The Liberal Variant of Amoral Familism

Mark Sammut

I do not believe that history is made by “great men”. “Great men” follow their passions, their (killer) instinct. History uses “great men”, only to discard them once their usefulness is over. Instead, I believe history is caused by a concatenation of events bigger than any one person. I also do not believe that history is the march toward freedom. It’s not a march actually; it’s a cycle which repeats itself but never in the same way. There are historical moments when times are ripe for personal freedom, others when they are ripe for political freedom. Others still, for neither. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, we have been experiencing a shift dictated by now-truly globalised market forces. These require an uprooted labour force which, in order to respond quickly and efficiently to the needs of production, has to accept precarity and mobility, forgoing family ties. Full sexual freedom, and the ideology that this “freedom” is good, are therefore essential.

At the same time, the labour force has to shed its national identity in favour of a cosmopolitan hotchpotch which prefers returns on capital to the benefits of living together in a more or less culturally homogenous community.

I see all of this as “neoliberalism” – social liberalism tangoing with market laissez-faire.

Joseph Muscat did not invent neoliberalism, and I do not think he is a true believer in it either. The way he changed his stance on gay “marriage” (from against to pro) says a lot. His stances seem calculated: he’s more of a marketeer than a visionary. He understands the spirit of the times and, chameleon-like, adapts to it to become its messiah. Which means that had the times been conservative, Dr Muscat would have been conservative.

That the times have a certain spirit does not mean that that spirit is right. The late 19th century was awash with imperialist greed and the early 20th with eugenics dogma. Both were morally wrong. So being a tool of history makes you neither a good nor a bad person, because history is amoral. It’s the principles you decide to embrace and push forward that shine through your public persona.

There’s no need to address the thorniest issue, since I have already written a whole book on those two lads who were playing hide-and-seek in secretive, far-flung jurisdictions for the sake of their families.