In his contribution ‘Ideology is dead! Long live ideology!’ (May 23), my friend, Alan Xuereb generously mentioned yours truly as a “self-declared conservative” intellectual.
I think the vast majority of the Maltese are conservative. The radical liberals are a minority – a vociferous minority, no doubt, but a minority nonetheless.
What do we understand by ‘conservative’ and ‘radical liberal’?
I think the best way to grasp the debate’s essentials is to view the problem from two angles: (1) chaos versus order and (2) individual versus community.
As it’s obvious to intelligent people that you can’t do justice to such topics in a few hundred words, I’ll briefly state that, to my mind, chaos occurs when individuals are detached from their community. It’s when individuals believe and act as though their desires take precedence on the needs of their community.
But chaos also exists when the collective forces individuals to sacrifice their aspirations for an ideological goal. This is where traditional ideology – that purportedly ended in 1989 – becomes relevant. In the communist countries, say, individuals were forced to sacrifice their freedom for Marxist-Leninist ideology or for whatever other ideology their country’s dictator imposed on them in the name of Marx and Lenin.
Order, on the other hand, is achieved when there’s harmony between the individual and the community, when a gentle equilibrium is found.
The problem lies in society’s ever-changing nature, which means that to find the equilibrium you have to adapt constantly.
So, it’s a paradoxical mindset: you’ve got constantly to adapt to changing circumstances in order to attain the rigid objective of finding the point of equilibrium between individual and community.
To achieve that equilibrium you need steadfast principles and a lot of compassion.
If your principles aren’t steadfast, and you follow the flow, then, instead of finding the gentle point of equilibrium, thereby restoring order, you find yourself stoking the fire of chaos.
I think the vast majority of the Maltese are conservative. The radical liberals are a minority- Mark Sammut Sassi
That’s how I understand conservatism; that’s my conservatism. It probably differs from other types of conservatism.
What does it mean in practice? It means taking positions against the radical liberals and castigating the socialists for forgetting the ‘needful’. (I use this dated word on purpose.)
Against the liberals who, in the name of some ill-defined personal freedom, demand, for instance, the introduction of abortion. The elimination of an unborn human for the mother and/or father to continue with their lives, self-evidently violates the principle of life.
Being pro-life is neither religious nor ideological; it’s the self-evident truth that all humans are created equal, to borrow the wording of the American constitution.
Humans are created when an ovum gets fertilised and from that moment onwards they are equal.
Being equal, they all have the freedom to live. Abortion means that the freedom of the unborn child to live is superseded by the supposed freedom of the mother and/or father (who together created that child) to move on with their lives.
The unborn child’s potential for the community cannot be sacrificed for anybody else to attainment their individual desires, including the parents. That would mean that the parents’ potential is more important/valuable than the unborn child’s. It would mean that all humans (born and unborn) are ‘equal’ but the born are more equal than the unborn.
The logic of seeking the equilibrium between individuals’ desires and the needs
of the community applies throughout the spectrum of social issues.
Then, the socialists. These deserve to be castigated for abandoning the vulnerable. Why should pensioners, say, keep living under the stress of having to strive to make it to the end of the month?
The conservative applies compassion and understands the plight of pensioners and such like groups.
Xuereb quoted one of my favourite philosophers, Slavoj Žižek, who, tellingly, has
been defined by free-market economist Tyler Cowen as a conservative, moderate right-winger. This Slovene philosopher – considered the Elvis Presley of philosophy – argues that ideology is what we don’t know that we know.
Let me clarify. Quoting Donald Rumsfeld, Žižek argues that we know what we know; we know what we don’t know; we don’t know what we don’t know. But – he adds – we also don’t know what we know.
What we don’t know that we know is ‘ideology’. It’s what we’re fed by the media, movies, magazines ‘and so on and so on’.
Ideology is conformism. It’s delegating your thinking to somebody else.
But is that somebody else looking after your interest or their own?
Being conservative means tending your own garden. With compassion though. Because it’s compassion that’s crucial in determining in an orderly fashion the gentle point of equilibrium between the needs of individuals and those of the community.
On ideology, there’s John Schwarzmantel’s excellent The Age of Ideology: Political Ideologies from the American Revolution to Postmodern Times (New York University Press, 1998).
Mark Sammut Sassi, author and lawyer