On the natural home of Maltese liberals

The topic of this post is the convergence, or so the traditional political parties would have voters think, of political allegiance and Malta’s liberal agenda: ‘the natural home of Maltese liberals’.

To begin with a commonplace observation, the emergence of the liberal voter in Maltese politics has dramatically unsettled the political field. In reaction to these developments the PLPN have adopted remarkably similar strategies which can be described as two parallel and complementary responses. The first is the attempt to define liberalism in ways that correspond with the traditional political discourse of each party. The PL, for instance, has absorbed elements of liberal rhetoric into its rebranding as a ‘progressive’ movement. The PN on the other hand has recycled cold-war rhetoric equating political liberalism with free-market economics and trumpeted its credentials as a champion of the latter. The second response by the PLPN has been to adopt particular issues that are thought to resonate with liberal voters. The PN government recently put on a show of reforming laws on censorship and freedom of expression, for example, while the PL sought to make political capital by aligning its parliamentary group behind the private member’s bill on divorce.

Advocates of political liberty in Malta may take some satisfaction from the emergence of liberalism as the centre-ground of Maltese political discourse and the ensuing contest over the PLPN’s liberal credentials. The Maltapamphleteer is inclined to share those sentiments, while mixing them with a certain unease as, at a more profound level, what appears to be occurring is that the PLPN are attempting to gain control over a liberal activism that has thus far operated outside the traditional structures of party politics. This unease is reinforced by the absence of any real commitment by the PLPN to principles of political liberty, offering in their place only the grudging concession of the listening and consultation exercise, with the possibility of perhaps being persuaded to adopt a specific policy.

Here sounds the warning! If Liberal activists concede to this shift there will be a return to sterile debates on political allegiance and the choice of particular candidates over others, rather than a true debate over issues and ideas on which the liberal movement in Malta has thrived. At its inception, the Maltapamphleteer declared its task to be the orientation of Maltese politics away from those entropic swamps, but to understand properly why the paths that lead to them should be avoided, it is necessary to make some observations, as though of some topographical curiosity, on their nature and process of formation.

Democracy in Malta

To make a second generally accepted observation, electoral success in Malta is about voter turnout rather than coherent political positions. The dominance of the PLPN over Malta’s political scene lies in their success at mobilizing voters through affiliations with particular social institutions, amongst which Trade Unions and various Church organisations feature most prominently. Through their ties to this organisational infrastructure, the PLPN grew into the formidable political machines that continue to dominate Maltese politics and polarise Maltese society in ways that are as clear as they are often lamented. All the defining features are there: the focus on the ‘strong leader’, a certain tolerance of low-level clientelism, the grand political theatre of mass meetings, the strikingly prominent role of party clubs in social life, the rhetoric of ‘us’ and ‘them’, how ‘we’ always encounter difficulties when ‘they’ are in government, and how ‘ours’ will be a government for ‘us’.

Readers with longer memories, and surely even those of a shorter life-span, will be aware of the dangers this kind of political organisation poses to political liberty and democracy. They should also be aware that the danger remains present though obscured. At the outset, the PLPN political machines were constructed to establish networks of support for divergent positions on the local ideological spectrum. With the end of the cold war any vestige of a genuinely political divide faded away and all that remains are the machines. Malta now has its very own Tammany Hall in duplicate. As a result, PLPN public-policy agendas and manifestos are skewed to meet the demands of particular interest groups which can be identified through the traditional lines of affiliation in place since 1964. Not necessarily the most vocal ones, but those most capable of delivering ballots on election day. It also means that individuals presented for election to parliament within the PLPN party structures are not chosen on the strength of their suitability as candidates, or as people committed to a political position, but on the basis of their ability to reliably amass a particular bloc of votes.

That elections in Malta are contested by political machines rather than political parties is so ingrained in Maltese political culture that it hardly bears mention. Once the subject is aired, however, the awareness of it serves to explain some of the more curious aspects of that culture. Take the continued presence on the front benches of figures from a long discredited past, the peculiar turnover in candidates who could be said to inherit seats vacated by their forebears, both aspects of a self-replicating political elite. It explains the internal hierarchies and the curious plurality of political agendas within the PLPN, their corresponding inability to commit to a particular worldview, and their efforts to court liberal voters by adopting single issues. When the PLPN talk of being the ‘natural home’ of Maltese liberals, therefore, what they are attempting to do is absorb liberal voters into their respective political machines, where they can be managed and organised into a reliable bloc of votes.

The Natural Home of Maltese Liberals

To conclude, the Maltapamphleteer offers a third and final observation that runs counter to current received opinion. The politics of Maltese liberals cannot be defined by isolated legislative goals or the favouring of one traditional party over another. It is to be found in the strengthening of Maltese democracy by securing the liberty of the Maltese people, equality before the law, accountability and transparency in the democratic process and in government. It should be clear to readers that Malta’s political machines, with their networks of favouritism and their lack of commitment to reform, stand in the way of this goal, indeed they are the principle obstacle that must be overcome. In view of this, the Maltapamphleteer is minded to suggest that liberals resist becoming one more cog in Malta’s political machines, and asks whether this is not the opportune time to create the conditions for the latter’s dissolution.

&c.

Notes on the current crisis in the Nationalist Party

If the Maltapamphleteer has been silent for so long it is only because the seachanges in Malta’s political landscape have been so striking that any comment on them as episodes would have risked falling into the kind of short-term irrelevance that this blog, perhaps a little too stubbornly, seeks to avoid. Arguments supporting the introduction of divorce legislation into Maltese law were, at the time of that question, admirably presented and (the Maltapamphleteer is pleased to note) vindicated in the polls. Any contribution to that campaign would therefore have been redundant, as would have been any engagement with the kind of superficial, playground, facebook-driven, gossip-commentary on the careers and character of individual politicians. Now that sufficient time has passed for a general pattern of this turbulence to emerge, the Maltapamphleteer judges it propitious once again to drive the menial cursor across the page and submit some thoughts to its readers, not least because a general election appears to be in the offing. The title of this post takes its que from what is widely acknowledged by Malta’s political commentariat, but rather than wasting space arguing who should do what and how, this post will put forward a particular interpretation, based on the Maltapamphleteer’s concern with ideas and their role in political affairs, of the current crisis in the Nationalist Party.

