KEITH SINCLAIR, Auckland, 1963 | Mar 03, 2005 09:20
The University of Auckland Winter Lecture series of 1963 took the theme of The Future of New Zealand. The seven lectures in the series were subsequently published as The Future of New Zealand, edited by Muriel F. Lloyd Prichard and published by Whitcombe & Tombs.
The book includes lectures by Allen Curnow and Bill Sutch on New Zealand literature and the future of manufacturing respectively, but it is perhaps the last entry in the book, Keith Sinclair's The Historian as Prophet: Equality, Inequality and Civilization that has weathered best.
Sir Keith's essay is copyright to the University of Auckland and is used with the permission of Raewyn Dalziel. It was retyped from the original book by Fiona Rae. Its publication here is made possible by the kind sponsorship of Karajoz Coffee Company.
The Historian as Prophet: Equality, Inequality and Civilization
You must wonder what on earth an historian is doing in a series of lectures on the future. And so did I when I was asked to give this talk. An historian is a man who examines evidence, usually documents, according to certain techniques, and seeks answers to certain types of problems. He is generally concerned with what happened, and how and why it happened. The most conspicuous thing about the future is that it apparently hasn't happened. There is plenty of evidence available for the study of the future, indeed an embarrassing abundance of evidence. But until I know what events I am studying, I don't know which evidence is relevant. I am in the position of the detective in the first chapter of a whodunit. He is confident that a murder will be committed, but he doesn't know who will be the victim. Consequently everything is a clue to the solution of the crime: everything and nothing.
Can we extrapolate present trends into the future? This is the question that these lectures beg. The answer is – not very far. Even a trend of which we have the best evidence, for instance, population movements, may prove in twenty years to have been a phase and not a 'trend' at all. One thing an historian can confidently say, from studying the past, is that the future is almost always different from what people predict, though rarely, perhaps, completely different. Some of our expectations will be realized. But which ones? It may be that what I think important – our balance of payments problems, for instance – may vanish, while what I think a crisis invented by ageing, frustrated newspaper editors – juvenile delinquency – will soon wreck our democracy and produce a decrepit police state, a dictatorship of senility.
Most of what I might say about the future is either widely agreed – the need for more diversified economy, the need for closer relations with Asia – or else, like most prophecy, it is wishful thinking.
When I weighted these considerations; looked at the situation of the historian miscast as prophet; one thought I had was to pretend to be a future historian. I decided not to peer into the future at all, but to imagine myself a very rational historian a century or two hence, in a rational society, and to imagine what he would think of our society today. This seemed a justifiable approach, for criticism of the present naturally implies notions of how to improve in the future. But it struck me that most of the things an unborn historian would think remarkable about New Zealand in 1963 are not peculiar to us. For instance, it seems to me highly probable that this historian will think we exaggerate the difference between communism and capitalist democracy, as they are practised, and devote too little thought to their common problems, such as how the growing state machine may be controlled by the population. Or again, the future rational man would be appalled by the way in which, in capitalist societies at least, truth, honour, and our language – the most precious tools of civilization – are degraded every day by advertising. He would be struck, for instance, by the fact that it is legal to advertise cigarettes, a well known poison, and to aim this appeal to young people (though I am glad to learn that this practice is forbidden by the N.Z.B.C.). He would be amazed by our local follies. Some hospitals, for instance, derive their staff fund from sales in the hospital canteens, which sell cigarettes. The annual staff parties are thus financed by selling poison to patients.
But this approach seemed to lend itself increasingly to a rather 'superior' satire, and to be evading the challenge which was plainly inherent in my task. So I am going to talk about our future in a more serious way, despite the occupational hazards, though I am going to keep my unborn historian by me as a useful prop. I am going to talk about the future, not as a prophet or an historian, but as myself, a New Zealander who is partly an historian and a university teacher.
In a recent press report, the director of the Dominion Physical Laboratory, Mr W. H. Ward, is alleged to have said that 'the safest plan for New Zealand would be to decide what the country is going to be in the future and then settle down to plan how to get there'.
