This year, Malta celebrated 60 years of independence, and it is also celebrating 50 years as a republic. Two important political and constitutional milestones. Thanks to independence, we became a free nation. Thanks to the republic, we radically changed the way we govern ourselves and, little by little, enacted laws strengthening freedom.
But has this spirit of freedom become entrenched in our collective DNA?
Freedom goes beyond legislation. It is an attitude and a way of life. The film Dr Zhivago gives us a scene showing one man in chains and others free to move around. But he shouted back at those pitying him that he was the only free person on the train. He was the only one with a free mind and a tongue that lashes out at the wicked. The others had free bodies but enslaved minds.
Freedom does, many times, carry with it a heavy price, as a reading of the legend of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, immortalised in Dostoevsky’s 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov, manifests. It is one of the best-known passages in modern literature discussing human nature and freedom. (If you have no time to read it, search on YouTube’s John Gielgud’s fantastic rendering of the Grand Inquisitor’s invective against Jesus whom he had arrested on his return to earth, in Seville to be more precise.)
Christ’s greatest crime, according to the Grand Inquisitor, was his position in favour of freedom. “Wasn’t it you who kept repeating in those days fifteen hundred years ago ‘I want to make you free’? That cost us dearly. For fifteen hundred years we have wrestled with that freedom of yours.”
The Grand Inquisitor represents all those political, social, religious and trade union leaders whose vision of humans is negative to the extreme. Political ideologies built on the position of the Grand Inquisitor are as simplistic as they are horrifying. Their underlying belief is that people prefer bread and spectacular stunts to freedom. The Roman adage ‘bread and circuses’ has been, and still is, a strategy used to control people, even in democratic states.
This vision of humans preferring to live by bread and circuses instead of being burdened by the freedom to choose underpins a paternalistic attitude to power. Like the Grand Inquisitor, many believe that the role of those in authority is to “deliver them (the people) from the great anxiety and fearsome torments of free and individual decision”.
Such a demeaning attitude towards people is also present among us. Many look down on the rest of the population derogatively, calling them the ‘popolin’, they who always chose Barabbas. These morally conceited types dampen the hope and enthusiasm that political and civic activists try hard to instil in others while struggling for a better and freer tomorrow.
Freedom goes beyond legislation. It is an attitude and a way of life
In the mind of the Grand Inquisitor, Christ, on the other hand, represents those who believe in the innate goodness of humans and in their desire to reach new heights. The inquisitor is furious at Christ for refusing the devil’s temptation to prioritise bread and spectacular actions over freedom.
Throughout history, many Grand Inquisitors burnt at the physical or metaphorical stake were those who urged men and women to fight for the liberty that “allows a person to decide or deny, at any given moment, what their conscience reveals as moral goodness”.
I am not naïve. I do not delude myself into believing that there are not many slips between the cup of material sustenance and the lips of freedom.
Moses, the great religious and political leader, convinced his people that freedom was possible. He soon realised that men and women, while ready to die to obtain freedom, will also die if there’s no food. He learned that the satisfaction of one need cries for the satisfaction of the other.
That’s natural. The attitude should not be either bread or freedom but both bread and freedom. He who finds it difficult to put decent food on the table will naturally prioritise food over everything else.
What I find disgusting is that the 60th anniversary of Independence and the 50th anniversary of the Republic were and are being celebrated in an atmosphere where the super-rich strive to become extra-mega-rich.
Their greed is satiated by the devastation of our environment, the exploitation of workers, particularly third-country nationals, and the corruption of those in positions of authority.
What I find very disturbing is that in our independent republic many do not have the courage to stand for what is right. It is horrifying that many humiliate themselves and just “say the words of one who kneels” (to quote Frank Sinatra). This attitude of serfdom is seen at work in educational establishments, places of work, Church organisations, political parties, etc.
In the past decade, there has been talk of a Second Republic and, in the process, many legislative processes have been proposed. What we really need is a Second Republic propelled more by a cultural revolution fuelled by freedom than by a legislative one.
Good laws enshrining freedom come to naught if we do not nurture the culture of free minds and spirits.
It is true that such a culture has a heavy burden attached to it. It is true that the burden of freedom can even be unbearable at times. But the essence of being human means being free. Everything else without freedom can give the illusion of comfort at the expense of the diminution of the human spirit.
Freedom does carry with it an unbearable burden but it is also endows one with an enormous dignity.
Remember the prisoner on the train in Dr Zhivago’s film.