the alignment of the civil group with the civil-liberal framework. It is composed of one moral (‘trusting–suspicious’) and one political item (‘citizen–enemy’). These items are also located in the populistcollectivist framework but in different groups belonging to different branches. When together, and in the absence of other moralistic or political items, these two items are attracted to the civil-liberal framework. This is a reasonable attachment since trust and citizenship belong to the core of the civil society ideology. Yet it is not equally apparent that civil-truthful is affiliated with populism-collectivism or that civil-critical is attached to the Intermediate institutional framework. Other types of analyses should be involved to solve this riddle. The last stage of our analysis deals with this issue (see below: the Semantic Map of Greek Political Culture). In all, the civil-liberal set of items denoting democratic relations proves to be the most ambiguous, as it appears, for the moment, to be the most homogenous of all lists. There is no clear and exclusive concentration of items which would allow us to see comprehensive patterns and no apparent reason for a group to belong to any given framework but not to another. It suggests the existence of a greater variation of subjective and idiosyncratic meaning vis-à-vis the items belonging to the list. In effect, it suggests that political discourses about civil-liberal democratic relationships in Greece do not correspond clearly to a political-cultural program that individuals can identify with. The suggestion that ‘civil-liberal’ persons are not ideologically aware that they indeed are civil-liberal, strongly correlates with the findings in Chap. 12, Sect. 2 wherein the ‘civil’ group 1561 are identified by what they are not, rather than what they are. In both findings individuals live liberally, but they lack the symbolic resources to transform life-experience to a liberal ideology and a corresponding political program.

15.2   The Horizontal Discourses 15.2.1  The Civil-Liberal Discourses The civil-liberal type of democratic institutions attracts four discourses which are arranged in two pairs. The first pair consists of the discourse the Sufferer (16GA1–A) and the Civil (18GB3–A,C). It constitutes the thinnest of all combinations in numbers of discourses and of items and is the most passive of all. It is a ‘motionless’ discourse of injustice which distinguishes between trusting citizens and suspicious enemies. Interestingly,

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this is the discourse of liberal-centrist parties use to describe the dire conditions Greece faces due to the populism that dominates Greece. The second pair consists of the Calm Activist (16GB2-C) and Brotherly Mutuality (18GA3-B). If the prior combination expresses frustration, this one denotes calm action mutually beneficial to the brotherhood in a civil-­ liberal framework of democratic institutions. It is the discourse used by liberal social movements which, by their actions, replace the absentee state in matters such as cleaning urban centers (e.g., the ‘Atentistas’). 15.2.2  The Intermediate Discourses The intermediated type of democratic institutions attracts six discourses arranged in two triplets. The first one consists of the discourse Anti-­ conformist (16GA2), Brotherly Expressivity (18GA1-B), and CivilCritical (18GB1). A common element of the three discourses is that they all reject framework A, the populist-collectivist framework of democratic relations. Thus, oriented toward framework B, individual detachment is combined with a strong commitment to brotherhood (the most abstract of the items denoting democratic relationships) and a critical-individualistic stand toward democratic relationships. In other words, independent spirit and unconventionality are linked to strong feelings of brotherhood and to critical notions of political individuality, that is, an individualist orientation to communitas. It reflects the discourse used by politically aware by-standers (e.g., social media commentators) criticizing various aspects of the messy public sphere but unwilling to enter the fray. The second triplet consists of the discourses Altruist (16GA3 B), The Controlled (16GB3-), and Affective Mutuality (18GA4-C). A common element of the triplet is the acceptance of frameworks B, the civil-liberal one. Thus oriented, the discourse that emerges out of their combination goes as follows: a mixture of institutions is the groundwork upon which authentic altruism, in a controlled manner, becomes mutually beneficial. In all, the intermediate institutional framework attracts discourses which are either altruistic-affectual, or individualistic-critical, without passionate overtures, stressing ecumenical aspects of the political community. These discourses do not animate strong civil action and they either constitute critical comments in public debates or are limited to social actions that are more ‘symbolic’ than substantive. Moreover, it is attributes of the ‘democratic self’ that determine the overall orientation of the complete discourse toward the intermediate position, rather than the specific attributes of the ‘democratic relations’ thereof.

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15.2.3  The Populist-Collectivist Discourse The populist-collectivist discourse concentrates the highest sample percentages and the highest number of discourses. Its constellation is made of two discourse combinations. The first, the dominant, one (seven discourses, half of the sample) is based on two discourses emerging out of the collectivist democratic self (16GA4-B & 16GA5-A), the Hero and the Rebel, and two emerging out of the civil-liberal democratic self (16GB5-A & 16GB4-A), the Autonomous Activist and the Rational Onlooker. These four discourses are linked to two discourses emerging out of the collectivist democratic relations (18GA2-C & 18GA6-B), Interpersonal Expressivity and Authentic Mutuality, and one discourse of the civil-liberal democratic relations (18GB2), that is, Civicdirect. Accordingly, democracy is made of authentic-­altruistic-defiant and rational-sane-reasonable individuals, who are joined in authentic-genuineinterpersonal-mutual-trusting-truthful relations aspiring to institutions that are flexible enough to accommodate the wishes and needs of ‘the people’. In all its various forms, it reflects a discourse that ‘feels’ right and is justified by the fact that all participants consider themselves to be brothers and sisters in arms. Crucially enough, this discourse does not include items such as ‘citizenship’, ‘brotherhood’, or ‘calm’ and ‘controlled’ (and their opposites). Their absence is suggestive: those who are immersed in this discourse do not find meaning in being a citizen (implying rules and responsibilities vis-à-vis the State and/or to the civil society), brotherhood (implying strong bonds of conviction or interest), and calm and controlled behavior (implying absence of passion). This discourse, at the same time, is highly individualistic and highly collectivist, scorning both institutional arrangements and those who do not share their convictions. The collective representation of ‘People’ they aspire to is both formless and tangible; it is an imagined, ideological, entity which manifests itself, exclusively, in those participating in the specific political action. This discourse constitutes the cultural basis of the schismogenetic civil religion in Greece that functions as the banner of social action only to tear apart civil bonds and institutions (see Chap. 6). No wonder this combination reflects the discourses that characterize the vast majority of social movements, syndicates, and acts of civil disobedience in Greece. The second constellation, much smaller than the prior, consists of three discourses, as no discourse belonging to the populist-collectivist democratic self is attached to it. This absence makes the discourse more civil than

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the prior one since justification does not arrive out of strong inner and self-­ referential moral convictions. Instead, we find a combination of the Rational Activist (16GB1-B) with Interpersonal Mutuality (18GB5-A) and Civil Truthful (18GB4-B) discourses of democratic relations; in other words, rational-­ sane democrats, involved in mutual-interpersonal and open-critical-­truthful relations of citizens, demand institutions that follow populist ideals. This is a sober discourse that, compared to the dominant one, recognizes citizenship and rejects egocentric-emotive convictions. It corresponds to various political discourses and promulgations that condemn ‘political violence’ and irresponsible behavior which does not take into account the rights of other citizens and does not contribute to a rational civil sphere committed to the construction of a ‘true’ popular democracy.

Bibliography Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Phillip Smith. 1993. The Discourse of American Civil Society: A New Proposal for Cultural Studies. Theory and Society 22: 151–207. Greenacre, Michael. 2007. Correspondence Analysis in Practice. Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall/CRC.

