But that is the dream, and the dream never comes off. The New Zealander does not always blame God or nature or human nature: he generally imputes the evil to ‘some chaps’. Men are in two classes, the ‘white jokers’ and the ‘bastards’. When it’s all boiled down there aren’t many in the world you can trust. The untrustworthy are the people one doesn’t have direct contact with – the watersiders, for example, seen through the polemic of Mr Holland’s radio turns and the daily press – or foreigners: a foreign tongue sets a New Zealander’s nerves on edge, he feels the speaker is deliberately taunting his incomprehension. Even people who speak English with an accent are watched, like yanks and ‘pongos’. The New Zealander lost among strangers is as trusting as a provincial asking his way in a big city, yet of people he doesn’t see or speak to, or of minorities, he is as suspicious as anyone in the world. Wilfrid Meynell mentions a New Zealand major of World War I who told him that British statesmen of the nineteenth century were far too trusting when it cam to dealing with foreigners. (Wilfred Meynell, Who Goes There, London, 1916). At the fall of France an aunt of min said, ‘It only goes to show you can’t trust foreigners.’ So there’s no one satisfies a New Zealander but a New Zealander. The New Zealand way of life is unquestionable and what is not like it is ‘mad’. Europe is backward and uncivilized in his eyes, they haven’t the same comforts and their art and architecture is of course ‘antique’ and ‘educational’ but it’s out-of-date. On a 3ZB radio quiz one man, asked his opinion on the Greek treatment of women, said, ‘Well, that was in the olden days. The Greeks weren’t civilized.’ Asia is worse than Europe. There are only two countries in the world we may emulate – the U.S. and Britain, and perhaps the ‘white’ Dominions. The attitude is not only provincial, it is bourgeois. It is the arrogance of the American labelling other people ‘gooks’ and ‘wops’: the New Zealand soldier had his ‘Wogs’ and ‘Ites’ and ‘Teds’, at home there are the ‘Chinks’ and ‘Ikes’ and ‘Dallies’ and even the ‘Horis’. It is the smallness of the mind of the man brought up to believe his own customs infallible and people who don’t observe them worthless.
But middle class attitudes don’t play so hard on the worker as they do on farmers and small tradesmen and clerks and civil servants. The worker has questioned the assumption that each man is his own economic responsibility, though he will hold no brief for the ‘cadger’; but he has no other measurement of success than material comfort. Now I’m not pleading ‘spiritual needs’: I accept the right of men to material goods. What is wrong is the closing of mind to everything not tangible or immediate. The worker’s object for his son is to see he gets a good job: what doesn’t lead to it is a waste of effort. (So he often doesn’t approve of higher education for his daughters.) To have a trade or a training for a profession is the aim of ‘schooling’: a humanist concept of the bringing out of innate abilities is beyond him, so is a socialist concept of the developing one’s capacities with the aim of serving society or any concept of converting matter and energy for the benefit of his grandchildren. The world is the world: his world is Ashburton or Waimihia, he wants to set his boy right in the system he knows: he has no wish either to change the system or to make his boy bigger than the place Waimihia will allow him. Life is a race: education (as the editor of this journal said) is an obstacle race; the modest aim is to be in the running, and the decent thing is to slow down the pace. The competition is not so fierce that all energy should minister to it: if you’re in the running you’re in the good company of the majority, the think is not to be left behind. The worker does not resent the businessman’s devotion to his bank-balance, only that he should perform it without decent moderation.