We can't, of course, decide what the future will be. Nor can we produce the future, as though we are carrying out a laboratory experiment, confident of the results. The most we can do is to decide what we would like New Zealand to be in the future, taking into account fairly plain limiting circumstances, such as that it is unlikely to become a great power, that it is inhabited by two races, that it is in the Pacific, and so on. We may then work towards the achievement of our ideal, not so much according to plan, a blueprint, but by daily making choices and decisions that appear to head in the right direction.
Ideals, visions of the future, are important facts, which exert immense influence on social development, without ever perfectly controlling it. A passionate vision of white mastery and black slavery has moulded South Africa: a pleasant dream of taking tea at Lyons Corner House – or Buckingham Palace – has shaped society in Remuera and St Heliers. It is of visions that I will talks today; our fathers' visions, and my own. I do not apologise for looking backwards as well as forwards. A. J. P. Taylor rightly says: 'Men see the past when they peer into the future.' And the future will be influenced by our past. We have to remember that there is an obvious sense in which the past is more real than the present. The past is immutable. The present is a moment, a point. Men commonly liken time to a stream. I would remind you of the Greek saying that you can't put foot in the same stream twice. Someone said you can't put foot in the same stream once. That is what the present is like. Here and gone. As soon as we touch it, it is past. The Greeks sometimes thought that the future was the past. Their word opiso, which means either 'behind' or 'in the future', contains the idea of time coming up behind men, who are stationary, passing them, and becoming the 'past' laid before their eyes. Or, putting it another way, the past is seen and known, and therefore before us; the future is unseen; it is what lies behind us.
The kind of questions I would ask are: can we conceive for our country a future more important or meaningful than success at exporting lambs or butter? Can we avoid the fate – or reputation – of Switzerland which (according to Graham Greene) is famous for the invention of the cuckoo clock? What can our people do that would be important? What could the word 'greatness' ever mean here? They are, you will agree, unusual, and to many people, plainly absurd questions.
It was not always so. Many of the founders of our state had such questions in mind frequently. Grey, Wakefield, Henry Williams, William Pember Reeves – they all hoped they were starting something important, though when they spoke of greatness they often spoke cant. Sir George Grey's mind dwelt so continually on the idea that New Zealand would produce a great nation, that he could not debate a Bill to alter the conditions of entry into the law profession without invoking the support of our unborn millions. (For twelve years, from 1880 to 1892, he tried to exclude Latin from the law examinations – apparently equating greatness with ignorance of the classics. 'I say', he said, 'our greatness will arise from studying laws made by ourselves, and not by clinging to musty records …') I am aware, you see, of the dangers I run between the sublime and the ridiculous; but to keep to my subject I must use the big words, and risk being naïve.
Two grand natal ideas lay at the foundation of our state, both parental gifts. One was the desire, which led the British Government to annex these islands, to achieve better racial relations here than had hitherto existed in the non-European world that Europe was busily invading. This ideal, of racial harmony, has exerted immense and benevolent influence. Perhaps before any other people we widened the concept of democracy to include non-Europeans. The Maoris received manhood suffrage in 1867. Though the ideal is, as yet, imperfectly achieved, it is achieved sufficiently to form our chief distinction. I do not mean that it is now done 'near enough'.
The other natal idea was Edward Gibbon Wakefield's. The grand objective of his system of colonization was that a high civilization should be established in colonies. He could not conceive of a new civilization developing there; indeed, if the colonists became what he called 'a new people', he thought they would be barbarous. So he hoped, by means of several mechanisms of land sales and immigration, to preserve in colonies the leisured, wealthy élite which he thought embodied civilization in Great Britain.
The means which he chose to that end were impracticable, but we must doubt whether any could, in the short run, have been effective. Is not the very idea of a 'civilized colony' a paradox? Had it been done, it would not, in my view, have been well done. There would have been, at best, an effete simulacrum of English middle-class culture. But the first generation of colonists, while holding to Wakefield's ideal of being British, took little heed of the fact that what he wanted was British civilization. His ideal was decisively rejected by the next generation who, led by the Liberals in the eighteen nineties, chose, instead, an ideal described by William Pember Reeves in two questions: 'Is it possible to have a civilization which is no mere lacquer on the surface of society? Can a community be civilized throughout, and trained to consist of educated, vigorous men and women; efficient workers, yet not lacking in the essentials of refinement?'
