Is humanity inherently good or evil?

Two anniversaries of events that shamed Malta were remembered in the same week – the infamous Black Monday, recalling the violent attacks on the printing press of The Times and on the home of Eddie Fenech Adami 45 years ago; and the cruel assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia seven years ago.

By sheer coincidence I am currently reading Rutger Bregman’s Human Kind: A Hopeful History – a book in which the author argues that notwithstanding the many times they resort to violence, humans are inherently good. The book goes against the grain since the many episodes of violence in the history of mankind lead us to think otherwise.

Stephen Fry has described the book as being ‘an extraordinarily powerful declaration of faith in the innate goodness and natural decency of human beings.’

Bregman cites as an example the failure of the allies bombing of a number of German towns in World War II. The tactic did not elicit the reaction that the allies thought the bombing would lead to. There was no breakdown in morale. The spirit of the Germans was not broken – not even the carpet bombing of cities like Dresden brought about the desired effect. In the cities that were bombed, the outcome was a fiasco for the allies as production of tanks and weapons had increased faster than in other towns that had not been bombed. This was perhaps the greatest miscalculation of the war.

It is the same miscalculation of those who plotted and executed the 1979 fracas and of those who plotted and executed Daphne’s assassination.

The incidents led society at large to react. Instead of accepting the evil that seemed to be temporarily the victor, the reaction strengthened the hand of those who believe that good triumphs over evil.

Bregman compares what ‘happens’ in William Golding’s fictional story ‘Lord of the flies’ to what happened for real in similar circumstances. In Golding’s story a group of schoolboys on a deserted island try to form their own society. Some boys turn to savagery and an innate evil force leads the boys to be bold, anarchistic and violent. In the end, any remaining sense of civilisation is gone.

Bregman cites a real story that happened when a group of boys were stranded on an uninhabitable island in the Pacific called Ata after drifting for eight days. The boys set up successfully a small commune where infighting did not exist. While the boys in the fictional ‘Lord of the flies’ came to blows over fire, in real life the boys tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.

Without entering into the many details, the boys in real life cooperated and lived as a community rather than experiencing some power struggle as in ‘Lord of the flies’.

As British screenwriter and producer, Richard Curtis, put it: ‘If you make a film about a man kidnapping a woman and chaining her to a radiator for five years - something that has happened probably once in history – it’s called a searingly realistic analysis of society. If I make a film like Love Actually, which is about people falling in love, and there are about a million people falling in love in Britain today, it’s called ‘a sentimental presentation of an unrealistic world.’

Let’s be more positive than just believing that ‘the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.’

Let’s believe in the triumph of good over evil because man is inherently good. I am not saying that we should forget because time heals all wounds. In fact, the wounds remain, although in time the pain lessens but, in fact, it never goes away.

Rather than keep mulling over what happened and whose fault it was when recalling these dark episodes, we should also look at the future with hope resulting from the innate goodness of mankind.

The dark anniversaries we recall every October should lead us to this hope rather than to further recriminations

Missing the point

In a full-page article in the back page of The Times last Tuesday, Regina Egle Lotta Catrambone attacked Roberta Metsola for stopping a number of MEPs from singing during a session of the European Parliament.

As president of the Parliament, Metsola had a duty to stop the singing in order to keep order in the session. Catrambone misses the wood for the trees: Metsola was not censoring the song Bella Ciao, as Catambrone implies, but attempting to restore order in the European Parliament, as was her duty.

What the unruly MEPs were singing is irrelevant.

It is true that the song is ‘a deeply symbolic reminder of the fight against fascism, tyranny and oppression that Europe has seen’ and that we must resist again. But this has nothing to do with the way it was sung by MEPs who were obliged to listen to the speaker addressing parliament or, otherwise leave their seats in protest.

These MEPs had no right to stand up and sing – whatever they sung – when the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban addressed the European Parliament. What they sang was irrelevant to the issue of keeping order when the European Parliament is in session. It was Metsola’s duty to stop the singing in breach of parliamentary rules.

This does not mean, as Catrambone’s article implies, that Metsola – or the European Parliament itself – condones Orban’s ‘chipping away at democracy from within the very heart of the European Union’.

Catrambone should have reprimanded the EU itself for not being strong enough in the face of Orban’s flagrant attacks on democracy and not the President of the European Parliament for keeping order when he was addressing the parliament, as she was obliged to do.

Judge vs Magistrate

A Magistrate was given a public dressing down by an appeals court judge earlier this month for her “irresponsible behaviour” after a court official testified she had failed to pass on her case files.

I reckon this is a first in Maltese legal history.

“The court deplores the irresponsible behaviour of the mentioned magistrate, who failed to explain why this documentation was not handed over to this court,” Mr Justice Lawrence Mintoff said in two court notifications.

Did the magistrate take the files home leading to their disappearance? Ouch!