My question on reading Fairburn’s essay is whether New Zealand wants to change – in fact, ever really wanted to change?
Fairburn begins with a typical provocation: “We are a very complacent people. And we love flattery.” He follows this up by including everyone in this:
“I think this spirit of complacency is so general, and so much a natural outcome of our whole geographical and economic situation, that it is almost impossible for us to change from it. The members of our leftist intelligentsia, for instance, are in their own way just as smug as any gathering of businessmen.”
I’d suggest that last sentence could have been appropriately written in 2024, not just 1944.
The other issue is, he observes: “…we are passive, not active. We are acted upon. We are, to some extent, instruments used for purposes, not our own. All this is true to an extent we don’t realise: it is because we don’t realise it that we are so complacent.”
A central problem identified by Fairburn is that “we don’t originate our own cultural products. They are nearly all imported.” That means we actually have a half-English, half-American culture – something which I’d suggest 80 years has done little to change for most.
I’d further suggest, with the rise of the internet and social media, that the vast majority of us are even more in cultural deficit than in 1944 , when: “Our culture is, in reality, almost entirely the creation of overseas political ideologists, businessmen, artists, poets, inventors, fashion designers and journalists.” The problem in part being a longstanding reluctance “to use local brains” – preferring to drive them out and import English ones instead; or today, perhaps American or European or Asian ones. If we chose to depart from English standards, then as now, it is to accept American ones instead. What we fail to do, then as now, is – given the situation – employ enough “vitality and intelligence” to modify and shape them to make something new.
What do we modify of elsewhere, from elsewhere, to suit ourselves, here and now?
The question is how we are involved with the outside world and what decisions we make regarding such involvement – on both a personal and a national level? We can’t and shouldn’t live in isolated purity, we need to be connected. We can’t be – or become –what Fairburn warns of as “an interesting museum culture, barren and introspective, and a tangle of neuroses.” Even in the 1940s we were, Fairburn suggested, about 20 years behind England and America and 10-15 years behind Australia, in large part because we don’t know or want to undertake the “communal living…in the sort of social co-operation that makes a highly-developed society possible.”
So, what should we do?
Firstly; “…get rid of our dammed mediocrity. We have enshrined dullness as a national idol” whereby our problem is our deep and oppressive conventionality. We are “one of the dullest, most stupidly conservative, most unenterprising races on this planet” who yet tell ourselves that “we are bold, enterprising, progressive, intelligent people, unhampered by the shackles of the past.” I would suggest that our ongoing issues socially, culturally, economically, environmentally, infrastructurally and our ongoing productivity issues suggest that Fairburn was – and remains – correct in his assessment.
The second problem is our national vice of stupidity, which is a consequence of “such a solid respect for stupidity…which pervades every department of our life, and chokes all growth.”
The third problem is “the consistent policy we have followed of encouraging brains to clear out of the country” – and yet “when we are buying brains we are competing on the world market.” In other words, the brain drain – and brain and skills shortage and issues of importing quality replacements – is nothing new, no matter what any current government, at any time, might proclaim.
Fairburn also wonders just how democratic we are in ideals and values and uses as an example our creation (then, as now, I would suggest) of an “elite class” who are ‘elite’ because of their “success in accumulating property”; they are not a “genuine elite [who] in a healthy community, will be honoured for its ability to enrich the physical and mental life of a people.”
Another example of our “undemocratic tendencies” is how “a minority of wowsers” can exert “an altogether disproportionate influence in our affairs” – and are allowed to do so because of the “mere slothfulness” of the majority of the population, who are “too lazy” to organize and oppose the wowser, who seeks to limit the actions of the majority. I’d suggest wowserism is very much alive and well in New Zealand but has shifted its focus from religious-derived morality into political and social realms. Fairburn blames this influence of the wowser on the growth of suburban life in New Zealand and the insipid life that they entail. If we add what we can call today’s digital suburbanization via social media, then we face a growing double insipidness that allows the wowser to thrive anew.
What is required, he argues, is the linking and sharing of “power with responsibility” and “both freedom and order” resulting in what he calls “economic democracy”, rather than what he sees as the desire to both grab the spoils and avoid responsibility. What he seeks is a way forward between “the dangers of simple State socialism [and bureaucratic rule] on the one hand, and private enterprise on the other.” However, to achieve this will depend on whether “we have enough moral energy” to insist upon the preservation of “personal opportunity and personal responsibility.”
