The Hellenism of diaspora is faced with certain social and historical dangers, situations and realities which cause serious problems in its cohesion and unity and often derail its aims and aspirations. Let us examine prudently and dispassionately these dangers caused mainly by reasons, including lack of organisation, the absence of methodical and caring providence, or even by the effort of the operating institutions, mainly the Church and the State, to maintain each on its behalf the authority and responsibility towards Hellenism. We will need at least two weekly reports to address these risks, being, of course, unable to exhaust their significance.
The first and fundamental danger to the cohesion and unity of Hellenism is the lack of clearly defining the power and authority of our institutional structures. This creates an incoherent and asymmetric dualism of State-Church influence. This situation of dualism causes situations of diarchy and synarchy between these two actors in the Greek Diaspora, which often end in tensions, divisions, fierce confrontation and schisms, as we will examine in the next article. The dualism of power prevailing in the Diaspora causes obvious dissatisfaction and chronic rupture regarding who is nationally, politically (certainly not spiritually, where the role of the Church is undeniable) the competent and mandated body of expatriate Hellenism in the Diaspora, Greece or the Ecumenical Patriarchate?
The second major danger for the Hellenism of the Diaspora is the loose or even non-existent, state (Constitutional) definition of responsibilities and relations between the National Center and the Greek Diaspora. The existing Constitution of Greece, the Charter of Operation of Greece, does not contain a single chapter, not a single article in its Constitution, which refers to the Greek Diaspora. Thus, while the Greek Diaspora constitutes at least 45% of the total number of Greeks, none of its more than 120 articles mention expatriate Hellenism.
A third pernicious danger for the Hellenism of Diaspora is the aging and biological disappearance of the first generation of Greek immigrants, those who organized and led to progress and advancement the presence of the Diaspora in all its host country. As we have already reported, by 2035, it is estimated that only a handful of the 270,000 pioneer migrants will be alive, with an average age of 88 (In 2023 life expectancy in Australia was 81.3 years for men and 85.4 years for women, or 83.3 on average). The rapid ageing of Greek-born settlers and their exodus from the family (the number of inmates in Greek nursing homes in the last decade (2003-2023) increased eightfold), had catalytic consequences for the ethnolinguistic preservation of their descendants.
The fourth major challenge for Hellenism of the Diaspora is the constant and unstructured transformation of the national identity of Greeks at an intergenerational level. It is a constant mutation of the “Greekness” of the children of Greek immigrants, as it evolves and is shaped as a result of the lack of a specific strategic plan to contain and preserve the basic structures of identity – namely the language and other basic forms of Greek cultural heritage. The Greekness of the Diaspora is an endless train of thousands of wagons, everyone enters the wagon of Greekness they choose, based on choices they make in the tradition and cultural heritage of our people, through the ages to the present and beyond.
Fifth and highly challenging remains the global mentality formed as a result of technology and consumerism, at least for the last forty years. A mentality of nihilism, contradictory anarchism, social devaluation of institutions and values, education, the family. Consumerism and the disorderly use of technology have led, in general, man to what the Mexican poet Octavio Paz considers “smug nihilism” or what Cornelius Kastoriadis declares “insignificance”. Internally, prosperity, consumerism and attitudes towards the achievements of modern society led to a redefinition of human behaviour, in the context of a general conformism, and brought about the deactivation and inactivation of those citizens who could form a self-sustaining and self-reliant society.
The abundance of goods gave birth to dumbing down and gave rise to what Octavio Paz called “general passivity” and turned the constituted people into “masses without will and without destination.” Cornelius Kastoriadis would characterise this situation as “almost an attitude of dumbing down in consumer and television masturbation.” It is about the citizen who mutates into a consumer observer, into a person who is a private person without civil conscience, who is foolish according to Aristotle. Societies without learning, societies trained by technocrats but without education are societies without sensitive citizens, without participating citizens, societies with qualified individuals (idiotes) who will be the first to be levelled by the coming storm of robotics. The conscious citizen does not accept to face the future in apathy and idleness, as Sophocles teaches us: “Poor in nothing follows the future” (Sophocles, Antigone, v. 359).
The above five dangers, in my view, constitute the knights of the Apocalypse for the Greek Diaspora. I will attempt to analyse, from a purely historical point of view, these five risks, offering the opportunity to all of us to think, each of us, about the dividend of responsibility that belongs to the above institutions I mentioned, but also to each of us, since we accept to be active citizens in a participatory society.
*Professor Anastasios M. Tamis taught at Universities in Australia and abroad, was the creator and founding director of the Dardalis Archives of the Hellenic Diaspora and is currently the President of the Australian Institute of Macedonian Studies (AIMS).