Ad hominem

The Maltapamphleteer here references a type of informal fallacy in an argument, whereby attention is shifted from the point being argued to an irrelevant character trait in the person making that point. For a very large swathe of the commentariat, the crisis in the PN is explained by the character flaws of those who have challenged the party hierarchy. That at least is the line being pushed by party apologists and that PN activitists have endorsed. It is also a very superficial assessment of the situation, and one that can be easily dismissed on the basis of the following assumption, which the Maltapamphleteer takes as a given: all politicians are ambitious and forceful characters, even those who appear most calm and meek. In terms of personality and behaviour, there is very little to distinguish Austin Gatt from Franco Debono, and yet the former is given a prominent role in the party while the latter has been forced out.

This kind of move is, nevertheless, very effective, especially for a society in which divergence from convention is equated with a fault in character. In the PN case this is all the more so as the party has staked its electability on the personal character of its leader: for Gonzi’s character to be shown in a positive light requires all challengers and opponents to be cast in shadowy tints of negativity, and as the conflict progresses so the shades of that negativity progressively darken. At the same time, however, this move by the PN hierarchy reveals the weakness of their position, as by focussing on the personal character of the individuals involved they also avoid discussing the issues around which the conflict revolves. And on the issues on their own the PN hierarchy would lose the argument.

For the Maltapamphleteer, then, the real cause of the crisis in the PN is to be found in the divergence of ideas and positions on public policy issues, specifically divergences on divorce legislation and the implementation of reforms. On both issues GonziPN’s hand has been forced, with the unpalatable consequence that the party hierarchy has been made to look weak. The question then arises: where does this divergence come from?

Generational ideas-gap

Whatever the Nationalist Party’s claims to a tradition of plurality and internal debate, it is apparent that the divergences within the parliamentary group are more fundamental and ideological than driven by personalities and differences of opinion. It is also clear that the differences are generational, in that the ideological priorities of a group of backbenchers differ considerably from those on the front bench. Ideological concerns and positions are not formed in the ether and are seldom arrived at from purely intellectual engagement. This is especially the case with political activism, which often stems from particular experiences that then influence, to a greater or lesser degree, ideological assumptions, aspirations, and commitment. The question of generational divides was first posited by the German thinker Karl Mannheim, the chart below is derived from Helmut Schlesky’s approach to the problem.

It is to be hoped that, whatever its shortcomings, readers will find the chart to a great extent self-explanatory. It illustrates the personal trajectory of selected PN MPs as a straight line. Tonio Borg is chosen instead of Austin Gatt, as the latter’s trajectory would be identical to the one for Lawrence Gonzi, while the example of Tonio Borg illustrates the key point, namely: the generational divide between those born prior and subsequent to Malta’s independence from Great Britain.

The thought of every group is seen as arising out of its life conditions.

In this analysis, the formative experience of the GonziPN hierarchy was the immediate aftermath of independence and the pressing question of economic development in the context of competing cold-war models: free-market capitalism / socialism. Also highlighted is the more particular cultural context of catholic conservatism and its influence on the political divide in Malta, highlighted by the shaded box representing the interdict of 1961. In the general context of Maltese political discourse in the 1960’s and 70’s, the pre-independence generation developed an ideological position that can be broadly described as free-market social conservatism.

The post-independence generation came of age, intellectually speaking, during the period of political turbulence illustrated in the chart by the shaded area representing the years of the Labour party adminsitration under Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici. These years saw an additional level added to the PN ideology, namely a discourse of political liberty and the rule of law, which the Fenech Adami administration conflated with free-market capitalism: chocolate-bar liberalism! (The Maltapamphleteer has had occasion to discuss this conflation of liberty and laissez faire in a previous post on the moral economy of apiaries).

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening up of the Maltese public sphere in the 1990’s gave ideas of personal liberty and individual autonomy greater currency. The question of which economic model of development to follow was no longer pressing and Malta’s economic security was tied to membership of the European Union. In this context, the post-independence generation developed stronger commitments to individual liberty and autonomy, a social liberalism that is at odds with the conservatism of the pre-independence PN generation.

In attempting to expose the views of another, one is forced to make one’s own view appear infallible and absolute, which is a procedure altogether to be avoided if one is making a specifically non-evaluative investigation.

&c.

Comments Open

At its launch The Malta Pamphleteer set out parameters to guide its reception. These are described in the ‘about’ section of the blog, and readers, should they require any clarification, are once again graciously asked to turn their attention to those few apologetic paragraphs. There is no need for them to be reiterated here. Since its launch this blog has been J’accused of long-windedness and making ineffective use of its medium. The Malta Pamphleteer pleads guilty to those particular indictments: it was always meant to be so and will not suffer to change, for reasons that have been rehearsed previously.

This blog will not flatter itself into suggesting it has many readers: it does not. It makes no claims to being prolific: as anyone can see from the content it is hardly the model for potential scribblers. Readers will be even more exasperated to learn that for an extended period, of as yet undetermined length, this blog will go into hibernation, to resurface possibly several months from now (and it will resurface). In the meantime, and opening one door as another closes, this blog will now allow for comments to be posted. Needless to say, these will be heavily moderated and will not receive any reply from the host.

What this blog has attempted to offer, in the short period of its erstwhile existence, is not a programme or a paradigm or a plan. These few posts were intended as starting points for thoughts on the topics identified. These topics have been chosen for their relevance to political debates in the Maltese public sphere. They represent areas requiring clarification, reconsideration, whatever you wish to call it. Its focus is a political liberalism for Maltese society and what this might look like.

