When Malta became independent in 1964, the powers that be chose as their motto for the nation: Virtute in Constantia. The virtues of courage and constancy were blazoned under our national coat of arms. Somewhere along the line, these ideals were lost.
Virtue as a form of government has been relegated to the hustings and it would do it great justice to revisit it. Aristotle, the father of virtue theory, used to say that man will never be happy with money, sex or power. What makes a man happy, Aristotle tells us, is seeking to do good. Seeking the virtues.
He put forward a number of these virtues, many of which are virtues of the character like temperance, courage and justice, while others, like wisdom and prudence, are virtues of the intellect. Without seeking to do good, man cannot be happy.
Later on, 1,000 years later, the same sentiments were aroused again by the scholastics, 2,000 years later, again modern philosophers revisit Aristotle.
Alisdaire McIntyre and Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe set up the theory of ethics by the name of virtue ethics. We become the choices we make in life.
We become men/women for others in doing good to others in the community and we thus become good persons or we choose vice over virtue and we become vicious, bad persons.
Ultimately, we become the nation we choose to become- Michael Asciak
We are seeing before our eyes the daily unearthing of misappropriation of public funds, mismanagement and corruption of a magnitude we have never experienced or witnessed before.
The personal greed for money, lavish living, graft and licentiousness, all creamed off the misgovernment of the nation and public funds, have become the order of the day.
Alliances with criminals, cavorting with undesirables, the subjugation of all that is good in the name of personal aggrandisement and folly.
The perversion of justice on a daily basis and, finally, as all vice pointedly descends to, the taking of a human being’s life when it stands between us and the vices we now adore.
We have now seen it all. The graft was a pointedly organised and an effective piece of business orchestrated by the wrong people in the right places.
Hail the king, hail money, hail electoral victory.
The failure we see before us is a failure of the Labour government in power over these last eight years but is also a failure of many of us as well. As we sought to objectify vice and the pursuit of the root of all evil, many chose to turn a blind eye to virtue.
Our excessive zeal for money, for power, for the fancied fruits of our dreams, which in moderation deliver virtue, proved to be the deathbed of virtue and turned out to deliver vitriol.
Now we must return to moderation. We must return to the love of virtue. This should be a national pursuance, a national temperance, a national justice, a national courage.
It must be, above all, a national common sense or guiding prudence. It is time for the good people at large and in all political parties to stand up and seek it out. To show no fear or favour in applying it.
Whether in parliament, in the executive, in the law courts, it was never as necessary more than today to establish virtue. To seek it out too in our daily lives at the place of work where, too often, it is scorned in favour of the darker alternatives.
At the end of the day, to thine own self be true. Grow a spine, reject vice, break off from those who have shown to idolise it, remove those who have wrongly and unjustly bent over to lick the founts of indecency, lewdness, lust, offence, perversion, crime, scandal and trespass.
Break with vice, promote those who seek good, character, ethic, merit, righteousness, faith, hope and, ultimately, charity.
Too often in life have I seen the former elevated as an alias for shrewdness and the latter suppressed for perceived temerity.
We become the nation we choose to be. We become the nation of the virtues or the vices we seek out. Ultimately, we become the nation we choose to become.
Michael Asciak, member, PN executive committee