So the New Zealander’s idea of social reality is the way things are. ‘Times’ change, but that is a matter of fashions of clothing, architecture and popular music. Any talk of changing the status quo meets with resistance. The government can do it by quiet legislation without anyone noticing the implications of a new law, because the government is part of the status quo and bigger than anyone who may object. It is when an individual talks of change the New Zealander resents and resists the discomfort of being forced to think up reasons for defending the existing order. Any man who thinks or reads beyond the immediate requirements of getting a good job is a fool – ‘wet’, ‘gormless’, ‘dilberry’, etc. Baiting him is the good sport of the enterprising wag: in New Zealand (but not so much overseas) little minds in the army used to whet themselves on men who read books with big words, to the entertainment of the hut. A method (used even among training college students) is to pick up another man’s book, to read aloud a sentence without attempt at comprehension as if to demonstrate that the words meant nothing but were the mutually flattering cult-lingo of a class of intellectuals pretending to be better than the ordinary chap. It is common for some people to accuse people who go to symphonic concerts of not understanding the music and going out of snobbery. They have some ground for their idea because the idea has produced the habit: an aunt of min went to the Old Vic plays in 1948, to see the films stars, but confessed the plays were ‘awfully dry’ – she didn’t know what they were about, but that was only to be expected because they were ‘educational’. For good-humoured baiting recall the attacks on anti-conscription speakers in Nelson in 1949: most spectators would describe this as a ‘bit of fun’.
VIII
Now the New Zealand child is not noticeably different from children of other countries – he tends to be impulsive, rough, afraid to be seen crying or in need of affection, and among his mates he prides himself on defying authority. Yet if we honestly compare our childhood and maturity we know we have lost something – life was full and rich, we never asked if it had a purpose, that was self-evident, we were confident and happy and there was always something to look forward to, and our homes were the centres of our world; in maturity we are bored, doubtful, dissatisfied and afraid. For between his boyhood and maturity the New Zealanders asserts his manhood by losing it. He becomes a coward with a ready sneer, an ugly little man with a routine bar-side guffaw. The change occurs in adolescence. The road forks here, so that the ordinary chap goes one way, the future intellectual another. Adolescence involves a widening of prospect of future experience. For the New Zealand adolescent the emphasis is on the possibilities of forbidden sensual enjoyment. He begins to hang about street corners in small gangs, watching the world. They do little these gangs, except drink milk shakes, swear profusely, whistle at girls, chaff one another and engage in the unnatural fiction that every man’s target, secret or acknowledged, is the vulva. It causes a strained and furtive attitude of mind; out of fear of being though ‘soft’ or ‘wet’ the youth reads double meanings into the most harmless of quips on radio and film, keeps a store of dirty yarns, most of them without wit or fun. He is impatient to be a man, to be manly, he lives in fear of being called a ‘drip’: he affects to be callous and blasé when at heart he is afraid and innocent, and alone with a girl may be clumsily tender. But he will jump to scorn any attitude that is not callous.
The sensitive and intelligent youth takes another way. Adolescence presents him with more distant possibilities. He becomes ‘dreamy’ and idealistic. If he goes to university his philosophy is widened. For a while at least he proceeds by widening his knowledge and developing himself in ways denied in his home town (in drama, debate and talk), where his former classmate proceeds by narrowing his aims and denying the many inchoate sensibilities and doubts and enthusiasms of adolescence. This lad prides himself on being ‘hard as nails’. He takes to smoking and enjoys a surreptitious drink. His first ‘piss-up’ is a landmark in his life: he relishes the sensation of following an impulse without check, the sense of expansion and dissolution, his next-morning wonder at the foolish things he did, his eager response to the attention he has drawn to himself in the chaff of his mates: he has begun to discover himself. But the student discovers himself by alienating himself. He is unlikely to go back to his former classmates who are mechanics, apprentices, clerks and counter-jumpers in his home town. He will probably pass his exams, marry and settle in a comfortable suburb, forget his student pranks and vegetate as a political conservative whose counter to every argument is, ‘That’s all very well, but … ‘ He will have retired, for life, from thinking. But a few students don’t retire, they keep their romantic dreams of self-fulfilment, their hopes of creative writing, their interest in ideas. They are destined to grow into an artificial and alienated class living a threadbare life not so different from that of the English colony in an outpost of empire. They have grown to fear the philistinism of businessmen and clerks and ‘retired’ professional men, the narrow range of interests of the worker, and the vigour with which they all will sneer at what interests intellectuals. Because they are few they become a kind of cult with no devotion but a sense of emancipation. What they do not realize is the number of attitudes they have carried over from the community they feel emancipated from.
1. There is their interest in people they know rather than ideas. They tend to gossip about one another, each to assert himself by criticizing an absent member in front of others.