Riot police try to maintain order during a registration procedure on Kos.
Photo: Alkis Konstantinidis / Reuters
From where will come the new barbarians, asked Nietzsche, rather wistfully. And it was a question that also troubled Lawrence. For despite the modern world being very full of people, there were no longer, he said, "any great reservoirs of energetic barbaric life", as in the ancient world.
At one time, I also shared this romantic fascination for those who roamed outside the gates of Western civilization; peoples full of violent discontent and savage enthusiasm; cultured, but untamed. Men who still believed in their own gods, because they still believed in themselves.
But when one turns on the news and sees what is happening on the Greek islands, and in Sicily, or at the French port of Calais ... One can't help being disconcerted by these hundreds-of-thousands of refugees and asylum seekers - these new barbarians.
It would help, I think, if - despite their obvious desperation - they behaved in a rather more respectable fashion: would it kill them, for example, to queue in an orderly manner and to show at least a modicum of gratitude towards those among whom they would live and prosper?
Having escaped from war, persecution, and sectarian stupidity and made it to European shores, they need now to display the greatest degree of civility and overcome their own terrible and violent origins; not threaten to recreate the very conditions they have fled by importing chaos and resentment.
Note: the line quoted from Lawrence is taken from Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (CUP, 2004), p. 189.
