History has no right side

In the post-referendum din, I’m not sure how many of Yes voters have noticed that they are not the only ones convinced of being, as they say, on the right side of history. Some No voters are saying exactly the same about themselves: history will vindicate them. Nor are they just saying this for comfort. The refrain is being used to put pressure on the Prime Minister to vote No in Parliament.

The idea of a right side to history is on the wrong side of clear thinking. Lawrence Gonzi would be ill- advised to use it as his criterion for voting, whichever way he goes.

The idea has its origins in 19th-century theories of progress, which have themselves now progressed to the dustbin of professional historians. It will not help you evaluate Genghis Khan, progenitor of history’s perhaps most successful empire. It is dumb about Waterloo, a battle that could have gone either way, with the loser’s legacy by far outstripping that of his adversaries. It will not help you with World War II, not with Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki; nor with the Cold War, not with Vietnam.

It will not help you with social and cultural history, either. We will never know for sure if things got better or worse with divorce. The law will not just change the conditions of marriage; it will change us: the way we judge what’s good and bad.

It would only be wishful thinking for the Yes side, my side, if it assumes that we will change for the better. It campaigned on the poetry of compassion. But the prose of humdrum liberalism is public indifference to the private lives of others. It generates a more open society; also a colder one for the stragglers. Which side of history is that: right or wrong?

Where does this leave Dr Gonzi? With respect to the No side, he is left another argument that, publicly and privately, is being plied on him: that he should, heroically, go down fighting.

There are two problems with this argument. First, it overstates the heroism and understates that he will surely go down. Generally, there is at best only an implied acknowledgment that voting No or abstaining would certainly cost him the general election. It says much that the only examples of heroism being touted are those of saints and martyrs, not of successful practising politicians.

Second, the idea of an honourable defeat rests on shaky ground. We’ve already seen that it’s unwise to bank on the vindication of history. But there’s more. An honourable rout at the polls will not draw a line under the matter. It will not enable the Nationalist Party to pick up where it left off, with clean hands and pure conscience.

History might not have a right side but it does have lessons to teach. The chapter on electoral routs is all about how they never draw a line for the losers. They are merely the prelude to a long dark night.

They open a trapdoor above a bottomless pit of acrimony and dishonourable infighting. It is a process that sees a major party of the government becoming a sect, more interested in its ideological purity than in the country’s good governance.

The British Conservative and Labour parties, no strangers to such periods, both needed at least three general elections to recover – just like Malta’s Labour. PN members and sympathisers should not dismiss the possibility of the same happening to their party. Even if it may have been just heated talk, threats of a split have been issued.

Does all this therefore leave Dr Gonzi with an irresolvable dilemma? Vote Yes and be accused of being an unprincipled opportunist with no convictions; vote No and incur the wrath of the electorate?

I do not see any other consequence for voting No. However, I am not sure that the majority of Dr Gonzi’s customary sympathisers would interpret a Yes vote as opportunism – even those among them who voted No.

This is not to minimise the anti-Yes persuasion but I believe it is over-represented in Dr Gonzi’s current circle of hell.

My conversational straw polls suggest that most people do have a sense of nuance. They can distinguish between the ethics of conviction and the politics of a leader’s responsibility: the fact that, in voting, Dr Gonzi will need to weigh more than the consequences of a divorce law for the country.

He will need to weigh whether the public backlash will irreversibly damage the persuasive force of Christian political conviction on life and death matters. And he will need to assess the consequences, for the country, of an electoral disaster for his party. (You do not have to be a Labour sympathiser to see that its post-1998 trauma was bad for the country.)

Dr Gonzi’s convictions on divorce are well known enough for a Yes vote to be interpreted as that of a man of conscientious duty: one prepared to undergo the ordeal (for him) out of concern for a broader range of issues than those directly raised by the referendum.

Indeed, I suspect that a Yes vote combined with an explanation of the vote (which parliamentary procedure permits) may attract far more attention to and respect for his conscience.

A No vote would see a large part of the electorate dismiss first his conscience then his government. A Yes vote, in these circumstances, has an honourable place in Christian political thought and practice.

ranierfsadni@europe.com