There seems to be some missing background to the ongoing discussion on media law, particularly by certain quarters that rally around radical anti-censorship positions. Or, at least, they think their positions are radical and anti-censorship. In reality, they are neither one nor the other.

I do not think that the anti-censorship front is radical at all. You are radical when you want to change a system from its foundations, from its roots. You are radical when your ideas are fundamentally different to the ideas which dominate your society. We think Malta is still isolated as it once was, without realising that Berlusconi's television stations have been exporting "culture" for the past 35 years or so. The effect has been that willy-nilly we participate in the dominant ideology of the West. Thus, clamouring for the dominant ideology is neither radical nor chic; it is as subservient as it could get.

It is easy to float with the current; you're a real non-conformist, a radical, when you swim against it. In the contemporary world, socially conservative is the new counter-culture, the new punk rock. By espousing the dominant liberal ideology, by recycling their ideas in one echo chamber after another, the anti-censorship front is anything but radical.

And neither is the anti-censorship front anti-censorship! Whereas this front and the so-called humanists have insisted on the removal of vilification of religion laws, so that those artists who want to vilify religion are not censored, they would then object to other criticisms of social mores. The front will cry foul if a play ridiculing Jesus Christ is censored, but then they would want to censor other types of plays.

Let's say a play was written inspired by the real-life story, reported by The Sydney Morning Herald in 2013, of a gay couple who paid $8000 to a Russian woman to be their surrogate, only then to adopt the resulting boy 'for the sole purpose of exploitation' (I'm quoting the Police here). Over six years, reported the Australian newspaper, the couple travelled the world, offering the boy up for sex with at least eight men, recording the abuse and uploading the footage to an international syndicate known as the Boy Lovers Network. It would be a great, shocking play by all standards. But would the front and the humanists support it or would they protest against its representation?

My gut feeling is that they certainly would protest. Because it would offend their ideology, to which they hold with fundamentalist fanaticism.

So, I reckon that they are only selectively anti-censorship.

This vociferous section of the population, which seems to have monopolised the attention of the dominant faction among the country's legislators, is a source of worry.

Not only because of their liberal-fundamentalist and selective stances but also because of what I perceive as their ignorance. I might be wrong of course, and I'm happy to be corrected.

But my perception is that many of these "anti-censorship" militants have read a few English books and consider them the last word on religion, Roman Catholicism in particular. I have had the (dubious) privilege of reading one of this group's favourite titles: The God Delusion, written by an Oxford don who specialises in biology but feels entitled to write about anything which piques his fancy - Richard Dawkins.

What these "anti-censorship" and humanist militants do not realise is that Dawkins writes in a context. In his case it is the English, or rather, Anglican context. If one were to look at ecclesiastical history in England, the tensions between High Church and Low Church, and the tensions in the High Church itself (such as the Oxford Movement and Anglo-Catholic developments), one would start identifying the shadows Dawkins boxes with. I have never read anything written by these militants, or said by them and reported by the newspapers, which could betray any inkling of the religious milieu Dawkins spent his formative years in and seems to have disturbed him ever since.

And yet, they quote him as if the English milieu and the rest of the world were identical. They thus betray a series of serious flaws in their reasoning, which constantly comes to the fore when discussing not only culture and censorship, but also life-and-death topics such as abortion and euthanasia. I'm not referring to anybody in particular here, but to the entire Humanist cohort. They espouse the theory of evolution as if it were a religion, without even considering the possibility that it might even be, to borrow from the English philosopher Mary Midgley, the illusory myth of progress under the guise of science.

 

* * *

 

And now for something not completely different.

The man who fronts the anti-censorship front, the Front's frontman, is also the chairman of the National Book Council. He recently gave a public dressing down to his predecessor. It was very much in poor taste and displayed not simply a lack of insight and savoir-faire but also of culture.

This lack of insight (and concomitant lack of culture) was confirmed when I received an email from the said Council with the rules and regulations for the National Book Prize 2016. I looked up the marking criteria for general research books and I found that 10 per cent of the marks have been allocated for illustrations (and maps and tables, etc).

According to these rules, if your research book does not have illustrations, etc., then the maximum mark it can be awarded is 90 per cent, whereas similar books which do have illustrations, etc., can potentially be awarded 100 per cent.

This is patently insane. The National Book Prize has been reduced to a sort of secondary school textbook prize. And this by somebody who had the gall to give a public dressing down to his predecessor, even insulting him because of his age. Unbelievable!

So I decided to pick a random sample of 10 non-fiction books from my personal library, to see whether I could find illustrations, tables, maps, etc., in them.

Here's the random sample, in no particular order (you can read it out loud like a litany, if you wish):

Harold Berman's Law and Revolution Vols. I and II, Harvard University Press, 1983 and 2006: not a single illustration, table, map, etc.

H. Patrick Glenn's Legal Traditions of the World, 4^th ed., Oxford University Press, 2010: not a single illustration, etc.

Randall Lesaffer's European Legal History. A Cultural and Political Perspective, Cambridge University Press, 2009: not a single illustration, etc.

Mario Ascheri's Introduzione Storica al Diritto Moderno e Contemporaneo, 2^nd ed., Giappichelli Editore, 2008: not a single illustration, etc.

Judith Ann Everard's The Laws and Customs by which the Duchy of Normandy is Ruled, The Jersey and Guernsey Law Review, 2009: not a single illustration, etc.

Manlio Bellomo's The Common Legal Past of Europe. 1000-1800, Catholic University of America Press, 1995: not a single illustration, etc.

Paolo Grossi's A History of European Law, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010: not a single illustration, etc.

AB Cobban's The Medieval Universities, their development and organization, Methuen & Co, 1975: not a single illustration, etc.

Walter Ullman's The Medieval Idea of Law, Methuen & Co., 1946: not a single illustration, etc.

James A. Brundage's The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession, University of Chicago Press, 2008: not a single illustration, etc.

If these books were to be submitted to the Frontman's Book Prize 2016, they would all forfeit those 10 marks!

U ħallina xbin, trid?

I expect the rules and regulations of the National Book Prize 2016 to be amended to reflect a saner approach, and someone to rein in the highly idiosyncratic chairman of the National Book Council. The whole thing is quickly becoming another carnival.

Dr Sammut is the author of the best-selling L-Aqwa fl-Ewropa. Il-Panama Papers u l-Poter