David Round: Thoughts for our Time - Article 7

I grew up in a different country ~ the New Zealand of more than half a century ago. It had its faults, of course, as all countries do, but in an imperfect world it was pretty good. It was a now-vanished golden era of optimism, prosperity and opportunity.

I was younger, and rather more naive than I am now, but as I recall I would, in my idealistic youthful innocence, have been prepared to fight and die for my country. My father had served in ‘the war’, as we still speak of it, as did uncles, some of whom did not return; I had a grandfather at Gallipoli, and a great uncle killed at Messines....

And how can man die better

Than fighting fearful odds

For the ashes of his fathers

And the temples of his gods..... ?

That was a long time ago. The poem that comes to mind now is no longer Macaulay’s tale of brave Horatius and his companions defending Rome against Lars Porsena, but Yeats’ Irish airman foreseeing his own death:

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;

Those that I fight I do not hate,

Those that I guard I do not love.

My country is Kiltartan Cross,

My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor;

No likely end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before......

The only country I would be prepared to fight for now would be, like the little village of Kiltartan Cross, rather more old-fashioned and a lot closer to home than the new diverse multicultural New Zealand. This is not disloyalty; it is the natural and inevitable consequence of the diversity we are all supposed to applaud. We are all different now. Why would anyone be prepared to fight and die for people with whom one has less and less in common?

What would we be fighting and dying for? The Treaty? Diversity? Other people’s cultures? The right to be a despised and exploited second-class citizen in what was once our own country? Who would fight for strangers?

Who, for that matter, would live and work for strangers?

A country hangs together only as long as its citizens have a shared understanding, however unspoken and even incoherent, that they are all one people, engaged in a common enterprise and with common interests and ideals. A country has to believe in itself; believe in its own ways, and its own virtues. Why would we sacrifice ourselves if our history has been just one long dark catalogue of bad racist behaviour? Why would we fight if our enemies are just as good as we are, or perhaps even better?

We have to believe in ourselves, and in the validity and goodness of who we are and how we do things. Yet the whole grand intellectual project of the last couple of centuries, at least, has been to destroy any meaning and purpose in life. God, religion, nation ~ to the cold eye of materialist science, these are all delusions. From the ‘Enlightenment’ onwards, it has been the purpose of the leading lights of our culture to demolish antiquated beliefs and hierarchies and replace them with.....what? Nothing. Emptiness. Meaninglessness. Now, of course, taking it a step further, it turns out that our civilisation has been worthless and downright bad from the beginning! Present-day multicultural ranters are merely the logical outcome of an intellectual process long under way. And yet these same voices now profess to be dismayed that people pursue nothing nobler than vulgar wealth, or ‘celebrity’, or the idle pleasures of sex and drugs and mere sensation. Why should they not, if material things are all that exist, and our short lives hold no higher purpose?

This is, perhaps, part of the reason for the enthusiasm for the Treaty, which appears to be somewhat stronger among the ‘educated’ classes. Treaty worship and its associated veneration for supposedly deep Maori spiritual connexions with the earth attempt to fill the void at the heart of modern life. There is ample evidence, after all, that much Treaty ‘education’ is little more than religious indoctrination. Treatyism is indeed our new religion. We watch reverently and uncomprehendingly as speakers speak at length in Maori at public events. What difference is there from the way in which we used to listen to the priest mutter the words of the Mass in Latin? Whether they speak Maori or Latin, they have the power. Why do they speak in a language which they know perfectly well most of us do not understand? It is not for the purpose of communication.

G. K. Chesterton said that the sad thing about atheists was not that they believed nothing, but that they would believe anything.

‘Culture’ is simply how we live. It is not just the fancy dress which we put on when we go to the opera, or the marae; those are part of it, but they are rather like the special things we keep in the china cabinet and take out only on special occasions,. Our culture is the food we actually eat every day, the clothes we actually wear, the language we actually speak, the work we actually do, the sports and entertainments we actually watch or participate in, the music we actually listen to. It is our actual celebrations ~ summer holidays, Christmas and Easter, birthdays and baptisms, weddings and funerals. It is also, beyond that, the attitudes which determine how we behave. Our culture is, or was, characterised by informality and easiness; by a love of the outdoors, by a dislike of stuffiness and privilege, especially unearned privilege, and of bludgers and spongers of all descriptions. We believed in a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. We fiercely believed in equality, which naturally accompanied our belief in democracy and in fairness ~ the equality of the sexes, and the equality of races. Even though we are not a church-going people, all of this was based on our understanding of Christian teaching; we are still living in the long twilight of Christianity. (Indeed, ferocious secular supporters of Maori culture might well be dismayed, if they actually understood the language, at the extent to which Christianity underlies much of what is now regarded as traditional Maori culture!)

This is our culture. We can debate how much of it survives. It is under attack from all sides ~ from the capitalists and globalists, who want us all to be anonymous wage slaves in a remorseless international money machine, and from angry self-righteous self-haters who know only that everyone else is better than we are.

Like brave Horatius, we have to fight for the temples of our gods. First of all, we have to know who our gods are.

To be continued…

David Round, a sixth generation South Islander and committed conservationist, is an author, a constitutional and Treaty expert, and a former law lecturer at the University of Canterbury.