In choosing the ideal of educational equality, the New Zealanders made a break with an essential feature of British society which, right up to the present day, through private schools, the '11 plus', Oxford and Cambridge, educates a quite small élite. The New Zealanders also chose, of course, at the same time, the twin ideal of what we now call social welfare. Now many modern societies, communist and capitalist, have made those choices, but in those days they were remarkable.
The Liberals aimed at greatness in a moral sense. They wanted a society which cared for all of its members, including the young and the old, the neglected child, and the female factory worker. In 1900 New Zealand, with a population of less than 800,000, was nevertheless a great country. With some of the Australian colonies, it stood for something of central importance to humanity, as was widely recognized. It was studied and visited by many of the most distinguished reformers, political thinkers, and leaders in the European world.
That moral ideal must be, in my view, one of our abiding concerns. It was Dr Johnson, a Tory, who said: 'A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.' Gentlemen of education, he observed, were pretty much the same in all countries; the condition of the lowest orders, the poor especially, was the true mark of national discrimination.
No future I would want for New Zealand would turn aside from the effort to achieve that ideal, and to extend its application – to the mentally and the criminally ill, for instance, unfortunates for whom we do little. But I will not dwell on this topic. My views are widely shared and we are, at present, engaged in the kind of effort I describe. Present policies towards improving the situation of the Maoris, and of assisting development in the Pacific and Asia, however inadequate or imperfect, are a product of three of our traditional ideals: racial equality, social equality, and social welfare.
The pursuit of the joint ideals of equality and welfare is no longer a distinctive characteristic of our society. It would not support any claim to distinction. We are born in a privileged society, not a great one. Our present shortcomings I will initially sum up by saying that equality is not enough: it must not ignore the just claims and rights of inequality. Do please understand that, in the rest of this talk, I am not advocating oligarchy, or the creation of a privileged élite. I speak of what is specifically a problem of New Zealand society, which has demoted ability.
Pember Reeves made another remark which may serve as a text. In a debate, in 1888, on a tariff Bill, he quoted Goldsmith:
… ye statesmen who survey The rich man's joys increase, the poor's decay, 'Tis yours to say how wide the limits stand Between a splendid and a happy land.
He made it clear that, if he had to choose, he would prefer that New Zealand should be a happy land rather than a splendid one. He was in some ways unsympathetic to economic growth, which he thought likely to produce a depressed industrial proletariat, and frankly preferred to see the country inhabited by a million people 'happy, prosperous and satisfied' than twice as many living in dreary poverty. If that were the choice, most of us would agree with him. But was it the choice? Or was he not nursing small ambitions? André Siegfried condemned a dog-in-the-manger attitude he found here, and wrote that the Government 'should realize that a young country which, in spite of its youth, is already trying to preserve itself rather than to expand, is by that act condemning itself'. There is something drearily domestic in Reeves's vision of New Zealand utopia. In praising his country in London, he said: 'though it is not a great nation, it has in it the element of a stable and comfortable and civilised nation'. It sounds a bit like the women's weeklies' ideal marriage!
His countrymen made Reeves's choice. We have since been devoted to the pursuit of popular happiness, which now takes the form of simple materialism, the accumulation of property, and a somewhat hearty hedonism. In making that choice, we have accepted what was the most widely held ideal of the ordinary pioneers, who came out here in pursuit of profit, property, and a higher standard of living, which often gave people a greater sense of importance. A man who secured an agency for boot polish wrote in the early eighteen forties: 'The labouring class is as well off here as the nobs at home … A person has a little chance to do something in this part of the world, and that is more than you can do at home.' To 'do something' meant, you see, to abandon labouring for boot polish and a white collar.
I don't decry pleasure and property and comfort, but they are not the only ends of life. The simple materialism which has superseded Christianity as our active philosophy is not enough. I think that the concern for human welfare, once our glory, has gone soft, and become, only too often, a matter of comfort and not much more.
New Zealand made Reeves's choice. He would have chosen happiness rather than splendour if he had to choose. But his life shows that he was not certain he did have to choose. As a politician he worked for happiness. But as a writer he worked for a quite different end: the creation of a national literature and a national self-awareness. My hopes for the future would dwell constantly on this; or what his successors left out. The splendour. The superstructure of ideas, literature, art, knowledge, truth. Without what M. J. Savage called 'social justice', the idea and the art are vanity. Without the idea and the art, 'social justice' becomes middle-class comfort and conformity.