Readers are hereby invited, most humbly, to scribble-in their marginalia, and are asked to observe a degree of courtesy as they do so. This invitation being made, The Malta Pamphleteer once more asks pardon of its readers for its extended future absence, supplicates them not to judge its many faults too harshly, and takes leave of this company with the pledge of eventual return and the renewal of past acquaintance.

Disgruntled Hives

Several years ago now, an article appeared in one of Malta’s English language newspapers in which the triumph of market-oriented economies was proclaimed. The end of history was trumpeted, with great rhetorical fanfare and much hooting, as a kind of ironic dirge to Marxist economic theory. And there, between the black bars of print, was Liberty imprisoned. That article was little more than a triumphalist regurgitation of cold-war Reaganite propaganda, an infantile attempt at rubbing the nose of a metaphorical cat into the spot on the carpet where it had just urinated so as to prevent it doing so again. The message was clear: stop talking ideology and get with the programme.

Some years later another op-ed piece, several of them actually, all by the very same wealthy Old Salt, listed frankly the failings of the younger generation. One gripe in particular sticks in the mind, and it concerns the behaviour, observed by Old Salt himself, of two young men drunkenly vandalizing a traffic-island fountain at the entrance to that great penis of a building, which dominates St Julians. (Is it worth remarking that the entire layout of the luxury complex bears a striking globular similarity to that of male reproductive organs? That so many expensive apartments follow the contours of its gonads? Some junior draughtsman somewhere must have had quite the chuckle out of that one).

How do we draw a line connecting the above two dots? For they are connected in ways that are not obvious or even expected: in the ether of ideas. Acts of vandalism have existed from time out of mind, but the one cited above is particularly significant, not least because of the person who decided to bring it to the public’s attention. But first we must turn to Liberty in that cage wrought by ‘the end of history’.

Ludwig Von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman. All three, and especially the last, advocated the core ideas of Reaganite policies. All three made a very close association between what they called ‘Free Markets’ and ‘Freedom’ more generally. Freedom, for this offshoot of the Vienna School, rested on property rights, and without property no person could enjoy political liberty. Friedman in particular, with his Nobel Prize in economics, was the advocate of this conflation of free markets and political freedoms. His was a very convincing formulation that tapped into liberal ideas on placing limits on the state, and could be easily thrown into positive relief by a comparison with the ‘Communism’ of the Western World’s greatest enemy: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The binary distinction was a simple one and easily articulated, and the conflation of liberty and market-oriented economics slipped in under the radar. It is not easy to determine exactly how these ideas infiltrated Maltese political discourse, but the best guess would include the influence of Thatcherism in the United Kingdom. (Thatcher had boldly stated that her economic policies were drawn from Hayek).

This conflation had a long history behind it. The association between political liberalism and economic liberalism was formed early on in the nineteenth-century, most strongly in Britain, the first country to industrialize on a significant scale. It came to constitute part of the appeal of the Whig Version of History, which has already been mentioned once on this blog. Most of its advocates would point to the works of Adam Smith as the original inspiration, but there is reason to doubt this assertion, since debates on political economy predate Adam Smith by half a century at least. Smith argued for free market economics (removing barriers to international trade) against state oriented economics (setting up barriers to international trade through taxation). State oriented economics was the position formulated by mercantilists, an unaffiliated group of policy makers in Britain who were looking for ways to increase the wealth of the British monarchy so as to fund the military exigencies of the growing empire. Smith felt compelled to advance his theories, not simply in opposition to Mercantilists, but because someone else had already presented arguments against mercantilism which did not satisfy Smith. That person was a Dutch physician, living in London at the turn of the eighteenth-century, Bernard Mandeville.

Mandeville’s works do not figure greatly in the public consciousness, and yet they articulate a social philosophy that is identical with economic libertarians such as Milton Friedman. At the time Mandeville published his first anonymous pamphlets in London, Britain was emerging as an economic powerhouse. This new prosperity brought significant social changes with it, changes that were debated in moral terms that cast the emerging wealth of the country in terms of vanity and as sure to lead to its downfall. Mandeville took issue with these moral debates, and advanced the opinion that what others defined as vice was the source of all prosperity, and that attempts to instil virtuous behaviour would only result in economic ruin. He presented his arguments in the form of a fable in verse, and later supplemented that humorous piece of doggerel with essays on charity, the origins of morality, the nature of society, and a full commentary on the poem itself, explaining and expanding on its ideas. That work is now known by its subsequent title: The Fable of the Bees.

The ‘Fable’ opens with a prosperous hive, one that mirrors eighteenth-century England in all its characteristics. The bees in the hive suddenly become aware that their wealth is based on their own immorality and vice, and decide to become more virtuous. The result is that the hive prospers no more and falls into decrepitude. The stated conclusion of the fable is that ‘private vices lead to public benefits’. In the words of modern day investment bankers: Greed is Good. Mandeville founded his arguments on a moral psychology that reduced all actions and even sociability itself to vanity, or as modern economists would have it, rational self-interest. He went on to criticise as hypocrites those who, while benefitting from the wealth generated by vice, pretended to be virtuous and called for the extirpation of all evils. Salt of the earth, for example, would be a hypocrite for criticising the drunkenness of the vandals, while indirectly living off the proceeds of that drunkenness, which after all depended on those youths spending lots of money. Even the result of this behaviour, such as vandalism (or externalities, in the jargon of economists), is grease to the economic wheel. It means that someone is going to get paid for cleaning up the mess.

Mandeville’s works are littered with refrains that have become the chorus of economic libertarians. Mandeville counselled against giving too much to charity, since this would discourage the poor from seeking work, a similar argument to modern day criticisms of the welfare state. He argued for the legalisation of prostitution and against the criminalisation of hard liqueur (in his day it was Gin), since both would add to the general wealth. From this argument stems Friedman’s advocacy for the legalisation of hard drugs. But Mandeville did not couple this with any recognition of political rights, in fact he was more than happy to preserve political inequalities alongside the economic inequalities he thought necessary for the greater prosperity of society. From his writings it does not appear that Mandeville was in favour of any political system in particular. All he required was one that would allow his vision of a society to function properly “ … by the dextrous management of a skilful Politician…” In this, Mandeville’s politics are perhaps best exemplified by the fictional city of Ankh Morpork, in the novels of Terry Pratchett, with its insomniac sociopath of a Patrician, Lord Vetinari.

