Caleb Anderson: Was Winston right in poking the bear?

Numerous times in parliament Winston Peters has drawn attention to the mixed ancestry of Maori Party MP's. On the surface it seems inappropriate (and perhaps impolite) to question what a person considers their primary identity, but does he have a point here?

The visceral response he receives when he does this seems to expose a very raw nerve indeed.

Photographs of nineteenth century Maori bear testament to how different they were from modern day Maori. Photographs from earlier times depict a people more akin in appearance to present day aboriginal people. Beautiful of course, but little in common physically with those who claim to be Maori today.

They were likely vastly different in myriad other ways too, as we often are from our forebears.

Perhaps this, in part, has been one of the motivations for the systematic removal of museum displays, and books and photographs, depicting the (assumed) earliest New Zealanders. These displays, among other things, provided formidable evidence of the different physical appearance, historiography, genealogy, lifestyles, and customs of the earliest inhabitants of these isles, compared with those who claim identical whakapapa today.

Winston seemed to assert that tikis the size of the South Island, and facial tattoos, were a vain and overcooked effort to assert identity and connection, and that they were more resolent of insecurity, of ego and of theatre.

As with many New Zealanders I am something of a hybrid. My ancestors hit the high seas for a better life (as did the ancestors of early Maori). They came from places as far apart as Scotland, Russia, Germany, yet to be identified places in Eastern Europe, and I have Jewish ancestors, likely desperate to escape the common lot of all semi-assimilated Jews.

Point is, I am a mix. A good number of us are.

The postmodern/cultural marxist dialectic seeks unashamedly to create dissent, and division, at the point of cultural interface. The more successful they are at widening the divide, of emphasising dissimilarity over similarity, the more leverage for advancing their dystopian ideology. The point of division is where they recruit the foot soldiers necessary to upend the social order, and this is where most of their energy is directed.

It is also where they get the most attention.

But it seems to me that the disorder, dissent and conflict without has a counterpart within. They are mirror images of each other. It seems to me that we either integrate the many aspects of ourselves, including our mixed heritages, or we commit ourselves to life long inner (and/or outer) conflict.

The more we bury (deny) any part of ourselves, the more it comes back. The more it comes back, the louder it shouts at us. The more determined we become to push it down, the more it asserts that it will not be pushed down. In other words, the more pure we seek to be, and the more ardently we seek to purge ourselves, the more we distance ourselves from (and misunderstand) those we create as opposites.

If conflict psychology knows anything, it knows this. Denial breeds dysfunction.

So what happens at a macro level, happens also at the micro level, and vice versa. Conflict without, creates conflict within, and conflict within creates conflict without. The longer this goes on, the more detached people become from their inner, and outer, realities. The less they know themselves, the less inclined they become to know (and tolerate) others, because the "others", paradoxically, remind them of bits of themselves, the bits they don't want to be reminded of.

Where we come from is an important part of who we are. But we cannot pick and choose winners and losers here. Our genealogy is fixed and we cannot turn clocks back. Nor, with integrity, can we custom make our past in order to frame or reconfigure our present.

An integrated society, as with an integrated self, is always a work in progress. But we cannot become integrated as human beings, and as societies, unless all parts of our personal past and present, and that of our collective past and present are welcome, as absolute equals, at the table.

If anything is true, it is true that a continual emphasis on points of difference, over points in common, undermines the common humanity that is critical for social cohesion and authentic and fruitful nation building.

So was Winston right in poking the bear?

If nothing else he gave us a glimpse of where a good portion of our malaise comes from, why some are so quick to anger, of the lengths we can all go to defend our egos, cover our shortcomings, and deny that we are more like others than different ... and, perhaps scarily of all, of the huge price we are willing to pay for doing this.

Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.