CHAPTER 16

The Semantic Map of the Greek Political Culture and Conclusions of Part III

Contents

16.1  T  he Semantic Map of the Greek Political Culture 16.2  Conclusions of Part III

 419  423

16.1   The Semantic Map of the Greek Political Culture In this chapter the results of the last three chapters are brought together to form a full description of the moral discourses which shape the Greek public sphere. The Map clearly depicts  the hegemony of the populist-­ collectivist discourses at the expense of civil-liberal ones. In other words, it depicts how the populist-collectivist discourses manage to dominate the public sphere by appropriating all kinds of symbolic representations. Let us examine its construction in detail. Bringing together all the results from the previous parts of the analysis we arrive at two patterns which we incorporate in the following semantic map (Fig. 16.1). The first pattern provides us with the six geometric figures (see Fig. 15.3) which represent six groups of variables which define six discrete groups of individuals. The content of each one of these six groups is defined by the binary items which are connected directly and explicitly to the levels of the ­grouping variables (see for 16A: Table 13.10, 16B: Table 13.19, 18A: Table 14.12, and for 18B: Table 14.21) which (the grouping variables) © The Author(s) 2019 M. Marangudakis, The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13589-8_16

419

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M. MARANGUDAKIS 800

Sensitive Controlled Affective

sensitive, Authentic, Altruistic, Independent, Oppressed, calm, realistic, brotherly bond, open, critical, trusting, truthful, straightforward

600 16GA3

16GB3

Unconventional Defiant Open Critical

18GB4

Intermediate 18GB3

-400

16GA2 0 -200

16GB2

5.2% RAT

Civil

victim sensitive calm realistic affective open critical citizen

POP 200

400

18GB2

-200 18GB1 18GA2

Calm Brotherly bond

0 18GA5

Populist

16GA5

INT

Victim Citizen

46.9%

200

18GA3

18GA1 -600

400

18GA4

16GA1 -800

Rational Reasonable Sane Interpersonal

16GB1

24.3%

23.5%

victim unconventional defiant calm controlled Affective Trusting Truthful Straightforward critical open citizen

-400

-600

16GB5

16GB4 16GA4

18GA6

600

victim unconventional defiant sensitive Authentic Altruist Independent Rational Reasonable Sane calm realistic Active Autonomous brotherly bond Authentic Mutual support Genuine Interpersonal critical open citizen

Authentic Altruist Independent Oppressed Realistic Active Autonomous Mutual support Genuine Trusting Truthful Straightforward

Fig. 16.1  The Semantic Map of the Greek Political Culture

derive from the second step of the analysis and are included (i.e., the levels of the grouping variables) in each one of the groups. Thus, each group is represented by a geometrical figure on the map. The binary items connected to each figure are written in non-italics. The second pattern provides us with the discourses these groups of individuals use to describe the democratic self, the democratic relations, and the democratic institutions. To arrive at these discourses we first identified eight groups of individuals (see the first step of the analysis in Chap. 15, Table 15.4). Each group of individuals is connected to a level of collectivist-­civil variable (E20, Table 15.3). The same group is also connected to some binary items which are connected directly and explicitly to the levels of the grouping (see for 16A: Table 13.10, 16B: Table 13.19, 18A: Table 14.12, and for 18B: Table 14.21) which (the grouping variables) derive from the second step of the analysis and are included (the levels of the grouping variables) in each one of the groups. The binary items which are connected to each one of these groups of individuals constitute the discourse of the level of collectivist-civil variable which is connected with the same group. These binary items are written in italics.

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Thus, by describing the six groups of the second step (see Chap. 15) we define the specific characteristic of each one of the six groups by using the grouping variables of 16A, 16B, 18A, and 18B, and by connecting the eight groups from the first step of Chap. 15 with the collectivist-rationalist variable levels, we reveal the abstract discourse for the responding level of the collectivist-rationalist variable. The map presents the full spatial distribution of the binary features/ items of the ‘democratic self’ and the ‘democratic relations’ vis-à-vis ‘democratic institutions’. Accordingly, each institutional framework (civil-­ liberal and populist-collectivist) includes two types of items: The first type (bold and in italics) is the items used in discourses oriented toward a particular symbolic framework (populist-collectivist, civil-­ liberal, intermediate). Its location inside a given discourse is not exclusive, since the same item could be used in the context of another institutional framework as well (e.g., the item ‘victim–offender’ is used by all three discourses, the item ‘realistic–unrealistic’ by two, while the item ‘straightforward–calculating’ only by one). In a sense, this non-exclusive use represents the instrumental use of symbols as tools of manipulation as argued by Ann Swidler (see Chap. 1, Sect. 1.5) and thus they belong to the framework of ‘practical rationality’ (see Chap. 1, Sect. 1.3). The second type of items (not in italics) is the one that is exclusively located inside a particular symbolic framework and is not found anywhere else, a fact which allows us to consider them as constituting the ‘substantive rationality’ of specific groups of people (see Chap. 1, Sect. 1.3). The analysis suggests that a given discourse is made of and is constructed around two types of symbols: the core (non-italics) and the peripheral, or instrumental  (italics). In other words, particular political visions of the good (in our case, of democratic institutions) could appropriate and make use of symbols floating in the public sphere and common to many competing discourses. These symbols are expendable, in that they will be triggered according to the occasion, to be dropped on other occasions when other symbols become contextually useful. But there is a limit to this flexibility, imposed by the presence of some symbols and their corresponding collective representations which are indispensable since they constitute the core of the discourse. Four items do not follow this pattern since their position as discursive symbols differs from their position as symbols that characterize individuals. They are the items ‘brotherly bond–stranger’, ‘sensitive–cold calculator’, ‘oppressed–oppressor’, and ‘straightforward–calculating’. This

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disparity suggests that there exist idiosyncratic cases that do not follow the general pattern set by the public discourse and debates, or that these individual cases are affected by symbols/items that the study has not accounted for. Either way, these items form minority cases of symbolic deviance to the rule. Thus, while the civil-liberal discourse uses eight items (italics connected to civil-liberal box) to construct an argument, the individuals who adhere to this discourse (5.2% of the sample) are characterized by four items, arranged in two pairs: ‘victim–offender’ and ‘citizen–enemy’, and ‘calm– excitable’ and ‘brotherly bond–stranger’. These two pairs denote strong meaningful connections that refer to different depictions of the current condition (i.e., a citizen who feels victim) and of the vision of the good society (i.e., a brotherhood of people living peacefully with each other). These four items amass the people who believe in a civil-liberal society as described by the discourse. Two items ‘citizen’ and ‘brotherly bond’ are political and refer to abstract conceptions of equality. The third item, ‘calm’, is behavioral and refers to composed behavior, while the fourth one, ‘victim’, though political in a sense, mostly denotes an undesirable condition rather than a principle. Moving to the Intermediate discourse, it is made of twelve (12) items (italics connected to the intermediate box), but only 7 items function as identifiers of the respondents (23.5% of the sample) that are attached to this discourse. They form two groups (see dot-line triangles above). The first group is made exclusively of items denoting behavioral-psychological predispositions, while the second group amasses items that denote personal identity and political preferences, suggesting two separate symbolic sources of the intermediate position. The first source is made of moderate sentiments (‘sensitive’, ‘controlled’, ‘affective’) that form a gentle predisposition toward the public sphere. The second source comprises two items denoting a strong personal identity (‘unconventional’ and ‘defiant’) based upon a critical evaluation of collective opinion and two political items that denote confidence and civility (‘open’), and reflective individuality (‘critical’). It constitutes a comprehensive model of liberal citizenship in full accord with the western liberal tradition, suggesting that liberalism aligns with institutional via media, neither cold rational, nor formless collectivist. Last, the populist-collectivist discourse is the richest of all three, as twenty two (22) items are used by it (italics connected to the populist box), while sixteen (16) items identify those individuals (46.9% of the sample) who are attached to this discourse. The people who aspire to