What Mandeville argued for, then, was a commercial society and not a free one. In this society all human interactions are reduced to commercial transactions motivated by vanity. This kind of society, he argues, would be the most advanced in the arts, the sciences, and in warfare. It is also the kind of society advocated by market-oriented theories such as those of Milton Friedman. In fact, the similarity is so striking, that at several points while listening to audio interviews with Friedman you can hear almost word for word, the same arguments Mandeville put forward. Of course, libertarians such as Friedman extended the precepts of commercial society far beyond what Mandeville did in his pamphlets, even though Mandeville himself presented his theory as all encompassing and total. Here is the concluding paragraph from A Search into the Nature of Society:

After this I flatter my self to have demonstrated that, neither the Friendly Qualities and Kind Affections that are natural to Man, nor the real Virtues he is capable of acquiring by Reason and Self-Denial, are the Foundation of Society but that what we call Evil in this World, Moral as well as Natural, is the grand Principle that makes us sociable Creatures, the solid Basis, the Life and Support of all Trades and Employments without Exception: That there we must look for the true Origin of all Arts and Sciences, and that the moment Evil ceases, the Society must be spoiled, if not totally dissolved.

This then, was the vision of society that Adam Smith had to grapple with, and doing so was no easy task. I have mentioned that Mandeville’s theory was based on a moral psychology that reduced all human virtues to the instinct of vanity, that is to say, a vice. The main problem was that this moral psychology was, and remains, so convincing. And yet Smith was uncomfortable with it, and before launching into the composition of his own rightly celebrated economic theories, he went to the trouble of articulating a moral psychology, published as The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Readers are here left to explore that work at their own leisure, since a discussion of the ideas of Adam Smith would go on at great length and the reader’s patience has already been sorely tested.

For the argument here is not an economic one, but rather an argument on the relationship between economic theories and theories of political liberty. The reader will have noticed the several references to ‘Market Oriented’ theories. The reason is because, in the judgement of The Malta Pamphleteer, that would be the proper nomenclature for the set of ideas here discussed. The term ‘commercial society’ has also been used to describe the social and cultural formation that results from such theories. Such a society, which, it should be clear to all including Old Salt, is the type of society Malta is turning into, is not a liberal society at all. In a commercial society people are not ‘free to choose’ as the propaganda so naively puts it, but ‘free to purchase’. That is the only concern of market-oriented theories of society, and what liberties individuals enjoy depends on their purchasing power. You are free to the extent that you can buy stuff, and that, as should be apparent to all, is simply a more genial form of enslavement.

What the skilful politicians of Malta have ensured over the past twenty years, is a transition towards a commercial society. They have been moderately successful, but the project for greater political liberalism never got off the ground. Could that be the reason for such disgruntlement in the hive? And with that question mark hovering, and the usual disclaimers, The Malta Pamphleteer commends these thoughts to the kind reader who has followed thus far and, as a sign of gratitude, makes the most obsequious of bows.

GENEALOGIES OF THE PRESENT or Television Documentaries and the Critique of Contemporary Political Culture

This is an essay on the television documentaries written and directed by the English film-maker Adam Curtis. It explores the narrative techniques, imagery and content of three of Curtis’ documentary series produced for the BBC: ‘The Century of the Self’, ‘The Trap’ and ‘The Power of Nightmares’. It shows how Curtis has created a set of critiques of political culture that are sophisticated yet accessible. Curtis achieves this by weaving together the history of ideas, the history of political events, and biographies of key individuals, and by using a bricollage of images and music from across the cultural spectrum as an ironic commentary. And that is not all. This essay goes on to suggest ways of appropriating that critical framework, of borrowing and reshaping it, so that it can be applied to the political culture in Malta.

The above paragraph serves as both an introduction and an homage, perhaps an inept one, to the direct and challenging quality of Curtis’ narratorial voice. By the time readers reach this sentence they will have realised that what they are reading is not intended as an appraisal of Curtis’ films by aesthetic, philosophical, moral or factual standards, but an attempt to define a method, a practice, a critical vocabulary that can be extracted and then applied to the discourse of Maltese politics. Those who choose to may easily look up Curtis’ biography and filmography online, along with some of the films themselves.

This essay is not about proposing or even imposing new political systems. It is not about knocking down houses but about opening new windows. For Malta’s political discourse has clearly gone stale. It is not that there are no new ideas, but that these ideas are prevented from entering into public policy debates. This resistance to change is one aspect of the dominance of a particular branch of political discourse which serves the interests of a narrow and exclusive social group. The effect of this dominance is a reactionary trend in government policy that undermines the place of democratic values in Maltese society. How did this happen? What follows is not an attempt to answer that question. It is an attempt to show how we might get at that answer.

The documentaries Adam Curtis has produced for the BBC all stem from an important insight, one that is often absent from political commentary in Malta: that ideas matter. The ideas that matter are those which are adopted by powerful elites and used to generate a set of practices that have a direct impact on the lives of ordinary people.

