Hybrid Vigour: A Critique Of Bi-Culturalism

 Hybrid Vigour: New Zealand's All Black rugby team is the epitome of this country's unique blending of the indigenous and the colonial. The Maori haka, or war-challege, with which the national team opens every game is as much a part of New Zealand's evolving culture as any of the ethnic traditions inherited from the British Isles.

GROWING UP on a farm, you just can’t escape genetics. Breeding for positive inheritable traits is a fact of pastoral life and its results are observable everywhere. I can still recall my father telling me that the particular bounciness of a lamb, or a puppy, was attributable to “hybrid vigour” – the prized outcome of a breeding pair’s best genes combining to produce a more than usually intelligent, energetic, or just plain flavoursome, off-spring.

In polite circles it is considered highly distasteful to apply the language of the farmyard to human interactions. This reticence is, however, misplaced, because the mixing of genes is as important to the health of our own species as it is to any other. Indeed, the dwindling of a species’ gene pool generally presages its imminent demise. Marrying outside the tribe not only makes sense diplomatically, it’s pretty much a biological necessity.

It is one of history’s most regrettable ironies that the individuals and nations most closely associated with Eugenics (with a capital ‘E’) fundamentally misunderstood the science of genetics. Instead of welcoming what they called “miscegenation” – the blending of genetic material from the widest possible range of human sources – they anathematised it. Ethnic homogeneity was the goal: “race mixing”, they insisted, was suicidal.

If they had really been interested in where this horror of breeding outside the group might lead them they had only to study the House of Hapsburg. The aristocratic fastidiousness of the Hapsburg dynasty all too often led to cousins marrying cousins, with physiological and mental consequences as grotesque as they were tragic.

The Hapsburgs: Not a good advertisement for aristocratic breeding.

Ignorance of genetic science did not, alas, stop at the level of human individuals, it was compounded to produce the even more pernicious notion that entire human cultures possessed some kind of genetic code: a unique, supposedly hereditary, social template that must be protected from defilement by “cosmopolitan” (by which the Eugenicists usually meant Jewish) and/or “degenerate” (by which they usually meant dark-skinned) influences.

We should, however, be careful not to restrict our condemnation of this Eugenicist nonsense to Europeans alone. The notion of being a superior form of human-being, living in a superior culture which must, at all costs, be “protected” from dilution and/or debasement, is as old as China, India and Japan.

But, once again, there’s an historical counterfactual. The Normans were a highly aggressive people who seized large tracts of Europe at the point of lance and sword. They were not, however, in the least bit fastidious. They married the women they conquered, learned their languages, worshipped their gods, adopted their cuisine and customs, and borrowed promiscuously from just about every culture they encountered. The results are visible from the borders of Scotland to the toe of Italy. The people called “Normans” long ago departed History’s stage, but the cultures they invigorated (our own included) continue to thrive.

All of which is by way of prefacing my misgivings about New Zealand’s “bi-cultural” project. These boil down to one heretical question: “Have we not, for the past forty years, been pursuing (for the most laudable and honourable of reasons) a policy based on the genetic and cultural fallacies of nineteenth century “scientific racism” and twentieth century Eugenics?

Has our pursuit of bi-culturalism not invested a racialised “blood and soil” mythology with all the force of law? Are “bloodlines” not now cited in “egalitarian” New Zealand with all the pride of a Hapsburg genealogist? Have successive governments not spoken approvingly of “preserving” indigenous culture? As if this constantly evolving human matrix was actually a discrete material artefact, impervious to external influences and immune to change?

Is this really the most sensible course for a small, economically-vulnerable nation, situated inconveniently at the bottom of the world, to have set itself?

Few New Zealanders understand the absurd contingency of the cultural porousness that, arguably, made us one of the most successful multi-racial societies on the planet. Instead of driving them further apart, as happened in the United States and Australia, the unfolding of “scientific racism” in New Zealand actually drew its indigenous and colonist populations closer together. By concocting an entirely fictitious ethnological bond between Maori and Pakeha, Edward Tregear’s The Aryan Maori declared them to be kin under the skin. The already high level of intermarriage between the two peoples thus acquired the unimpeachable imprimatur of “science”.

Key Text: According to New Zealand historian, Prof. James Belich, Edward Tregear's The Aryan Maori "arguably ranks with the Treaty of Waitangi as a key text of Maori-Pakeha relations."

It was, I believe, this legacy of “kinship” which allowed New Zealand to take the lead internationally in establishing a process for redressing the worst of its colonial crimes. Our Treaty of Waitangi-based settlements process speaks eloquently of this country’s longstanding commitment to amity and fairness. It would, however, be wrong to suggest that Pakeha are entirely comfortable with the treaty settlement process. They fear that a growing number of Maori regard it as a means of unpicking History’s embroidery and starting afresh on cloth too closely worked to withstand further assault by needle and thread. To subsume the treaty settlement process in the bi-cultural project would, I believe, be a tragic mistake.

New Zealand’s cultural porousness has only increased beneath the blankets of its founding peoples, and, exactly as happened with the promiscuous Normans, the resulting biological and cultural fusions have grown steadily stronger and more complex. And it is these intricate relationships, not the “bi-cultural project” of a well-meaning political class, that is producing the “hybrid vigour” of the people recognised and appreciated around the world as “New Zealanders”.

This single evolving culture, adapting and incorporating the language and lore of both contributors to the “New Zealand Project”, needs no cossetting, no special “protection”. All it requires from the New Zealand state is the freedom to grow, along with an official affirmation that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and that no part of the whole is greater than any other.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.