Being a progressive means embracing change, innovation and technology under a principled guiding aim to better and improve society intellectually, materially and culturally. Being a conservative means fighting for the established normative order in all its spheres, including culturally and economically, and hence embracing tradition is politically a conservative principle.
The very essence and even definition of tradition can vary from culture to culture, but in many places like Malta, it is mostly a practice rooted in religion and religious festivities. Hunting is less of a tradition and more of a blood sport because it celebrates nothing and falls under the definition of a blood sport: supposedly a competitive endeavour to kill another species (animals).
However, even if hunting was a tradition, there is nothing that makes it fundamentally a positive contributing factor to culture. At the same time, culture is neither absolutely righteous nor morally worth keeping. In anthropological terms, we can even say that beating our wives used to be part of culture. However, we embraced progressive values and criminalised domestic violence.
Laws in Malta are ahead of culture, as evidenced by the murder of a woman just yesterday, and women are still treated as dispensable by many men. Similarly, from a broader cultural and legal spectrum, the secularisation of the state is ahead of society because religious festivities are still considered highly important. However, there are positive artistic and social elements in religious festivities that provide functionality to society.
Obviously, there is nothing functional in having a half-naked man on a public beach carrying a gun and shooting at birds. Apparently, the two men shooting Squacco Herons in Marsascala last Friday (feature below) were arrested as the birds were protected by law. However, hunting on public land is still legal in Malta.
Labour in Malta has become a conservative political force, and its embrace and championing of traditions, along with the augmentation of a labour-intensive economy via tourism, are hallmarks of a conservative political culture and philosophy. Progressives would normally be driven to improve society in all its facets, but Labour intends to preserve bad practices, and any practice conducted by enough people, for electoral advantage: this is populism.
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