The starting point of Curtis’ films is always the lives and thought systems of key intellectuals and how their ideas were picked up by elite groups or radical ‘vanguards’. ‘The Century of the Self’ opens with the life and writings of Sigmund Freud, whose vision of human nature as determined by the ‘dangerous instinctual drives of the unconscious’ was adopted by his nephew Edward Bernays as the basis for modern public relations and advertising techniques, both practices associated with what was later called ‘the engineering of consent’. ‘The Trap or what happened to our ideas of freedom’ takes its cue from the ideas of the economist Freidrick Hayek and the mathematical formulae of Game Theory developed as part of U.S. policy during the cold-war by academics and intellectuals at the RAND Corporation. These ideas gave rise to a consensus view of humans as selfish, rational machines who can only be controlled through the self-directing automatic mechanisms of capitalist free-markets. ‘The Power of Nightmares’ traces the rise of neo-conservative ideas in the U.S. derived from the teachings of the Chicago sociologist Leo Strauss, and the parallel evolution of violent Islamist ideologies in the Middle-East inspired by the writings of the Egyptian radical Sayyid Qutb. Both Strauss and Qutb had a similar fear of the destructive forces of individualism, but while Strauss recommended the creation of ‘necessary illusions’ to control the masses, Qutb advocated indiscriminate violence to shock people out of what he termed the ‘barbarous ignorance’ of modern culture.

There are grounds for stating that Curtis’ approach is Hegelian. The narrative drive of his films is based on the changing fortunes of competing world-views over time. Freud’s views are eventually overturned and replaced by a vision of the human subconscious as a source of creativity and individuality. The simplified formulation of human nature in ‘The Trap’ is placed alongside the complementary ideas on liberty of the Oxford political theorist Isaiah Berlin. The influence of Hegelian dialectic is perhaps strongest in ‘The Power of Nightmares’ as it traces the parallel histories of neo-conservatism and radical Islamism to show how the two mutually reinforce each other just as they find themselves in direct and bloody conflict. These narratives converge and are synthesised in the ways in which ideas are used to serve the purposes of a narrow group of self-appointed elites. The set of assumptions then infiltrate and spread into the popular consciousness, with unpredictable and sometimes conflicting results which in the end prove to be problematic.

The comparison with Hegelian dialectic is useful, but not quite satisfying. What if we were to ‘read’ the documentaries backwards? Curtis’ argument is not with the past, it is with the present. He views contemporary culture and society as atomized, alienating, and ultimately hollow. The films show how this is a result of the defeat of post-war liberal political expectations, the pernicious effects of a materialist culture propagated by corporations, and the cynical exploitations of popular fears by political elites. Taking the present as a starting point and working backwards, Curtis traces a genealogy of contemporary political culture. In so doing he discovers surprising connections and intersections. In one interview Curtis stated that ” the surprising thing in the modern world is that different things impinge on each other in unexpected ways.” This genealogical approach has its antecedents in the works of Nietzsche, and more recently Foucault, and it would seem that Curtis’ own ideas are part of the critique of modernity commonly identified as postmodernist.

Again, this would be too narrow a classification. Many of Curtis’ analyses and concerns are similar to those of such critics as Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, John Pilger and Will Hutton, and the way Curtis focuses on historical events and biography suggests a positivist streak. Many of the themes he picks up are familiar to the point of being pedestrian. But it is not the arguments and interpretations Curtis puts forward, so much as the way he makes them concrete, reveals the everyday implications of what is common knowledge, and locates them within a particular historical context, that make his films so relevant and instructive. In this way the critique becomes more substantiated, its targets are given names and faces, and we see what we already suspect being acted out. Curtis’ main method of producing this effect is through interviews with people who can be termed ‘insiders’. For ideas do not exist independently of human beings. Quite the opposite, they stem from a particular set of human interactions. Their success and development over time can be traced through the fortunes of the individuals themselves. Hence the focus on the Freud family in ‘The Century of the Self’, the extensive interviews with neo-cons in ‘The Power of Nightmares’, and the outline of the life of Isiah Berlin in ‘The Trap’.

One other aspect of Curtis’ critique is the way he keeps these histories, these genealogies of the present, in the foreground, while sustaining a critical attitude in the background. This critical attitude is often conveyed through the ironic use of imagery and music that undercut the legitimacy of the ideas being presented: recurring images of balloons, 1950′s horror movies, popular songs, automobile adverts. This has the effect of turning the popular culture produced by these world-views against the views themselves and thereby de-legitimizing them.

The introduction to this essay states that its purpose is to consider the ways in which Curtis’ critique of modern political culture in the US and UK can be applied or transferred to political culture in Malta. There is a sense in which this should be obvious. Many of the ideas on government and the direction of public policy in Malta are derived from the same world-views Curtis scrutinises, albeit perhaps like third cousins, several times removed. This is not sufficient, however, and it is necessary to narrow the focus of the critique, just as Curtis does, and locate it in a historical context. For the basis of Curtis’ critiques is historical, and his are in effect very particular and focused histories. This is where critiques of Maltese politics fail. They are limited to single issues of a narrow temporal span and do not address the underlying assumptions that give rise to these issues. They are part of a journalistic, piece-meal approach to public policies that is blind to the world-views and ideological frameworks that produce them. This has a limiting effect on the scope and depth of political debate, in that this debate, or what passes for a debate, is limited by a very narrow set of received ideas, the political consensus that binds Malta’s political elites together and at times makes opposing groups indistinguishable. The image this situation conjures up is that of a person standing in front of a mirror and arguing with their own reflection.

There are many voices calling for a change in Malta’s political culture, but the change they call for is circumscribed by that culture. Criticisms in the press and elsewhere are often superficial, single-issue, full of the rhetoric of sarcasm and irony, and too easily dismissed. They are mosquitoes on the body politic: a constant nuisance perhaps, but ultimately parasites, careful to draw just enough blood for self-sustenance without causing enough damage to cripple the host which, after all, is their livelihood. Our current political culture has the effect of limiting debate to an established set of issues, is reactionary in its tendencies, and inhibits the development of democratic values in Maltese society: the values of liberty, transparency, accountability, etc.

We all think we can say what is wrong with public policy in Malta. What is lacking is an answer to the question of why it is wrong. To generate those kinds of questions it is necessary to trace how this situation came about. Again, this is not about simply setting historical records straight or resurrecting old grievances, but about linking the past with the present in a way that makes the latter intelligible through the former: a genealogy of Malta’s present.

positive v negative

The previous post on this blog made the case for distinguishing between ancient and modern conceptions of liberty, arguing that it is a useful and necessary distinction with concrete ramifications for Maltese political discourse. This post will argue for another equally relevant distinction, one that has a more direct bearing on current political debates: the distinction between ‘positive liberty’ and ‘negative liberty’.

