Whichever side you’re on – even if you are on the side of those that no longer unthinkingly take sides – you will agree that last week was not an ordinary week for this country.
The huge emotional surge caused by the announcement of his death was a unique historical opportunity to observe our society in all of its complexity and contradictions.- Mario Vella
Dom Mintoff’s death, on the evening of August 20, was more than just the end of an individual. It was also an event that compelled us to reflect on our history. It was an event that forced us to think back on our collective experiences as a people, especially but not only, during the second half of the 20th century.
It was of course also the death of an individual and as such an entirely predictable and ordinary event, one that we may attempt to delay but that we cannot indefinitely prevent. As none of us can escape death – whichever side we are on – the grim reaper cuts us all down to size. It makes even the most extraordinary personality ordinary. That which is common to all of us reduces even the most uncommon of us to a common human being.
Not that this ‘ordinary’ aspect of death is uninteresting and does not in itself stimulate us to reflect, on the contrary. In fact, one of the first fundamental lessons I learnt as a student of Peter Serracino Inglott in the early 1970s was precisely the centrality of death in much of the best of contemporary philosophy. My first readings of Kierkegaard were an experience I will treasure to the end.
Kierkegaard’s admission of his (and our) perfectly ordinary but irreducibly personal dread of the (quote) “stillness of death spreading over me” was the starting point of a reflection that led him to give greater weight to the uniqueness of personal existence than to the “bigger picture” of Hegelian philosophy; a picture within which individuals tend to be sacrificed or at best pass by unnoticed by that impersonal something called “history”.
This reference to Fr Peter is not a theatrical ‘aside’. As I tried to argue in a book-length discussion of his philosophy and his politics (Reflections In A Canvas Bag: Beginning Philosophy Between Politics And History, 1989), there was more that bound Fr Peter and Mr Mintoff than the mere (but not insignificant) fact that both had been Rhodes Scholars at Oxford, the latter in the 1930s and the former in the 1950s.
The title of Chapter 6 of that book, (Peter Serracino Inglott’s Politics and Dom Mintoff’s Philosophy: A Provisional Epilogue, pages 163-208) was not quite a tongue-in-cheek statement. My point was that the tendency to portray Fr Peter as the genial but absent minded and politically naïve philosophy professor was as much a reductive caricature as portraying Mintoff as a politician who despised philosophy, culture and intellectuals generally.
They were both intellectually a (huge) cut above the ordinary. Their death, within a mere five months of each other in this eventful 2012, is an invitation to reflect critically on the politics of our culture and the culture of our politics.
This leads me to the second consideration arising from Mr Mintoff’s death. It was more than the death of an individual. There will be time to revisit his significance in an epoch that carries his imprint: directly or indirectly, for better or – depending on one’s interests, prejudices and points of view – for worse.
In fact now that he is dead, especially when the emotional surge subsides, it will be easier to engage with his historical role and with the conditions that made him at all possible, in a way that is more serene and more objective than has been possible so far.
The huge emotional surge caused by the announcement of his death was a unique historical opportunity to observe our society in all of its complexity and contradictions. I am not referring only to the emotions of the thousands for whom Mr Mintoff could do no wrong (many of whom were therefore profoundly saddened and disoriented by the political developments of 1997-1998). I am also referring to the mixed feelings of the thousands who never liked him much but whose fundamental decency and sincerity compelled them to admit to themselves that a great man had passed away, one that would be, as Eddie Fenech Adami said last week, positively judged by history.
I am also referring to the emotions, to the anger, of those that felt that they cannot forgive him. To those of them that kept this anger to themselves and to those who expressed it loudly, with varying degrees of dignity and good taste.
The anger of the latter leads me to another consideration, one that links up with my thoughts above on the death of the individual.
Elsewhere, even on a couple of occasions in this column but especially in the book referred to above, I wrote of this country’s late and still incomplete encounter with the Enlightenment. Basically I argued that Mr Mintoff took it upon himself to get Malta to “catch up with history”. Given the delay, he felt he had to do so as fast as possible.
This is, if I well understood Oliver Friggieri’s long interview last week, also my old friend’s view of Dom Mintoff. When history accelerates, however, we tend to lose sight of individuals. This is an issue that those that really want to understand this country’s history will need to grapple with, and those that will lead it will have to take care to avoid.