A decade of decadence

ternational company to stay in Malta but bring in foreign workers than shut down and leave.”

This was last April, a mere three months ago. So why is the Central Bank now changing the rules for buy-to-rent loans? What’s going on?

Government and bedrooms

Government policy affects bedrooms not only in the sense of accommodation, but also in the other sense. In an article published in 2010 called “The state and the bedroom”, Mario Vella – the current Central Bank Governor and author of one of my favourite books ever, Reflections in a Canvas Bag (1989) – had criticised Nationalist MP Edwin Vassallo for saying that, “What happens in the bedroom is, up to a point, the government’s business because it often had to resolve problems caused there.”

Mr Vassallo had sensibly cited “single parents and teenage pregnancies” as examples of the sort of problems arising from “what happens in the bedroom”. Nine years on, I still cannot understand Dr Vella’s criticism. Wasn’t Mr Vassallo right? Don’t these cases create problems the State then has to solve? Shouldn’t the State open people’s eyes to the consequences of their actions?

Dr Vella had contended that these concerns reflect “bigotry, prejudice, intolerance and sheer ignorance”. Again, I cannot understand how discussing the public consequences of private decisions could ever add up to these accusations. Dr Vella promised to articulate his criticism in his next article (“More next time” he had promised), but I couldn’t find it. Most probably, he changed his mind. Possibly because it was politically expedient to make illogical criticisms without backing them up with... logical clarifications.

During a PL activity in Żurrieq in January of this year, the Prime Minister referred to the same theme. In the civil sector, he said, ten years ago divorce didn’t exist and the Government would go into everyone’s bedroom, while today the country is at the forefront of civil rights.

Civil rights, or so it seems, are equal to sexual “liberation”.

Which must therefore imply that the “bigotry, prejudice, intolerance and sheer ignorance” of Dr Vella’s article referred to what many of us consider as the responsibility inherent in sexual activity. But this sense of “responsibility” is – in the eyes of the liberal-progressives – nothing but a manacle.

Nine years have passed. The supposed “bigotry, prejudice, intolerance and sheer ignorance” have remained unexplained by that part of the political spectrum that issues these fatwas. As the Prime Minister himself admitted, in this decade Malta has become a radically progressive country, despite the pre-2013 electoral pledge that the project was to be progressive with moderation. (The Minister responsible

My Personal Library (59)

In December 2016, I visited Marcello Veneziani (right) in his Rome apartment, or loft, actually. I thought that I had a lot of books! I had to recalibrate my self-perception... each and every wall of Veneziani’s residence was covered with shelf upon shelf, and the air was saturated with the sweet smell of lignin.

Veneziani has written a number of middle-brow books on philosophy; I think he can be classified as a populariser of philosophy. The first book of his which I read, and which I still consider to be his best, is called Comunitari o liberal: La Prossima Alternativa (“Communitarians or Liberals: The Next Alternative”, 1999). He uses the English word “liberals” to distinguish these “new” liberals from the classical liberals of the 19th century.

Veneziani claims that the liberals believe in emancipation, in liberation from ties, in the project of Humanity. They believe in overcoming frontiers and boundaries, and in universalism (or cosmopolitanism).

For the communitarians, on the other hand, importance is to be given to the feeling of community, to rites, to the usages and customs of a people. This is not a sociological or folkloristic importance, but one intimately related to life – these should serve as points of reference for one’s orientation in life.

The communitarians are children of a fatherland; the motherland of the liberals is time.

The communitarians love variety and distrust precarity; the liberals prefer variability and dislike differences. Variety is diversity in the spatial sense, argues Veneziani; variability is diversity in the temporal.