In case you banished Malta from your life over the weekend, and have only just re-embraced it, Eddie Fenech Adami has proposed that the divorce law should be postponed till after the next general election. Within a few hours of his op-ed’s appearance, the proposal had already been, indirectly but pointedly, dismissed at the Nationalist Party’s general council. So what else is there to discuss?
About the proposal itself, nothing. About the man himself and his ideas, however, there is a lot that needs clearing up. His post-referendum interventions have raised questions about his authenticity. That is, not just whether he is being true to himself but also about his ideas concerning national authenticity and their relevance for politics.
A lot of his former devout followers are talking about him as though his body has been hijacked by aliens; they just do not recognise him anymore. Others have claimed that, finally, the fundamentalist’s mask has fallen. Both reactions assume that Dr Fenech Adami is letting his consistency about divorce show up a serious inconsistency about democracy.
I think the truth is almost the other way round. To understand his behaviour one needs to see that he is being consistent about democracy but has changed his mind about divorce.
Or rather, one aspect of the divorce issue: whether the legalisation of divorce is a matter of political or moral judgement. I have spoken to four people who worked closely with him as party leader. All claim that Dr Fenech Adami then spoke of a divorce law as something that might turn out to be a necessary evil. An interview he gave MaltaToday around two years ago also suggested as much.
Since then, something has made him change his mind. Just what is difficult to say. But he did not lose his sense of the demarcation between Church and state. Only a few months ago, he was reported to be critical of the Judicial Vicar because the latter crossed that line.
However, having redefined the legalisation of divorce as a moral matter, he is being true to himself. The man who staked his personal safety for democracy, and who staked his health for Europe, is ready to stake his reputation, leave it in tatters, for something he believes is right.
As it happens, what he takes to be right is based (partly, although to an important degree) on pseudo-history and non-sequiturs that might well draw gasps from professional historians, sociologists and anthropologists of the family and of Malta. However, an aspect of the philosophy informing his argument is worth considering.
Dr Fenech Adami’s understanding of authenticity and personal identity – both what is driving him personally as well as what is driving his arguments about Malta – is clearly informed by John Paul II’s last book, Memory And Identity. That book, about the relationship between national and personal identity, offered an intense paradoxical idea of authenticity.
Essentially, John Paul II argued that personal authenticity – the deep truth we must each individually realise about ourselves – requires an acute awareness of collective national history, its deposits in our personal make-up, its realisation in our biography. Such attentiveness to history does not make us hostages to the past; it enables us, on the contrary, to become history makers, pioneers of the future.
The apparent contradiction is easier to understand if one sees that John Paul II had an actor’s understanding of memory as something creative. It helps an actor become the role and make the role uniquely his own; bring the text to life as well as add to it; contribute to the ensemble as well as stand out. On this view, national memory (under which John Paul included landscape, culture and the arts as well as history) is like a text to be performed and critically reinterpreted. Plumbing its meaning gives authenticity to our personal lives. But drawing on the wells of our personal experience is what keeps it alive and new.
It’s a giddy mythic vision. It informed John Paul II’s nationalism and understanding of his own involvement in Polish and world history. And one can understand why Dr Fenech Adami would feel such a strong affinity for it. His whole political career, from failed candidate to Prime Minister, has been dedicated to the idea that individual destinies cannot be divorced from collective ones. Personal choices only make sense against a wider horizon of meaning. A strictly atomistic view of one’s own life is too limited to see what collective development is needed to make even individualistic choices possible. It was on the basis of such convictions that he and his political party strove for national independence and EU membership.
They did not do so to endorse a popular view. At critical times they even flew against it. Still, they strove to indicate the horizon against which personal choice and destinies would make more authentic sense: of both the past and the future.
This point is worth remembering today. “Liberalism” – understood simplistically as the political sanctification of individual choices – is the talk of the town. However, take sexuality off the table and “liberalism” leaves us mute before the critical issues facing us on the quality of our towns, work, friendships and culture.
Dr Fenech Adami is wrong about the divorce law and, yes, Christianity no longer provides the language within which an inclusive national vision can be articulated. But his idea of authenticity is as relevant as ever. If, that is, we want to have a vision at all.
ranierfsadni@europe.com