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populism-collectivism are divided into two groups (see dot lines, schemes line, and pentagon earlier). One group consists of three personal traits (‘rational’, ‘realistic’, and ‘sane’) plus a relational one (‘interpersonal’), suggesting that the basis of a personal rational predisposition to the public sphere is anchored in interpersonal relations. The second, and more numerous group, is made of political (‘active’, ‘autonomous’, ‘independent’, oppressed’, ‘realistic’), relational (‘mutual support’, ‘trusting’, ‘truthful’, ‘straightforward’), and personal traits (‘authentic’, ‘altruist’, ‘genuine’). Compared with the previously examined groups we notice the following. First, it is the group that concentrates all the relational items; second, it concentrates the political items that denote autonomy and intentional action (against oppression); and third, the personal traits that characterize this group refer to an ‘inner voice’ of truth and contribution. Together, they form a powerful symbolic universe of confident actors who based upon their personal relations seek to bring a sense of felt freedom in the public sphere. Remarkably, as the semantic map clearly indicates, populism-collectivism has managed to symbolically control both rational and emotive symbols. This control ­symbolizes its hegemony of the public sphere.

16.2   Conclusions of Part III Juxtapositions between constellations reveal that the types of ‘democratic self’ and ‘democratic relations’ that could emerge out of an apparently homogeneous set of items which reflect an ideal-type of a democratic condition are quite complex (three in the populist-collectivist and four in the civil-liberal ideal-type) but still meaningful. It is very interesting, and intriguing, that in both cases of the ‘democratic self’ we find a combination of items to function as the backbone upon which variations of the self emerge (independent-defiant-authentic-altruistic and active-reasonable-­ rational-sane). In contrast, in both cases of the ‘democratic relations’ instead of a combination, we find one single item to be the bedrock from which variations of ‘democratic relations’ are formed (mutual support and trusting), suggesting that definitions of the self are more complex than of relations and that the individual is seeking for something very specific in relations, upon which she can build up her moral community. The moral orientations we detect in all four constellations of the ‘democratic self’ and the ‘democratic relations’ are distinguished by orientations which confirm the priority of either the individual or the collectivity, action

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or reflection, intellect or emotion, and communitas or civility, with strong convictions and emotiveness to be attached to populism-­ collectivism, while sobriety and calculation to align with the civil-­liberal ideal. We can draw two conclusions from it: First, that there is a selective affinity between self-reflection, images of ethical properness, and moral political ideals: the way you perceive an ideal, such as democracy, also defines your political orientation toward liberalism or populism-­ collectivism. Strong self-referential moral convictions combined with the abstract notion of community strongly tend to be adjoined to populism, if populism is defined positively in similar terms. Second, an individual could always find ways to express its uniqueness by focusing and exploring particular sub-sets of moral imperatives. The reason for this lies in the indeterminacy of the symbols. As the symbolic system is self-referential, the individual comprehends symbols  in very unique and idiosyncratic ways and contextualizes them differently than the next individual. Yet, the choices are limited by the boundaries of the definition of the good and the evil the symbolic system promulgates. Thus, ‘mutual support’ is quite different from ‘trust’, since the former is the basis of a communal setting of limited individualists, while the latter is the basis of a reliable but sovereign individual. The analysis of the ‘democratic self’ and of ‘democratic relations’ shows clearly that an individual could be immersed in quite different symbolic-­ discursive environments and finds her bearings with relative easiness. No matter the cultural framework she is placed in, our analysis suggests that (eventually) she will develop a concrete moral identity which will be based on tangible psychological orientations such as active/passive, calm/passionate, involved/distant, solitary/social, emotional/sober, composed/ spontaneous, and basic socialization orientations, which then will be attached to specific collective representations and  compatible cultural codes with political-specific meaning, such as rational, sane, trustworthy, compassionate, heroic, defiant, revolutionary, and so on. It is this pre-­ political, pre-ideological sense of the self which provides the moral dimension of political preference. Yet, there is a political-symbolic factor that restricts such an individual freedom and adaptability, even when alternative sets of political culture are available. This factor is the hegemonic discourse of the public sphere, our ‘democratic institutions’, which appropriates the private/individual discourses by incorporating them in its own framework, thus framing them according to its own spirit. It manages to do so, first, by seizing free float-

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ing signs of symbolic worth, appropriating in the process a diverse array of collective representations which verify and reinforced its cultural c­ apital. The Polytechnic Uprising school commemorations—highly emotive ceremonies which bring together the heroic, the just, the altruistic, the critical, the citizen, and the brotherly bond ideals—in a populist-collectivist framework are one such mechanism of increasing its cultural capital, against its opponents which by default are linked symbolically to the profane. It also manages to do so, second, by arbitrarily bringing together a diverse array of self-referential clusters of symbolic representations of the good society and the good citizen, thus increasing its ability to withstand a variety of challenging pressures from competing democratic ideals: a defeat at one symbolic arena can be replaced by mobilizing a different symbolic resource and replacing its loses in another arena. This multiplicity of resources at the disposal of populism in Greece allowed Alexis Tsipras, the tricksterleftist PM of Greece, to state proudly at the Parliament: ‘many call us liars, but no one has called us thieves.’1 Thus, the juxtaposition of ‘democratic’ versus ‘anti-democratic institutions’ in Alexander and Smith’s article certainly makes sense in the particular framework of American democracy but not necessarily elsewhere. The exact same ‘anti-democratic institutions’ are actually considered to be democratic, and the ‘democratic institutions’ are considered to be ‘non-­ democratic’, in a society which follows the populist-collectivist definition of the good and the evil. It is this framing that makes schismogenetic code orientations so prominent in the Greek political culture, even during the peaceful and prosperous Metapolitefsis period (1974–2009), and it is this framing which makes collectivist social behavior self-aware of itself while forms of individualist social behavior remain symbolically meaningless and, for this reason, politically insignificant.

1  https://www.news.gr/politikh/article/615029/alexis-tsipras-ekana-lathi-megala-lathi. html.

