Dave Witherow: Brave New World

The past five years have been quite a tonic. So much has changed. So much has vanished: our notions of citizenship, democratic freedom, the limits of authority, our identity as a nation.

This transformation began long ago and grew slowly – sufficiently slowly that most people, if they noticed it at all, were inclined to believe that it wasn’t all bad. What, if you thought about it, could be very wrong with a general loosening of restrictions inherited from earlier and less enlightened times? Why put up with custom and tradition, just because they were customary and traditional?

To the rebellious and disillusioned of eighty years ago many of the changes were exhilarating. The Big Fascist War was over, and as the wrecked economies of Europe were rebuilt and expanded the world was entering, it was widely assumed, an era of perpetually-advancing prosperity. And in this brave new world what could be more fitting than to question the rules prescribed by “folks in old-style hats and coats”, as Larkin described his parents’ generation. These old dudes were superfluous. They had had their day and were on the way out. Henceforth nothing would be believed just because it used to be believed – not even the Great Ghost in the Sky – the almighty, all-knowing, spiritual bogey-man.

Faith in religion – which in our part of world meant Christianity – had been in decline for a long time, undermined by science, by biology, by the sobering discovery that between us and the apes stood only a tick in the DNA molecule. Humans, it became clear, were no more than animals - a realization so initially destabilising that its ultimate acceptance meant goodbye to what was left of traditional Christendom.

“Is God Dead?”, queried Bishop Robinson in 1963, as the old faith fell apart around him, leaving little of permanence but the great Gothic cathedrals and the inspired art of the Renaissance – magnificent testaments to the mortal fears a vanished society - yet no more relevant now than the Dead Sea Scrolls or the hieroglyphs of the Pyramids.

For the young and carefree a new era was opening – an iconoclastic era where working-class youth, for the first time in history, were economically independent, with jobs for all, money to burn, and more stuff to spend it on than ever previously imagined. Every year was better than the last, and soon, it was predicted, automation would replace human labour, leaving us free to do as we wished - expand our minds, compose a masterpiece, cultivate our gardens. The last days of wage-slavery were clearly in sight.

The attraction of all this was undeniable. Now, in the Western world, there were fancy new toys to play with: televisions, microwaves, cars and motorbikes. Now we had birth-control, cheap booze, marijuana and mini-skirts. It was the old, libertarian dream come true, and the repressions of the past now seemed absurd, if not unnatural. Chastity? Forget it. Marriage? Who needs it. Fidelity, integrity, hard work and responsibility? You must be joking, mate. Do your own thing and don’t be a mug.

For a full thirty years the good times rolled. Petrol was cheap and apparently inexhaustible. Cars had big motors, hot cams, mood-music, and bench seats. And as the great rockets took off from Cape Canaveral it seemed that Growth and Progress would go on forever – the moon today, the stars tomorrow.

Yet even then there were doubting voices. The world’s resources, some said, were not inexhaustible, and perpetual growth, in any case, makes no sense in on a finite planet. Others pointed to the unfortunate precepts of biology, and reminded us that growth, let loose, is suicidal – the exact definition of the cancer-cell.

By the nineteen seventies, as the early Gulf Wars doubled the price of petrol, these doubts no longer seemed implausible. The Americans, abandoning their Vietnamese allies, became involved in new wars, suffering defeat after defeat at enormous cost.

Inflation soared, bankruptcies erupted, and in the US alone almost two thousand banks failed between 1980 and 1994. In New Zealand, during the same period, double-digit inflaton caused general distress and a rash of suicides in the farming community.

The new century brought no relief. In 2007-8 the world economy came close to crashing, a disaster averted only by bailing out the banking establishment with a monumental flood of fake dollars. The culprits were rewarded, the public defrauded, and here in New Zealand the crime-rate doubled in a single year.

It would be tempting, in the light of this dismal catalogue of apparent failure, to conclude that the expectations of just eighty years ago were no more than delusions, and the cult of Growth, as its critics had maintained, had all along been unsustainable.

In reality, however, these fears were never realistic. Growth had not stopped, or even slowed down. Growth is a protean, adaptive organism. It moves forward, like evolution itself, changing direction as circumstances permit – yet always reliably beneficial. Consider the internet, computers, cellphones, electric vehicles, and the miraculous new vaccines that now promise a new era of unprecedented health.

These advances, of course, are familiarly technological. Growth continues as before, but now also in new forms - in the way we live, the changing nature of our work and leisure, and even the basic structure of our society.

