The hurricane that slammed into the eastern seaboard of the United States a few weeks ago seemed to be an object lesson from nature that even the richest city in the world, New York City, is nothing more than a crystal palace when nature goes unhinged. Weeks after the storm, thousands were still without power, without a home, without gas for their car and train service to get to work, and whole families were living on donated food and dwindling hope that they would ever see their home again—all in the shadow of that symbol of modern upper mobility—the Empire State Building, and the condos around it that sell for tens of millions, and the restaurants that cater to the owners of the condos with their $500 meals.
A hurricane as deadly and tragic as this only demonstrates how vulnerable we are and how inflated our hubris is in thinking that our beachfront homes will be safe forever, and our subway system will take us everywhere without a hitch, and our smart phones will keep us connected, and our genii of electricity in the light switch would keep them all humming. Little did we know. Our veneer of civilization crashed within minutes of the storm and suddenly we urban sophisticates were left huddling around candles like cavemen, or rooting for our valuables in the muck, or walking aimlessly in the cold to find food and water, or scrapping like feral tomcats over the last of the food at the supermarket and the last of the fuel at the gas station.
So much for our civilization.
The cradle of civilization, Greece, is going through an even ruder awakening of civilization’s perils as with the economic tsunami people from the cities have returned to the land once again to grow olives, oil and raise chickens to survive, and to revive the barter system, and make a steady bestseller of a book called Starvation Recipes, which recounts how Greece once survived the Nazi occupation.
One exuberant Greek mattress entrepreneur (predictably Spartan) told The New York Times that what Greece needed was, “Spartan thinking, man! We’ve got to get lean and smart. All of these state subsidies that Greeks got, they make you fat and lazy!”
A more sober-minded Greek economist predicted a two-tiered population for the future. “You are going to see a part of the population, the middle class, comprising say 30 to 50 percent, involved in some kind of resurgence. But another part of the population will be living on 300 or 400 euros ($400 to $500) a month. This part of Greek society won’t be living a Western European lifestyle. It will be more like Bulgaria.”
Not much cheer if we’re all going to be Bulgarians, or the threat of more hurricanes to come (whether man-made or natural) will reduce us to huddling like cave-dwellers in the midst of our once-proud cities. The Greeks considered themselves the apogee of civilized man and the rest of the world as barbarians: we have learned lately that the barbarians are always at the gate.
Dimitri C. Michalakis