Simply put, negative liberty refers to the absence of constraint. Positive liberty refers to the ability of an individual to realise their true purpose. The distinction has a long history and it is not the aim of this blog to treat the various strands of liberal thought that can be grouped under the two headings. It is worth noting, however, that the most significant discussion of negative and positive liberty was by Isaiah Berlin, who devoted his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford to this topic. The importance of Berlin’s contribution to this debate within liberal thought cannot be underestimated, and much has since been written by him, of him, for him and against him, and all of this is easily accessible across a wide variety of media. It is surprising and, to a certain degree, encouraging, to note the extensive resources available on the internet that are devoted to introducing and discussing Berlin’s ideas on positive and negative liberty, and these should give any prospective researcher a good idea of the influence Berlin’s essay has exercised on the political thought and practices of the last fifty years.

The influence of Berlin’s essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ does not mean that there is a consensus surrounding its conclusions. The distinction remains problematic to this day and Berlin’s own thoughts are often contested. The terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ refer to broad categories of thought that Berlin viewed as antithetical. Berlin identified negative liberty with western liberal pluralist democracies, in which a significant sphere of action is available to the individual. Within that ‘space’, which is legally defined, the individual is free to do as he or she chooses, whatever those choices may be. Positive liberty on the other hand is what Berlin identified with the quest for realising the true purpose of the individual, it is liberty as self-realization or self-determination.

On the face of it, the definition of positive liberty appears harmless enough, and yet Berlin saw within it the seeds of a harmful paradox. For what, we might ask, does it mean to be self-determined? What exactly constitutes self-realization? We must remember that we are talking about a political set-up, with institutions and laws created according to principles of liberty, so if we are to follow the course of positive ideas of liberty then we must have a definition of what that liberty consists of. And here, I think, Berlin provided a very useful insight. There are, and have always been, many different ideas on how people can attain self-realization. These thought systems take the form of religion, ideology, personal philosophy, lifestyle choice, etc. The range of these thought systems extends from the completely materialist to the totally ascetic and spiritualist. All these thought systems have adherents, and all these adherents are convinced that theirs is the true path to freedom of the self. Follow the teachings of X and you will be free! Reject worldly goods and passions and emotions and you will be free! Rid the world of capitalism and the world will be free!

So which one, it is pertinent to ask, should we choose over all the others? For surely, once we have chosen one of these paths of self-determination, of self-realization, surely then all others must be suppressed. Surely all people within our political unit (country or state) must be obliged to follow this glorious path to freedom by becoming their true selves as we prescribe. It is in this train of thought that Berlin identified what he considered to be the dangerous paradox of positive liberty: that in the end it leads to authoritarianism.

Once I take this view, I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture them in the name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man (happiness, performance of duty, wisdom, a just society, self-fulfillment) must be identical with his freedom – the free choice of his ‘true’, albeit often submerged and inarticulate, self.

We do not have to look very far from our shores to find such examples of ‘positive liberty’ in a state, nor do we have to look very far back in time. Malta’s political system is a democratic one and pluralist one, and our legal system is such that it follows, for the most part, the principles of negative liberty. It is of course worthwhile to remind ourselves of the dangers of positive liberty, even as the debate over its relevance continues amongst intellectuals, and yet this is not the argument being put forward here.

The most widely read of Malta’s newspapers devote many pages to op-ed pieces, and frequently the arguments put forward by columnists resolve themselves into an equation: the government must do x. It seems to be a commonly held assumption among opinion makers that governments can and should interfere in every aspect of our lives. That government is somehow responsible for shaping society as a totality. There is no sense of a sphere of action in which the government must not intrude. Plenty of ink is devoted to arguments in support of or against legislation on this and that aspect of Maltese society. There has yet to be a columnist who slams on the brakes and states unequivocally that, actually, government has no business legislating on a particular matter at all. We have yet to develop a political vocabulary that includes the concept of an individual space with a recognizable legal boundary, that governments with their laws should never attempt to cross. There is much in the way of positive liberty, but almost no set of opinions that take their shape from the idea of negative liberty. And so it is that without realising it Maltese political discourse is beginning to fall into the paradox of positive liberty.

Let us introduce a question then, a question that we often forget to ask or perhaps do not want to ask or perhaps even never thought of asking: What can government not do? No doubt this post appears a little confused and readers may find the main argument over-stressed. These failings are clearly the failings of this blogger, and readers are kindly asked to refer to the about section of this blog for clarification.

Ancients v Moderns

The previous entry on this blog made the case for considering Liberty as a universal aspiration, one that dates back to the earliest known human societies. In support of this claim, readers were urged to enter the term ‘Liberty’ into an internet search engine. Somewhere among the results of this online search, readers may have stumbled across a reference to amagi, a cuneiform symbol said to be the earliest know reference to the concept of Liberty. The symbol is said to date from 2350 BC and is found in the legal code of the Sumerian city-state of Girsu/Lagash. A literal translation of the term is “return to the mother” and it refers to a set of legislative reforms that freed citizens of Girsu/Lagash from compulsory service originating as tax exactions. There is no need here to dive into the contested waters of academic debate on how this term can be taken to represent a concept of Liberty, it is enough to point out that one branch of liberal thought understands it as the earliest example of the principle of private property, understood as the material basis of personal Liberty.

2350 BC is a long time ago, and just think of all that has been associated with Liberty ever since. It might please some readers to know that there are groups of historians who spend most of their time pouring over the sediments of political philosophy, drinking in those heady wines by the bottle before pissing a disappointing cupful into the public domain; struggling to squeeze every last drop of knowledge from the dry parchments.

