The Idea of Progress

Somewhere in the King Country a bureaucrat was riding along a country road in his Jaguar. He had come off the main highway in the hope of finding a short-cut that would take him through to Auckland, where he had to chair a big Conference. But he had lost his way. And he came to a crossroad where the signposts had become illegible by age and the action of the weather. An oldish Maori man leant against it smoking his pipe. The bureaucrat questioned him. ‘Where does that road go to?’

‘That one, ehoa? That goes to my brother’s farm.’ ‘And that one?’

‘That goes to the sea. Where we get the pipi.’ ‘How can I get to Auckland from here?’

‘Auckland? I don’t know about that. It’s a long way to Auckland . . .’. ‘Look here,’ said the bureaucrat. ‘I’ve got an important meeting in

Auckland. They can’t run it without me. I’ve got to get there quickly. So you’ll have to put me in touch with somebody who knows the way. As a matter of fact, you seem to be lost just as much as I am.’

The old man puffed his pipe for a while, and then he spoke slowly. ‘That’s not right,’ he said. ‘I can’t be lost, mate. I’m not going anywhere.’

The story has something to do with the idea of Progress. There was the case of my grandmother too. When she saw her first aeroplane, she went inside and brought out her family. ‘Look!’ she said. ‘Look! It’s the Devil riding in his chariot.’

I may have dramatised the occasion; but that was more or less the way she reacted. When the thunderbirds fly over the jungle, unloading fire, a Vietnamese peasant woman might react in a way not too unlike that of my grandmother – except that she would not say, ‘Look!’ – she would say, ‘Come and hide! Let us hide ourselves in the belly of the earth . . .’.

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It is a truism that modern technological development has outdistanced the capacity of men to judge, control, distinguish. On the plain of Armageddon all the soldiers lack faces. I have feared often that – even if war should cease – we may finally establish in New Zealand a society where all are equally arid, all are equally hutched and fed, all are equally devoured by tedium, all are equally gutted by the mechanisms of propaganda and commercial advertising.

The danger does not really lie in the fact of technological progress – that, for example, one can use a bulldozer where once one had to use a shovel – but in a narrow and arrogant spirit of grinding secularism that inhabits our bureaucracy. Perhaps I may set down roughly the tenets of this cult:

• (a) The decisions of a committee are sacrosanct. From time to time the tribe of bureaucrats foregather in a mausoleum, in the belief that their god will visit them there and speak through them. The precise details of the ritual are hidden from me; but perhaps my grandmother’s intuition was correct – the crude speech of our people bears witness to an opinion that they kiss the hindquarters of their god, in the person of a powerful or moneyed elder, and count the experience most savoury. They themselves hate any crudity of speech – perhaps because their god cannot stand against ridicule.
• (b) The decisions of a committee are infallible. Not the hedged and defined infallibility of a Pope speaking ex cathedra – but a broader infallibility exercised on all matters at all times. Thus when the bulldozer blades, at seven in the morning, crash through the houses of a Maori pa, where old men and women are still sleeping, nobody can effectively resist the invasion. ‘You have had your final warning’ – that is, the god of Progress has spoken infallibly through a committee, and mere human comment is irrelevant.
• (c) The god speaks habitually in the passive voice – ‘You have been warned’ – ‘It has been decided’ – ‘Your proposal is under consideration . . .’. Thus, as suits a deity, he cannot be exactly located; though his works are evident, local and aggressive.
• (d) Education is most dear to the heart of this god, chiefly because it can be used to glorify his own words. One could take as an example what is likely to happen if a teacher decides that his class should make a group study of the new Wanganui River hydroelectric scheme. They get some brochures on hydroelectricity, issued to schools by the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education. In these brochures, apart from a few whimsical character studies, there is no statement at the human level – no indication of the permanent tension between nomad workers and the clerks who pay them for their labour – the emphasis is all on pure process – and the hydroelectric scheme is counted praiseworthy whether the electricity is used to light a cell-block or drive the machines that print pulp magazines. They get some clippings from the newspapers. These chiefly contain panegyrics issued by officials of the Ministry of Works. The real issue – that a Maori tribe arepage 751 about to observe, with uneasy acquiescence, their ancient meeting houses and burial grounds drowned for good or evil under a man-made lake – will never be discovered by the children’s study group. They have been asked to admire the works of the god; not to criticise them. And the atmosphere of tedium in which they work is the cloud of unknowing through which the god communicates with his worshippers.
• (e) Contraception is also dear to the god’s heart – not on account of the likelihood of any population explosion, since this country is in fact under- populated – but for its own sake, as a scientific marvel. His female worshippers haunt birth control clinics as peasant women once haunted the shrines of local saints to be freed from the curse of barrenness. It is worth remembering that the god is deeply Puritanical. He may appear to favour contraception for the sake of more frequent and more pleasurable copulation – but actually nothing is further from his mind – it is the clinical side of it which appeals to him most, the possibility of governing private life by legislation, and the fact that sex without fertility is a little less than sex, a little more like an equation in practical mathematics. For he knows that his deepest enemy is the spirit of the ancient earth itself. If he could do it and still have citizens to govern, he would kill the goddess Venus.
• (f) ) Though in his open speech the god is tolerant of all races and nations, he is in secret deeply xenophobic. The English are objectionable because they race dogs instead of horses; the Dalmatians because they make good wine and drink it; the Italians because they are Catholic and have large families; the Jews because they are idealists and understand the use of bread and salt; the Maoris because their tribal authority is separate from his own . . . He likes in fact only his true worshippers, the faceless bureaucrats, and their servants the cops.
• (g) Though the god professes an interest in the arts, the meaning of art is wholly unknown to him, since (in his own way) he understands both past and future, but never the present moment.
• (h) Tedium is the very essence of his being. He can be stabbed to death by a laugh.

That is what my grandmother should have done when she saw her Satan, the god of Progress, riding his cloudy chariot over the land. She should have laughed till the tears ran down. It is still not too late to do so.

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