CHAPTER 17

Conclusions: Greek Political Culture and the Theory of Multiple Modernities

Contents

Bibliography

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The decisive role of culture, as was defined it the first chapter, in shaping tempestuous modern Greece and its unstable social organization gave us the opportunity to employ and, indeed, to test Shmuel Eisenstadt’s theory of multiple modernities, a theory which defines modernity primarily as cultural programs. In his words, modernity constitutes … reconstructions of multiple institutional and ideological patterns carried forward by specific social actors in close connection with social, political, and intellectual activists, and also by social movements pursuing different programs of modernity, holding very different views on what makes societies modern. (Eisenstadt 2000a, 2, emphasis added)

It is these ‘views’ we examined, the way attitudes vis-à-vis the world permeate social institutions assuring their reproduction and their incorporation into modern secular ideologies and social institutions as symbolic orientations. In a sense symbolic orientations reveal what various individuals really mean by values, such as ‘democracy’, ‘citizenship’, ‘equality’, and ‘freedom’. To find methodologically sound ways to read between the lines, to see the world through the eyes of the social actors, became our key endeavor. © The Author(s) 2019 M. Marangudakis, The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13589-8_17

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Using the framework of Eisenstadt’s theory, but without hesitating to add (i.e., cultural pragmatics, cultural trauma, civil religion, schismogenesis) or to stress and expand on Eisenstadt’s own analytical concepts (i.e., liminality, charisma, transcendental vs. mundane order) to account for historical contingency, structural diversification, social change, and above all systemic collapse, we came to conclude that modern Greece could be best grasped as a multiple nexus, as what happens when (a) a mystical religiosity is interweaved with western, secular, ideologies; (b) a collectivist, Zone III, society of immensely strong Mythical memories is constantly upset by war and strife and concomitant cultural traumas; and (c) amoral familism is intertwined with the structures of an imported centralized, modern, state. The first amalgamation is cultural-ideological, the second is cultural-­military, and the third is cultural-political. None of these is purely cultural; by definition they could not. Yet, it is culture that, when intertwined with specific, indeed contingent, social networks of power, turns socio-­structural indeterminacies to pathological code orientations and ground rules. This is the major modification the study makes to the theory of multiple modernities: that worldviews do not set out definite ‘tracks’ for a civilization’s development in a strong, predetermined, intentional way. Rather, they affect the course of a social configuration only in conjunction with, and through the development of, the semi-autonomous social networks of power.1 The actual result, the hegemonic civil religion in our theoretical scheme, is a matter of contingency (Arnason 2003; Knöbl 2011). We have identified three internalized code orientations, that is, clientelism, amoral familism, and anarchic individualism, as the primary cultural forces which run through modern Greece. We also identified the Metapolitefsis communitarian civil religion (the exact reverse image of the preceding sponsored civic religion) as the hegemonic discourse which turned these moral code orientations to destructive forces. The obvious question is why are they so persisting? The answer is rather simple. They constitute only partial manifestations of an out-worldly cosmological and ontological vision which produces an abundance of symbolic codes which under favorable social conditions could in fact be a source of strength. For example, the post-war ‘Greek economic miracle’ (McNeill 1978; Kalyvas 1  This was noticed first by Stephen Kalberg who brought it to my attention. I am indebted to him. For an elaborated analysis of how Eisenstadt uses Weber’s ‘ideas as switchmen’ in a ‘soft’ way, see Kalberg (2018).

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2015) was produced under the same code orientations which today tear the country apart. Clientelism, amoral familism, and anarchic individualism were also present in the 1950s. Then, at a moment of utter desolation, paradoxically, they were manifested as constructive institutional ground rules: clientelism allowed networks of marginal social strata to reach much-­ needed collective resources controlled by the political center; amoral familism, functioning as a safety net, reduced the cost of taking on risky business projects; and anarchic individualism allowed for original social action. In a Weberian framework, post-war economic rationalization was not transferred to the political sphere; it did not become a ‘methodical way of life’. Our study suggests the reason: the same code orientation functions differently when incorporated in different networks of social power. In terms of self-reflection, the constructive function of the code orientation in one type neutralized the detrimental function of the same code orientation in the other. In the same vein, the current economic disaster was caused not by an essential ‘Greek culture’ which produced reckless economic behavior by Greeks in general (in 2011, the debt of the Greek private sector was average among EU countries) but by specific statist and paternalistic institutional ground rules which were produced after the liminal year of 1974 and were nurtured in the sheltered EU environment, under the symbolic auspices of the Metapolitefsis civil religion. In this environment, they became politically destructive. By hindsight it could be argued then that as far as the economy is concerned, even though certain cultural configurations indeed hinder economic development, mainly by keeping out social trust and by keeping in generalized clientelism as well as by impeding economic differentiation (Hausmann and Hidalgo 2014), they do not produce economic meltdowns. It is specific economic policies which produce them, ominous policies which are culturally justified by evoking respected and venerated constitutive goods, and specifically in democracies, it is political parties and interest groups who mobilize constitutive goods to achieve privileged access to collective resources. From the moment these constitutive goods are crystallized in civil religion symbolic orders, and are defended by various social carriers, they trickle down, via various hegemonic discourses, to schismogenetic institutional ground rules and internalized code orientations infecting in the process the whole social organization and not just the economic social networks of power, as Michael Mann’s theory rather presumes. It is this process which produces long-term economic ­pathologies

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and prepares the ground for economic disasters, that is, social resistance to change course even when a clear and present danger is visible. The argument implies a worrying supposition: the more democratic but non-civil a regime, the more possible an economic disaster. Indeed, while Greece has experienced many economic busts in the last 100 years, 2010 was the year an economic disaster only occurred because, for the first time, the most dynamic and energetic parts of the Greek social configuration (professional associations, syndicates, new social movements, the press, intellectuals, and public personae)—in fact the social groups that benefited the most by the post 1980 economic growth—fiercely rejected necessary drastic economic measures ‘in the name of democracy’. Their rejection was the unavoidable result of the radical, yet collectivist  and patrimonial, democratization of Greece in 1974; of what has been called the ‘vertical incorporation of the periphery to the political center’ (Mouzelis and Pagoulatos 2003). The extrapolation strongly suggests that the social domain wherein the three internalized code orientations are definitely and relentlessly destructive is not the economic, but the political one. For, while a rudimentary economic growth depends primarily on practical rationality, the latter cannot produce political collective goods. Instead, for individuals to act as citizens in unison, they need to possess particular value postulates which urge the individual to act intentionally toward achieving the collective good. For this to happen, the community must be perceived, in one form or another, as sacred, a notion able to place strong psychological premiums on the individual. This is the sacrality the Orthodox religion prevents from occurring: in the Orthodox theology immanence cannot afford sacredness; only transcendental entities afford sacredness and for this reason constitutive goods need to be as remote and detached from mundane existence as much as possible.2 Accordingly, an actual, mundane, civil community cannot be sacred. Even if the Church blesses it (e.g., in the framework of the old sponsored civic religion), the meaning the Church will give to the community will refer to something mystical and apathetic to civil mundane action. Thus, in matters of civility, the Orthodox Church nourishes either parasitic docility and egoistic indifference or outbursts of civil strife. As for the secular Metapolitefsis civil religion, it proved to be equally imagistic and mystical, orienting the political self to transcendental visions utterly 2  This is the reason holy icons are so important in Orthodox religiosity: their presence in out-of-church mundane environments functions as short-range sacral radiators amidst the impure world.

