Articles pour out about the mounting problems in Greece. Homelessness, drugs, shops shutting, psychological despair, political alienation, emigration, suicide, and the rest.

Such as this one in the Guardian:

A new underclass has appeared: in the homeless and hungry who roam the streets; in the spiralling number of drug addicts; in the psychiatric patients ejected from institutions that can no longer offer them a place; in the thousands of shop owners forced to close and board up businesses; in those who forage through municipal rubbish bins at night; and in the pensioners who make do with rejects at fruit and vegetable markets. Suicides have also risen, with help lines reporting a deluge of calls…

With desperation has come a collective sense of guilt and depression – more dangerous, say analysts, than even the social tensions that threaten to tear the country apart.

Recently hundreds of Greeks piled into a lecture hall to hear Fotini Tsalikoglou, a prominent psychology professor, speak on "the power of loss".

"Greeks feel like they are in a bad dream," she says. "You wake up not knowing what will be overturned today of what was overturned yesterday. A common thread that unites people is the experience of fear and desperation."

This is a fascinating insight into just how fragile our existence is. Homelessness and hunger are not some sort of indictment of ‘capitalism’ but the planet’s default mode. Greeks are finding out how most people in human history have lived and indeed in much of Africa and Asia still live – a meagre, grinding, subsistence existence.

To get out of that dismal condition requires high, sustained inventiveness and collective discipline. Sure, in Greece’s case Germany’s export policies and other external factors have not helped. But the basic reason for that society’s accelerating decline is that Greece for far too long has lived off other people’s good will. Borrowing and not paying back – sometimes for good reasons, mainly for reasons of chronic mismanagement – has characterised Greece’s attitude to borrowing for over 2000 years.

Latterly Greece has enjoyed a significant pseudo-boom as EU funds (grants and loans) have poured in. Yet the country’s elite have gone to the amazing extent of telling lies to EU authorities and their benefactors about the state of public finances. This deception has helped make a difficult situation far worse.

While all that has gone on, Greece has enjoyed a smirking relationship with its own hard-core Leftists and terrorists. When I was in Thessaloníki in June 2000 for a Balkan Stability Pact gathering, the British Embassy Defence Attaché Brigadier Stephen Saunders was murdered in cold blood by Greek Marxist fanatics. Under severe British and wider international pressure as the 2004 Athens Olympics loomed, the Greek system finally started to make a proper effort to find the assassins and the whole vile network which had killed many other people was at last arrested and sent to prison.

Above all, the Greek masses have had a more than ambiguous relationship towards the state, enjoying the jobs and bribes and privileges coming from state jobs while studiously doing everything possible to avoid paying the taxes needed to fund them.

Things which can’t last, don’t. Greece is busy sliding back towards the sort of overall living standards associated with far poorer countries.

This wretched situation compels the EU and wider financial forces for reasons of crude self-interest to scramble round looking for ways to manage the mess. But France’s President Sarkozy adds a moral argument:

“The failure of Greece would be a failure of the whole of Europe. There is no other credible alternative. Yes, there is a moral obligation of solidarity. But there is also an obligation for economic solidarity. It is not possible to leave Greece behind.”

What exactly is this ‘moral obligation of solidarity’, exactly? Why should we help Greece more than we help, say, much poorer countries which have not yet shown themselves to determined to scrounge for hundreds of years at a time?

Should not collective bad behaviour have collective bad consequences? Isn’t that the most ‘moral’ position of all, or at least the only one that truly matters as it gives the purest impulse to making the Right Choices?

PS   Just to add that Stumbling and Mumbling also offered us last month some terse but pertinent thoughts on the deeper moral issues underlying the Eurozone debacle – see especially the fine last line :

All these options – except fiscal expansion which is only part of the solution anyway – impose costs upon northern European taxpayers. Which prompts the sort of questions posed by Clemens Wergin of Die Welt: why should German tax-payers support Greek tax-dodgers? Why should bankers who have made bad loans be bailed out?

In short, there’s moral resistance, founded in part upon natural justice and in part upon the protestant bourgeois belief that hard work and prudence should be rewarded and fecklessness punished.

… Herein, I think, lies the cause of the markets’ annoyance at Europe’s lack of leadership. If you regard the crisis as a merely technical one, you’ll see lots of possible fixes – or at least improvements on the status quo – and will therefore be frustrated that these aren’t being pursued.  What you miss is that moral aspect.

This, though, merely raises a more general point about politics – that there is not only often a clash between moralists and technocrats, but a mutual incomprehension between them.