The invisible origins of current political debates

Journalists preach a lot about the need to modernise society, to rend the cobwebs of the past, to let in the fresh air. It’s not just columnists; it’s the editorial slant of at least three Englishlanguage Maltese news outlets

But this idealisation of innovation and embracing what’s new isn’t novel; it’s as old as time itself. In our contemporary context, it’s a logical extension of a debate that started in the eighteenth century and then gained huge momentum in the nineteenth. The two antagonists were the partisans of “Law as a product of History and Tradition” and the partisans of “Law as a product of Reason”.

Indeed, the law is the lynchpin. For human nature doesn’t change – it’s the law that changes. And it changes because political circumstances change and allow the ideas latent in legal thinking suddenly to come to the fore and carry the day.

This has implications for the debate between “what is” and “what should be”. Human behaviour (“what is”) has always been the same – people have been fornicating, stealing, murdering, you name it, since antediluvian times! What changes is the “what should be”: the law. And the novelty almost always lies in the not-so-novel idea that “what should be” ought to reflect “what is” – rendering the two ideas equivalent and, therefore, meaningless.

Be that as it may. It’s obvious to the intelligent onlooker that in the debate between Law-as-Historyand-Tradition and Law-asReason, the Conservatives will root for the former and the Liberals for the latter.

The intelligent onlooker will also notice that, all said and done, both positions are rooted in the Christian worldview. The idea of Tradition is Christian; ditto, the idea of Reason as our guide. So here we’re not discussing religion per se, but an argument that, because of history, is situated in a “religious” framework. The framework of all our reasoning – despite the relentless onslaught from secularists – remains Christian.

The supporters of Reason try to debunk the Traditionalists as irrelevant. It’s the typical stance of this group of (let’s call them) “thinkers”. They think that the “old” is necessarily wrong, while the “new” is ipso facto good. Whereas it sounds irrational to me, it is indeed the position embraced by those who see themselves as guided by Reason. They call those on the other side “dinosaurs”, “outmoded”, “outdated”, “expired”, “medieval”, and so on, in an attempt not to counter the arguments but to discredit the proponent.

Reason supporters seem unable to consider that, perhaps, certain rules created in the past were not, as they might think, mechanisms of oppression, but responses to threats. Instead of trying to analyse the possibly menacing circumstances that led to what we now see as “traditional rules”, they (the Liberals, the “children of Reason”) prefer to relegate everything traditional to expression of oppression, in a misguided application of Marxist theory.

As the late Giuseppe Mifsud Bonnici argued in the book we wrote together, Il-Liġi, il-Morali, u rRaġuni (2008), the problem with Reason is that Reason is always inherently arbitrary: what is reasonable to me might be most unreasonable to you, and vice versa. If it weren’t so, there would be no need for the State, a higher (theoretically impersonal) authority that regulates human relations and interactions.

Reason is abstract and therefore nobody can “see” it. It’s not a physical phenomenon, like the heat or the cold, say, two phenomena that everybody can experience through their senses. (Only somebody demented would claim that August in Malta is cold.) But Reason is different. Reason exists in the mind, not in the world of “facts”, and is therefore necessarily arbitrary.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, all proponents of Reason are aware that laws based on reason are ultimately arbitrary. Being aware of the arbitrariness underlying their apparently “reasonable” or, to be more precise, “reason-based” principles, they have to resort to coercion to ensure that their principles be applied.

This is very much a top-down approach, and as such conducive to indiscriminate application and therefore popular resistance. Its opposite, the bottom-up approach, is more democratic, as it allows diverse principles to coexist.

And this is where the tensions between Radical Liberalism (the real name of the Reason party) and Democracy (the real name of the Traditionalists) arise. The deep-seated conflict between Radical Liberalism and Free Democracy originates from the vocation of the Radical Liberals to impose (their understanding of) Reason on everybody else, and imposition is the ultimate weapon of democracy destruction in the State’s governance arsenal.

The dictatorship of Reason leads to the beheading of Democracy. Several French revolutionaries discovered this first-hand, during the Great Revolution.

(Though the holiday season is indeed over, I enjoyed writing fiction so much that today I want to propose another Søren Farrugia story.)