But what are we to make of the myriad definitions of Liberty that the past has foisted on us? Are we to make our way through all those stacks of treatises and speeches, scrunch them all into a big wad of paper and claim to have produced a concise understanding of Liberty? Surely that will not do. Surely there is some other way of approaching our subject that does not require so long a list of venerable tomes. We are not all historians, nor do the majority of us have the time to be. And even those who have the time might object to wearing away the elbows of their jackets on the rough edges of desks, and their eyesight by dim lighting.

Thankfully, the past can come to our rescue. In 1816, after the final curtain had definitively fallen on Napoleon and his armies, Benjamin Constant wrote and delivered an address on ‘The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns’. Constant had witnessed the French Revolution, had gone into exile for criticizing Napoleon, and was soon to become the leader of the French Liberal parliamentary group in the newly restored monarchy of France. The speech reflects his experiences as a political activist as well as his aspirations. It is littered with self-conscious references to the failures of the Revolution of 1789, and alludes obliquely to what he considered the errors of Napoleonic France. It is, nevertheless, a very direct speech as far as its main argument is concerned.

The argument is as follows: attempts to reproduce the political liberty of the ancients are foolish because the world is very different now from what it was back then. If we wish to establish a form of Liberty that is true and applicable to our time then we must reason from the present, not from the past and, more importantly, we must not confuse the two.

And how did the world of the ancients seem different to that of Benjamin Constant? The states of the ancient world, of Greece, and Rome, and Gaul, were smaller in size and belligerent by nature, whereas modern states are larger and their tendency is towards peace. Liberty as understood by the peoples of Athens, Sparta, Rome, and even Florence, differs from that which people like Constant aspired to. In particular Constant singles out the principle of representative government, not uniformly or completely practiced by the ancients, and at the heart of modern ideas of Liberty. Constant’s understanding of the past was common among liberals of his day, who believed that History was a record of human progress, that unstoppable force of change, and that Liberty went hand in hand with the peaceful relationships created between peoples through commerce.

In England this twinning of peace with commerce and prosperity, this optimistic vision of history, has been termed ‘The Whig Version of History’. It is no longer considered a tenable thesis, but in its time, across the whole nineteenth century, it was an idea that exercised an important influence. In that way our own times are different from those of Benjamin Constant, however, his argument for distinguishing between ancient and modern concepts of Liberty remains valid.

And it is important in another respect. Constant being something of a scholar himself, was well aware that the words of ancient writers could be used to support the suppression of Liberty as well as its advancement. What was taken for freedom in ancient Rome could be used for enslavement in modern France. This was the consequence he warned most strongly against.

Let us mistrust, Gentlemen, this admiration for certain ancient memories. Since we live in modern times, I want a liberty suited to modern times; and since we live under monarchies, I humbly beg these monarchies not to borrow from the ancient republics the means to oppress us.

Malta, 15^th June, 1802

We, the Members of the Congress of the Islands of Malta and Gozo and their dependencies, by the free suffrage of the people, during the siege, elected to represent them on the important matter of ascertaining our native rights and privileges (enjoyed from time immemorial by our ancestors, who, when encroached upon, have shed their blood to regain them), and of fixing a Constitutions of Government, which shall secure to us and our descendents in perpetuity, the blessings of freedom and the rights of just law, under the protection and Sovereignty of the King of a free people, His Majesty the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland…

Thus did the representatives of the Maltese people declare their rights to the Empire. But what were these native rights and privileges? Representative self-government was clearly one of them, the control of taxation and legislation. The predominance of the Catholic religion was another; spiritual matters to remain in the hands of the papacy. Privileges? The export of grain and other victuals from Sicily perhaps, and perhaps also acknowledgement of noble titles. The above is an extract from one of several extraordinary documents written at a time of uncertainty by a group of men with multiple competing interests: the nobility, the clergy, members of the intelligentsia, the business community, etc. One hundred and four members of a General Congress who took it upon themselves to decide the fate of the islands following the end of the French occupation in 1800. All these competing interests written down cheek by jowl for the sake of collective security.

What emerges from a reading of this and other documents written by members of the General Congress is a blue print for a government similar to that of the Medieval Universitas, the administrative body that the Order of St John had divested of authority. Similar, but not identical, because the Universitas of yore lacked the representative element desired by the liberals in the Congress. Liberals such as George Mitrovich.

It is this same George Mitrovich whom we find, in 1835, railing against the imposition of arbitrary British government and complaining that those who previously stood together to secure the ‘ancient rights’ of the Maltese had now deserted that cause. Where are the clergy? He asks. Where the nobility and the leaders of the insurrection against the French? Mitrovich was calling for representative government but he was left to do so alone. The Roman Catholic Church was secure in its position, however much Mitrovich claimed it was under threat. The nobility had their titles recognised and thus achieved their aims. There were even those who were allowed a share in the government of the islands, although these ‘representatives’ were hand picked rather than elected. In other words, all the ‘ancient rights and privileges’ had, to some extent, been conceded. What was not conceded was the right to a representative assembly. That last innovation was called for in vain. It was not part of any ancient liberties of the Maltese peoples and it was not about to be granted by the officers of the Empire.

All Mitrovich’s petitions to the British Parliament and polemics to his countrymen were met with a kind of selective deafness. And yet his words, or their substance at any rate, continue to be echoed even today. The argument being put forward here has been a long time in coming, and, given previous assurances by the malta pamphleteer, readers may be wondering why the need for the above sketchy forays into the realms of the past. The argument is this: current regurgitations of Mitrovich’s rhetoric, that rhetoric itself, do not correspond to the modern notions of liberty. On the contrary, they are, as Constant warned, rhetorical moves that lead to a diminution of Liberty in the modern sense. The Medieval Universitas was not a liberal institution, it was a mechanism of power and wealth monopolised by a self-appointed elite. It was the kind of institution that liberalism seeks to dislodge in favour of the modern innovation of broad representative government.

