Is Byzantine an "insult"? Probably for the backward Normans who, engaged as mercenaries by the Arab rulers of Sicily a thousand years ago, met the Byzantines and were overwhelmed by their inexplicable sophistication, "Byzantine" was an insult. The word "Byzantine" is today used to describe the Byzantine Empire (that fell in 1451) as well as to denote something excessively complicated.

The same applies to "liberal" - it can mean somebody who adheres to "liberalism" or the opposite of "bigot".

Were the Byzantines, "Byzantine"? Are opponents of liberalism, bigots?

Before developing my argument, I want to tease the reader with a question.

What keeps the liberal construction industry from developing that prime ODZ land with fantastic sea-views occupied by a few dilapidated buildings known as Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra? Why doesn't the Malta Developers Associations talk to journalists and - more importantly - to our liberal Prime Minister, to argue the case for a phenomenal 69-storey tower built on that plot currently occupied by a heap of pinkish, mouldy stones known as the Ħal Tarxien Neolithic Temples?

Even entertaining the idea - let alone the act - of demolishing Neolithic structures and erecting modern, shining towers on their sites, is absolutely shocking.

The question is, Why?

And the answer is found in one word: "taboo".

It is (and hopefully will forever be) a taboo even to consider such hideous projects as demolishing prehistoric buildings.

And yet, the liberals have demolished other, non-physical age-old institutions, because the taboo that shielded them has been eroded and, unlike the temples, no protective tent was erected over them to shelter them from the elements of "liberalism".

In my book L-Aqwa fl-Ewropa, I devoted a longish chapter to analysing Joseph Muscat's politics. I quoted from one of my favourite thinkers, the French Alain Supiot who argues that "a politics of deregulation of personal status is actively promoted in the name of a struggle against the 'last taboos"' (Homo Juridicus: On the Anthropological Function of the Law, p. 37).

The liberal agenda is, indeed, one which seeks to remove the "last taboos".

To what "liberal" are we referring?

A short book by the Italian public intellectual Marcello Veneziani, written in the late 1990s, can serve as a good introduction to the subject. Titled Comunitari o liberal. La prossima alternativa? [Communitarians or liberals. The next alternative?], it suggests that in the post-1989 world the divide is no longer between capitalists and communists, but between liberals and communitarians.

Essentially, the liberals seek an atomised society in which the individual is directly linked to the State. By removing the "last taboos", the State deregulates personal status but asks for full subjection in return. Human rights, I would add, thus become indispensible in such as scenario, as they are the individual's only defence which claim to originate from an authority higher, and other, than the State.

The communitarians seek buffers between the State and the individual: intermediating associations of people which attenuate the relentless encroachment of the individual's freedom by the State. The primary among such associations is based on nature: the family.

No wonder that the family is one of the prime targets of the liberal approach to politics.

Some liberals claim they want to embrace new ideas, opinions and behaviour. Let's consider prostitution as one example of such "novelties".

The Prime Minister claimed last summer that he had the people's mandate to launch a reform of the laws regulating prostitution. The irony behind this "progressive" so-called mandate is that the "liberal" idea of regulating prostitution is as medieval as they come!

In 1988, the French historian Jacques Rossiaud published a book on prostitution in the Middle Ages which has now become a classic. I found the Italian translation, La prostituzione nel Medioevo, in a second-hand bookshop in Florence and never bothered to buy the English translation. This, however, is from the blurb of the English translation, which you can find online: "public prostitution may in fact have been viewed by secular and religious authorities as a means of social control and of preserving marital stability - a means by which the virtue of wives and daughters was actually protected". 

In the Middle Ages, prostitutes were charged with public duties. Among these was the duty to "take care" of foreigners, by offering an outlet for their aggressive traits as well as protecting women of good repute (Rossiaud, p. 59 of the Italian translation).

Malta is experiencing a high turnover of foreign workers, who spend only a couple of years in the country because of the 'inflated property market' (as claimed by the president of the Malta Employers Association only a couple of days ago). I might be wrong, but this influx seems to cast light on the government's intention to regulate the prostitution industry.

Last July, the Prime Minister referred to it as "a black market industry which could be enslaving women". But by regulating it, Dr Muscat's government would only be transforming it into a legitimate industry, which does not necessarily solve the "enslavement" issue.

For the purposes of my argument, however, such regulation is nothing new at all! It would simply amount to a throwback to medieval times, when there was a "social climate that encouraged even respectable men to use [the] services [of prostitutes]" (again from Rossiaud in English).

So much for "new" ideas and behaviour! Unless, that is, we are really in the "new Middle Ages", as John Rapley pithily put it in his famous Foreign Affairs article of 2006. In that sense, it would be a case of a novelty and a throwback at the same time. And this can only be achieved by removing the "last taboos", and - to put it bluntly - forgetting those who are left behind by the "new" system.

So, is "liberal" an insult? No, I would not say so. It's an ideology. But, in my opinion, it's a rotten bad one.

 

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