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divorced from methodical and pragmatic civil action. In both cases, liminality—in our case the imaginary alternative of living beyond any social order whatsoever—becomes the rule rather than the exception of the Greek political constitutive goods. It is for this reason Greece needs a new set of civil constitutive goods. But first let us evaluate our three ominous code  orientations. They manifest themselves in current social organization in various ways as a series of pathologies which have been already scrutinized and exposed in piecemeal fashion by previous research as: lack of rational organization of the Greek state; lack of solidarity and weak civil society; lack of rational bureaucratic structures; lack of modern rational ethos; lack of social responsibility; and lack of in-worldly ethics. These diagnoses, exactly because they are selective and particular, come down to two diametrically opposite conclusions: either that special interests and clientelistic networks of power do not allow structural changes to happen, and that Greek culture has nothing to do with the predicament, or that Greek culture does not allow necessary reforms to take place, and only when old, ‘oriental’, habits die, ‘we will become modern’. Eventually, as desirable changes do not happen, both arguments become circular: vested interests prohibit the political system to eradicate these vested interests, or Greek culture does not allow Greek culture to change. In effect, they become fatalistic. Our analysis avoids circular reasoning by utilizing an analytic model for the analysis of culture-as-morality, which takes into account social structures specifying the way culture is intertwined with social networks of power, its manifestations, and its societal impact. Moreover, and more crucially, the model allows for the examination of the structure of culture itself, that is, the symbolic orders, patterns, and codes, as an analytically— not temporally—hierarchical structure and thus allows for the monitoring of the trickle-down effects of culture from abstract visions of the good, the true, and the beautiful to tangible cultural practices embedded in social structures as well as on the corporeal self. In all we argue that Church and/or civil religion, formal or informal, are the cultural configurations which transform ‘immovable’ culture in tangible social phenomena allowing scientific observation and scrutiny. Our analysis and findings allow us to argue that for the implementation of decisive structural changes to ­happen, ‘habits of the heart’ need to change; and for habits of the heart to change, civil religion and its constitutive goods need to change. With this intention in mind, the main historical, literal, ­anthropological, social psychological, ethnographic, and sociological studies on Greek

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c­ulture were examined, identifying in the process the cultural developments that took place in Greece the last half a century, underlying those crucial moments and major cultural products which left their mark either in the form of civil religion or as hegemonic narratives in the public sphere. The analysis strongly suggests that the current Greek political culture is schismogenetic: that it is structured symbolically is such ways that it constantly generates internal contestations, clashes, and breakdowns as various social groups compete for scarce resources as the righteous interpreters and gate-keepers of these imperatives and that these pathologies are caused by the frustration generated by mystical-emotive visions of democracy which on the one hand can never be materialized and on the other allows for egoistic social action to be interpreted as authentic and heroic. Having identified cultural phenomena and symbolic structures we consider to be of crucial importance to the perpetuation of this civil schismogenesis, we then employed a questionnaire and original methods of analysis to examine the specific structure and the specific effects of the basic contours of Greek political culture. The data analysis of a socially homogenous and culturally representative sample of the Greek population (as explained in Chap. 8)  allowed us to identify (a) the alignment and the patterned orders of the constitutive goods; (b) the actual code orientations and the moral standards they instill; (c) the specific patterns of ethical action and broad ground rules; and (d) the centrality of collectivist social behavior and its correlation with the core constitutive goods of Greek culture. Furthermore, the analysis allowed us to follow the ways a ‘democratic self’ is constructed as a bottom-up process from elementary combinations of binary oppositions to locating the self in public discourses concerning the institutions a proper democracy should aspire to. The process allowed us to identify basic moral stands and perceptions of the self as the way the ideological self is constructed and the crucial role the current hegemonic collectivist discourses play in shaping individual identities to their image: by attaching and absorbing various individual meanings and worldviews to its own discourse and by disarticulating and culturally obliterating discursive expressions of the individualist civil self. The results suggest that late-­ modern processes which foster individualization, and in fact the decentered self (Taylor 1989), politically can be neutralized by the presence of hegemonic populist-collectivist civil religions. The results of the data analysis, together with the preceded descriptive analysis of Greek political culture, led us to conclude that schismogenesis stems from two sources, one is religious and the other is political. The

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religious source, on the one hand, imposes a very sharp distinction between the transcendental-sacred and the immanent-profane domain and nourishes the belief that in-worldly social action is morally insignificant and meaningless. Consequently, through the religious and secular alike, ‘little and folk traditions’, it cultivates a vision of an entrenched paradise on Earth surrounded by evil and danger, a vision which invariably encourages erecting walls between insiders and outsiders and keeps alive primordial kin-and-kith notions of friend versus stranger or even friend versus enemy. On the other hand, as a social imaginary, it rouses the vision of communitas: the vision of the undifferentiated community of believers who are joined together through mystical-imagistic rituals in holy union but which in fact leaves every one isolated in his own egocentric reality and premodern, cyclical, and atemporal, symbolic order. As for the political source, it cultivates the notion of democracy as protest and insubordination, not as participation in trustworthy civil bonds. And while its expression and manifestation draw from the religious communitas, its ideological meaning emanates from the iconic Polytechnic Myth and its discursive offshoots. Today, as this Myth fades away in oblivion, protest and insubordination have become ends in themselves; indeed, non-civil, violent, and parasitic behavior has become the new, unofficial, civil religion of the current, ‘anti-systemic’, government and the anarchic public sphere it nourishes. Both religious and political sources become socially significant by discourses/cultural pragmatics which cross-fertilize and reinforce each other to give the impression of a unified and cohesive symbolic domain. The same impression is caused by organizational affinity since both clientelism and non-civil individualism thrive on weak institutional and bureaucratic structures and a symbolically weak political center which cannot inspire loyalty and duty either to state functionaries or to the citizens. Yet, both descriptive and quantitative analyses assert that in fact they are two distinct cultural processes with different symbolic and organizational sources and social carriers. The religious process animates clientelism, as the latter, by metaphor and homology, is attached symbolically to amoral familism and the ‘social exchange’ of saints-mediators with the faithful. Each one of them is a micro process of private rituals finding their way up to wider social structures, thus making their symbolic affinity all the more politically approved in terms of psychological premiums. The political process animates protest-­ as-­democracy. We have identified it as various civil-religion formulations

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which are primarily an ideological construction of networks of intellectuals at large which become incorporeal by a process of ‘in-culturation’: by informing ecstatic performances, public rituals, and grant narratives of Hellenism and its historical trajectory seen through grand achievements and cultural traumas. The prominence of anarchic individualism is then to be explained as being the overt expression of both processes, since the main concern of the self in both cases, the religious and the secular, is to remain authentic (see Chap. 15, Sect. 2.3). As for the cultural traumas of the civil war and the Polytechnic Uprising, they are not regrettable events begging to be healed but gallant tragedies breeding heroic identities and cultural justification of political supremacy. The two constituents of this civil religion, mystical-imagistic ceremonies, and dramatic performances on the one hand, and egalitarian mythical representations on the other are not identical, nor do they necessarily signify inescapable backwardness. Mystical religiosity also characterizes mainstream western denominations such as American or Canadian Pentecostalism (Marangudakis 2011; Poloma 2003), and egalitarian Mythical memories are strong in countries such as Ireland and Israel (Smith 2000). Yet, Greece is a rather unique case in this respect: it is the combination of these two cultural elements in a geographical location of high geopolitical volatility. This volatility constitutes a fourth independent factor of great cultural consequences: it makes difficult the long-term stabilization of any given social configuration, and any robust political elite to accept civic responsibility, while it is constantly a source of psychological anxiety and anticipation for deliverers who will save the day. It causes structural fluidity which turns mystical rituals and egalitarian mythical representations of the People into ideological ‘free agents’ in Eisenstadt’s terminology, to be appropriated at will by various social actors instrumentally for their own benefit. It is not a coincidence that today’s volatile Greece is the same country which experienced critical social reconstructions first in the warring decade, 1912–1922, when the population of the country increased by 30%, mainly by ex-Ottoman Orthodox Christians (most of them desolated peasants), and once again in the warring 1940s when the country lost 15% of its population, more than half of its wealth and infrastructure and most of its moral bearings. Such upsetting contingencies allow only the most basic cosmological and ontological principles to survive: the religious and the familial ones. We have identified the Metapolitefsis civil religion of victimhood and defiance to be the key factor of political schismogenesis. In the heart of

