“We were here first,” is no justification for anything

10 July’s The Platform debate between Julian Batchelor and Buddy Mikaere, skillfully moderated by Sean Plunket, helped to highlight some of the issues in the co-governance controversy with particular reference to Batchelor’s meetings around the country.

Hopefully, New Zealanders may be starting to have a debate we should have had a long time ago. Major credit must go to The Platform for enabling discussion to take place. There are many places -- such as much mainstream media and, I regret to say, within legal organisations such as the New Zealand Law Society and the New Zealand Bar Association -- which promote one side of the debate but refuse to share the platforms they have with those who disagree.

”To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility…. [Those] who are accustomed to unlimited deference, usually feel this complete confidence in their own opinions on nearly all subjects.” So said John Stuart Mill 165 years ago, in On Liberty. It is a specific example of the historic struggle between liberty and authority.

I want to take Julian Batchelor to task for his emphasis on cultures and cultures being represented – 160 cultures in New Zealand, consulting with 160 cultures, he said several times, to indicate why he disagreed with co-governance involving a special position for the Māori culture. I take him to task, not because he claims infallibility but because he was undermining his own position.

It may seem technical or semantic at first sight, but it is crucial to note that a culture does not have a physical presence and does not represent views. Culture in the relevant sense means “The distinctive ideas, customs, social behaviour, products, or way of life of a particular nation, society, people, or period” (Oxford English Dictionary). These ideas and behaviour are the ideas and behaviour of individual people which become distinctive because many individuals within the nation, society, people or period have the same ideas or behave in a similar way.

A culture represents the dominant ideas. That a culture exists does not mean that everyone subscribes to the ideas, although authority figures and regimes, confident of their own infallibility, may suppress dissenting voices.

Only individual human beings have a physical presence within a community. Only individuals may consult or be consulted. Only individuals may represent others. They may do so as a group, with one or more spokespersons, with whom others agree, but they nevertheless speak and agree, as individuals. There is no such thing as a collective mind. Such a thing does not exist.

That, at root, is why racism is irrational and evil. It pretends that a category of people distinguished in some way by the nature of their ancestry are a collective mass with collective ideas, behaviour, etc. It proceeds as if there were one mind doing the thinking for all persons with that ancestry, dictating the ideas and actions of them all. A moment’s thought reveals this to be a ridiculous proposition.

Buddy Mikaere’s claim that Māori have a special entitlement because they were “here first” is incapable of rational justification; so, also, is Julian Batchelor’s claim that other cultures are entitled to participate. The only valid entitlement to anything is an individual entitlement. In a rational and just society, that entitlement must be earned by achievement.

No one can claim an entitlement derived from something done by someone else. The exploration of the Pacific and the discovery of New Zealand some 800 years ago by those great Polynesian navigators and explorers were monumental achievements. They are entitled to admiration and honour. They earned it.

Their achievements are not the achievements of their progeny, even of their children. No one living today is entitled to anything by reason of that achievement. Nor can someone claim an entitlement because they are of English, Chinese, Indian, Māori or any particular ancestry.