One significant difference between Joseph Muscat and Robert Abela is that the former tried his hand at political philosophy while the latter keeps limiting himself to platitudes.
For instance, in 2012 Joseph Muscat insisted that social mobility would be a priority for a future Labour government. What Muscat didn’t factor in was the bell curve – the normal distribution of IQ levels in the population. You can populate higher ranking jobs with all sorts of individuals, but you can’t go against the natural distribution of IQ levels. No matter how positively you think and no matter how big your electoral victory, you simply can’t disregard genetics.
Muscat catapulted a social mobility of sorts, not sure whether he would hit or miss. If my memory serves me right, he used to write a column in the 1990s for KullĦadd called “Fejn Ħabat Ħabat” (liberal translation: “Any Which Way”) – I think I’m not mistaken to argue that he kept that as his moral compass. He did push a sort of social mobility on the country, filling in the newly-emptied lower ranks by importing third-country nationals, many of whom are probably more intelligent than the locals they found themselves having to slave for. Little wonder, then, that intelligent young Maltese want to pack and leave.
Irrespective of the outcome, Muscat did try – in his one-book-man way – to launch a philosophical revolution in the country. He even made it a point to insist that the State should be kept out of the bedroom – a clear dig at the government of the day which he repeatedly (and exaggeratedly) depicted as ultra-conservative. The philosophical shift in Labour’s politics, from socialist to liberal-liberalist, did not inflame Labour Party supporters, either because they were salivating at the prospect of devouring the spoils of war or because they belong to that part of the bell curve where these things don’t matter. Very few voices were raised when Muscat’s Labour surreptitiously left the Socialist International, and as far as I can tell nobody is publicly insisting that Abela should bring Labour back to the fold. Labour has simply given up on social democracy.
As an aside: by “philosophy”, I mean “political philosophy”. I’m not excited about the British school that passes its time speculating about consciousness, the mind, personhood, and such stuff. To me, and in this I follow the Italians, there’s only one type of philosophy: political philosophy, and all branches of philosophy are essentially emanations of it. And it is in this sense that I perceive Muscat’s Revolution: in its bare essence, it was a philosophical revolution. Not even Mintoff managed to pull off something so radical, so reckless, so reprehensible. To be frank, I don’t blame Abela that much for being unable to manage the ensuing mess. Not so much because Abela seems to me to lack the intellectual wherewithal, but mostly because the Revolution Muscat stirred in this country has had and will still have consequences that are so far-reaching that it will take years to filter the good from the bad and undo the damage.
Needless to say, “like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children”. Like Robespierre before him, Muscat was beheaded, metaphorically of course, when his Revolution spun out of control. Even though here I have to make a correction: “like Robespierre before him” – but up to a point. Robespierre was known as the “L’incorruptible”; Joseph “Invictus” Muscat was hailed as the 2019 Person of the Year in Organised Crime and Corruption.
Muscat’s brand of liberalism – the cornerstone of his Revolution – leaked into other spheres of public and social life. The progressive “freedom” Muscat thought would free the Maltese from the shackles of obscurantism and retrograde thinking in matters sexual – a narrative by which that very-high-IQ person Salvu Balzan was taken in, and now he’s regretting it (or so he claims) – ended up corroding the moral fabric of the nation. For the simple reason that people do not compartmentalise their thinking; they embrace a dominant ideology and then attune all their thinking to it. The lack of morality normalised by Muscat’s political marketing has infected our national culture.
The Church – which has the constitutional right to teach what is right and what is wrong – was caught unawares. Or perhaps it thought it was wiser if it simply didn’t exercise its constitutional right. Or perhaps it calculated that “Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius” – “The Lord will know His own”. Anyway, I’m disappointed by the Church’s relative silence. Except that a few days ago, the Bishop of Gozo condemned the immorality of getting paid for a job one doesn’t turn up for.
Needless to say, kudos to Bishop Teuma! But the Bishop’s statement serves to highlight the plight of the country. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not one of those nostalgic sentimentalists who believe in a mythical past when people were pure and sins were not committed. After all, as observed by Anna Arendt (the philosopher who spent a lot of time evaluating what possessed common Germans to behave so immorally under the Nazis), it’s difficult in the “new” world for public morality to thrive. The greatest contribution the 19th-century German Friedrich Nietzsche made to our self-understanding is his remark that if God is dead then everything is permissible – by which he meant that the erosion of religious beliefs means the erosion of the foundations on which much of the world was built.
Still, despite the currents, the Church had and has a sacrosanct duty (constitutional and beyond the constitution) to preach what is right and what is wrong, and to live what it preaches. The Bishop of Gozo highlighted one of the wounds inflicted on the collective body by Muscat’s Revolution and by the inability of his successor to recalibrate the situation. The mess has festered to such a degree that people who can’t cope (under a post-Socialist government, if you please) had to resort to fraud to make ends meet. Mind you, I expect them to pay for their wrongdoing. But at the same time, I cannot fail to sympathise with the poor. For two reasons. One, because they have limited material resources, and, two, because nobody taught them they could use democracy to better their lot. The small fry who got burnt by the fires of moral degeneration ignited by Muscat’s Revolution could have put pressure on their MPs to change the laws, rather than allow whoever it was to cajole them into breaking the law. The ultra-liberal/ist Revolution Muscat kicked off ran wild. And as Alfred Sant has paradoxically (since it comes from him) but rightly pointed out, it impacts the family. And, one would add, society at large.
The point here is that Muscat’s Revolution has plagued the country with moral degeneracy. EP candidate Peter Agius has recently remarked on Facebook that people in Malta ask him why the EU is doing nothing to rein in the corruption eating Malta away, whereas people in Brussels ask him why the Maltese haven’t voted Labour out of government. He’s right in pointing this out. It goes without saying that both questions require extraordinarily elaborate answers. But, simply put, it’s easier to be corrupt than to be upright. It’s easier to give in to your instincts and desires, than to control yourself. This is the true legacy of Muscat’s Revolution. It has been enabled by the nihilist philosophy engendered by the EU’s neoliberal policies, and nurtured by the short-sighted greed that seeks instant gratification and enrichment at the expense of long-term prosperity.
The country has a garbage collection problem. But it’s also burdened with a corresponding problem: moral filth. I don’t mean this in the sexual meaning – after all, as Pope Francis said in December 2021, “the sins of the flesh are not the most serious”. Actually, it’s the puritans who are fixated on these sins. What I mean is the moral filth we’re experiencing on a daily basis. I think I’m not the only one to feel exhausted by the daily dose of corruption news outlets feed us. But let’s be completely honest. Some of the stories are slight exaggerations, some of them outright inventions. Yet the vast majority are true. And this filth drains the nation of vitality.
The public doesn’t always manage to articulate what it sees. But it feels the impact. Moral degeneracy spreads like a contagion. Muscat kicked it off with his Revolution. Abela allows it to march on, virtually undeterred.
Just consider the case concerning Olvin Vella. Mr Vella isn’t a politician, though, in a sense, he’s a public figure. He has been caught red-handed lying to his colleagues at the National Council of the Maltese Language and to the public in general. And he has been caught, if you please, not by some astute Minister, but by a Minister whose legacy will be reaching new heights in political incompetence. Owen Bonnici’s incompetence, however, does not exonerate Mr Vella from lying to the public. But the evil – the moral filth – has spread so much that Mr Vella’s still there. He even wants to have his day in court.