Barbarism and democracy

We were told that on a happy scale, the Maltese are deeply satisfied with what they’ve got. But when society reaches a stage where collective anxiety turns into self-centred indifference, you know that something is seriously amiss.

If anything, this signals a malady that goes right to the bowels of what makes us a polity. And there, we are neither a happy lot, nor are we even close to understand why this is the case.

If what we are hearing in the Maksar trial is not gruesome enough to haplessly question why we could have ever come to this, then I cannot understand how as a people, we could ever look at the future with any sense of hope. Neither could we even aspire to claim the right to say that our young republic will one day recover from this miserable impasse.

I say “an impasse” because ever since that horrific 16 October 2017, when Daphne Caruana Galizia was heinously butchered by a car bomb, Malta’s polity has never recovered. This is mostly confirmed by how many choose to avoid talking about it. When some do, they invariably fall in tribal default.

Most of the time, the usual clichés are ready at hand: From parroting Voltaire’s defence of the right to disagree, to indulging in the usual acrobatics by which one avoids saying it loud and clear—Malta’s democracy is so compromised that it was only a matter of time for its latent barbarism to prevail.

Fearing the present

We often calculate barbarism by sheer number. In our discussions we take sides, as we are currently seeing in our discussions of war and peace. We even indulge in competing on numbers. And yet there is one side which is often forgotten—that of the vast number of innocents dying at the expense of corrupt politicians, arrogant superpowers, vested interests, corruption, and failed polities.

Theodor Adorno, that great philosopher who asked if we could ever write poetry after Auschwitz—to whom another great author, Primo Levi, once answered that poetry is all we could write—once said that the whole is the false. He went on to add that the whole is barbaric.

Whenever in our attempts to “win the argument”, simplistic equivalencies and binary justifications are drawn, the destructive latency of the human condition is bound to emerge. Yet, beyond quantity or equivalence, comparison and symmetry, the barbaric remains in the universe of the self. Whether the person murdered is one or many; in the thousands or millions; the barbaric remains ensconced in the whole, because one person is already a universe, just as tragedy is in no one’s right to barter or exchange.

This is why the fear of the present remains perennial. To suppress or forget our destructive inherence as a human species, is to fall prey to a kind of evil which, at the risk of falling into more clichés, we ultimately recognise in its facile ease, in its banality. The tragedy of evil is that it is all too easy, and how it evolves is often as absurd as it remains horrid. To explain evil’s ease, we often have quick and simplistic answers and remedies. Recipes for a “good life” which, from our infancy, are based on fear, often claim impunity especially in the political scene.

Democracy’s fragile impunity

The moment of barbarism is as ordinary as it comes, which is why its vulgar ease is at its most destructive. Yet, if instead of concealing our dispositions, we understand and embrace their perils, it would be possible for us to realise (to badly paraphrase Kant) the ethical dispositions by which we are potentially free and intelligent. It is also then that we begin to understand what democracy all is about.

Democracy was never just about voting and winning teams. Democracy is not a sport nor a trophy that is won every now and then. Nor is democracy a ticket to ride roughshod over those who lost and by implication considered as another tribe. That is not democracy.

Democracy is a way of life and living. I say “life and living” because life without living is just an idol to be worshiped. An idolised life is an excuse for some to claim more privileges than the rest. Instead, to choose to live and recognise the living, is to make sure that we all live together. Democracy is at the core of this togetherness. Failing that, even when formally democratic, society would default to barbarism.

Beyond the impasse

It is not easy to move out of an impasse such as that in which Malta’s polity found itself on 16 October 2017. Even if or when those culpable of Daphne’s assassination are locked in jail, justice is not guaranteed, neither for Daphne, nor her family, and less so for Maltese democracy.

In their social nature, democracy and justice require that we as a polity continuously seek the togetherness by which in our diversity and plurality, we find ways of realising each other in conviviality. Democracy and justice are essentially convivial in the sense that every person’s freedom is secured and articulated by the freedom of everyone else.

It would be useless to draw parallels between one tribe and another. At the end of the day, barbarism belongs and comes with the whole. The indifference and impunity which facilitated the conditions for Daphne’s heinous murder, become systemic when they become a way of life.

That is why, as a whole, we, as members of the same society, need to recognise each other as diverse but equally as dutiful towards each other by the very recognition of our disagreement. Democracy is characterised by difference. Disagreement is democracy’s virtue. But it could turn into its destruction if by disagreement we mean mutual cancellation. When disagreement turns into a need to cancel each other on the basis of some high moral ground, truth, or a power claimed by sheer number and force, then democracy becomes barbaric.

If what is being testified in court does not shake our foundations, then one cannot see how there could be any hope for Maltese society to become a functioning polity—that is, a viable political community. We don’t need to look at the past to learn from the mistakes that keep recurring in modern democracies. The rise of reactionary politics, hatred, corruption, and the inability for human beings to even have a civil discussion, goes to show why rather than recognise the horror that afflicts us, we prefer to forget it and indulge in a circus of self-inflicted deceit.

If we want justice for Daphne, we need to begin to recognise that what murdered her is still manifest in the indifference by those who continue to deny the paralysis by which Maltese democracy has become a formalised ghost of what it once aspired to be as a free independent republic.