Divorce and expertise

A few weeks ago, and not for the first time, this column argued that people who generalise about the stability of the Maltese family can barely know what they are talking about. Even our basic statistical knowledge is nil. Since then, a near consensus has been made public: Yes, we do need to know more. And the government, together with setting up a national family forum, will be putting money into research.

It is a positive development but it does raise a new set of questions about divorce and expertise. What kind of authority will be used to justify public policy? Discussion over the last weeks, both pro and contra, has appealed to studies conducted on patterns of divorce elsewhere. How reliable have these appeals been? And can academic studies decide the issue on their own?

On the first question, it appears by some people to have been entirely missed that the government has committed itself to decide the issue on purely secular grounds. I think this should have been clear since Eddie Fenech Adami's time as Prime Minister - since the idea that divorce should not be introduced on the grounds of "social harm caused by divorce" is a secular one.

Right or wrong, it places the burden of argument on reasons that leave the Church with no special authority on the issue. Which is to say, if the Archbishop is going to say that divorce causes more social harm than good, and draws parallels with the family in Roman times, he is making statements about the sociology and history of the family, not about faith and morals. And he is as subject to correction by people who know more about the historical sociology of the family as he would be subject to economists if he ventured to make statements about the economy.

This may well have been the case in Dr Fenech Adami's time - some readers might retort - but what about Lawrence Gonzi's reported statement that he would not allow a free vote in Parliament on the issue? I see this as further commitment by the Prime Minister to the secular nature of the case.

It means he regards divorce legislation to be a matter of public policy, not a matter of conscience. Of course, introducing divorce will have irreversible consequences, but then so do certain other laws that affect, say, the environment. For the Prime Minister to be prepared to impose party discipline on divorce legislation must mean he sees it as major legislation, but not sacred.

If the authority is to be secular, how reliable have been the references in recent weeks to patterns of divorce elsewhere? Alas, as reported, there appears to be a basic misunderstanding running through most arguments I have seen, both pro and contra.

Most of the arguments I have seen for the immediate introduction of divorce appear to think of the issue as a purely private matter. The chair of the National Family Commission has shown why divorce raises matters of public concern - to do with the burden on welfare services, for example.

However, he has (to my knowledge) been silent about the exaggerations of the anti-divorce lobby. For example, any statement to the effect that the introduction of divorce legislation has caused more harm than good is without scholarly foundation. Not one world-class historian, sociologist or anthropologist of the family has ever made such an assertion.

This is not because the introduction of divorce can be proven to cause more good than harm; it is because scholarly research cannot demonstrate either one thing or the other. We can have hunches, but we cannot know whether things would have been as good or as bad with or without divorce. (Computer simulations can show you what the rate of marriage breakdown would have been, but that is not the same thing.)

Basing our discussions of divorce - and the details of its legislation - on experience elsewhere is sensible. Drawing on experts will help us avoid some of the naivety often manifest in Malta on the issue (a naïvety one encounters at least as much in pro-divorce arguments). But academic expertise can only illuminate the issues. The final decisions boil down to politics - matters of judgement to do with the values of prudence, liberty and justice.