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this civil religion lie the Polytechnic Uprising and the traumatic memories of the event. Why has this dramatic event proven to be so powerful as to affect the political culture of the country so decisively for so many years? The answer is to be found in its symbolic ability first to attract and then to transmit a complex discourse which combines (a) the secular mythology of eternal Greece, (b) the civil war cultural trauma, (c) the traumatic events surrounding the junta regime, and (d) the guilt feelings of the great majority of the population who had accepted, actively or passively, the junta regime up at least up until 1972. As a result, the absolutizing interpretation of the Polytechnic Uprising became the unshakable sacral Myth of the Third Greek Republic and eventually the free-floating resource to be used for the justification of any egoistic, counter-civil, behavior; it became the mimetic mechanism to subvert democracy itself. Yet, this hegemonic complex is not solid. First, as our analysis indicates, the symbolic ingredients of the civil religion are structurally distinct from each other. The findings imply that political culture is episodic and made of layers of meaning embedded in distinct cultural practices and in distinct complexes of cultural pragmatics which keep their autonomy, even if such autonomy is blurred by homologous or compatible performativities and unspoken certainties (Garfinkel’s et cetera clause). Second, the Metapolitefsis civil religion’s vision of radical egalitarianism and its consecutive pathologies are top-down processes of public discourses, descending on an otherwise individualist, yet amorphous, self, rather than a bottom-up cultural construction emerging out of a collectivist self. The post-junta promulgation of freedom, equality, and fraternity in a maximalist, absolutizing, formulation intensified the problematique of its implementation and thus heightened the indeterminacies of the distribution of power, the legitimation of social action, and the boundaries of social trust. The indeterminacy was tackled and the subsequent insecurity was resolved, even temporarily, by falling back to the traditional symbols and meanings of amoral familism, clientelism, and anarchic individualism, not by a modern alternative interpretation of the maxim. Contra Eisenstadt’s supposition, political modernization was achieved at the expense of political modernity. Our findings point to the crucial role public discourses play in manipulating, even distorting, individual notions of the public good  and of the vision of the civil society. It suggests that cultural hegemony could be imposed by certain ideological social networks ‘outflanking’, to use Michael Mann’s nomenclature, unorganized individual preferences, stopping in their tracks social differentiation and social mobility. This rather Gramscian

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finding is in fact the reversal of his ideological argument: instead of the bourgeoisie imposing their ideology in the public sphere, it is statist and leftists’ collectivist ideologues which symbolically outflank the bourgeoisie. The Metapolitefsis civil religion nourished atomistic ethics of various forms, either as blatant egoism or as collectivist egalitarianism, not because it promoted them intentionally, but because as a messianic-imagistic collective representation it allowed each and every citizen or interest group to comprehend the constitutive goods of the civil society in its own self-contained and self-referential way. Exit from cultural schismogenesis and organizational dysfunction, and entry into a political culture of civility, participation, cooperation, and trust, necessitates the disassembling of the constitutive parts of the Metapolitefsis civil religion and their re-assembling in a genuine civil symbolic structure and patterned order. It means, primarily, the dissociation of religious from civil rituals, ceremonies, and commemorations and, second, the construction of a new civil religion. Is this possible? Could a mystical vision be turned into a civil symbolic configuration? Impossible as it sounds, something of that short started happening a decade after the end of the warring decade of the 1940s. We refer to the cultural-civil developments of the 1960s, before the advent of the militaristic sponsored civil religion of the junta regime and its inverted image, the militant Metapolitefsis civil religion of the 1970s. Immediately before the imposition of the dictatorship, and in spite of the poisonous cold war politics and religious ultra-conservatism, there were definite developments toward a genuine civil culture. It was the period when a multitude of artists and writers were achieving national fame and international recognition as the cultural carriers and the avant-garde of the Greek modernity, a modernity which depicted graceful individuals emerging effortlessly out of the traditional eastern communitas.3 Yet, with the advent of the dictatorship in 1967 and, with it, of a genuine anti-civil, traditionalist populism, wrapped in a sponsored authoritarian civic religion, the stage was set for the strategic defeat of civil society as civilized society and the triumph of the communitas vision. 3  Music composers Dimitris Mitropoulos and Manos Hatzidakis, singers Maria Kallas and Nana Mouschouri, painters Tsarouchis, Engonopoulos, and Fasianos, architects Dimitris Pikionis, Nikos Mitsakis, and Aris Konstantinidis, movie directors Nikos Tzavelas, Nikos Koundouros, and Yiannis Kakogiannis, actresses Katina Paxinou and Eirini Papa, and Nobel Prize winners in literature Kostas Seferis and Odysseas Elytis.

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The obvious question is why post-junta Greece did not return to the track of the 1960s’ civil culture? First, the transition to democracy was never completed symbolically, a fact which allowed liminality to remain strong in the midst of civil society for the years to come; second, the civil culture which was blooming before the junta regime was delegitimized, and after 1981 it was replaced by PASOK’s brutish populism; and third, a radicalized youth created a free-floating symbolic resource of perpetual unruliness, that is, ‘protest’, which became the moral justification of any anomic act.4 This cultural aporia allowed the parochial cultural patterns and out-worldly cultural forms and discourses, religious as well as secular, to rule supreme. After the dictatorship, and unlike the pre-dictatorship public feeling, populist culture, first cautiously, then more boldly, scorned and ridiculed every pillar of public authority, civic institutions, and the rule of law: first the priesthood, then the police, the teachers, law and order, the Parliament, and even patriotism were all assaulted and scorned as fake. They were mocked as fake as the loss of candid and authentic traditional values was nostalgically lamented and the narcissistic self was exulted. The result was the erecting of a multitude of entrenched, exclusive, Edens, the perfect ground for the cultivation of the Weberian ethics of conviction rather than of responsibility. This is not to say that each and every individual is affected in the same way and to the same extent by this anti-civil symbolic complex. As our quantitative research indicates, there are cultural complexes of alternative code orientations and patterned orders. The uproar against the current corrupted and immoral government suggests that civility and virtue are not absent in Greece; we can only assume that the strong links with the EU did have an impact. Yet, the truly civil part of the population, the one not characterized by amoral familism, is organizationally and symbolically outflanked as they are easily pushed aside and silenced by those who manipulate the free-floating symbolic resources of communitas. As far as deep culture is concerned, to alter this hegemony free symbolic resources need to become civil, and for this to be achieved, it is necessary that a new civil religion be established. The current condition of the country urges us not only to decrease the corrupted state-controlled bureaucracy and 4  Polytechnic School: The fall of logic and the encouragement of barbarism. Πολυτεχνείο: Η υποστολή της λογικής και η ενθάρρυνση της βαρβαρότητας http://www.kathimerini. gr/942380/gallery/epikairothta/ellada/polytexneio-h-ypostolh-ths-logikhs-kai-h-en8arrynshths-varvarothtas.