I would dream of a civilization based on equality, in the respects in which equality is valid: in educational, social, and economic opportunity; in legal and political rights. But I would also emphasize quality, which we have neglected. Wakefield was right in supposing that the intellectual and artistic flower of a civilization is, in the last resort, the creation and possession of an élite. New Zealanders don't like that. They are pleased to concede that there is a physical élite, but they ignore the existence of superior intellectual athletes. Whether we like it or not, however, there is an intellectual élite in almost every society. Part of it is included in the intelligentsia which consists, the dictionary tells us, of those people who aspire to independent thinking, and, indeed, do much of our thinking for us. (Camus says: 'An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.') Cricketing aristocrats and footballing public may think an intelligentsia is an ugly thing, but, like a head, it is necessary. The intellectual élite of which I speak is, however, much broader, and includes many scientists, technicians, executives, artists, scholars, writers, and some politicians.
The only future for New Zealand which would to me seem worth while would be to develop a new, but inevitably, partly European civilization. Albert Camus wrote that 'the destiny of culture is to produce a civilization', a remark which I would adopt, though he gives 'culture' and 'civilization' different meanings from my own. I use the word 'culture' in its sense of everything that pertains to refinement of manners and to artistic and intellectual excellence, as well as to social complexity – which we already have. To me, all that is embraced in the word 'civilization' is the supreme end of life, the finest product of the human being, and perhaps a phenomenon unique in a universe of otherwise unthinking matter (unless a table is 'a random collection of primitive experiences', and molecules have mental fields, as we were recently told in a 'Point of View' broadcast by the natural heir to Professor Bickerton).
I refer to the nature of the universe simply to make plain that I am not speaking of mere national ambition. But I must include some thought of cultural nationalism because cultures develop in richness through national and regional diversity. In the distant future a world-culture may replace national cultures, but at the moment the nearest approach to it lies in our common heritage of knowledge, art, and literature, freely available to the world through modern media of communications.
Civilization is profoundly serious. It has nothing to do with a trite piece of architectural wood-carving placed outside the Ellen Melville Memorial Hall; nor with ignorant cartoonists who mistake such a trivial carving for modern art. It has nothing to do with the antics of retired and battered footballers yelling at a piece of sculpture. (In connexion with this recent controversy, I might remind you of what happened to the Philistines: a thousand of them were slain with the jawbone of an ass. Regrettably, it is not usually the Philistines who are slain in the battle for a New Zealand civilization; nor are the strong and boisterous, who hold the jawbones, usually on the right side.)
A civilization is, as I say, profoundly serious. A civilization is man's speech in the face of final things: his answer to death. It is one thing that gives to life a meaning that death cannot take away. Civilization is man's discourse with eternity. Here, he says, is my absolute. It is a carved Maori face, grimacing at life. It is the Maori god Tu, the man-god, Man's idea of himself. Civilization is a man standing in the wind.
Those of you who cannot give civilizations the important place in the universal scheme that I do, may feel that I am exemplifying the truth of a remark quoted by James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son. He speaks of the necessity, for an American, to find a 'motive for living under American culture or die'. You might think that I am rationalizing my lot, to be a New Zealander.
We must now descend from flying over the sublime but distant peak to the first faltering steps up the slope. They are being taken principally in the universities. The future I have heralded must be made, as it were, on the premises. In the womb of our egalitarian society the future is growing from cells of inequality.
Why do I say this, when universities have existed here for nearly a century? Because I believe that a quantitative is becoming a qualitative change. Until fairly recently, though universities did their job well, they were tiny. They must have attracted a negligible proportion of the country's talent, for even secondary schooling was not universal until during the Second World War. Very many changes in New Zealand, of a kind which make me believe that a New Zealand civilization is not impossible, have derived their force from the universities in recent years. In 1946 there was no literary journal in New Zealand worth mention. The establishment of Landfall was a private enterprise. But the great improvement of our literary criticism, in its pages, has been brought about mainly by university staff and critics. A good deal of our prose fiction and verse has also been written in the universities. The great increase in the number of historians (there are now far more in Auckland than there were in the country before the war) has meant that most of the scholarly work on New Zealand history has been published since the Second World War. Staff publications of all sorts have multiplied as original research has increased. The staff, though not necessarily improving in average native ability, has, since the early thirties, become better trained, more professional.
