The Virtual Rambler

Number twenty five: 26^th June 2012

European Self Importance

For those who share a homeland , a common language and cultural profile , the default attitude to outsiders is one of suspicion or mockery. Not that long ago , the native Englishman thought Frenchmen were volatile , gesticulated wildly and drank wine all the time. Swedes and Danes were benevolent but slow-witted. Spaniards were cruel and sinister , rolled their own cigarettes and sported thin moustaches. Italians excelled at making ice-cream but were highly-strung and probably carried a stiletto. Germans were ruthless warmongers and often sadists. Genetic mapping has now indisputably proved that we all have the same original ancestors who left Africa a hundred thousand years before it was “discovered” by Europeans. Those who call for a hard-line expulsion of 'divisive immigrants who won't integrate into the Euro-native culture' might usefully turn their attention to a far more troubling minority , namely those indigenes in the upper echelons of Business and Finance who are a law onto themselves.

A phrase much used by politicians involved in the later twentieth century European Community was “a shared European cultural tradition”. They didn’t mean the centuries of bellicose behaviour among themselves or their violence towards anything else that moved on land , sea or air. Nor were they referring to the endless wars for resources , wars of succession , wars of religious differences. They were talking about the artistic techniques and scientific investigations accumulated since the collapse of the Roman Empire , as the Church and European towns gradually evolved to re-assert administrative control. The Rambler proposes another European heritage to be : living among the unhinged. Clinical psychology identifies the truly insane as consumed by such a degree of self-importance that all other creatures fade into insignificance. The mad are incapable of grasping that valid ways of seeing the world exist other than their own. People can become so deranged they not only think that unabating economic growth is a sane policy for all to pursue but insist on it being the only way forward.

Shared European cultural traditions ? Identify with a solitary supernatural being who is by turns a bully and a tyrant. Root out those with ideas about that non-existent supernatural being which differed from church dogma and burn them as heretics. The Lord moves in mysterious ways , most of them unfathomable. So torture others who said the earth moves round the sun. Here they come , roaring and yelling out of the history books : Mad hatters with a tendency to release psychopathic blasts of destructive energy , the Vikings and the Crusaders , the ‘voyagers of discovery’ in Asia and the ‘New World’ of America - all practitioners of a reckless , murderous violence exerted with what seemed to its recipients as superhuman strength. After Europeans evolved credit systems and paper money (‘bills of exchange’) , they perfected the mass production of heavy artillery , machine guns , tanks and aeroplanes. Some of its 'famous men' then gave us two World Wars and thereafter , the nuclear arsenal.

After spending 24 years in the far east , Marco Polo described to Europeans (in a book published about 1300) the mysterious cultures and inner workings of that world. He offered the first comprehensive look into China, India, Japan and other Asian countries. Here were ancient civilizations deeply rooted in the distant past. Their diet was largely vegetarian and in both India and China there were as many gods as the thousands of characters in the classical Chinese alphabet. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that scholars in Europe began to take an interest in Asian culture and its religions - Taoism , Buddhism , Hinduism , followers of Zoroaster. These in turn became attractive to those few westerners who preferred anything esoteric to their own cultural traditions. By the end of the twentieth century , the gods had become managers. There were as many of them as the millions of programs accessible on Amazon Prime. In realms invisible to the public eye , a great pantheon of managers , each possessed of their due degree of self-importance , bestrode the economic world like a parasitic colossus. What were they managing ? Having put your capital to work on speculations that proved ill-advised , they are now busily managing the consequences of that unregulated spree. How so ? By ordering elected governments to pursue unpopular and socially-divisive measures of ‘austerity’ because madmen in The City , who steered us onto the rocks in the first place , require them in order to ‘restore confidence in the European Economy’. It would require a modern Marco Polo to describe the mysterious inner workings of that sinister cabal.


Wig

Archive

Virtual rambler #1 – Posturing, 9^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #2 – Managerialism, 17^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #3 – Nostalgia, 27^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #4 – The Alpha Male, 13^th April 2010
Virtual rambler #5 – General Elections, 3^rd May 2010
Virtual rambler #6 – The Leisure Industry, 15^th May 2010
Virtual rambler #7 – Guide to The World Cup, 15^th June 2010
Virtual rambler #8 – Human Nature, 12^th July 2010
Virtual rambler #9 – Communities, 13^th August 2010
Virtual rambler #10 – Worlds Apart, 6^th October 2010
Virtual rambler #11 – Dawdling, 22^nd November 2010
Virtual rambler #12 – ELVIS, 24^th December 2010
Virtual rambler #13 – Transience, 4^th February 2011
Virtual rambler #14 – Regional Accents, 15^th April 2011
Virtual rambler #15 – The Afterlife, 21^st July 2011
Virtual rambler #16 – Bizspeak, 27^th August 2011
Virtual rambler #17 – Night Walks, 3^rd October 2011
Virtual rambler #18 – Bob Dylan & Charles Dickens, 8^th November 2011
Virtual rambler #19 – Another Nutty Professor, 16^th December 2011
Virtual rambler #20 – Customer Choice, 16^th January 2012
Virtual rambler #21 – Wearing Shorts, 18^th February 2012
Virtual rambler #22 – A Brief History of Progress, 17^th March 2012
Virtual rambler #23 – The Myth of Sisyphus, 16^th April 2012
Virtual rambler #24 – Natural History, 20^th May 2012