Redux
Every journey circles home
“The only scholarly virtue is to distinguish the essential from the non-essential, so that you can then say it and show it.”
ELeni Glykatzi-Ahrweiler
I turn to a phrase by the pioneering Greek French Byzantinist and historian, in an effort to hold on to the news of her death, and not let it be swept away by the torrent of the day’s headlines. She has no need of the news cycle to secure her place in History, yet it is regrettable that the algorithm leaves so little room for a pause, for a moment to consider who she was and the legacy she leaves us.
A phrase that feels more relevant today than ever. Because if anything is missing from public discourse, it is precisely this ability: to distinguish what truly matters from the noise that overwhelms us. That pause, which the human mind so desperately needs in order to process events, has sadly become a luxury.
What remains of the initial revelations in the Al Jazeera case and the golden passports scandal? By a majority verdict, the Criminal Court acquitted former House Speaker Demetris Syllouris and former AKEL MEP Christakis Giovani, ruling that the charges against them had not been proven. Justice is blind, as it must be, and no one is advocating a trial by mob. Blind enough, it seems, to miss a video the entire world had already watched.
And because it did not see it, a new “videogate” soon surfaced, in even more viral times, as if to remind us that what goes around comes around and, as the saying goes, you make your bed and must lie in it. Yet it too was forgotten, even more quickly, because the relentless age of information is concerned with the churn of content rather than with substance.
A video appeared, a video disappeared. It was forgotten after content presenting the wife of the Mayor of Paphos as a victim of domestic violence, and on the road to the Presidential Palace, Phaedon Phedonos was reportedly nowhere to be found. We moved on to rumours of rape, allegations of nepotism, kickbacks, flawed recruitment procedures, files said to be with the Attorney General. All fuel for the public gutter. The discussion has now shifted to Turkish Cypriot properties in Mouttalos, a fictional country in which everything “fits” together: reality, rumours, personal agendas, all tangled into one knot, with no distinction between the essential and the non-essential.
Did the Phaedon case emerge so that the new video would be forgotten? Or did the expected acquittal of Syllouris come to deepen the climate of distrust? The most substantial element of all the non-essentials is that social media has already delivered its verdict. Users scroll, become angry, swear, forget. Quite literally a gutter. Substance? Substance has been sacrificed to speed, to impression, to the need to vent before we have even learned what actually happened. Trust in institutions takes yet more leaps backwards. Essential? And ultimately, what does Mouttalos have to do with someone being accused of rape? Can we finally pause and focus on what matters?