The moral and cold blooded murder and injury of refugees from Africa in our country shows clearly a rot in our societal fabric that has been long brewing! It has been long brewing and fed by a disdain and xenophobia that allows us to focus all our problems in life on the presence amongst us of refugees from other countries. All the ills we perceive in our country is focused onto the arrival of these human individuals and it becomes a national obsession to hit them with all the ills one can perceive rather than treat them as human beings with the objective rights and respect which emanates from their being human. Because they are black or yellow or belong to another religion they become a sub-class, a social punching bag and a national disdain as a fixative for all our ills. It becomes acceptable to kill someone. But hey, we do this in other issues as well, where it becomes expedient for us to do so. The real illness lies elsewhere. It is the illness of a moral relativism where we fail to objectively grant individual human beings their objective fundamental rights, where we render human beings as commodities, as commercial products and then proceed to dispose of them at will and as necessary. We see the same things happening with human embryos, with human clones, with genetic testing and engineering, with human surrogates and surrogates and with elderly citizens with euthanasia. We reduce a human being into a product and the public become increasingly immune to a progressive dehumanisation. Unfortunately this relativism of human rights is often fed by those who should know better. Political establishments, rather than promoting human respect often are the cause for the moral slide that follows. We also must include some of the media here where often anti-human ideas are put forward and pushed relentlessly.

One of the local issues which feeds this getting away with it, is the local disposition for the government to water down rights, to apply two weights and two measures for individuals depending from which side of the political divide one comes from. A soldier commits a misdemeanour for criticising the government on the social media and is instantly discharged while another commits a felony and is allowed to carry on. This type of approach brings in a relativism of values. Some people have more worth than others and this government has a lot of soul searching to carry out in this respect, especially keeping associates on board, who have agreed to opening bank accounts abroad where no tax is paid and being in league with others in money laundering exercises, all against the letter and spirit of the law.

Across Europe and in Malta we see another political ailment raising its head. The rise of racism and xenophobia in the form of an anti-immigrant, anti-globalising, insulating and populist mentality seen as an antagonistic approach to an extreme liberal secular trend where with both approaches, the freedom of religion  and of the individual are being constantly threatened. These populist parties feed on racist sentiments and also on those of fear of those they do not know well. These hard right parties are a threat in their own right because they deny in several ways fundamental human freedoms to those who are victims of circumstances. They propose simple solutions to often complex issues and seek to reverse globalising trends by becoming more insular and inward looking. Often they parade as champions of a Christianity which only contains fragments or symbols of real Christianity but in effect they do not incorporate all the social implications of the religion they purport to praise, like Don Quixote fighting the windmills of his imagination. In their frenzy they purport to turn the clock back on global and social development in ways that the hard liberals and leftists taint human rights with their ironing over of rights purporting to the ontic individual such as abortion and personal freedoms. Abortion is a very important issue and stands out as a means of removing individual rights of human beings and the objective right to life. As an issue, it is important enough to stand on its own and be treated on its own merits and its behoves the hard liberals to take note of the damage they cause here both to the human individual and to the perception they create amongst more objective minded individuals in society. However it should not be allowed to be used by politicians as an excuse to role the clock back on social and economic development in other spheres, on political integration, on fundamental rights of minorities, on the issues of a worsening environment and on all the manifestations of a globalising world. This is obviously a step backward in a two-step forward process and is bound to fail in the sense that it will entrench countries in themselves and the world will not be able to progress at any adequate rate. It will fail because essentially it would be an inadequate answer to globalising world. One cannot answer the challenges of globalisation by entrenching oneself internally and dismantling supranational institutions which are essential in an increasingly inter-relational world. In a globalised environment, your country first, essentially means your country alone!

One also needs to look at globalisation in the correct light. Some thinkers look at globalisation as something evil and to be resisted while others see it as morally neutral, as being neither good and neither bad in itself, as a morally neutral global phenomenon. But I and many others beg to differ. In my studies of philosophy of process, one can clearly discern that this process of globalisation is coming from God and therefore it cannot be stopped. It is a process that avoids subjectivism and where it is clear that God is forcing us to mix, to incorporate the peripheries into the centrality of our world! Henry Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and Samuel Alexander, who were all aware of constantly evolving emerging realities. What Darwin and Wallace are to biology, these three were to the philosophy of emerging process. However these were not only philosophical treatises but also theological ones were they perceived of a God who works through active emerging realities. To these three one must undoubtedly add the Jesuit, Bernard Lonergan especially in his seminal work Insight, and one of the founders of Peking Man, the Jesuit anthropologist and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In their deliberations, these individuals have all perceived the work of God occurring in constant change not least in political inter-relations. The past is assumed by the present which is furthermore assumed by the future. The only constancy in the universe is change but a directed one at that. A process of consciousness that begins intrinsically as a biological process but becomes social and international where consciousness becomes reflected upon itself. If indeed globalisation is coming from God, then indeed nobody can stop it, nor do anything about it, nor do I see any need to! Populism will have its moment but is inevitably consigned to failure, as indeed was fascism, Marxism, subjectivism and any ism that does not recognise human beings to be worthy of the respect and rights they have been objectively endowed with!