Well, no, Fr Gouder

My public conversation with Fr Anton Gouder has somewhat strayed from the point of the column that sparked it off. Reading him you would think I was decidedly in favour (if only secretly) of legalising divorce. You would also think I was an idiot - incapable of telling the difference between marriage breakdown and divorce - whereas in fact I am a fool, trying to inject some reason into a debate that often resists it.

My original point was this. Arguing about the effects of legalising divorce, good and bad, will only get us so far; at some point we need to relate this to the current family and sexual landscape in Malta. Currently, we know too little about it. We need to start looking - if we are to take the necessary decisions prudently. It is a genuinely open question whether or not what we find suggests that legalising divorce is less socially disruptive - and so more conducive to the common good - than prohibiting it.

I do have some intuitions. I do not expect divorce to be very disruptive when it comes to childless separated couples. But intuitions are often mistaken. Besides, I do not have the nerve, sitting here typing this article on a Lm1,600 powerbook while listening to Glenn Gould's second recording of the Goldberg Variations, to nurture any intuitions on the likely effects of divorce on families that live on housing estates, or on any other social groups with which I am not familiar.

I urged that we needed to stop arguing and start looking - before resuming the argument in a more focused way. The point is not to challenge the studies that show that divorce often imparts a damaging personal and social legacy (although some of the most recent studies also suggest that it is possible to survive the personal effects of divorce and in some cases also thrive). But people with the common good at heart will also be aware of the dangers posed by a social policy of laissez-faire in this area, as in others.

How is one to know that prohibiting divorce is more socially disruptive than legalising it? Indeed, how is one to know whether a third option is not desirable - a reform of the current marriage law that addresses some of the concerns of people who wish to be allowed to remarry, but without legitimising re-marriage as such? Only by looking at the specific Maltese situation.

Now Fr Gouder claims that social scientific studies demonstrate that legalising divorce can never be for the common good. In fact, the social sciences show no such thing. What they show is that divorce is linked to several distressing conditions; but no senior sociologist, anthropologist or historian of the family has ever claimed that divorce, as such, has brought about more harm than good - or even that these distressing conditions had divorce as prime cause.

Jack Goody does not claim it. Nor does Martine Segalen - or the various contributors to the volume she co-edited on the impact of modernity on the modern family (volume 2 of 'A History of the Family'). Nor does Roderick Phillips, author of a much-praised history of divorce. Nor does Lawrence Stone in his history of English divorce between 1530-1987 - it is a measure of the consensus that he ends the volume by wondering whether modern divorce laws have brought more social benefit; he does not even hint that the effect could have been to make things worse.

It is this consensus that explains why (say) Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics, can acknowledge the harmful effects of divorce while still urging a (reformed) liberal divorce law. Divorce is one factor among many, both a cause and a symptom.

The entire point is that several social and cultural conditions in Western societies contribute to the sexual habits and marital fragility of their families.

Fr Gouder, for instance, links the rise in rates of cohabitation to divorce; but this is to make the incredible claim that divorce eclipses independent factors like widely available contraception, the spread of an experimental culture to sexuality, and important changes in the status of women (less dependent on marriage for status, more aware of the raw deal that marriage often deals them - throughout the 20th century, barring two short exceptional periods, the majority of petitions for divorce across Western societies were filed by women).

With the family and sexual landscape of contemporary Western societies, one cannot speak of ideal legal solutions to marriage breakdowns. The only real options are two: more mess and less mess. One cannot just exclude the legalisation of divorce: it is not the sole or even the prime cause of the mess.

Indeed, it would be contrary to the common good to over-state the importance of divorce as a social factor - if the consequence is to make the public debate less sophisticated than it needs to be for the predicament of contemporary Maltese families to be addressed as adequately as possible.

What people with the common good of Maltese families should now be urging - before divorce becomes a hot electoral issue that resists rational discussion even more than it does now - is for more studies to be conducted on the rates of marriage breakdown and the forms of family life in Malta.