The most important change, however, has been in student numbers. The proportion of the population attending our universities and other institutions of advanced education is now about the fifth highest in the world:
U.S.A. 1.9% U.S.S.R. 1.1% Canada 1.1% Australia 0.9% New Zealand 0.8% France 0.5% Great Britain 0.2%*
This growth has occurred in response to the demands of educational equality. But one of the consequences, which I think will change our society immensely, will be to produce a large intellectual élite. In this respect our universities are unique institutions in our society. No other institutions, not the church nor the law, have in the past much encouraged learning. There has never been a strongly established upper class which might (at some cost to everyone else) have encouraged the arts and learning. There has never been a numerous section of the population devoted to thought – nor, indeed, with leisure to think. The universities thus form a new element in our society, immensely more important than in the old centres of civilization.
Some teachers think we face a crisis of numbers versus quality, but I believe they are utterly wrong. Our hope of quality lies in the numbers, and the talent that numbers include. Not nearly enough people go to university – only some 3 or 5 per cent of each age group from sixteen to twenty-five are attending university. In the United States a half of one per cent of each age group graduate as Ph.Ds.! Only about one person in 150 in New Zealand is attending university. These figures seem to me very much below what we should aim at. Moreover, government expenditure on the universities (£4.6 million in the year ending in March 1963), though it is rising, is nowhere nearly high enough for the universities to fill their role adequately. It is less than the stabilization subsidy on wheat and flour; the same as the subsidy on milk. We simply can't afford, for instance, to establish a great library with our present funds.
It is essential, if New Zealand is to succeed in the economic and political competition of the future, for its small population to be highly trained, highly skilled. We need a very high average education, to assure flexible adaptation in the future, for only the young and the educated are educable. The universities will help to produce that educated citizenry. But one of the most important questions is – what are we going to do with the élite, those well above the high average, that the universities will inevitably produce? What are we going to ask of them? – and offer them? At present we do and offer next to nothing. The public at large does not accept that there is an intellectual élite, nor that there is a role for one. We export brains and import brawn.
My future historian would regard this as an extraordinary feature of our society. If some relevant document survives, he would learn that those graduates who receive the loudest acclamation at capping ceremonies are those who have scholarships to go abroad. He might infer that an interesting experiment in selective breeding had been in progress: that the aim of higher education had been, indeed, to select those who were to be exported. Any doubts would be dispelled if he learnt of the incredible number of New Zealanders on the staffs of American, British, and Australian universities – especially at the Australian National University! He would notice, too, that 50 per cent of such talent as inadvertently remained in the country was expected to devote its time, between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, to changing napkins and washing dishes. Créches might contribute as much to civilization here as the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council. My historian would also learn that, though there are only slightly more men than women in New Zealand, three times as many attend universities. In 1893 there were more female students than males.
The unborn historian would have difficulty in understanding our system of rewards and payments. He would observe, to start with, a de-emphasis on leadership. Eighty members of Parliament earn no more than waterside workers and only slightly more than the least competent and least qualified secondary school teachers. He would debate whether leadership was meant to be part-time, a perquisite of wealth, or an occupation so rewarded as to deter the most able.
He would observe, too, that the person commonly thought the most distinguished experienced writer in the country lives on a pension smaller than the salary of training college students. He would see clearly that small extra financial rewards are offered to skill – scientists and technicians, who are carefully selected and highly trained. But incentive – which means potential profit – is provided for farmers and businessmen who are not selected, nor very often trained. Moreover, they are protected from being stringently weeded out in competition by a complex system of price controls, produce boards, and producers' and retailers' associations – not to mention tariffs, subsidies, exchange controls, and import licences. My historian might label New Zealand the Society for the Protection of Inefficient Urban Producers and Distributors and the Prevention of Talent.
