David Harvey does an excellent lengthy response to Wilson’s assertions.
Read it all, but here are some key aspects:
The article argues that Hammurabi had law and therefore rule of law isn’t Western; India had universities and therefore Western universities are not unique and Japan had novels and therefore literature is not Western.
These are all non sequiturs.
Civilisations develop particular institutional trajectories, not monopoly patents on ideas. The relevant question is not who invented something first, but where did our institutions come from? Which civilisation’s intellectual tradition shapes the society we actually live in?
New Zealand’s legal and political system is not Babylonian, Mayan, Indian, Arab, or Chinese. It is English common law, Westminster parliamentarism, and Greco-Roman intellectual tradition, synthesised through Christianity and the Enlightenment.
Claiming “Hammurabi existed, therefore Western legal tradition isn’t special” is historically and conceptually incoherent.
This is key – it is not who invented the idea, but who made it an enduring institution.
The abolitionist movement, parliamentary government, separation of powers, constitutionalism, and human rights came from the West, not despite it.
To claim Western civilisation “was built on slavery” ignores slavery was universal across all civilisations and still is present in some cultures. The West eliminated it first and globally through moral reasoning grounded in Christianity, natural law, and Enlightenment liberalism.
This is not triumphalism; it is historical fact.
In New Zealand slavery was legal and common prior to any Western colonialism. It was effectively made illegal by the Treaty of Waitangi. It did persist in the Chathams until the resident magistrate in 1863 issued a proclamation formally releasing the remaining Moriori from slavery.
One estimate of the prevalence of slavery in New Zealand prior to 1840 is that half of the North Island population were slaves.
David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders
10 comments:
Was this rebuttal printed by the Herald?
Legal expertise vs histrionics
Spot on. The slavery issue is one that I was often hit with as a White member of the academic staff at a Black university in Africa. The worst thing one can do is come across apologetic. Blimey, I said, it was YOU lot who started it, and given half a chance you're back at it; it was US lot who ended it, so there.
Yes, slavery remains alive and well in parts of Africa........ and not a White man in sight!
What the NZ Herald’s Simon Wilson never quite admits is that his comparisons only work if you leave the lights off.
Pointing to Hammurabi, ancient Indian universities or early Japanese literature is clever, but irrelevant to the only question that matters: Which civilisation built the institutions we actually live under?
Our legal system isn’t Babylonian. Our Parliament isn’t Vedic. Our rights don’t trace back to the Heian court. They come from the West — common law, parliamentary government, Christianity, natural law, Enlightenment reason. That lineage is not mythology; it’s what underwrites every freedom Wilson relies on to critique the civilisation that gave it to him.
There’s also a conspicuous silence running through his argument.
If we are going to gesture reverently at other civilisations as counter-examples, then intellectual honesty demands we look at what life was actually like under them: entrenched caste hierarchies, widow-burning, hereditary servitude, slavery on an industrial scale, ritual brutality, absolute monarchs ruling by divine whim. These aren’t footnotes; they were the operating systems.
The West had its failings — every civilisation did — but it also produced the institutions that abolished slavery rather than normalised it, elevated individual rights rather than stamped them out, and constrained power rather than sanctified it.
That is why we live under Western institutions, not because they were first, but because they proved durable, reformable, and universal in their moral claims.
Wilson’s worldview requires downplaying all that.
It treats the West as a villain to be prosecuted, never as a tradition to be understood. Hence the rhetorical sleight of hand: highlight the sins, minimise the achievements, and invoke distant civilisations as if merely naming them dissolves the intellectual foundations of our own.
It doesn’t. It only dissolves clarity.
And the deepest irony?
Wilson’s ability to live in an ivory tower and denounce Western civilisation without fear, censorship, or consequence is itself a luxury created by the very civilisation he insists on diminishing.
— PB
Saved from lame-brains by never reading the Herald - or any other public paper.
How boring , it's all the left can talk about . The far left have Marxism as the alternative - Totalitarian states with tyrannical leaders. Hard fought for freedoms all lost , along with respect for the individual Then it will be Sharia rules and strict compliance to Islamic beliefs or the death penalty. What about Western music , literature , and art? All to go as well ? Where is the appreciation for selectively science unique to the West that has given us so many life enhancing technologies to reduce poverty , hardship and discomfort For many Christianity is the real target of their hatred which that is the foundation of the West.
The agenda of the far left is to dismantle Western Culture but particularly Christianity.the Wests foundations . Their alternative leaves us with Marxism where there are two categories oppressed or oppressor. There is no individual responsibility nor respect for the individual . Collectivism is the aim . Progressive education has been badly affected by this ideology .
Anon 923 seems to think that Marxism and Islam are flipsides of the same coin. But classical Marxism didn't like Islam any more than Xianity. Classical Marxism is, after all, explicitly atheistic, while Islam is (and there really ought to be no need for me to tell anyone this) fanatically monotheistic. This creates an oil-and-water scenario when the two come into contact.
This writer seems to be unaware of the 'neo' prefix for most modern Marxism (well, since the 1950s, actually......) in which the oppressor/oppressed model was extended beyond the industrial state (owners, supported by the State, vs workers) to imperial power/third world relations, and as time went by, to sex and race relations within societies. Religion is part of the problem from the neo-Marxist's point of view only when it actively supports the status quo. Which it doesn't always do - recall 'liberation theology', a very hot topic in Catholicism a few decades back; it is interesting to see some branches of Protestantism going the same way (e.g. some Anglicans). Readers may recall an exchange I had in these annals with someone who lectured us all about how naughty we were in oppressing the Maoris, and then signed off by inviting me to church to wash away my sins as oppressor. Sigh...........
Marxism is inconsistent . It has in the past condemned all religion but then become happy in CRT to ignore the religious aspects of Maori which it embraces. This has me conclude its real target of destruction is selectively Christianity. Liberation theology has Marxist themes as does Freire's 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed' a favourite
text of radicals. Freire claimed he was Catholic . There is guile here in Marxism sneeking its ideology into Christianity. But not a new tactic. Pagan ideas were introduced from Greece and Roman into the church , which had to be purged in the Reformation. Christians would usually accept that the church is constantly under attack from the outside world and there is a need for constant renewal of true beliefs. The book of Revelation warns of apostasy and that is what we see today in main stream churches . That is why Pentecostalism is thriving .It recognises churches can get off track because scripture tells them so. I don't think Islam has the same self-correcting mechanism. Lying and deceiving is acceptable in Marxism since its main agenda is perpetrating of its own agenda.
Islam certainly does have a 'self-correcting mechanism'. The two 'holy books' in Islam are the Qu'ran and the Hadith. The first of these is considered infallible as it supposedly reproduces the messages from Allah to Muhammed through Gabriel, faithfully recorded by the Prophet's scribe as Muhammed was illiterate. The Hadith is a collection of reported sayings of the Prophet and other great personages in the decades and indeed centuries following Muhammed's demise. Muslim scholars may debate the authenticity of these and/or quibble about their application without being accused of blasphemy.
An example of Hadith law I came across while in Lebanon is muta'a marriage, which the Shia continue to permit while the Sunni consider it as having ceased to be legitimate after the time of the Prophet. Muta'a involves a man and a woman coming to a contractual marriage arrangement for a fixed term. This arrangement was seen as desirable at a time when there was a serious shortage of Muslim brides and when single men would be engaged in combat or border guard duty for weeks or months at a time. Muta'a marriage provided excellent legal cover for the brides - so much better than standard permanent marriage that some Shia couples today who intend spending the rest of their lives together enter into 99-year muta'a contracts.
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