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economy (as many political commentators and political parties promulgate in Greece today) but also to separate State and Church symbolically and organizationally. This would be a first step in conceiving the republic as ‘a way’ of the political good, a civilized and gentle civil sphere fundamentally different from ‘the way’ of the Church and the pursuit of the religious good. However, as the above analysis implies, this institutional and symbolic separation is only the first step toward shaping a civil culture of citizenship. The second and decisive step is the explicit and timely development of secular civic and civil cultural pragmatics which will inspire a moral community of citizens, a new civil religion. To become an integral community of citizens, rather than an aggregation of atomized individuals, Greeks must reinvent civil religion and turn it liberal by orienting the cosmological and ontological principles of individual authenticity and eternal communitas in present, secular, time. In a sense, we need to re-invent intentionally what the aborted civil culture of the 1960s achieved, for a moment, subliminally. For the moment, there is no sign of any genuine civil society emerging out of the ashes of the Third Greek Republic. Only a shattered political community bewildered and in disarray and a polity which, under a government made of a vengeful far-leftist and an amoral ultra-conservative party, fosters internal ruptures and encourages civil disorder. The prospect of a strategic and utter defeat of today’s anti-civil government in the next general elections will certainly sooth the immediate pain but will not solve the issue of schismogenesis and self-destructive passions. In past times, and under different international orders, such a social condition led straight to social disintegration, decisive military invasions, and annihilation. The Roman conquest of Greece in the second century BC, and the Ottoman conquest of the nascent Greek-Byzantine state in the fifteenth century AD, occurred under conditions identical to what modern Greece experiences today. It is only by the grace of liberal modernity and its international orders that Greece is still an integral state. From a historical perspective then, the Third Greek Republic is no more. Today we live its last, horrendous, gasps. It is only when the Greeks fully understand their duty not to their glorious past but to themselves and to their children that a national, civil, rebirth will ensue.

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Index1

A Agonistic social interaction, 67 Ambeli, 49, 50, 52, 204 Ambiguity, 8, 69, 136, 248, 259 Amoral familism, ix, 46–57, 62–72, 81, 82, 90, 95, 103, 106, 181, 186–188, 237, 243, 244, 253, 313, 315, 428, 429, 433, 435, 437 Anarchic defiance, 53, 70, 208 Anarchic individualism, 41–48, 62–73, 81, 82, 95, 106, 132, 139, 144–146, 148, 156, 189, 190, 211, 218, 253, 286, 309, 315, 327, 428, 429, 434, 435 Ancient Greece, 60, 158 Angelopoulos, Theo, 132, 185 Apophatic theology, 118 Atonement, 52, 113, 175

Authenticity, 45, 59–61, 69, 71, 74, 75, 137, 138, 185, 187, 211, 215, 216, 262, 288, 295, 341, 438 B Binary oppositions, 4, 17, 33, 74, 112, 172, 324, 330, 336, 352, 355, 367, 372, 383, 385, 388, 392, 432 Byzantium, 60, 158 C Cataphatic theology, 117 Charisma, 31, 32, 83, 93, 113, 116, 136, 142, 143, 176–190, 247, 249, 428 Charismatic devotion, 118 Charismatic social action, 8, 35, 138 Checks and balances, 190

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Marangudakis, The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13589-8

455

456 

INDEX

Civic alienation, 224 Civic education, 213, 214 Civil religion, 4, 5, 7, 10, 19, 34, 62, 106, 111, 113, 137, 150, 153–164, 166, 168, 170, 171n6, 172, 173, 175–177, 179, 180, 186, 188–190, 192, 194, 197–199, 208, 210, 215, 218, 237, 243, 244, 245n59, 247, 253, 258, 263, 286, 315, 416, 428, 429, 431–438 Clientelism, 74, 82–92, 95–106, 113, 114, 132, 148, 156, 163, 191, 197, 217, 218, 227, 243, 288, 294, 295, 307, 313, 315, 412, 428, 429, 433, 435 Code orientations, 9–12, 14, 21, 30, 33, 47, 52, 53, 55, 64, 66, 89, 92, 94, 95, 97, 101–104, 113, 114, 121, 123, 126, 133n12, 136, 137, 146–150, 176, 186, 189–195, 201, 202, 208, 212, 213, 215, 217, 218, 233, 243, 244, 253, 254, 257, 285–299, 301, 309, 311, 329, 425, 428–432, 437 Collective effervescence, 17–24, 124, 179 Collectivist self, 46, 57, 58, 126, 317–328, 435 Collectivist social behavior, 324–328, 425, 432 Collectivist social structures, 41 Collectivist values, 41, 67 Comedians, 185, 213 Communitas, 70, 109–150, 153–165, 173–175, 180, 186, 197, 218, 226, 237–250, 286, 297, 315, 330, 341, 374, 384, 415, 424, 433, 436–438

Constitutive goods, 4–9, 11, 12, 15–17, 21, 23, 32–35, 40, 45, 46, 49, 50, 69, 70, 74, 82, 97, 101, 103, 106, 107, 111–114, 117–123, 126, 128–130, 136, 137, 150, 154–156, 176, 186, 189, 192, 196n26, 201, 202, 204, 205, 208, 212, 215, 217–219, 226–231, 243, 253, 254, 257, 261–283, 288, 301, 306, 311, 315, 324, 326, 327, 329, 402, 429–432, 436 Cosmological and ontological principles, 4, 6–9, 11, 23, 29, 30, 32, 35, 51, 52, 55, 104, 111, 113, 114, 129, 143, 147, 170, 217, 218, 261, 434, 438 Cultural performances, 21, 178n13 Cultural pragmatics, xii, xv, 20, 21, 247, 249, 428, 433, 435, 438 Cultural trauma, 4, 59, 154n3, 155, 166, 173, 178, 185, 194, 201, 236, 241, 253, 342, 428, 434, 435 Cyclical time, 64 D Debt crisis, 219 DIMAR, 221, 232 Direct democracy discourse, 225, 229–231 Disciplinarian experiences, 75 Doctrinal religious mode, 19, 20, 23, 123, 124, 137 E Eden, 49, 51, 52, 55, 139, 243, 437 Elections, viii, xiii, 89, 171, 183, 191, 195, 195n24, 206, 220–223,

 INDEX 

223n16, 226, 228, 231, 232, 234, 235, 237, 240, 438 Elytis, Odysseas, 59, 173, 436n3 Ethno-populism, 180, 209–215, 253, 311 Ethno-romanticism, 214–219, 253, 298, 311 European Central Bank, 220, 221 European Commission, 220 F Faceless-patriotism, 54 Formal rationality, 14, 56, 95, 110, 112, 115, 126, 150, 175, 190, 227 Freedom-and-equality, 69, 70, 72 Free-floating (resources), 130, 435, 437 Free-rider, 45, 46, 286 Frustration of the youth, 225 Functional time, 121, 122, 132 FYROM, 243, 245 G Gemeinschaft, 55, 68, 88, 210 Generalized clientelism, 92–97, 99, 102, 106, 165, 189, 190, 237, 286, 429 Gesellschaft, 88, 210 Golden Dawn, 221, 224, 230, 231, 250n63 Greek economic miracle, 428 Ground rules, 9–12, 33, 49, 52, 55, 89, 92, 94, 95, 103, 104, 113, 114, 137, 186, 190–194, 207, 208, 212–214, 253, 254, 257, 428, 429, 432 Guilt vs. shame, 43 H Hero, 16, 55, 72, 134, 143, 144, 146, 175, 210, 236, 242n52, 341, 342, 351, 411, 416

