A recent survey found that 47 per cent of Maltese people never leave the island. This doesn’t mean that they take a short trip once every five years, when they can afford it. It means exactly what it says: they never leave Malta. Ever. Their entire lives are conducted within these narrow boundaries, roughly the equivalent of never leaving a very small backwater town in Germany, ever, not even for a day. For a moment, let’s leave aside the question of why they never travel, which I suspect is mainly due to the fact that they either can’t afford it or prefer to set material acquisition as the higher priority. Let’s tackle instead, the question of how a person can adjust to life in what is really a large cage. “Oh, it’s easy,” a girlfriend told me. “They become institutionalised.”

I can see what she means, and the comparison is rather a good one. Adults who are incarcerated in an institution – a mental asylum, a hospital, a prison, the army, a convent, an old people’s home, and even those who work for a large corporation that takes over their entire life – become institutionalised to a greater or lesser extent. They adjust so completely to the routines of the institution that they cannot cope with life in the wider world outside. As life within the institution fills every cranny of their consciousness, interest in life outside the institution fades away.

Men who have spent a lifetime in the army stick to rigid routines and systems for the rest of their lives. Inmates of old people’s homes want to rush back in time for supper at 5pm even if they are enjoying a day out with their families, and become increasingly tetchy as the hour grows near. Patients who have spent years in care are apathetic and dependent. Women who have served long prison sentences collapse when faced with the prospect of shopping in a supermarket, with that massive array of choice and all those decisions to be taken. I recently read an interview with a former convict who described how she dissolved into nervous tears when, immediately after her release, friends took her to lunch as a treat and she was handed the menu. In 15 years, she had not had to make a single decision, and this was the first one. The pressure was too much.

So what does this have to do with never leaving minuscule Malta and yet not feeling as though you are trapped in a cage? Simple: people make a rapid psychological adjustment when they feel there is nothing to be done about their situation and they can’t get out – whether the situation they can’t get out of is a prison, an island, an army barracks, a cloistered convent, a mental hospital, a marriage, or a bed where they are confined. This psychological trick is a survival mechanism: those who fight against their incarceration go mad with frustration and resentment (or, on the positive side, they succeed in breaking away). Those who shrink to fit, who accept the situation with fatalism, maintain a form of serenity about them. The trouble is that this serenity, so desirable when you are in prison or bedridden, is dangerous in other situations when it transmutes into a complete lack of curiosity or interest in the world outside. If you are not driven to do something about your situation, then you remain stuck in it, and never grow or develop. If everybody had had this attitude, since the beginning of time, we would still be living in caves, running around naked, and tearing raw meat apart with our hands – and forget the invention of the wheel or the discovery of fire.

It’s also true that those who grow up in a cage get used to it. The cage is normality. Those who haven’t grown up here, on the other hand, cannot adjust and can only tolerate living here if they are able to escape fairly frequently. Things have improved, though. At least people are now leaving their villages and going to the next town. In the past, transport was difficult and costly and the idea of travelling for its own sake, just for the fun of it, did not exist – and when I say travelling, I mean travelling between Mosta and Birkirkara, and not travelling between Mosta and South Africa. People lived their entire lives in tiny villages, sometimes even hamlets of just a couple of hundred people. They never ventured out, except for the men who had a job elsewhere. This wasn’t in the dark ages, but in my own lifetime.

In the late 1960s, the girl who helped my mother with her three toddlers had never seen the sea before she came from Siggiewi to stay with us in Sliema. She had lived her entire life in a very small island like Malta, and she had never seen the sea. It seems incomprehensible now, but it was unremarkable then. Not so long ago, the only Maltese who knew how to swim were those who grew up with quick and easy access to the sea. I remember being astonished, as a child, to see children much older and larger than I was, on what were clearly very special expeditions to sandy beaches with their families (complete with those square “tents” made out of old bed-sheets), floundering around in the shallow water, securely tucked into the inflated inner tube of an old truck tyre, while their parents panicked. In my world, which was just as narrow as theirs, everyone could swim by the age of four and was as comfortable in the water as an otter. It was years before I understood that people who did not grow up on the water’s edge had to be taught to swim, that they did not begin doing so naturally after being put in the water every day from babyhood.