The nuclear family – Mum, Dad, and The Kids – is almost extinct now, replaced by a rainbow smorgasbord of ad hoc arrangements. Commitment is onerous, children are presumed to be incidental, and sex – last vestige of the tyranny of biology, no longer oppresses us. Sex, we all now realise, is endlessly negotiable, a voluntary condition to be changed at will by surgical wizardry and pharmaceutical interventions entirely unimaginable just a few years ago.

In politics we see similar advances. No longer are we condemned to the old political two-step of National and Labour. Now we have Diversity. Now we have the Greens – the party of flexible morality, acquisitive delinquency, and free-wheeling sexual aberration. Now we have Te Pati Maori, contemptuous of the majority of their fellow-citizens, openly racist, and devoted to the reconstruction of a taxpayer-funded tribal New Zealand - just as promised in the latest version of the Treaty.

What right-thinking Kiwi could object to this? Who would oppose a happy return to the bracing privations of the Neolithic? Or would wish to defend such colonial indignities as equal rights and one law for all?

On the global stage too, the same buoyancy prevails. The war in Gaza will soon be over. And with the Palestinian population (or what remains of it) shifted elsewhere, the desert will bloom again, cultivated by peace-loving kindly Zionists.

In Ukraine, simultaneously, the end is near, as the heroic warriors of Commandant Zelensky (the Winston Churchill of our times) inflict defeat after defeat on the despot Putin. A great victory is nigh, and this triumph, inspiring others, may one day proliferate until the flag of freedom floats over the Kremlin.

Everywhere we see Democracy resurgent. The Europeans are re-arming – a sure sign of Peace - while the Pentagon, poised for action, readies its arsenal for a final showdown in Taiwan. Nor are we, in remote New Zealand, remiss in rebuilding our military potential. We will play our part in the common struggle. We will augment our strength with a squadron of helicopters (well, almost a squadron), as soon as we can find the money. Our Navy, combat-hardened from it’s recent attrition in Samoa, is fighting fit, and almost ready to put to sea. We are lean and mean. How Mr. Putin will quake and tremble!

The worst is almost certainly over. Before long the war-clouds will fade away, and the sunny uplands of the future will be within our grasp. Our government, well-aware that this future depends on advanced Education, is determined that the light of learning shall finally penetrate our last provincial pockets of ignorance. Old prejudices will evaporate, and Indigenous Science, endorsed and applauded by the peerless intellects of our Royal Society, will resume its proper place in the onward march of civilization. Our universities, long constrained by a blind fixation on mere intelligence, have already been vastly expanded, and new college graduates by the hundreds of thousands are replacing a generation of colonist troglodytes whose day, none too soon, is ending.

These transformations are everywhere evident - from the serene acquiescence of our people to the condition of our infrastructure - our roads, railways, schools, libraries, well-packed prisons and full-to-bursting hospitals. These facilities, unrecognisable from just a few years ago, are solid proof of what can be done with minimal funding and the deft hand of an expanded bureaucracy.

New Zealanders, sometimes, are too modest. We have done great things – things that any nation might be proud of. Think no further back than to our recent history, to the Great Pandemic, to the Team of Five Million and the heroic leadership of Dame Jacinda. The shuttered dwellings, closed borders, triumphant lock-downs, life-saving masks and miraculous injections.

We have achieved much in these little islands. Yet a few tasks still await completion. Our fragile environment, overrun by rats, stoats, ferrets, and savage possums – remains vulnerable. But these predators, very soon, will be eliminated. And with their disappearance the forests will thrive again. The Kakapo will boom again. The Kokako will trill again. We will find the last shy, reclusive Moa, and reconstitute the legendary Huia. Our sylvan glades, before long, will be veritable cathedrals of native birdsong.

The final challenge, beyond doubt, will be intractable menace of Climate Change. But here too New Zealand’s commitment is a beacon to the nations. Our charismatic Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, following the best advice and refusing all compromise, will build enough big windmills to power the country, heat all our houses, and charge up several million electric cars. He will bring to an end the most lethal of our emissions, phasing out the internal combustion engine, and insisting that irresponsible farmers become responsible their irresponsibly farting livestock.

This, of course, will take some time. and meanwhile Mr Luxon will assist Air New Zealand in expanding the tourist trade, buying more big jets, and importing more and more wonderful people. He will sell what we still own to Mr Larry Fink, who - much better than we do - knows what’s good for us.

It is, perhaps, unremarkable that here in New Zealand the flame of liberty burns brightest. We are, after all, a small nation of independent-minded people - the first people on Earth to assert there’s unity in division. Others may differ. Some may argue, pull back, think twice, or hesitate to adopt such an apparently lunatic policy - but that’s not our way.

For we are Kiwis and there’s no flies on us.

Dave Witherow, who emigrated to New Zealand from Northern Ireland in 1971, is a columnist, author, script writer, and former scientist for Fish and Game.