Are there any ‘self-appointed elites’ currently ensconced in the Maltese political system? Is there any group that claims the seat of authority for itself through what that group considers to be its innate superiority? That is a question very much worth asking, although the answer will not be easy and, in any case, is not the subject of this post. The argument presented here is, admittedly, sketchy and lacking in those details proper to historical investigations. No doubt there are those whose knowledge would allow them to offer a better description of the events mentioned above. Given the weaknesses of this essay it is incumbent on the essayist to point out that Benjamin Constant’s address ‘The Liberty of the Ancients compared with that of the Moderns’ is available online in full text, and that there exists in published form a generous selection of documents, related to Maltese political development during British rule, that includes the two cited here.

A Fundamental Principle

 

The starting point of all Liberal politics is the fundamental principle of Liberty, according to which all people begin life in a state of freedom. No person is born with less or more freedom than others. By ‘Freedom’ is meant the ability to think and act as a person wills. People may be born into conditions of greater or lesser freedom, but they do not carry this surplus or surfeit of Freedom within themselves. Freedom is, as it were, a state of nature and this fundamental principle of Liberty is the a priori assumption from which Liberal politics stems.

But not so fast. Since we are to take the fundamental principle of liberty as normatively basic, as a state of nature with which all are born, then we must consider the relationship between this freedom and social interaction. Social interaction and resultant organisation, the latter being formal or informal, institutionalised and codified or conventional and fluid, results in negotiations of the extent of freedom. In other words, to some degree social interaction places limits on this complete freedom. The extent of freedom resulting from social interactions I understand by the term ‘Liberty’. ‘Freedom’ describes the ability to do as one chooses in all situations irrespective of others or not. ‘Liberty’ denotes the ability to do as one chooses within a system of formal or informal social interaction. The concept of Liberty, thus applied, becomes a political, social, and juridical concept, pertaining not simply to the individual but to individuals within a society.

Am I justified in making this distinction, between Freedom and Liberty? The two are often conflated in the realms of popular culture, whether issuing as a cry from an enraged and face-painted Mel Gibson, or as a cocky retort from a scruffily dressed and shackled Matt Damon quoting a nineteenth-century American Congregationalist minister. I am free to do what I want any old time, and, freedom, freedom you gotta give for what you take. My argument for making the distinction runs thus. We are all born with an equal measure of freedom, but through social interaction we lose, or give away, part of it. The remaining freedom that we have I designate as liberty. So liberty, as I understand it, denotes the extent of freedom we possess as members of a society.

While it would probably be a useful thought experiment, at this point, to digress into a discussion of freedom and liberty as would pertain to a person marooned on a deserted island far from any human presence whatsoever, I will pass this over in favour of pursuing my line of argument.

Since it is given that as members of a society we do not possess complete Freedom but Liberty, that is the extent of freedom we retain as a result of social interaction, then we can ask ourselves: is it better that we have more or less Liberty? When I stated above that the fundamental Liberty principle is the starting point of all Liberal politics, I should have mentioned also that it is the starting point of political theories that are not liberal in their final analysis. I promised arguments not reading lists, so I will leave it to the reader to identify those political theorists who fall into this category (though they could do worse than to start with the writings of Thomas Hobbes).

The Liberal answer to the above stated question is, predictably, more Liberty not less. In practice what this means is that the authority of the state over members of a society should be limited. It should be limited to the extent that individuals are in charge of their own lives, rather than the state or some other social institutions being in charge of their lives. Restrictions on Liberty require justification, and the burden of proof rests with those who would seek to diminish Liberty.

Why is this desirable? It is desirable because for individuals to act in a truly moral way, to make sincere ethical decisions, they must do so of their own volition. To force someone into a course of action deemed ethical is to deprive them of their agency. The act of coercion involved negates the morality of the action itself, making the action morally void. Where there is no choice of action a decision on moral grounds is impossible. This emphasis on free will as a necessary condition of moral choice is the reason that the writings of Desiderius Erasmus, a sixteenth-century Dutch monk and humanist, are considered part of the Liberal tradition in European political thought.

And how do we know that people, once given the opportunity to make decisions of this kind, how do we know that we will choose correctly? Here the Liberal must bite the bullet: we cannot be sure.

We cannot be sure in several senses. Firstly, human behaviour is so varied in its manifestations, and the circumstances of human interaction so multiple, that few can plausibly predict, or even describe comprehensively, how every single person should act in every possible situation. The limits of human knowledge, in all its aspects, do not allow us to make statements on this question with complete certainty. We are sometimes surprised by the actions of persons who are entirely familiar to us and occasionally we find ourselves in situations that we have never faced nor contemplated before and grasp in vain for a prescribed course to take. Complete certainty would necessitate the creation of a world as large as the one we inhabit, and populated by humans as numerous as we are, and furthermore, to replicate its trajectory over the whole course of time past, present, and future. Such an experiment is possible only in the realm of fictions, for example The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and even in that case, owing to the particular humour of its author, the enterprise suffered an abrupt and premature conclusion.

Secondly, and following from the first, no person can claim complete knowledge of what is morally good, not without sounding, at best, mildly eccentric. A certain degree of humility is required. This was as true for people living centuries ago as it is today, and is the reason why moral questions have been debated for all those centuries and will continue to be argued over for more to come.

Liberty is the soul’s right to breathe, and when it cannot take a long breath laws are girdled too tight. Without Liberty, Man is in a syncope.

 With the above appeal for intellectual humility this blog acknowledges its own weaknesses: the arguments I have put forward perhaps seem frail, ill conceived and poorly communicated. Others have certainly articulated the concept of liberty in a clearer fashion before. For the questions surrounding Liberty and Freedom have been asked for millennia, and if this writer is convinced of anything it is of Liberty’s universal emotional appeal. Entering the term ‘Liberty’ into a search engine should be enough to assure the reader of that fact, for among the results we find references to both the ancients and the moderns, to all corners of the globe, to all branches of human reasoning. We live in a culture so permeated with the idea of freedom that we hardly notice it, and yet it is there coursing below the surface, a constant effervescence.