Why do some people bridle at the merest hint of criticism or negative comment from non-Maltese who live here? They should consider seriously any such remarks, because it takes the eyes of somebody who comes from a different culture, but who is at the same time very familiar with our culture, to see things as they truly are. When an Irishman who has lived in Gozo for many years wrote to another newspaper and remarked that Malta is priest-ridden – pointing out that the situation was the same in Ireland in his day – several people rushed off snarling letters to the newspapers condemning him for colonialism, for condescension, and for daring to criticise our Roman Catholicism.
I thought that was particularly funny, because Malta was never colonised by the Irish and if there is one country that rivals Malta, Chile and the Philippines in being overburdened by the yoke of omnipresent Catholicism, it is Ireland. Italy, on the other hand, with its fierce sense of liberalism and autonomy, is free of all such constraints, though it has harboured the Pope in its midst for centuries, and its capital gives its name to the religion.
There was even a letter from an Englishman who said that those who are “guests” in Malta should have the courtesy not to criticise the culture of the host country, but to accept it as it is. Aside from the fact that the man in question is not a guest, but an EU citizen who has as much right to be here as does a Maltese person, it is this kind of remark that is condescending and patronising. It suggests that the natives should be measured by a different yardstick to that used for the civilised and democratic people back home, because they are different – and we all know what “different” means when it is used in this kind of context. It is a bit like saying that we shouldn’t criticise sub-Saharan Africans for mutilating the genitals of pubescent girls, because it is their culture.
Yet what the Irishman from Gozo wrote is true: Malta is priest-ridden. He can see it clearly because he comes from Ireland, where priests held back the social development of the country for so long. It was only EU membership, and the resulting economic boom, that forced Ireland into the 21st century, and helped reduce the influence of priests. I have no doubt that the same thing will happen here – eventually.
Yes, there is a disproportionate number of priests here, and a reverential respect for them that gives off a whiff of backwardness, and allows them to appropriate an unwarranted degree of influence. You could see this quite clearly in the way so many people rushed to defend the Gozo priest whose self-admitted actions made him the subject of much controversy in the American and Maltese media. Had he not been a priest, the reaction would have been what it should be – one of unqualified revulsion – and no one would have written to the news-papers to stick up for him.
Yet the fact that he is a priest makes the behaviour of which he stands accused more reprehensible and not less so. This has passed over the heads of the good people of this country, and it takes a foreigner to point it out. This would either be a foreigner like the Irishman in Gozo, or a “foreigner” like me, alien to the local culture and yet immersed in it, and so better able to observe it. This undue influence is what is meant by “priest-ridden”– a term which, coincidentally, both I and the Irishman used in precisely the same context. I rather suspect that the offence taken is largely due to ignorance of the expression, and a direct comparison being made with “flea-ridden”. Even that is really quite funny, as were the pompous, self-important reactions (“Don’t criticise our culture; how dare you; you kill babies and foxes; go back where you came from; if you don’t like it, leave”).
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Malta is not just priest-ridden, but lawyer-ridden too. We have had three lawyer prime ministers and three lawyer presidents in a row. The Nationalist Party has been led by a succession of three lawyers since the 1950s (we needn’t count any further back than that), and from its earliest days has been thought of as the party of lawyers. The Labour Party has a lawyer as deputy leader, a lawyer as an immediate past leader, and at least three lawyers who are waiting in the wings ready to take over the leadership. Even the leader of the green party is a lawyer. Oh yes, and so is the leader of the Alpha Party, which contested the MEP elections.
Democracy has given us a parliament packed tight with lawyers on both sides of the house, and a cabinet of ministers in which the dominant professional background is – you’ve guessed it. It’s not that I have anything against lawyers – I’m married to one after all – or even against priests for that matter, but it strikes me as odd that this situation is considered unremarkable. It’s not unremarkable at all, but peculiar enough to be the subject of a doctoral thesis in anthropology. If priests were allowed by the Catholic Church to participate actively in politics, they would present a serious challenge to lawyers in parliamentary predominance. Of course, it will only serve to keep our outlook firmly entrenched somewhere around 1950, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for many people who like it that way because they think it’s cosy.
They say that it is people in business who control the country. If only that were so. Malta is run by lawyers and priests – the former through direct democracy and the latter through the wielding of influence – and the results are all around us. Instead of being run like a business, the country is run like the law courts with a good dose of duttrina thrown in. There is about as much organisation, planning, efficiency and time management as there is in the most chaotic of legal offices, and every so often the entire country has to stop functioning while the finer points of the evils of divorce, cohabitation, sex before marriage and homosexual partnership are debated. This is while the rest of the western world legislates for gay marriage.
As I write, the country has ground to a halt while a debate takes place on whether “personhood” begins at conception or later, and the ground is prepared for a ban on abortion to be written into the Constitution, to defeat any future democratic attempt at making it legal. It’s not our business what future generations choose to do with their vote, and we can’t use the Constitution as a time-machine to allow us to interfere in the morality of untold generations still to come, but that’s what happens when the predominance of reactionary forces remains unchallenged.
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The supply of lawyers has long since outstripped demand, and the archaic notion of a lawyer’s standing in society alongside the doctor and the priest has been falling rapidly into abeyance. Yet the university is churning them out in droves, possibly because young people and their parents are so lacking in imagination and initiative that they think becoming a lawyer is the best way to achieve status and financial autonomy. If they have their eyes set on a horizon-expanding job in Europe then I would understand it, but most of them apparently aspire to nothing more than the Lilliputian microcosm of the Valletta scene. The older generations of lawyers had no choice; the younger generations of lawyers have all the choice of an entire continent, business and industry (in which law degrees are useful), and yet they remain hamstrung by mid-20th century attitudes.
Lawyers are now two-a-penny, new graduates are finding it hard to get work, and a law degree no longer automatically conveys social standing. There are more interesting ways to earn larger amounts of money, and more reliable roads towards financial autonomy and work-for-yourself independence. The motives and desires that drive people towards the law in Malta drive them towards business in the rest of the western world – in other words, towards something that helps build the economy and create employment for others. It doesn’t happen in Malta – at all – and despite the attempts of the banks at encouraging entrepreneurial spirit, it will never happen because the underlying problem is one of a complete lack of creativity. It is a lack of creativity that makes people here follow one another into the sheep pen. Businesses are the result of ideas, and ideas are the result of creative thinking. There’s not much of that around here.
People express astonishment that none of our sons is even remotely inclined towards the law, or has ever shown any interest in it, given that their father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all lawyers. If I’m in the mood, I remark that the law is not a hereditary profession, and that Malta and the rest of the world are not what they were in their father’s, grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s day. If I’m not in the mood, I just say “Thank God for that.” Some people actually suggest that we should have obliged at least one of them to become a lawyer against his will, so that his father will have an heir apparent, which is precisely the kind of thing I mean when I say that I am immersed in the culture of my country but at the same time completely alien to it. From my stand-point, children are not extensions of their parents, nor are they there to fulfil their parents’ stifling bourgeois dreams. Yet that is the role they are brainwashed into playing here, which is why so many of them end up going nuts later on in life – and also why there are so many lawyers in Valletta and not enough people building businesses, thinking creatively, and pushing the economy forward.