In the public mind, Maltese politics has been traditionally associated with a form of tribalism, because our culture has been based on “belonging” to a parish organisation, a town or village, or to a political party. It has all to do with our past insularity and the small size of our island.

There has been some progress, in the sense that today’s political generation realises that arrogance and violence lead nowhere. Nevertheless, our society remains sharply polarised, with a number of issues dividing the country in two.

This view bears examination as well as qualification.

The process of dialogue and the breakthrough of pluralism in broadcasting, house visits by politicians, and the latter’s exposure to aggressive questioning by the electorate marked a drastic departure from the polarisation prevailing in the dreary 1970s.

Vital Spark

Today, more electors can, and do, stand up and ask questions. Some ask hostile questions and expect straight answers.

It is a moot point whether all the answers are satisfactory. More often than not, they are evasive or are wrapped heavily in circumlocution. None of this militates in the service of total transparency. Unsatisfactory as this may sound, it opens a space for dissent, which is the spark that gives life to democracy.

It is true that there is no satisfactory participation by eligible intellectuals in this process. But the dam of submission and total conformity has been breached. New ideas can arise only in discussion, in the face of objections. Dissent presupposes the right to express not only true but also dubious ideas.

Open Market

Democracy thrives on basic principles such as freedom to speak, however hatefully, freedom to dissent, freedom to assemble, freedom to believe the most preposterous things. The right to question constructively, and even to disagree, forms part of the bedrock of western culture that holds that no one must be allowed to corner the market of truth.

From the sixth century BC – the century of Confucius and Lao Tze, of Pythagoras and the Ionian philosophers – man seems to have stirred into awareness and embarked on a Promethean quest for natural explanations and rational causes. Yet, after centuries of controversy and conflict, there are still serious people who fear even allusions to free discussion.

Throughout the sweep of history, great battles have been waged over the issue of dissent. There have been murderous wars and various forms of psychological warfare, right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the monolith manipulated from the Kremlin.

Supreme Lesson

Although the Catholic Church and its monasteries were the last oasis of learning in the desert of ignorance throughout the Dark Ages, the Galileo scandal, representing a conflict between religion and science, cannot be overlooked. Neither can the atrocities during the Reformation be expunged from the history books.

One would have thought that, at the outset of this millennium, democracy had won the day, and those democracies everywhere have assimilated the one big lesson that matters: that one cannot enjoy the fruits of freedom without freedom, or its efficiencies without its discomforts.

On paper, this is clear and clearly right. In reality, intolerance still stalks many an anguished country, and this is not limited to the lands of the ayatollahs and the fundamentalists in Middle Eastern countries.

In the more extreme cases, religious and ethnical conflagrations are burning with intensity. In a milder form, the right of dissent is being denied in the name of petty political partisanship, even in the name of democracy. Entrenched interests have their selfish reasons to foul the mildest atmosphere of free and audacious inquiry.

New Dawn

It is time to press home the thought that truth is not established by a majority vote at general elections. There is a place for constructive questioning, where the electorate is free to speak.

It is worth stressing at this point that pluralism has introduced a new dawn that is not always sunny. In politics, truth cannot be known in advance. It can only be discussed and verified through a struggle of contradictions. It should forever be able to withstand the play of dissenting waves, however persistent. And there is a “realm within” where conscience is sovereign and fully entitled to respect and dignity.

In the sphere of political thought, there are no dogmas, although there is a place for faith in matters of the spirit. By all accounts, faith is a positive attribute but, in relation to other beliefs it, too, is an act of dissent, and deserves respect on democratic grounds over and above spiritual considerations.

In the final analysis, whatever men are willing to die for deserves a certain honour. This is one reason why the right of dissent has been embodied in the canonic texts of western culture.

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