Diversity, liberty and solidarity

In an article titled Beyond Independence (MaltaToday, January 5, 2014), I was keen to stress that, “to me, it is more important to be a human being than to claim some national badge, or in the name of patriotism, turn one’s country into a fortress that forgets it forms part of a wider world of human beings.”

I was also keen to add that just as there is no Independence without democracy, there can be no democracy without social justice, and more so, there can be no social justice without compassion. On the 50th anniversary of Malta’s Independence, I want to dwell on compassion and the three challenges it raises: diversity, liberty and solidarity.

Writing from Scotland

I am writing the present article on the day when Scots are voting in the Independence Referendum. The time and place are obviously crucial: I write from Scotland while I am asked to reflect on 50 years of Maltese independence.

It is tempting to reflect on one’s own history in such circumstances, especially if one happens to turn 50 in the same year that one’s country of birth celebrates half a century as an independent state. I also sense a degree of benign irony in that I now find myself participating in a democratic process that is taking place within the same United Kingdom from which Malta got its independence in 1964. This bricolage of histories and circumstances is neither unusual nor unexpected. After all, contingency is never the exception in the ways of human fate.

I speak of irony and contingency with an eye to discuss diversity, liberty and solidarity. I do this in recognition of that great American philosopher Richard Rorty, who in his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (published in 1989), calls himself an ironist. By “ironist” he means “the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires.”

Intrigued by Rorty’s take on solidarity, I am interested in how the contingency – or indeed the accident – of selfhood, language and community are bound to converge in a need to see life from beyond one’s centre. Like Rorty I believe that principles and desires cannot claim to be absolute in any way. Yet because absolutes amount to excuses for oppression, by ungrounding one’s own principles and desires one continues to hope “that suffering will be diminished” and “that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease,” as Rorty put it.

So for those who hold their sense of self and community as absolute, especially when it comes to their idea of nationhood or belief, I would suggest that they either stop reading or brace themselves for disappointment. This is because as I speak of independence, I am not intended to wax lyrical on “‘us’ Maltese”, let alone on how “we” came to be so distinctly what “we are” by moving away from “them”, whoever “they” happen to be.

“… to see strange people as fellow sufferers”

I should clarify that while I love unions of people freely bonded in democratic conviviality and shared histories, and while I relate to some nations more than others, I am not a fan of nationalism in any form or shape. Likewise, while I am deeply tied to the Maltese struggle for freedom and self-determination, I want to look at the future – 50 years’ on, if you like – from a position that cannot be seen from the inside outwards, but by looking in from within the margins.

While I am not interested in waving a national flag from the centre I want everyone to recognize the tenacity of human beings and their claim to freedom and intelligence from within the margins that are mostly ignored by the noisy crowds that think they can gain leverage by bullying themselves into prominence or power.

By “those in the margins” I mean those who are left behind: the poor and the weak; those who are hated for their different beliefs, appearance and lifestyle; and those who are conveniently forgotten. In other words, I want to hear the voice of those who are ignored by the necessities of the many. And yes, I am speaking as a utopian, invoking the ou tópos, the place that is not there but which could be there if we care to imagine and want it.

In Rorty’s utopia, human solidarity is “a goal to be achieved.” More importantly this goal “is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers” (and I emphasize this last bit).

Societies built on prejudice would invariably ignore suffering and poverty. They begin to blame and hate the victim. As we speak of solidarity we cannot forget that the essence of democracy is diversity. The nationalistic excuse to wall society in, in order to prevent the “foreigners” from “invading us”, is the first step towards the destruction of democracy.

Once one decides that people who look, speak, dress or appear to behave differently are not allowed in, there begins a process where more and more walls are built within each other. As these walls multiply, everyone becomes a stranger: if it’s not ethnicity it is belief; if it’s not belief it is lifestyle; if it’s not lifestyle it will be customs, food, sexuality, body-shape, social class … anything.

Inherited contradictions

Three major protagonists: Dom Mintoff (left) and George Borg Olivier, and Eddie Fenech Adami

Eddie Fenech Adami

In Malta, 50 years on from Independence, we still speak of three major protagonists: George Borg Olivier as the father of Independence; Dom Mintoff as the father of the welfare state and its republican ambitions; and Eddie Fenech Adami as the statesman who insisted that Malta’s republican independence must take advantage of a different sense of nationhood within the European Union.

