Rebuilding Society’s Welcome
The Utopia Thieves: Progress, Ecology and Neoliberalism — Chapter 10
IF there is a common denominator to a number of recent political events, such as the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement but also a number of others, this common denominator may be the beginning of a revolt against the punitive tendency that is so often exhibited in white settler societies.
In New Zealand, perhaps the most recent upsurge of this new mood took the form of an official injunction to express more social solidarity than usual, the better to overpower and smother Covid-19: to ‘be kind’, to express the old community virtues that in today’s New Zealand are often associated with Māori culture: aroha (‘love’, cognate with Hawai‘ian aloha), atawhai (kindly concern) and manaakitanga (hospitality).
These, in either language, were represented as the secret to overcoming the potential local spread of the virus, most memorably in the official tricolon ‘Be Kind, Stay Home, Save Lives’. Squashing the virus was a task at which New Zealand did, indeed, prove to be quite successful.
This virtues are often opposed to an individualistic and punitive tendency supposedly more widespread in the pākehā (white) population, a punitive tendency which includes a tendency to rely on individualised, carrot-and-stick theories of motivation in economics and management, instead of more cooperative and inclusive approaches to human motivation.
Though it applies across the board, this punitive tendency arguably finds its origin in the ethnic history of the white settler society. For it is most often and most obviously directed against the angry young men of various minorities, who in earlier generations would have been the indigenous warriors or rebel slaves the ancestors of the colonists fought.
Much, perhaps, as depicted in the 1983 New Zealand film Utu, a Māori word meaning payment in an economic context and ‘just deserts’ in a social one. A fitting title for a surprisingly unsentimental film about the New Zealand frontier of 1870 that, had it been made in America, would have been classified as a revisionist Western.
Of course those days are long gone. For more than twenty years in the mid-twentieth-century, the by-then disarmed police force of New Zealand did not shoot anyone dead at all, and was happy to present a far more urbane image than the armed constabulary of yore.
All the same, the reflexes of an ancient atavism die hard even in our nowadays more urban and sophisticated society: and are easily stirred back into life like some sleeping dragon, in the form of what sociologists call ‘penal populism’: the un-edifying spectacle of the politicians of Anglophone New World societies competing for votes at election time by promising to increase the detection rate and penalties for the sorts of desperate crimes most often committed by poor people, who in these societies are often people of colour.
Poor people of colour who are in general no more likely to commit crimes than poor whites, but who live in societies where people of colour are more likely to be poor than most whites.
There seem, by contrast, to be no votes in boosting the detection rate or penalties for the actions of white-collar grifters from the middle classes, even though the total social costs of their crimes are probably higher.
In New Zealand, where most of the inmates of our jails are Māori, not all the academics have yet made a connection between penal populism and what Americans call race: least of all in the sense of the atavistic fear of the angry young man of colour.
Nor have New Zealand academics been traditionally all that clued up, either, on the relationship between Auckland’s giant, American-style downtown motorway (or freeway) junction, mostly built in the 1970s amid massive population relocations including the anti-immigrant ‘Dawn Raids’; and the fact that before it was built, the inner city was, as in most American cities, the most ‘non-European’ part of town in the sense of the poorest and most visible minorities of colour. A fact spelled out unmistakably in a 1968 publication called Development in the Auckland Region.
The next image consists of a photo of inner-suburban Auckland being scraped bare for the city’s so-called ‘Spaghetti Junction’ of inner-city motorways, taken on the 10th of October 1978, which is to say some ten years after Development in the Auckland Region and about four years after the Dawn Raids.
It was already quite late in the day for that sort of thing, historically speaking: a fact that only increases the sense of ‘Auckland as it might have been’. Inner city Auckland might so easily have been spared the effects of the bulldozer, the freeway, and wholesale population removal.
Australia had declared a moratorium on federal funding for downtown freeway construction at the end of 1972. In Canada, disruptive forms of downtown freeway construction had also been ended at the beginning of the 1970s with the overturning of controversial schemes in Toronto and Vancouver.
Even in the USA, inner city freeway construction was in decline by the 1970s; with the first actual closure and non-replacement of a section of freeway happening as early as May 1974 in Portland, Oregon, via the closure of a section of Harbor Drive along the Willamette River in order to create an esplanade instead.
In New Zealand, we don’t really draw the dots that could be drawn between Māori and Islander immigration to the city, the Dawn Raids, and Spaghetti Junction. But it’s getting harder to remain quite so clueless about the relationship between ‘race’, inner city freeways, the right to welcoming acceptance in the city and punitive attitudes of every kind, in America.
And, getting harder all the time, with even US Transportation Secretary James Foxx offering an apology to the almost half a million households displaced by American urban freeway construction, mostly in poor inner city neighbourhoods of colour.
Everywhere we look, now, there seem signs that many younger people are getting smart about these forms of structural racism: punitive, hostile and exclusionary attitudes that seem to have their root in some kind of frontier or plantation violence and yet continue to play out, anachronistically, in the modern city.
Nor would it be correct to say that such revulsion is idealistic but unworldly. For technologists, too, have long viewed excessively punitive and blame-pinning attitudes as hopelessly out of date in the face of technological complexity.
Take for example this lecture on nuclear safety by Nicklas Means, which runs for as long as an episode of Air Crash Investigation and is even more nuts-and-boltsy in the middle, but ultimately makes an even more forceful case against the usual practice of blaming the last person to be caught up in a complex chain of precipitating events.
For, regrettably, not all our management systems operate with the same degree of forensic rigour as a typical air crash investigation, or nuclear safety investigation for that matter. The last person to have their hand on the lever is, indeed, the one most likely to cop the blame in most organisations.
There is a final irony here, to conclude. A lot the qualities that complex, modern technologies seem to demand of their operators are precisely the same as the aroha, atawhai and manaakitanga of traditional and tribal societies, renowned for their community spirit even if they were occasionally warlike as well.
In the 1940s, the sociologist Karl Polanyi referred to this seeming paradox as the ‘double movement’ of modernity, which at first took us away from an earlier communitarianism toward greater individualism, good in some aspects and bad in others. But which then came to demand a measure of re-socialisation, at least where the worst, most unsupportive and punitive forms of individualism were concerned: bad forms that were also strongly associated with the harshness of the nineteenth-century frontier.
Which is not to say that, even there, life was ever as wholly individualistic among the whites, cowboys and colonists as it has often since been made out to be.
It seems that as with the control of Covid, the societies that do best in managing future high technologies will be the ones that have learned most effectively to be transcend the worst aspects of white frontierism and to kind, whether they invent the idea anew or draw on ancient sources.