Con: The Scales of Freedom

It seems like a story set in Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, with the liberals and the conservatives fighting a civil war. Only that in that novel, General Buendía tells his aide that, when all was said and done, they were fighting

And yet, political discourse should not be like that. If everybody occupies the centre, then the voters feel cheated, and voter apathy sets in. In practice, the antidote to ideological apathy would be further clientelism, in which the rules of patronage hold sway. You elect your patron and s/he takes you on as client. Let’s be totally honest. There are situations in which you need that extra push from the politician. There are situations when State mechanisms either fail to work because the rules are blatantly stupid, or because the bureaucrat applying them is. Stupidity can indeed be a formidable enemy, which only power can defeat, if at all.

But these are in the minority of situations. In the majority of cases, the rules are more or less fair and equitable, and bureaucrats are savvy enough to know how to make them work. The real problem arises when clientelism is used as a short cut, to jump the queue say, or, worse, to obtain something you patently do not have the right to. The price paid for such practices is high, and the bill is footed by the entire community, in terms of morale, physical and natural environment, and so on.

It therefore follows that political parties have to offer a real choice to the electorate. If all parties – the three represented in Parliament, and the fourth one which is still fiddling with the self-starter of the engine that never starts – occupy the political centre, then it’s just more of the same. It is true that we do tend to venerate political leaders for their charisma, cunning and courage, but personality cults lead to disaster. The Führer, the Duce, and the other dictators of the 20th century exemplify this. So, parties have to have a distinct personality, which transcends even that of their leaders.

Joseph Muscat has hijacked the Labour Party, transforming it from a party of the workers into a “progressive and liberal” movement. It had also set out to embrace the moderates, but it has been intimated now they have to take the very last back seat of the very long double-articulated bus. When Malta under Muscat is being hailed as number one in certain areas of legislation, then it is abundantly clear, even to the more obtuse, that the moderates have no place in this movement. They were simply allured, mostly because of the silly usand-them tribe mentality, and their vote used to buttress the progressive-liberal agenda favouring vociferous minorities.

Now the problem with minorities is a problem of freedom.

In a democracy, there is absolutely no issue with freedom. By definition, there can be no choice between a party which allows freedom (democratic) and a party which disallows freedom (Fascist). Democracy is nothing but the process whereby freedom is exercised individuals. For instance, in the case of adoptions by same-sex couples, the question is: do same-sex couples have absolute freedom to adopt children or do they have an obligation towards the community (in this case, embodied in the sub-set of adopted children) to allow each child to enjoy a relationship with a father and a mother? Where to strike the balance between the freedom of the children and the freedom of same-sex couples?

(With all due respect, arguments about lack of scientific evidence on psychological harm and arguments that heterosexual couples can abuse children are logical non-starters and serve only to obfuscate the issue.)

In the particular case of adoption of children by same-sex couples, the removal of all references to “father” and “mother” means that the law does not discriminate between children – all children have the equal right to parents, of whichever sex. So the question becomes: does this little piece of legal trickery respect the freedom of each child to have a parental relationship with a member of each sex? Or does it impose on children the possibility of having a parental relationship only with members of just one sex? These questions have to be asked also in the light of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “all human beings are born equal in rights”.

This example shows that in the ultimate analysis we all agree on freedom (because we are all democrats) – but we do not all agree on the degree of freedom, because some of us are “liberals” and some are “communitarian”.

A less controversial example is the speed limit. We all have the freedom to drive a car, but we do not have the freedom to drive the car at exceedingly high speeds. The question becomes: which is the speed limit that respects freedom in all, or many, of its aspects? Even for such an apparently easy question, the answers in reality are not easy at all, as one can conclude by simple observation. There are different speed limits on different roads and for no apparent reason.

Just transpose all that to other, more complex and complicated questions, and the need for discussion becomes obvious. Ideally, the discussion should be outside the patron-client mindset. But this is a seemingly intractable problem of the modern State: socio-professional interests seem to have become the force which dominates the State. This too needs more reflection. In the current chaos, it seems there is no time for reflection. This is sad.

If I understand the ethos of the PN correctly, it is one which views society as a tree. We, different individuals, are all different parts of the same tree. In other words, we as individuals have a relative autonomy as parts in relation to the whole. As individuals, we are endowed with the deliberate dimension of freedom which must always exist within the fulfilment of the “social agreement”. Finding and striking the right balance between the part and the whole is the job of every political leader. Joseph Muscat prefers moving the poise very much toward the part. Towards which end will the new PN leader prefer to move the party’s poise on the weighing scales of freedom? Towards the whole or the part?