In my View [12]

The Kiwi virtues have always terrified me most. When I see our good Prime Minister, bespectacled and kindly, packing a suitcase to go overseas, I am worried in a special way. I think, ‘How will he get on? Over there in those corrupt places they are different people from him. Some ride in bullet-proof cars and have a chain of mistresses while bringing their daughters up in convents. Some read books for pleasure. Many know that there are fifty different shades and varieties of Marxism. Some may have committed crimes, knowing they were in the wrong, and brazened it out and risen to the top and preserved the great advantage of knowing from the inside what the man knows who has never loved the cops. But our man’s virtue may be his downfall. His profound intellectual and moral innocence might lead him to agree to the incineration of the globe, in the best of faith, while his mind was really running on trade.’

And when another prominent man mentions a little wryly that he has had to bury a passion for horticulture to give greater scope to that passion for public good which is coarsely called politics, again I tremble. We know that Adam was a gardener. But among us later-born deadbeats it takes a rare faculty for sublimation to reduce our tumbling, grabbing, disordered impulses to the single all-but-heavenly passion for planting flowers and pumpkins and watching them grow. Will this latter-day Adam know enough? May he not mistake a bomb for a pumpkin? Perhaps a less refined nature would be better equipped for the public arena.

This worry of mine regarding the virtues springs up again whenever I come within earshot of those TV or radio discussions of contemporary sexual values which are so popular these days. Some lad or lass just out of varsity, or some well-ballasted minister or housewife, will open out with the greatest seriousness and care the problems of the age and their own concern about page 64 them. I am then gripped quite as much by anxiety as by admiration. These excellent people, old and young, are profoundly concerned that the right things should be done – that pre-marital chastity should be retained (or not retained); that divorces should be widely permitted (or discouraged); that families should be limited to two and a half (or expanded to twelve) – and all this may indeed be food for thought and material for moral choice. But any Cypriot or Albanian could tell my fellow-Kiwis what they have forgotten, that the whole point of human sexuality is not its rectitude but its success or lack of success. I grant it is better to be a carpenter than a burglar, better to be a faithful husband than a philanderer. Yet burglars need to know how to crack safes well, just as carpenters need to know how to mortise joints and, having chewed the moral issue to rags, I’m ready to pay my respect to skill in either field.

As I see it, the domestic tragedyofPig Island stems not chieflyfrom the sins of the people but from our lifelong conditioning to be sexual nincompoops incapable of pleasing either ourselves or others. Thus what we call maturity is commonly amputation, and the boredom and violence endemic in our marriages makes them stink in the nostrils of the young. Yet it is hardly a moral issue. Who is to blame who?

Both ignorance and chivalry make me unwilling to diagnose the difficulties of New Zealand women. But (at least in my own generation) I do not think we men ever emerged from the adolescent torture room. Our sex came to life in its Puritan cradle, howled for mercy, and finally choked and died. We regarded women as authorities whom we had to placate, not even remotely as fountains of hope or understanding; and they, poor things, were probably just as badly off. More and more, as I get older, the whole business makes me want to laugh my head off. If we had deliberately chosen to turn the relation between the sexes into a machine designed to produce the maximum misunderstanding and disunity, we could hardly have done otherwise. I hope the young will be wiser; but I fear they will not.

At least partly because of these great blockages on the instinctive level, the Kiwi passion is not hedonist. It is a passion for property. And this passion, more than any other, makes people stupid. What is it but a form of madness when a man lies awake worrying because his mortgage is unpaid or the bottom of his new car has mysteriously begun to rust? When such a man becomes a politician he unconsciously projects his own preoccupations upon the screen of world events. He imagines that what the Asian Marxists want is to deprive him of his property, not to lay planks on their own morass of destitution and disorder. He imagines that the whole world is interested in his moneybags, when very likely the world has better things to think about. Such as justice. Such as hope. Such as racial identity. The Kiwi virtues of thrift and decorum are sad virtues. I do not think they are enough to build a life on.

1969 (591)