Fairburn also ventured into the need for political reform which includes replacing the Legislative Council with an industrial chamber who, from a variety of perspectives and experiences as economic specialists, would complement the House of Representatives who would hopefully be of “wide general culture”; this to be undertaken alongside the decentralising of authority, power and responsibility.
Questions of what he terms “morality’” were also addressed within a concern of ensuring personal liberty yet maintaining population growth. He did so via an argument made for an experimental legalization of abortion alongside large scale family benefits, pro-natalist propaganda, full contraceptive information for all people 17 years and over, state organization of domestic help for mothers of families and a guaranteed income for every mother of children, married or unmarried. He argues strongly for the economic independence of women to ensure their freedom and happiness.
Because, just like today, population growth and how to achieve it was a concern, Fairburn stated New Zealand required “a well-thought-out immigration policy”, not the failure of that following the First World War which brought out underachieving Englishmen – either public schoolboys or those from depressed northern England who both ended up merely replicating existing New Zealand suburban life. What is required are a “wide assortment” of Europeans, not just English immigrants – and he argues for this on the basis of “the dynamic energy of the United States” and its broad culture. Perhaps our challenge today is how we can implement both an immigration policy and wider socio-economic policy that ensures immigration does not just continue to replicate existing suburban life, but rather provides proper dynamic energy – and not just infrastructure and housing issues in the suburbs…?
New Zealanders also lack manners, whether in conservation (we “talk a great deal too much and usually at the wrong time) or in how we move – or don’t – in public spaces. We are also “very sentimental” and therefore are also cynical and this gives rise to “the opportunist policies we habitually follow in our political and economic activity.’
Our challenge, then as now, is to facilitate the organic growth of a New Zealand culture, not the synthetic, deliberate choosing and mixing of elements – for who does such choosing and mixing? What is required is for our cultural life to have and proceed from a “consciousness of purpose’, yet then as now, we stand “in the midst of chaos.” Our issue is we are unable – and unwilling – to decide on a central question of human nature: whether we are ‘radically bad’ or ‘radically good’? And this indecision puts our social legislation and systems at loggerheads, especially our educational and penal ones. For we need more than social security, for “that can easily mean boredom; and boredom is the worst of human afflictions, and never fails to lead to violence in the long run”. Eighty years on we must ask how much of our contemporary issues of violence, at individual, familial, community and national level arise from boredom and the lack of a culture of meaning and value?
Fairburn does not wish to abandon social security, but rather emphasize that it “is not in itself a sufficient ideal to quicken our energies and give tone to our social and individual life.” Secondly, the “establishment of social order is useless unless it provides for individual freedom”; but as he notes, “freedom has no meaning without a background of order.” This requires, in turn, “a way of life, a common consciousness, a common set of values” that celebrate and makes sense of living here, that can create an organic New Zealand culture and society, free of dullness and mediocrity, free of the falseness and pretentiousness of many aspects of our life. That is, a culture and society that means we will no longer be “bored by the insipidness of our social life”. What he would like us to develop an ability to “face fundamental problems with courage” and to “treat serious things seriously. (And by seriously, I don’t mean solemnly)”.
Eighty years on, how successful have we been in realizing Fairburn’s hope for New Zealand? Are we still too complacent to undertake the changes required? Do we continue to flatter ourselves – and seek the flattery of others – as to how wonderful and competent we are, when in fact we continue to lack an organic culture and still celebrate and are governed by and with dullness and mediocrity?
Mike Grimshaw (PhD Otago) is associate professor in sociology at the University of Canterbury. This article was first published HERE
Fairburn begins with a typical provocation: “We are a very complacent people. And we love flattery.” He follows this up by including everyone in this:
“I think this spirit of complacency is so general, and so much a natural outcome of our whole geographical and economic situation, that it is almost impossible for us to change from it. The members of our leftist intelligentsia, for instance, are in their own way just as smug as any gathering of businessmen.”
I’d suggest that last sentence could have been appropriately written in 2024, not just 1944.
The other issue is, he observes: “…we are passive, not active. We are acted upon. We are, to some extent, instruments used for purposes, not our own. All this is true to an extent we don’t realise: it is because we don’t realise it that we are so complacent.”