Nonetheless these leaders’ historical legacy is also marked by significant contradictions. Notwithstanding his own liberal ambitions, Borg Olivier presided over a young democracy whose potentials were frustrated by religious bigotry and an illiberal state of affairs.

Mintoff was the man who pushed an agenda of welfare and communitarian politics by insisting on social justice. Yet he found himself presiding over a wave of discord that threatened and stifled personal liberty, and where the independent republic he delivered almost lost its way.

To which Fenech Adami reacted with pushing what he saw as a combination of liberal and social democratic policies, whose realization were frustrated by the fact that his conservative-clericalist Catholicism left old prejudices unchallenged, and where a deep sense of inequality quickly crept in. This came to a peak with Fenech Adami’s own party opposing divorce legislation and alienating itself from the demand for comprehensive equality and civil rights.

These contradictions remind us that the claim for liberty does not come cheap. Malta’s independence from a colonial past is not an automatic guarantee for liberal democracy. Perhaps out of the three challenges, liberty is the most difficult to maintain because it is always taken for granted. How could liberty flourish with no sense of solidarity? How could a society that shuns diversity remain free and democratic?

The young ones

For the first time since Independence, Malta is led by two political leaders who are too young to have been around in the early 1960s or even remember the 1970s. Opposition leader Simon Busuttil was five when Malta became a Republic. Prime Minister Joseph Muscat was not yet one.

Unlike their predecessors, Muscat and Busuttil represent the generation that was shaped by the EU referendum. With their political positions pitted against each other over EU membership, as MEP candidates they both went on to command the highest vote in their respective parties. As Euro-parliamentarians they cut their political teeth away from Maltese shores.

This cannot be ignored, especially when assessing the political context of the present and what it holds in store for the next 50 years. Since the last general elections many are still trying to make sense of where this young leadership is taking Maltese democracy. With a government with a disproportionately strong majority and an opposition that often seems to have gone in hiding, it is difficult to speculate about next week, let alone the future.

Back in Scotland

In the run up to the Scottish referendum, there was one issue on which both sides remained in agreement: the wealth of diversity by which Scotland and the United Kingdom retained their success and prosperity.

In an interview with David Dimbleby on the BBC, Gordon Brown extolled the traditions by which a diverse United Kingdom sustains the sense of liberty and solidarity, as inherited from the English and Scottish political traditions. In turn, Alex Salmond claimed that an independent Scotland needs a diversity of people to sustain itself as a great nation.

Salmond emphasized how he wants to see a Scotland that nurtures and sustains a diversity of peoples and talents, and he premises this on attracting and welcoming an even more diverse population to Scotland.

From the perspective of the values of liberty, diversity and solidarity, it was evident that even when standing opposed to each other, these two Scottish leaders – as a former British Prime Minister and as the current Scottish First Minister respectively – never hesitated to emphasize the same basic ingredient of a democracy: a diverse society that sustains itself in liberty and solidarity.

Where does this leave Malta, its democracy and its young leaders? I would argue that this is a crucial reminder that independence is not a day that happened 50 years ago, but a state of affairs that must happen every day. In turn, a republic is a form of governing that is a public affair and where its primacy for individual liberty within a sense of conviviality, duty and social justice, require that the public be not caught in ideological absolutes or nationalistic myths.

To be Maltese or Scottish, British or European, is a consequence and not the cause of being a willing participant in a democracy that sustains diversity, liberty and solidarity. Perhaps the best way to celebrate Independence is to promise oneself to look beyond the limits of one’s respective nose.

Then, and only then, could we begin to have “the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers” and do something about it!  

Professor John Baldacchino is Chair of Arts Education at the University of Dundee in Scotland. He is the author of ten books including John Dewey: Liberty and the Pedagogy of Disposition (Springer 2013) and Democracy without Confession: Philosophical Conversations on the Maltese Political Imaginary  (Allied Publishers 2013), which he co-authored with Professor Kenneth Wain