LIFE IN NEW ZEALAND

Southland Times, Issue 25549, 18 December 1944, Page 4

LIFE IN NEW ZEALAND

Opinions Of A Philosopher

By <

J. N. FINDLAY.

After 10 years’ residence in New Zealand, as head of the philosophy department of the University of Otago, Professor Findlay left recently to take up a position in his native South Africa. This article was written on the first trans-Tasman airborne stage of his journey home.

Painlessly, in the soaring elan of mystical modern engines, one is lifted out of New Zealand, painlessly it slips away from one, an inert and powerless picture; the whole process is far too rapid for any valedictory tears. Is it then truly possible for them to melt away so easily, those seemingly solid mountains with their spikey Chinese contour, those undulating pastures that one loved to stroke spiritually, those precipitous vantage points from which one gazed on the blue vacancy of southern seas, those faces and voices, whether kind or unkind, that caressed or oppressed one, those quaint, shabby, agreeable streets and buildings that constituted for a while the whole architecture of one’s world? Yes, indeed, for such instantaneous dissolution is the lot and law of all things experienced; they vanish incontinently, leaving behind them only that inner residuum from which one can at best raise wandering vapours in the sad -"ff-indulgence of memory. CONFLICT OF CLASSES What, then, would one cite as most truly memorable in one’s ever foreshortening and receding picture of New Zealand? One might perhaps choose, as less personal and more readily communicable, that strange, senseless conflict of classes, that battle of the elite and the masses, which gives an unexpected piquancy and vividness to New Zealand living. Such conflicts would be quite in order in the major social structures, where power and wealth are vast and divided with the grossest inequity, but they are truly surprising in a structure where there is all too little of power and wealth to be battled for, and scarcely anything in the way of disparity to be adjusted. Historically, however, the situation offers nothing extraordinary. The small city States of Greece, poised perilously on their rocky citadels, and with equal peril on the fringes of starvation —whose wealthy pursued simplicity and achieved vulgar ostentation as much from necessitous circumstances as from inward preference—these small city States were after all the classic battleground of rich and poor, the seat of all those unmeasured animosities which could only be satiated by periodical essays in extermination.

Certainly there seems to be something of that classic rancour in the small cities of New Zealand. Outwardly, indeed, the garment is notably seamless. They extend before one, immense, formless aggregations of closely similar wooden houses, some spruced with paint, some weathered like an ancient schooner, some graciously or vulgarly Victorian, while others are as graciously or as vulgarly modern, but none displaying any distinctive marks of aristocratic or plebeian tenancy. Inwardly, also, there are as few observable differences. Everywhere one see the same autumn-tinted carpets, the same halfdrawn blinds, the same tassels and satin. Everywhere one finds the same faltering taste in pictures and decorations: one hears the same conversations and listens to the same radio programmes. Everywhere one finds the same material comforts, the same fanatical cleanliness and order, the same superb middle-class virtues and regrettable middle-class evils. THE ELITE AND THE MASSES Yet one gathers with astonishment that half of these wooden houses—situated possibly on some faint slope or eminence—are tenanted by a high nobility of the oldest vintage and the haughtiest pretensions, while the remainder are inhabited by obscure masses who will never “count socially.” And both the elite and the masses believe profoundly in these differences, and are passionately concerned either to maintain or to remove them. And though the sectional barrier is totally invisible, it is none the less electrically charged. And woe to any member of the high nobility who strays across the wholly imaginary zodiac which divides the social firmament, or who ventures to speak of “levelling” in a land where State action and other slower social forces have practically levelled every difference to the ground. We may prophesy that neither he nor his seed will be allowed to prosper, and that whatever shreds of reputation or consideration have been left him by the men will be gnawed from his bones by the inveteracy of the women. Nor is this queer conflict simplified or mitigated by all the useless, unreasonable voices of those who persist in chanting of direst revolution in a key suitable to other times and circumstances, and who turn every fact and problem in New Zealand into dialectical smoke. From these less than anyone

dare one expect a glimmer of realism and lucidity in social matters, from these less than anyone a fragment o! constructive help and guidance. Foi while they may be skilled in using

facts to the greater glory of their theory, and in using individuals in the service of their future world order, they are as little interested in a true understanding of the former as they are interested in co-operating with the latter. And since their future world-order, though sketched in scientific phrase, achieves at best the poetic clearness of John’s heavenly Jerusalem, it would be rash to trust them with the smallest enterprise, let alone with the whole refashioning and direction of society. A “DEEP DLLIBERALISM” And one remembers further, in one’s ever narrowing perspective, how all these strange antagonisms were heightened and embittered by the war. For while the war might have embalmed genuine differences and appeased antagonists who were fighting about something, it only served to deepen the schisms between opponents who were fighting about nothing. The nobility might have seen in it yet another opportunity for that unreasoning selfimmolation in< the service of a system whose merits they only inadequately appreciated, while their opponents might reasonably have seen in it the least imperialistic of wars waged against the most debased of enemies. And all parties might have rejoiced in such a happy harmony between the paths of patriotism and political progress. Yet both preferred to quarrel over their several reasons for pursuing a common end, and both sought and discovered in each other the comfort of an enemy within the gates. The war made manifest the deep illiberalism always inwardly characteristic of New Zealanders. They sought scapegoats for the undischarged animosities which were held in leash by their peace-time meekness. Some found such scapegoats in conscientious objectors, in refugees and in university professors, while others found them in newspaper editors, in returned soldiers, and in doctors. And all liberalism and liberty fell by storm in one salient incident, the regrettable silencing- of Jehovah’s Witnesses. For here was a body which had done no more than exercise the traditional Protestant privilege of heaping curses on “the Scarlet Woman”—curses which had never hitherto affected that lady’s health or reputation—which had done no more than exercise somewhat rashly a gift of prophecy and interpretation, which had refused, quite canonically, an offering of incense to imperial Caesar deified, and which now found itself manacled and muzzled when one of its more provocative exponents had fallen a victim to religious violence. And liberalism and liberty seem to pass away utterly in the ensuing silence of the lay and clerical world. The two old ladies of Wairoa, who lay murdered for a fortnight without attracting any neighbourly attentions, were not stricken down in any atmosphere of more absolute indifference. ACHIEVEMENT IN LEADERSHIP And looking back over all the strange strained episodes in this telescoped perspective, one admits with some reluctance that New Zealand, being what it is, could scarcely have been better governed in these latter years than it actually has been governed. And one is also forced, with some hesitation, to discover in its principal governing influence the indubitable lineaments of a statesman. For who else could have held together a nation of which a considerable part faces the world on Kipling, while the rest tries to face it on the Marxian dialectic? And who else could have combined an unsurpassed war effort with so large a measure of progressive legislation? More perhaps from necessity than from choice, more perhaps from circumstance than from principle, he has directed New Zealand wisely and in its best interests. And while we, in the historical foreground, may see unpalatable features of current policies, posterity with its discerning eye for major landmarks will judge differently and more favourably. Posterity, too, will see a steady trend towards well-adjusted, unfanatical solutions of the basic social problems, while we, in the historical foreground, see only too many crippling compromises and arrests.

And now these new Arabian genii have removed it utterly from my view, the country that I liked so well and criticized with such asperity. The whirr of the mystical modern engines continues; I must attune myself to novel and perhaps less pleasing prospects.