A central problem identified by Fairburn is that “we don’t originate our own cultural products. They are nearly all imported.” That means we actually have a half-English, half-American culture – something which I’d suggest 80 years has done little to change for most.
I’d further suggest, with the rise of the internet and social media, that the vast majority of us are even more in cultural deficit than in 1944 , when: “Our culture is, in reality, almost entirely the creation of overseas political ideologists, businessmen, artists, poets, inventors, fashion designers and journalists.” The problem in part being a longstanding reluctance “to use local brains” – preferring to drive them out and import English ones instead; or today, perhaps American or European or Asian ones. If we chose to depart from English standards, then as now, it is to accept American ones instead. What we fail to do, then as now, is – given the situation – employ enough “vitality and intelligence” to modify and shape them to make something new.
What do we modify of elsewhere, from elsewhere, to suit ourselves, here and now?
The question is how we are involved with the outside world and what decisions we make regarding such involvement – on both a personal and a national level? We can’t and shouldn’t live in isolated purity, we need to be connected. We can’t be – or become –what Fairburn warns of as “an interesting museum culture, barren and introspective, and a tangle of neuroses.” Even in the 1940s we were, Fairburn suggested, about 20 years behind England and America and 10-15 years behind Australia, in large part because we don’t know or want to undertake the “communal living…in the sort of social co-operation that makes a highly-developed society possible.”
So, what should we do?
Firstly; “…get rid of our dammed mediocrity. We have enshrined dullness as a national idol” whereby our problem is our deep and oppressive conventionality. We are “one of the dullest, most stupidly conservative, most unenterprising races on this planet” who yet tell ourselves that “we are bold, enterprising, progressive, intelligent people, unhampered by the shackles of the past.” I would suggest that our ongoing issues socially, culturally, economically, environmentally, infrastructurally and our ongoing productivity issues suggest that Fairburn was – and remains – correct in his assessment.
The second problem is our national vice of stupidity, which is a consequence of “such a solid respect for stupidity…which pervades every department of our life, and chokes all growth.”
The third problem is “the consistent policy we have followed of encouraging brains to clear out of the country” – and yet “when we are buying brains we are competing on the world market.” In other words, the brain drain – and brain and skills shortage and issues of importing quality replacements – is nothing new, no matter what any current government, at any time, might proclaim.
Fairburn also wonders just how democratic we are in ideals and values and uses as an example our creation (then, as now, I would suggest) of an “elite class” who are ‘elite’ because of their “success in accumulating property”; they are not a “genuine elite [who] in a healthy community, will be honoured for its ability to enrich the physical and mental life of a people.”
Another example of our “undemocratic tendencies” is how “a minority of wowsers” can exert “an altogether disproportionate influence in our affairs” – and are allowed to do so because of the “mere slothfulness” of the majority of the population, who are “too lazy” to organize and oppose the wowser, who seeks to limit the actions of the majority. I’d suggest wowserism is very much alive and well in New Zealand but has shifted its focus from religious-derived morality into political and social realms. Fairburn blames this influence of the wowser on the growth of suburban life in New Zealand and the insipid life that they entail. If we add what we can call today’s digital suburbanization via social media, then we face a growing double insipidness that allows the wowser to thrive anew.
What is required, he argues, is the linking and sharing of “power with responsibility” and “both freedom and order” resulting in what he calls “economic democracy”, rather than what he sees as the desire to both grab the spoils and avoid responsibility. What he seeks is a way forward between “the dangers of simple State socialism [and bureaucratic rule] on the one hand, and private enterprise on the other.” However, to achieve this will depend on whether “we have enough moral energy” to insist upon the preservation of “personal opportunity and personal responsibility.”
Fairburn also ventured into the need for political reform which includes replacing the Legislative Council with an industrial chamber who, from a variety of perspectives and experiences as economic specialists, would complement the House of Representatives who would hopefully be of “wide general culture”; this to be undertaken alongside the decentralising of authority, power and responsibility.
Questions of what he terms “morality’” were also addressed within a concern of ensuring personal liberty yet maintaining population growth. He did so via an argument made for an experimental legalization of abortion alongside large scale family benefits, pro-natalist propaganda, full contraceptive information for all people 17 years and over, state organization of domestic help for mothers of families and a guaranteed income for every mother of children, married or unmarried. He argues strongly for the economic independence of women to ensure their freedom and happiness.
