By Boris Johnson
It is one of the
tragic delusions of the human race that we believe in the inevitability of
progress. We look around us, and we seem to see a glorious affirmation that our
ruthless species of homo is getting ever more sapiens. We see ice cream
Snickers bars and in vitro babies and beautiful electronic pads on which you
can paint with your fingertip and – by heaven – suitcases with wheels! Think of
it: we managed to put a man on the moon about 35 years before we came up with
wheelie-suitcases; and yet here they are. They have completely displaced the
old type of suitcase, the ones with a handle that you used to lug puffing down
platforms.
Aren’t they
grand? Life seems impossible without them, and soon they will no doubt be
joined by so many other improvements – acne cures, electric cars, electric suitcases
– that we will be strengthened in our superstition that history is a one-way
ratchet, an endless click click click forwards to a nirvana of liberal
democratic free-market brotherhood of man. Isn’t that what history teaches us,
that humanity is engaged in a remorseless ascent?
On the contrary:
history teaches us that the tide can suddenly and inexplicably go out, and that
things can lurch backwards into darkness and squalor and appalling violence.
The Romans gave us roads and aqueducts and glass and sanitation and all the
other benefits famously listed by Monty Python; indeed, they were probably on
the verge of discovering the wheely-suitcase when they went into decline and
fall in the fifth century AD.
Whichever way you look at it, this was a catastrophe for the human race. People in Britain could no longer read or write. Life-expectancy plummeted to about 32, and the population fell. The very cattle shrunk at the withers. The secret of the hypocaust was forgotten, and chilblain-ridden swineherds built sluttish huts in the ruins of the villas, driving their post-holes through the mosaics. In the once bustling Roman city of London (for instance) we find no trace of human habitation save for a mysterious black earth that may be a relic of a fire or some primitive system of agriculture.
It took hundreds
of years before the population was restored to Roman levels. If we think that
no such disaster could happen again, we are not just arrogant but forgetful of
the lessons of the very recent past. Never mind the empty temples of the Aztecs
or the Incas or the reproachful beehive structures of the lost civilisation of
Great Zimbabwe. Look at our own era: the fate of European Jewry, massacred in
the lifetimes of our parents and grandparents, on the deranged orders of an
elected government in what had been one of the most civilised countries on
earth; or look at the skyline of modern German cities, and mourn those medieval
buildings blown to smithereens in an uncontrollable cycle of revenge. Yes, when
things go backwards, they can go backwards fast. Technology, liberty,
democracy, comfort – they can all go out of the window. However complacent we
may be, in the words of the poet Geoffrey Hill, “Tragedy has us under regard”. Nowhere is that clearer than in Greece today.
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Every day we
read of fresh horrors: of once proud bourgeois families queuing for bread, of
people in agony because the government has run out of money to pay for cancer
drugs. Pensions are being cut, living standards are falling, unemployment is
rising, and the suicide rate is now the highest in the EU – having been one of
the lowest.
By any standards
we are seeing a whole nation undergo a protracted economic and political
humiliation; and whatever the result of yesterday’s election, we seem
determined to make matters worse. There is no plan for Greece to leave the
euro, or none that I can discover. No European leader dares suggest that this
might be possible, since that would be to profane the religion of Ever Closer
Union. Instead we are all meant to be conniving in a plan to create a fiscal
union which (if it were to mean anything) would mean undermining the
fundamentals of Western democracy.
This
forward-marching concept of history – the idea of inexorable political and
economic progress – is really a modern one. In ancient times, it was common to
speak of lost golden ages or forgotten republican virtues or prelapsarian
idylls. It is only in the past few hundred years that people have switched to
the “Whig” interpretation, and on the face of it one can forgive them for their
optimism. We have seen the emancipation of women, the extension of the
franchise to all adult human beings, the acceptance that there should be no
taxation without representation and the general understanding that people
should be democratically entitled to determine their own fates.
And now look at
what is being proposed in Greece. For the sake of bubble-gumming the euro
together, we are willing to slaughter democracy in the very place where it was
born. What is the point of a Greek elector voting for an economic programme, if
that programme is decided in Brussels or – in reality – in Germany? What is the
meaning of Greek freedom, the freedom Byron fought for, if Greece is returned
to a kind of Ottoman dependency, but with the Sublime Porte now based in
Berlin?
It won’t work.
If things go on as they are, we will see more misery, more resentment, and an
ever greater chance that the whole damn kebab van will go up in flames. Greece
will one day be free again – in the sense that I still think it marginally more
likely than not that whoever takes charge in Athens will eventually find a way
to restore competitiveness through devaluation and leaving the euro – for this
simple reason: that market confidence in Greek membership is like a burst paper
bag of rice – hard to restore.
Without a
resolution, without clarity, I am afraid the suffering will go on. The best way
forward would be an orderly bisection into an old eurozone and a New Eurozone
for the periphery. With every month of dither, we delay the prospect of a
global recovery; while the approved solution – fiscal and political union –
will consign the continent to a democratic dark ages.
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