Unless the climate of the earth were to invert itself in a very
strange way, then the Germans, Nordics and other North Europeans will
always be more disciplined and harder working than the Greeks and
other Mediterraneans where the living is easier.
This is something that the Eurocrats and northern politicians, being
insufficiently educated as yet, can't take account of. Whether they
finally force the Greek government into budgetary submission today or
whether they manipulate Greece out of the Eurozone remains to be
seen. (Or not, if they kick the can down the road yet again!) If the
principal negotiators were indeed roundly educated and up to date,
then they would know that Greek people are heritably Greek and that
Germans are heritably German -- that is, when on holiday abroad, they
will always be the first to reserve their sun-bathing plots around
the hotel swimming pool.
Eurocrats and North European politicians (like their counterparts
most everywhere) will be unaware of the conceptual explosion that has
resulted since the publication of the first draft of the human DNA
sequence in 2003. It is now known that each of us not only inherits
genes from our parents but we also inherit the way that genes are set
in subtle ways and express themselves accordingly. This phenomenon is
now termed epigenetics. Thus each of us are born with predispositions
to particular skills and behaviours (and also, unfortunately, to
particular diseases -- another explosive discovery which has already
thrown the large pharmaceutical corporations into disarray and,
sometimes, bankruptcy).
Furthermore, these predispositions (epigenes) are responses to the
particular environment in which we live. Furthermore, if particular
environments are shared by a larger population over a long enough
period (several generations) then similar behavioral predispositions
(and genetic diseases) will have had time to be inherited from the
preceding generation in a fan-like manner and thus will be shared
very widely. While the environment remains the same, then the same
broad cluster of epigenetic settings will also remain the same.
This is why the characteristic personalities of people who live in
particular localities, regions and countries remain idiosyncratic for
generations or even centuries. What we call a 'national stereotype'
in a casual way really does contain many distinct, albeit
sophisticated, behaviours. While climate is the most powerful of the
environmental forces that has epigenetic effects on our genes there
is a host of other subsidiary factors in the surrounding culture
which affect our particular emotional and behavioural
predispositions. While a country can relatively quickly change its
intellectual stock-in-trade by means of education, and make use of it
in similar ways to other countries, there are a thousand-and-one
other much more sophisticated ways in which different cultures differ
from one another and remain stoically different generation after generation.
Back to today and whatever is decided in the short term, the Greek
people are never going to act in the Eurozonal ways desired by the
Germans, Finns and Dutch unless they were bodily transported at least
1,000 miles north and live there for several generations. They would
then experience a different climate, of course, but also many more
subtle stimuli (and would also lose many stimuli which keep them
Greek). Gradually their epigenetic settings would change from
generation to generation until their personalities would become
indistinguishable from Germans. (Mind you, the German personality
differs enormously from north to south of the country, just as in
Italy or even in a small country like England.)
An unlikely migration? I'd say so! Whatever happens today in the
formal sense, and whether the Eurozone persists or not, you can be
certain that there will always be huge problems between the Germans
and the Greeks (and, of course, many more will arise in the coming
years between the Germans and the Spaniards, Portuguese and Italians
when they start refusing to knuckle under Northern European ways).
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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