The future historian could not, of course, tell us anything we don't know on this point. From our documents he will learn that we know that we deprecate quality, and generally don't care. Our state medical system rests on the general practitioner. The specialist receives no encouragement – unless it be to practise generally on the sly. Our Junior National Scholars receive only £110 more than all under-graduates with higher school certificates; only £150 more than those with U.E. (accredited).
Perhaps you think I place too much emphasis on financial reward, but this is a modified capitalist society. Moreover, until New Zealand is more civilized, and makes a stronger call on them, patriotism needs to be made more profitable for the able. We might begin by paying high salaries to M.P.s and top civil servants, thus creating a greater range of incomes among the large proportion of the population employed, in one way or another, by the State. It would then be easier to reward intellectual leadership and ability of all kinds.
One question I have heard asked is whether there are, in our society, tasks awaiting an intellectual élite. Of course there are: tasks of the sort that will make a civilization. Our society needs higher standards in almost every intellectual and artistic respect, but it rarely demands them. Here, however, I am optimistic, for many, if not most, of our weaknesses are the characteristics of villagers and frontiersmen. Village-mindedness, pettiness, crudeness, philistinism, rough-and-readiness, are declining as the cities grow. Civilization is an urban phenomenon (as the origin of the word hints) which arises from the division of labour. As the cities grow in population and wealth, many of the tasks that intellectuals will take up are naturally arising. To take obvious instances – problems of town planning cannot permanently be ignored; the erection of large buildings calls for more difficult skills than small. A growing population requires a more thorough investigation of our natural resources than has been made, an investigation which only highly trained persons can carry out. Moreover, with the growth of a cultivated urban minority, there is a growing demand for aesthetic as well as utilitarian satisfactions. One might say that the pioneering phase is being outgrown, but I prefer to say that a new phase of pioneering has begun: the labours of intellectual and artistic frontiersmen. At the end of a recent history of New Zealand, W. H. Oliver wrote, in discussing our literature: 'The imperatives of the habitat are no longer ignored; the heritage of England and Europe has ceased to be an overpowering substitute for independent thought. Another group of settler demands has been made, and some answers offered. The spiritual pioneer is beginning to populate the land; he is restless because he knows himself to be part stranger, part intimate; he is demanding, not security, but understanding.'
A more difficult question to answer is whether the university, the academic tradition, is not positively antagonistic to the growth of the new – new ideas, new art forms, new civilization. I cannot deny the danger that our universities might be devoted to the European intellectual tradition, cosseting the old without cradling the new; but I do not think it is very great. It is not easy to stifle originality. To adapt a remark by Sartre to my purpose, the medieval clerk scribbled his poems in the margins of Holy Writ. Almost everything that modern universities mean, that is implied by the term 'research', is opposed to intellectual sterility. And it is in research, most of all, that the universities hold out hope for our future; research hand-in-hand with teaching.
Modern universities, especially in the United States, go farther than learning and academic research. They are new patrons of the creative arts. No one who reads modern American verse can believe that universities dampen this kind of originality. Fellowships open to writers and artists and musicians, like the Robert Burns Fellowship in Dunedin, are as valuable as lectureships and research posts in the largest university scheme.
But even ignoring research and the creative arts, in a narrower sense of learning, the universities must make our future. I refer to a phrase recently used by Sir Herbert Read, when talking about the possibilities of a New Zealand style: 'the habit of perfection'. Universities daily encourage, in those who have the stuff of perfection in them, that habit. We live with great men. We go to bed with Byron, or George Eliot – or Sappho. It is from those few who seek and most understand perfection that we, like all other communities, must hope most. The future of New Zealand must be sought on high Everests of mind and tracks of wit. It must be found in the endlessly laborious but exciting tasks of research, of writing and revision, sketching and painting, draughting and experiment.
