Dialogue: Challenge we face is to rediscover our soul

BOB HARVEY* says we need a long-term solution to our roller-coaster existence. Our ability now to travel digitally, as well as physically, is creating a powerful nostalgia for a shared vision.

There have been a lot of complaints about a lack of "the vision thing" in New Zealand. Well, it's the beginning of a new year - let's see if we can find it.

To start with, we need to do some digging. When we want vision, we're asking for something that makes powerful, intuitive sense and takes us where we want to go. Where are we supposed to find that?

Will the Government provide us with a vision and its partner, a soul? I doubt it. We'll need to find them for ourselves. Both are elusive.

We now have five generations and more of New Zealanders who prefer their concept of soul and vision kept pretty static - single gods or ideological machines of one variety of another, including the idea of a mother nation-state.

We've just got through the 20th century, which started with high hopes for just that kind of thing, but turned out a wasteland of battlefields. One version of spirit trying to conquer another: the Spirit of the Motherland versus that of the Empire; the Spirit of Christianity versus the grab bag of capitalism, communism and humanism through the United Nations. And a lot of them did a lot of good in limited ways.

The trouble is that people have soul only when they act like they don't have the right to take over the world. Putting it simply, a good soul is hard to find.

The grand vision of New Zealand as paradise is rapidly becoming as hollow as our clean, green image - a public relations myth we have decided we can live with and lure tourists to buy into.

This vision, if we don't add substance to it soon, will be as shallow as the idealism parodied in Austin Mitchell's Half-gallon, Quarter-acre, Pavlova Paradise and later Gordon McLauchlan's The Passionless People. Both showed that utopian egalitarianism had arrived, but, unfortunately, the result was boredom, monotony and - you guessed it - a lack of spirit.

Did we leave our soul in the 1970s? We had Nambassa and we had our first protests, beat poets, Baxter, Shadbolt and the Vietnam War. It nurtured a newer, freer side - music, drugs and anarchy.

Labour Prime Minister David Lange's ability (in 1985) to unify national consciousness against the French after the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior primed the bellows of a nationalist fire ready and willing to ignite latent green and anti-war sentiments. The result was as potent as the support given by Norman Kirk, of a previous decade, to sending a frigate to Mururoa Atoll. Do you remember feeling it? It sure felt as if we at last had both a vision and a spirit, without embarrassment.

As Elvis Costello once asked: "What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?"

Many activists have gone our separate ways, but the vision expanded and resided inside us for a time. For those of us who acted together, that space is a little thermos flask of soul that never seems to lose its head. We didn't try to take over the world, but we had soul.

Another huge part of the human vision thing is in our capacity for technology. We needed ideas to get civilisation moving. The first big one was fire. It took around six million years to get us out of the caves, and then came the wheel. Next came hay, and then sliced bread.

But the single biggest idea of all is one that we have just seen emerge in our lifetime, the fastest and the quickest growth idea in the history of the world - the internet. In a mere six years the internet has brought to us the single biggest unifying spirit in the universe and this is how newfound vision will take flight.

On the internet everyone is equal and untrapped. The secret has always been in education and communications. Stupidly, we thought and hoped it would be television, but that turned out to be a one-way blank wall to nowhere.

Either the internet is the ultimate fragmentation of the soul, where people can be everywhere and belong nowhere, or it is the beginning of something truly free.

But it is striking in how it brings people together who actually believe in what they are doing. The internet engenders the first truly global tribalism and this will be the biggest trend of the 21st century.

As groups of people break through nationalism to join others - from Harley-Davidson's free-rider to Robbie Williams' fans, fashion freaks, sex perverts and specialists in Japanese animation - e-groups will become e-tribes, leaping time zones, sensors and even the police.

You may well ask: aren't the people who belong to those little groupings just a little sad? No, we have an inherent spirit to want to belong. Well, if you don't belong to something, believe in something, commit to it and be prepared to join with others who are like-minded, you probably are a little sad.

It's now on the internet that New Zealanders overseas are able to relate to this tribalism of belonging which they could never do here without a brooding sense of failure. To the thousands overseas - our young and best ambassadors - tribalism that wears the epithet Kiwi gives kudos.

This is where our soul and vision are these days residing. It's this ability to travel - digitally and physically - that makes the nostalgia for shared vision so powerful. In the "Kiwi tribe," in different worlds, the true soul of New Zealand exists.

After all, soul exists in shared interests, belonging, acting together, doing stuff, feeling good about it, improving a sliver of the world, meeting together in at least virtual space but usually analogical space as well.

Back home, in our own real world, is our wake-up call for the future - the soul of New Zealand as a patriotic entity. It's being tested right now in the media as Australia, fresh from celebrating its century of federation, hints that we, as a nation, would be better inside its tent. This debate will not go away, it will grow stronger, and to many it is something to be given serious consideration.

Is this the first real vision we seriously can consider that is both alluring and practical and a long-term solution to our roller-coaster existence? Will it challenge us to find a soul that is based in our history and our belief in ourselves, or once again leave us nervous and unsure, fretting about the trivia of life and our petty expectations?

* Bob Harvey is Mayor of Waitakere City.

Herald Online feature: Common core values

We invite to you to contribute to the debate on core values. E-mail dialogue@herald.co.nz.