Because, just like today, population growth and how to achieve it was a concern, Fairburn stated New Zealand required “a well-thought-out immigration policy”, not the failure of that following the First World War which brought out underachieving Englishmen – either public schoolboys or those from depressed northern England who both ended up merely replicating existing New Zealand suburban life. What is required are a “wide assortment” of Europeans, not just English immigrants – and he argues for this on the basis of “the dynamic energy of the United States” and its broad culture. Perhaps our challenge today is how we can implement both an immigration policy and wider socio-economic policy that ensures immigration does not just continue to replicate existing suburban life, but rather provides proper dynamic energy – and not just infrastructure and housing issues in the suburbs…?
New Zealanders also lack manners, whether in conservation (we “talk a great deal too much and usually at the wrong time) or in how we move – or don’t – in public spaces. We are also “very sentimental” and therefore are also cynical and this gives rise to “the opportunist policies we habitually follow in our political and economic activity.’
Our challenge, then as now, is to facilitate the organic growth of a New Zealand culture, not the synthetic, deliberate choosing and mixing of elements – for who does such choosing and mixing? What is required is for our cultural life to have and proceed from a “consciousness of purpose’, yet then as now, we stand “in the midst of chaos.” Our issue is we are unable – and unwilling – to decide on a central question of human nature: whether we are ‘radically bad’ or ‘radically good’? And this indecision puts our social legislation and systems at loggerheads, especially our educational and penal ones. For we need more than social security, for “that can easily mean boredom; and boredom is the worst of human afflictions, and never fails to lead to violence in the long run”. Eighty years on we must ask how much of our contemporary issues of violence, at individual, familial, community and national level arise from boredom and the lack of a culture of meaning and value?
Fairburn does not wish to abandon social security, but rather emphasize that it “is not in itself a sufficient ideal to quicken our energies and give tone to our social and individual life.” Secondly, the “establishment of social order is useless unless it provides for individual freedom”; but as he notes, “freedom has no meaning without a background of order.” This requires, in turn, “a way of life, a common consciousness, a common set of values” that celebrate and makes sense of living here, that can create an organic New Zealand culture and society, free of dullness and mediocrity, free of the falseness and pretentiousness of many aspects of our life. That is, a culture and society that means we will no longer be “bored by the insipidness of our social life”. What he would like us to develop an ability to “face fundamental problems with courage” and to “treat serious things seriously. (And by seriously, I don’t mean solemnly)”.
Eighty years on, how successful have we been in realizing Fairburn’s hope for New Zealand? Are we still too complacent to undertake the changes required? Do we continue to flatter ourselves – and seek the flattery of others – as to how wonderful and competent we are, when in fact we continue to lack an organic culture and still celebrate and are governed by and with dullness and mediocrity?
Mike Grimshaw (PhD Otago) is associate professor in sociology at the University of Canterbury. This article was first published HERE
2 comments:
Mike, you seem to be describing general humanity, once it has passed a particular point in its civilisational trajectory. Glub Pasha wrote on just this subject when he explained the bell curve most civilisations describe. At the beginning, strong incentives to build, (or more controversially to conquer), then trending into commercial and financial modes, then rent seeking and cynicism, and finally widespread corruption and collapse. To be replaced eventually by phase 1 again by a different population. Perhaps we are in the last phase?
NZ had cause to be complacent. We had one of the highest and most uniform standards of living in the world andby 1944 there was no obvious looming reason for demise. Fairburn was trouble dby lack f cultural advancement. I wonder what he would make of today when we are bent on returning to a culture not from the educated of Europe but straight from the stone age. And when business tycoons are even less cultured than decades ago. And he laments our stupidity. I wonder what he would make of today when, from school results, the fastest breeding sector of the population exhibits significantly diminished achievement, presumably linked to intelligence. Pom immigrants may have based their lives on traditional suburbanism, but from work colleagues and old tv documentaries many were very content with their 1/5 acre, recent near new stand alone group house and car many thought they were in paradise.. From my observation most fitted in remarkably well and, not being so obsessed with rugby, contributed to a myriad activities. Politicians fostered much of the complacency here. We were repeatedly told we could/should be a high wage economy; pie in the sky for a country with a large percentage dim population, miles from anywhere and relying on barely processed pine wood and milk powder for income.
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