One of our traditional ideals I have scarcely mentioned. To be 'British' has been a major aspiration of many New Zealanders. Since Britishness lies at the source of many of the silliest of our excesses, one can feel sure than my future historian will have a good deal of fun with it. The extra lavatories built all over the country for royal tours. The evolution of Governors-General from dictators to, it would seem, state literary critics, within a little over a century. A century of royal fever and fervour, with its accompanying petty snobbery, sycophancy, and militarism. How much of our past is summed up in a splendid telegram, sent it was thought by Seddon himself, to the Earl of Meath, who started Empire Day. This is a complete historical document:
'Empire Day inaugurated successfully. Great Enthusiasm. School children assembled hoisted saluted flag throughout colony. Patriotic speeches made. Governor opened Veterans' Home, Auckland. Victoria Memorial opened Christchurch. Premier opened Victoria Wing Wanganui Hospital. Volunteers paraded; holiday general; universal rejoicing.'
One aspect of 'being British', which I can only touch on, has been our desire to emulate the military virtues of the British, who have, for centuries, been, of all nations, the one most frequently involved in wars. We have tried to get in as many as possible, and take great pride in our feats of arms and our enormous casualty lists. It is probable that this militarism will be a dwindling asset in the future: a future belonging to rocketry, not infantry. My personal opinion is that neutrality would be a highly desirable policy, as tending to keep H-bombs at a distance. When you consider it, who could have attacked New Zealand in the past – I mean, invaded it, not just fired a few shells or dropped a few bombs on the coast – if we had kept out of wars and alliances and decided to defend only ourselves? Certainly not the Boers. Nor the Germans in 1914-18, nor in 1939-45. They were too far away and lacked the shipping. Only once have we been directly threatened – by the Japanese – while our best troops were away fighting the Germans and Italians. Only once, when we fought the Nazis and the Japanese, did we fight for what most modern historians regard as good causes. I mean that almost no historians believe that the British were justified in killing thousands of Boers; nor that the Germans were responsible for the First World War. But whatever you think about the past, I believe we can do more for civilization by staying out of wars: we might ensure that some of it survives.
In New Zealand 'Britishness' has involved other things than John Bullishness. The future historian won't fail to see that the effort to be British was a source of strength as well as weakness, providing a code to live up to. He may also think it was a useful political device to keep the head of state, at no expense to the taxpayer, 12,000 miles away, rather than to elect an ex-prime minister or general as president. There's a chance, indeed, that New Zealand will, in a few centuries, be the last monarchy in the world. But I feel sure that New Zealand will be much less British when the future historian writes. Moreover, I am satisfied with that prospect, not as a critic of British life (indeed, I would rather be in London than anywhere else in the world, outside Auckland), but because we never can have a high civilization that is British. For us to want to be British is a poor objective, like wanting to be an understudy, or a caretaker – or an undertaker. Any New Zealand civilization will certainly be mainly European, and British, in origins, but it will be 'something different, something nobody counted on'.
Many New Zealanders now accept this conclusion: what does it imply? In my view, the Australians have partly found the answer, in its non-British immigrants. They present the natives with other choices – good and bad choices – in conduct, habits and thought. They bring new skills. They bring variety, which stodgy New Zealand needs. But need New Zealand be white? Will the minority of human beings with large noses and pink hairy faces inherit the future? I doubt it. And it seems to me that our future civilization, which we can scarcely imagine, is likely to be created by people of different races, facing the future together in these islands. I would welcome, then, more Polynesian and Asian immigration, especially if it were combined with an active programme of education for native and immigrant, aimed not at complete assimilation, but at integrating the newcomers into our political and social activities, so they they no longer remain outside our life, like so many of our Chinese and Indians, but become active New Zealanders. Then the challenge of their difference will be fully presented to us, instead of going underground.
Many European New Zealanders will resent this suggestion. But let us be modest. In my future historian's history of civilizations, the Polynesians will receive some attention. They have contributed a unique sculpture and design, for instance, to man's heritage. The European New Zealanders have done little of note and will scarcely deserve more than a mention except for their contribution to better race relations.
Perhaps that is where our future lies. We live on the border of an area where man's future will be made, where Asians, Polynesians, Europeans, and other races meet, or confront one another across the Pacific Ocean. Pember Reeves was violently opposed to Asian immigration, seventy years ago, because he thought it threatened the prospects of a New Zealand civilization. I think the opposite, and believe that our future civilization, the creation of an élite, may arise from racial equality as well as from higher education.
* Table based on figures in UNESCO, Basic Facts and Figures, 1961. The British figure consists almost entirely of university students and could, perhaps, be doubled if training college and other students were included.