Peter Wood: One people or a fragmented society of victims - the choice is ours

COMMENT

Are New Zealanders "one people", as Governor Hobson almost naively declared? Or is New Zealand a country where multiculturalism is growing rapidly, and diversity is the highest public good?

As an onlooker, I consider that diversity is heavily influencing the Treaty of Waitangi debate, and also threatens New Zealand's identity.

The word "diversity" is, on the face of it, not at all mysterious. It is a slightly dressed-up version of the idea of variety, said by the poet William Cowper to be the spice of life.

Cowper was right. Diversity is a delightful spice, but it is not suited for use as an all-purpose principle. The trouble comes when diversity is put to uses for which it is ill-suited.

Diversity, for example, is not a good principle on which to found ideas of justice and equity, which depend on overarching rules that apply to all alike.

The affair of the amethyst necklace removed from Marlborough Girls' College pupil Megan Church illustrates this. The obfuscations of principal Greta Firth about taonga aside, the school does have a policy of different rules for different students based on group identity.

And this neatly exemplifies how diversity intrudes a regime of petty injustice into everyday life. Such injustices, however, are not always petty, and many people seem to think the double standards at Marlborough Girls' College are a token of larger injustices at higher levels of society.

Diversity is not a good basis for justice or education if it means jettisoning core values and common knowledge.

To judge by Government policy, the statements of advocacy groups, training for teachers and actual curriculums, the diversity doctrine in education is firmly established.

The curriculum has been rewritten to make sure that "diverse" cultural and social perspectives are emphasised, and that tacit assumptions about common identity and shared purpose are eliminated or radically diminished.

New Zealand has, in effect, decided to find out whether an intellectually coherent education can be achieved when teachers are trained to pay primary attention to cultural background, learning styles, sexual orientation and national origin.

Such priorities are hazardous to both education and national identity, which depend on providing children with a reasonably coherent, historically grounded view of their society, as well as good common values.

What does the word "diversity" really mean when drafted into widespread political and cultural use? For many people - people I call diversiphiles - diversity is now a profound principle, a vision of social good, a way of organising society, a conception of education, and a moral edict. This is a lot of tonnage for one word.

Diversity, of course, has become the fashionable way of talking about the role in society of various categories of people: ethnic minorities, homosexuals, immigrants, the handicapped, and, sometimes, women: people who are said to have suffered ill-treatment by the dominant culture.

In short, diversity is a way of evoking an image of society as starkly divided between victims and victimisers. To celebrate diversity is, in effect, to coerce from the supposed victimisers a collective apology to the supposed victims, and to offer a programme of economic and political restoration.

New Zealand is not becoming a hybrid society; it has been one all along. New Zealanders were a model, to the world of people who were comfortable with their real diversity and who had accommodated a major cultural division better than any other former European colony.

But New Zealanders are now being asked to find a new hybrid national identity. Down that road lies a society built on victim groups in a perpetual grudge match with the supposed victimisers. National identity in the diversiphile dream means a regime of group set-asides and privileges.

This is not a real national identity at all, but a managed collection of resentments, covered over with a sugary glaze of "celebrate diversity". Serious people can demand more of themselves than that.

National identity is not a matter of repeating some timeless and tired pattern. The greater part of a national identity is finding genuinely worthy goals that inspire people in work, in everyday life, and even - or perhaps especially - in play.

New Zealanders face a contest between those who think the modern nation is a coherent and worthy form of cultural unity and those who challenge the foundation of the modern nation by insisting on the primacy of identity groups. Which of these is the more noble and enlightened view?

Choose the vision of society offered by the diversiphiles, and New Zealand will have a chance to discover what social division is really like.

Or choose to go forward with a vision of nationhood that continues the tradition of Western culture suffused with the heroic spirit of a Polynesian people.

* Peter Wood is an associate professor of anthropology at Boston University. He is speaking at a Maxim Institute forum, "Political Correctness: End of an error?" on Saturday.