Divorce and internet

You have in the past seen a close relationship between the crisis of marriage and the electronic revolution of our times. As the issue of divorce may be coming to a head in Malta sooner than expected, could you not clarify your thinking on the matter?

Let me sum up my position as provocatively as possible and assume the decision about divorce can be postponed for a sufficient lapse of time.

Then whether the demand for it will prove to be inexorable or not will depend on the kind of operations that will be undertaken in Smart City and on how much support is given to such systems as Linux.

I make that claim on the basis of a two-part argument. On one hand, with the advent of capitalism, the family ceased to be a productive unit. It was reduced to just a group within which mutual emotional support was provided.

Under these conditions it could hardly survive as an operational, intergenerational alliance based on permanent union between husband and wife.

Then the capitalist system further degenerated into the consumer society and the extreme individualism that goes with the new communication technologies.

That trajectory made the demand for divorce more and more compelling.

On the other hand, I have also argued that the electronic revolution need not continue to promote a social organisation based on capitalist individualism. The possibility of a truly communitarian, participative, inclusive society has been clearly depicted by such authors as Yokai Benkler.

If the principles underlying open access systems and correlative network structures were to prevail, then the family based on stable marriage would have a strong chance of recovery.

Why do you sound so sure that the crisis of the marriage-based family is related to the extreme individualism of the ultra-liberal economy?

My great fear is that in Malta there still seems to be little appreciation of either of the two parts of the argument. Many still appear not to have been convinced of the inability of what is often referred to in our culture as the 'traditional' family to survive beyond the phase of late capitalism.

Yet this inability has unfortunately been demonstrated as a matter of historical experience: a little bit more 'teaching' in life skills or parenting or home economics is apparently still deemed by some to provide sufficient support in the face of the threats against family stability.

Yet it should be clear that even with such fortification, people with average psychological strength will not be able to resist the crushing weight of the social structures that at present prevent the family based on permanent marriage from flourishing.

On the other hand, few - even of our political leaders - seem to have grasped the extent of the socio-economic transformation rendered possible by the use of the internet with open access systems of programming.

Economic activity in general, and work organisation in particular, can be restructured in family-friendly ways made only possible by the electronic revolution. If such a restructuring took place, then the family system based on stable marriage could find the social and cultural support without which it cannot survive.

Nevertheless, I rarely hear any of the opponents of the introduction of divorce in our country urging concrete moves and measures in this direction.

For instance, the most important relevant promise in the Nationalist Party programme is the article that promised investment in "open access" ITC systems.

It should be clear that the implementation of this solemn promise would be a major step towards creating the environment needed for the re-invention of family life free from the oppressive forces that have stunted its flourishing in modern times.

How optimistic are you about the situation in Malta?

It should be remembered that the need to introduce divorce in those parts of Europe in which the capitalist system had not reached an advanced stage had not been compellingly felt until 40 years ago.

Divorce was only introduced in 1970 in Italy, in 1981 in Spain, in 1987 in Portugal and only in 1997 in Ireland.

It was also in this relatively short period that the great increase in divorce as well as in children born out of wedlock and cohabitation without marriage occurred in the other parts of Europe.

These statistical facts tend to support the theory that links the necessity of divorce with the social/economic/cultural conditions at the tail-end of machine-based industrial capitalism.

With the electronic revolution, a radical contextual change affecting the family may be on the eve of happening.

For instance, the computer has made it possible for a revival of home-based work and of "cottage" industry modes of production that are plainly much more family-friendly than those hitherto prevalent.

New ways of husband-wife collaboration in productive work and not only in biological reproduction are becoming more common globally.

Obviously, much more radical, structural developments need to occur for them to significantly affect the prospects of the stable marriage-based family.

Nevertheless, two centuries of the history of the family may be at their end. The family had ceased to be a household (with even the education of its one or two children taken by the State out of the hands of the parents). The conjugal relation had come almost to exclude any wider kinship network.

Obviously there is not going to be a return to the system that prevailed before the 18th century when marriage was arranged by parents mostly on economic grounds. The value of intimacy and freedom of choice is too precious for it to be given up.

But it can flourish even better in a socio-economic context which again gives scope for prosperity to the extended and multiple families that have subsisted much more in southern than in northern Europe.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.