Expat: Unravelling the Fair Go or what have the Romans ever done for us

I never intended to leave New Zealand. I went to the US for a year with no plan to stay, and thirty years have somehow slipped by. Retired now from medical research I’ve been able to return home for a month or two each year, intervals that show my once prosperous and egalitarian country unravelling in real time.

Media headlines feature political struggles, but those run downstream from a tacit cultural tussle occurring in front of a preoccupied populace. Too radioactive to declare prematurely, the institutional destination is cloaked in a moral frame that stalls any open discussion.

How did this successful country come undone?

It helps to go back to basics and consider the survival needs of our primate ancestors. Those are at the root of the tribal instincts that endure as pre-rational settings for our lives. And they draw us back like gravity: Stick to your own kind; Trust only your kin; The outsider is suspect; Silence those who disagree with our beliefs and sensibilities.

Societies in which we trust agreements made with people not our kin took centuries of struggle and bloody conflicts to establish. Europe had to be dragged kicking and screaming through the Reformation and Enlightenment to accommodate a view that valued individual rights and conscience. Those now form the ground of the liberal state.

These radical humanistic values are implicit in the everyday life of societies, imperfect as they still are, and the appeal that results is evident in the hardship and danger people will undergo to get into them. Those of us who had the dumb luck to be born into one, the ‘we’ who never had to ‘earn’ that inheritance, assume these principles are natural and take their continuance for granted.

In that, we are especially vulnerable because radical ideas like liberty and equality before the law never had to be thrashed out and enshrined in a philosophical text like the US Constitution. Our political structure landed as a near fully formed clone of Britain’s unwritten code, and we have little patience for the finer points of political philosophy. We got by with a common-sense Protestant moral code; a lightly schooled version of justice distilled into a gut-level "fair go" for the working person.

Fair go sufficed for a long time as our forebears created a high-trust society and got on with building homes, schools, hospitals, roads, railways and harbours, hydroelectric dams and a national grid. The remarkable infrastructure later generations have been neither grateful for or adequately cared for.

New Ideas Arrive, Unchallenged

But other ideas have arrived to challenge these embedded values as the academy enthusiastically adopted post-modern critical theory from the US. And as the growing number of their students became the professional managerial class, that worldview became embedded in education, civil service, healthcare, the arts and the press. With little intellectual ballast to defend liberalism, it is now the cultural hegemon.

Critical theory maintains that there are no intrinsic group differences, so a group’s disadvantage must be due to some structural injustice. Conversely, any advantage is a result of privilege. Its most significant institutional effect has been the racializing of disadvantage and a drive for governance based on biological ancestry; any drop of Māori blood.

This dispensation negates the hard-won victories that level old hierarchies by supporting individuality, the right to live life as you see fit, and to be judged by your competence instead of your ancestry. It insists rather, that we identify ourselves as Māori or Pākehā. In the worst sort of irony, liberal values become seen as further pakeha oppression.

And so, once again in human history, the gap opens for the old draw toward blood and soil. Forgetting its trail of misery, including for Māori, it this time finds respectability behind critical theory’s intellectual fig leaf. Blind to its cultural colonialism we’ve put this view on steroids; a bit like we did with the fourth Labour government’s neoliberal reforms.

When narratives can’t be challenged, they become oppressive

Traditional cultural narratives tell a positive story about its people and their place in the world. That’s their job. They are self-serving. They are also static and immune to critique. Cultures exposed to open criticism from within, and importantly from without, change their beliefs and norms, sometimes violently, to allow a way of life more conducive to the general well-being of the members. It’s an error correction mechanism. Those are the cultures people are willing to risk their children’s lives, to get into.

A Māori cultural narrative that can overlook its dysfunctional features while remaining immune to critique, limits the opportunities of both its members and the rest. And critical theory’s sacralization of minorities makes that immunity unassailable. Outsiders are silenced or self-censor so as not to be labeled racist, while inside critics are seen as race traitors. Short circuiting the discomfort of transparent self-examination arrests cultural development.

Conclusion

Human history shows clearly that peace and prosperity are not our default settings. They are fragile and require decades of education and socialization in the values that allow them. When foundational ones are de-valued or neglected, history also makes clear that we open the door to distrust and the reappearance of nepotism, corruption, and generational tribal squabbling.

Dynamic societies clumsily update their norms over time, and we are going through a period of that at present. The foundations of the high-trust society we inherited, such as equality and meritocracy, are being challenged by the imported ideas of critical theory. Although quite alien to the majority of New Zealanders, but lacking articulate and culturally confident spokespeople, dissenters are readily dismissed or ridiculed. And in the absence of a neutral public forum to steady our remote and fragile ship of state, the country is not well equipped to navigate its way through this.

None of us can be blamed or take credit for what we are born into. That’s just luck. But amidst it all, it’s good to consider that this functioning society we had the dumb luck to be born into was established by braver and more thoughtful minds than we’ve had lately, and we have a responsibility to steward the values that gave rise to it if we want it to be there for our children.

Expat is a New Zealander resident in the US and recently retired from medical research.