Only a few days passed from my father’s passing away and certain quarters started using his literary oeuvre in the ongoing political debate. Which is not bad in itself. It is high time this country looked at its own native intellectuals for inspiration in its political controversies. One looks forward to the day when politicians, political commentators, judges use not only my father’s work but the work of others from the fields of both literature and the social sciences as keys to interpret the reality we live in. When this day will dawn, then one of my father’s dreams – the Maltese dream, actually – would have come true and the cage’s door would have finally been flung open.
My father’s work is being hailed as the output of a liberal man. This is true. My father was a liberal. But we have to qualify that “liberal”.
There are many currents within liberalism, and I submit that my father could be included in Rawlsianism. I am not saying he was directly influenced by John Rawls, the American philosopher who died in 2002. But that my father’s philosophy can nevertheless be perceived as more or less Rawlsian.
My assessment stems from my father’s belief that liberal ideas should not be imposed. For him that would have been a contradiction in terms. Instead, he believed that real liberty means that different, decent opinions may co-exist and holders of different opinions should respect each other’s opinion. If the debate remains decent with no hidden agendas (mostly of a personal nature), then different opinions may co-exist peacefully. According to this view, it is possible for liberals and conservatives – provided they are decent – to share the same social space.
Another type of liberal would insist that everybody should be liberal. This mindset is shared by those conservatives who insist that everybody should be conservative. My father regarded with scorn both manifestations of such a cage-like mentality.
Instead, he believed that everybody should have the liberty to hold their own views, provided they be decent. His understanding of how these views are to be weighed and measured, which I learnt from innumerable conversations with him, is the lynchpin of my argument that his outlook was Rawlsian, as it was very similar to Rawls’s idea of a “decent” people.
Naturally, my father disliked control-freak conservatives. It is probably this attitude that is mistakenly perceived as uncompromising liberalism. But, as I am saying, it is only one face of the coin. The other face is his equal dislike for those “liberals” who deride and ridicule conservatives. He perceived such liberalism as patently self-contradictory. How can you be a real liberal and deride the liberty of others to disagree with you?
He took the liberty of others to hold different opinions so seriously that he would get angry when others expressed different views from his... Not because he was intolerant but because he would get engaged in a contest for truth between equally validly-held opinions, one of which would be (to his understanding) wrong.
He harboured visceral dislike for those who sneer at you and curl their lips in a supercilious smile when you express your opinion, because deep-down they feel you are not validly entitled to hold an opinion. He found such people insufferable. We all find such haughty, arrogant people insufferable.
My father, like Rawls, also considered social justice as part of liberalism. He believed that those living in destitution will view earning a decent wage as more important than their democratic right to hold an opinion. Therefore, for all members of society fully to enjoy their liberty to hold and express an opinion, they all have to enjoy decent living conditions. Only then can you have a fully-fledged democratic society.
To sum it all up, an interpretation of my father’s liberalism as being of the uncompromising type is both simplistic and erroneous. My father’s position was against imposition, be it liberal or conservative. In this, he was a liberal par excellence.