Daphne Caruana Galizia and 'Amoral Familism'
How the government feeding trough made the Mafia powerful
I used to read Daphne Caruana Galizia’s blog regularly, as did so many others, and there was much that remains in the memory. I particularly liked the way she used her expertise in dress-making (yes, really) to criticise the clothes worn on state occasions by the Maltese President, for example. But there was another phrase she introduced me to to that entered my mind and stayed there: ‘amoral familism’.
Her son Paul’s memoir recounts just when Daphne herself came across the phrase in an anthropology lecture, which discussed a book called The Moral Basis of a Backward Society The link summarises the book’s argument better than I can: essentially ‘amoral familism’ is the desire and the habit of looking out for oneself and one’s relations, while seeing other families as threats. The antithesis would be devotion to the Common Good, which is the centrepiece of Catholic Social Teaching. But the Common Good cannot flourish where there is no ‘social capital’, no culture of co-operation and shared endeavour. A society dominated by amoral familism would essentially be a society that has no social coherence, is savage and competitive, and where voters are bribed to vote one way or another rather than voting out of conviction and belief. Amoral familism is the basis of the Mafia mentality.
While Malta has become a Mafia state, there are other places, chiefly in the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which have been Mafia societies from time immemorial. The Kingdom, you may remember, had no real apparatus of government, and, crucially, no taxes. The government left you alone, banditry flourished, there was no law and order to speak of, infrastructure was poor or non-existent, there was little trade, there was great poverty. So, left to your own devices, and you and your family survived as best you could. It was every family for itself.
Thus it continued for centuries, until suddenly something changed. The central government began to act, and in the worst way possible, by spending money. The competing families thus had to compete for their place, not in the sun, but at the government sponsored feeding trough. It was at this point that the various Mafias, having once been rather small businesses, began to expand and hit the big time. Once more, it was every family for itself; but the stakes were higher, and the conflict naturally more bloody. The small government of the Bourbon era created the Mafia mentality; the big government of the Christian Democrat era turbocharged it. Government contracts, with all the kickbacks and bribery and fraud they brought in their wake, made the Mafia rich, and Government initiatives weakened the already feeble idea that the problems of Sicily and elsewhere should be solved by local people. Corruption and her twin Apathy, who is necessary for the spread and continuation of corruption, reigned.
The prime example of this is the port project at Gioia Tauro, which led to a murder rate higher than New York, as rival families vied for control of what would become the greatest drug gateway into Europe. Then there is the as yet non-existent Messina Bridge, which is the occasion for my second book ‘The Nymph of Syracuse’. And finally, in Malta, it was the sale of passports, the swindle of Electrogas, and all the other things that Daphne wrote about, that turned the island nation into the scene of gang warfare as the rival ‘families’ quarrelled over the spoils. Never underestimate the power of human greed.
The answer? A touch of morality would help, a sense of the Common Good as the fundamental good worth having - after all, it is the good that we all share that makes a place good to live. Malta, with its disregard of the Common Good, has become a hellhole of dust and cranes and overtourism. The failure to value the Common Good has made parts of Sicily hellholes of pollution, illegal building and illegally dumped rubbish. Perhaps we need to dial down the competitiveness and to stop seeing the success of our neighbours as somehow damaging to ourselves. One for all, and all for one. That would be a good place to start. And as for journalists like Daphne, they are the conscience of a nation. In murdering her, they tried to murder a nation’s conscience. But they did not quite succeed, thank God.