* * * *

The “institutionalisation” of the Maltese up to the 1960s was explicable and even justifiable. There was literally no awareness of anything beyond Malta. People did not have televisions, and their substitute for radio was that thing called “cable radio”, with the choice it offered between Cable Radio 1 and Cable Radio 2, both broadcast out of Guardamangia. Newspapers were considered a waste of money and were only for the literate in any case. Only a few women in Sliema bought magazines. The cinemas showed films which were years old. The Maltese lived in a giant institution that passed for a country. Now everyone has one television, and many have several. Everyone has a radio. With the schemes on offer, virtually anyone who wants a computer and Internet access can get it, and huge numbers have done so, even if their homes are short on other necessities. There is no longer any excuse for behaving as though we are living in an institution, for we are besieged by print and broadcast communication from the outside world. And yet, almost half of the population of Malta considers it precisely in that way: as “the outside world”, in the same way that the inmate of an asylum or a home for the aged might consider events and reality outside the main gate. Rather than feeling that Malta is part of the world and they are part of the world too, they feel that the world is There and they are Here, and what is There is of no interest to them because it might as well be a different planet. Here is all that matters, all that interests them. They have shrunk to fit. They are institutionalised. Their survival mechanisms have kicked in to stop them shrivelling up with anger and frustration – for the truth is probably that half the population never leaves the island not because they don’t want to, but because it’s too expensive to do so.

When you have no access to something, your interest in it diminishes. Worse, it might mutate into xenophobia and the conviction that nowhere can possibly be better than Malta and no one more fascinating than the Maltese, so why bother exploring. Malta is just 60 miles from Sicily, but yesterday I was talking to a Maltese woman in her 40s who asked me, in a moment of confusion, whether Sicily and Catania are the same thing, because she had been to Catania on a day trip but had heard people calling it Sqallija. This is easily dismissed as individual ignorance, but it isn’t that. It is symptomatic of a much wider, deeper malaise. Being physically cut off from the rest of the world has led to us being intellectually and psychologically cut off, and made Malta our whole world.

The majority of families simply cannot afford to travel. The survey results, in fact, indicate that those who travel most are in the age cohort where they are most likely to be single people or couples who are childless. Even those from the upper socio-economic group can afford to travel as a family only rarely. There are many Maltese teenagers from comfortable backgrounds who have never travelled with their families at all. The question that was missing in that survey is: why don’t you travel? Perhaps the answer was taken to be obvious. If this is the case, and half the population does not travel because it cannot afford to do so, then the standard of living is even lower than I had previously thought.

The old adage that travel broadens the mind is a true one. Half the population never travels and I would say that 90 per cent of the population never reads. Yet we make the mistake of thinking that the key to education lies in increasing the numbers of students at the university. What is the point of a university graduate with no general knowledge, whose horizon and idea of a good trip stops with a couple of drunken bonks in Gozo? Education does not only mean what one learns in formal institutions, like schools and universities. It is much wider than that. In this latter sense, the Maltese are among the most poorly educated in Europe – the level of general knowledge is abysmal, and hence, so is the level of conversation. Far worse is the lack of embarrassment with which so-called educated people display their profound lack of knowledge – they are so ignorant that they do not even know they are ignorant. If you were to tell them that it is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought stupid than to open your mouth and prove it, they would wonder what you mean. Here in Malta there appears to be no conversational middle road between those boring academic discussions that have me glazing over with tedium, and the vacuous chit-chat that belongs round the school gates. The reason is that people are poorly educated and have been exposed to very few ideas and very little that is “outside” Malta.

We have fallen so far behind the rest in this way that the government should be doing all in its power to get more of us out and about in the world. Instead, the opposite is happening. Since the increase in taxes on air travel, the number of Maltese who leave the island has fallen dramatically. The government, which has found all sorts of excuses as to why this might be – certainly not because of the taxes on travel, heaven forfend! – can carry on pretending no longer.

There is a more serious question to be answered, though. Does the government want us to travel? Or would it rather we stayed put? Putting in place fiscal measures that will allow the Maltese out of their cage more often is not something the government should do to keep us entertained, but because it will improve the quality of the human resources on offer. People who never leave their cage are not exactly brimming over with creativity, ideas, imagination and initiative. It is bad enough that the government sees no need to do that, but I suspect that we now have to ask whether the government is actually striving for the opposite goal, and deliberately implementing measures that will discourage us from travelling. Some weeks ago, a politician told me that one of the “beneficial” side effects of the high taxes on air travel, apart from the revenue collected, was the fact that people are spending their disposable income in Malta rather than in, say, Rome or Bali. And then the government collects more revenue through valued added tax, besides cutting down on the outward flow of money.

“Gosh,” I said, “I’m actually old enough to remember when the governments of Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici thought that way.”