457

I Icons, 124–128, 146, 147, 270, 282, 430n2 Imagined community, 57, 58, 83, 84, 95, 230, 298, 298n1 Imagistic religious mode, 19 Immigration, 98, 223, 244 Incorporation (social), 9, 44, 427, 429 Independent Greeks, 221, 231, 237, 239 Indeterminacy(ies), 8, 9, 31, 86, 91, 112, 424, 428, 435 Indignants, 226 Individualism, 41–43, 45, 46, 62, 63, 65, 66, 69, 73, 104, 114, 144, 203, 211, 266, 283, 309, 318, 322–324, 327, 330, 351, 374, 388, 433 Institutional devotion, 118 Instrument of God vs. vessel of God, 120 Integration, 44, 65, 85, 98, 153, 155, 215 International Monetary Fund (IMF), xiii, 220, 230 In-worldly social action, 103, 116, 121, 433 J Journalists, 205, 212 L Legal positivism, 42 Liminal(ity), 5, 19, 70, 137, 155, 161, 166, 171, 241, 242, 247–249, 428, 429, 431, 437 Liminal protest, 171 Limited good, 47–49 M Memorandum agreement, 220, 227, 235, 237

458 

INDEX

Metapolitefsis’ civil religion, 165–199, 201, 207, 228, 234, 236, 243, 246, 253, 269, 296–298, 311, 403, 429, 430, 434–436 Middle-range goods, 193 Montegrano, 46 Moral community, 6, 7, 57, 82, 103, 111, 124, 153, 155, 163, 258, 402, 423, 438 Moral orientation, 6, 9, 23, 39, 111, 146, 257, 285, 294, 298, 328, 331, 332, 403, 423 Moral self, 4, 8, 23, 30, 76, 147, 161n7, 209, 216, 257, 262, 285, 301, 323, 324, 329, 331 Multiple modernities, xi, xii, xv, xvi, 4, 112–115, 427–438 Municipalities, 194, 194n22, 240 Mythical collectivism, 57–62, 185, 210, 216 N Nea Democratia, 221 Nepotism, 46, 74, 197, 238 Networks of social power, 5, 26, 90, 429 O Orality, 57 Orthodox ontology, 115–121 P Palamas, Gregory, 120 Papadimos, Loukas, 221 Papandreou, Andreas, 176–178, 183, 184, 186, 187, 189, 190, 193, 210, 235, 248 Papandreou, George, 177, 221

Parliament, 99, 163, 179, 183, 193, 194, 194n22, 221, 234, 235, 241, 425, 437 Particularism, 84, 85 Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), 88, 176, 177, 180– 183, 189, 190, 194, 207, 220, 221, 224, 232, 238, 238n31, 437 Path dependency, 88, 91 Patrons, 87, 89, 91, 94, 99, 102, 233 Patterned orders, 5, 112, 113, 233, 254, 263, 279–283, 301–316, 324, 329, 432, 436, 437 Polytechnic Uprising, 59, 167, 170, 175, 192, 194, 207, 208, 425, 434, 435 Populism, 86, 165, 181, 185, 186, 194–198, 205, 213, 217, 227, 238, 286, 330, 342, 405, 412–415, 423–425, 436, 437 Positive politeness, 66, 67, 69, 73 Practical rationality, 12, 13, 24, 90, 110, 137, 140, 142, 238, 286, 430 Professional associations, 44, 74, 85, 94, 204, 430 Protest and insubordination, 433 Psychological premiums, 16, 30, 48, 50, 51, 55, 106, 137, 172, 196, 198, 204, 212, 430, 433 Public administration, 84, 193 Public sphere, xv, 4, 5, 15, 21–24, 34, 47, 76, 114, 123, 131, 134, 141, 156, 166, 170, 171, 173, 177, 181–185, 191, 205, 213, 214, 219, 226, 239–241, 244, 246, 253–254, 259, 263, 288, 294, 333, 341, 357, 388, 415, 421–424, 432, 433, 436

 INDEX 

R Rituals, 4, 17–24, 26–30, 32, 34, 48–50, 52, 55, 57–59, 65, 69, 70, 74, 103, 116, 118, 123, 124, 127–128, 136–142, 154–156, 154n2, 160, 163, 172, 174, 175, 180, 192, 208, 218, 247, 253, 433, 434, 436 S Sacrality, 139, 156, 430 Salvation through devotion, 123 Samaras, Antonis, 221 Sarakatsans, 52, 102, 130, 139, 187, 204 Schismogenesis, 214, 241, 244, 246, 253, 428, 432, 434, 436, 438 Seferis, Giorgos, 173 Selective affinity, 5, 10, 14, 106, 111, 119, 167–169, 184, 187, 203, 231, 257, 278, 279, 291, 412, 424 Signifiers, 9, 16, 22, 66, 70, 106, 139 Social arenas, 11, 12, 32, 34, 233 Social configuration, 48, 83, 84, 92, 96, 110, 111, 148, 149, 156, 331, 428, 430, 434 Social division of labor, 5, 8–11, 14, 17, 24, 25, 33, 41, 49, 52, 57, 70, 71, 74, 82, 95, 96, 109, 111, 112, 115, 120, 131, 137, 138, 140, 148, 155, 156, 169, 189, 190, 195, 225 Sponsored civic religion, 161–164, 428, 430 Substantive rationality, 11–15, 23, 24, 100, 106, 110, 112, 115, 116, 126, 130, 142, 175, 177, 193, 194, 227, 238, 264, 292, 295 Symbolic classification(s), 29, 34, 50, 51, 55, 57, 69, 72–74, 82, 102,

459

104, 106, 111–115, 136, 137, 139, 148, 149, 170, 180, 189 Symbolic codes, 16, 17, 20, 69, 110, 112–114, 193, 329, 428 Symbolic orders, 7, 28–30, 32, 57, 82, 111, 112, 136, 259, 330, 429, 431, 433 Symbolic patterns, xii, 4, 20, 33, 47, 52, 104, 112, 113, 123, 124, 145, 256, 257, 293 Syndicates, 44, 147, 194, 196, 196n26, 211, 214, 430 Syriza, xiii, 170n5, 171, 197, 221, 222, 225, 231–235, 237–240, 239n37, 242–249, 242n52, 243n55 Syriza-Anel (coalition government), 150, 238, 246, 249, 250n63 T Theodorakis, Mikis, 62, 173 Theoretical rationality, 13, 14, 24, 33, 110, 113, 126, 130, 137, 142, 177, 296 Third Greek Republic, 171, 188, 205, 210, 237, 438 Time zone III, 83 Trickster, 248 Troika, 64, 197, 220, 221, 235, 237, 239, 239n38, 248, 295 Tsipras, Alexis, 178, 207n7, 233, 235, 235n25, 236n26, 237, 238, 239n38, 245, 247–249, 425 Types of rationality, 4, 12, 14, 15, 33 U Undifferentiated community, 137, 143, 149, 214, 298, 433 Undifferentiated self, 119 Urbanization, 40, 44, 63, 88, 98, 184

460 

INDEX

V Valid canon, 5, 13, 101, 115, 126, 207, 214, 292, 297, 298 Victimhood, 62, 185, 211, 236, 434 W Workers’ rights discourse, 229

X Xenophobic discourse, 228, 231 Y Yellow journalism, 182–185, 193, 212