Friday 5 May 2023

Looking Backwards.

20/20 Foresight? It’s as well A Message From 2040 is animated rather than live-action, because it would’ve been difficult to find flesh-and-blood actors capable of delivering the video’s messages with a straight face. The idea that the changes envisaged would be universally accepted as self-evidently beneficial is naïve in the extreme. It’s as if the bitter arguments about te Tiriti and co-governance offer no hint of the massive resistance such a revolutionary programme would inevitably inspire.

MY OLD FRIEND SIMON called it the Left’s “pink lemonade world”, and not in a kind way. He had very little patience for the naïve idealism of those who insisted they could change the world by offering it a better vision of itself. Some castigated Simon for what they saw as his cynicism. Not me. Simon wasn’t cynical (well, not very) he simply understood that change never came easily, or without pain. It wasn’t enough for leftists to conceive of a world without violence, oppression and exploitation – a pink lemonade world – they also had to produce a clear road-map to Utopia. No road-map, no credibility. It’s what made Simon such a good political journalist.

Watching A Message From 2040 on YouTube earlier in the week, I couldn’t help recalling Simon’s scorn for pink lemonade dreamers. The work of two of this country’s more outspoken political NGOs, Action Station and Just Speak, A Message From 2040 purports to demonstrate how New Zealand undertook an inspirational transition from the darkness of exploitation and oppression to the light of a Tiriti-centric Aotearoa – a country without prisons.

It’s as well A Message From 2040 is animated rather than live-action, because it would’ve been difficult to find flesh-and-blood actors capable of delivering the video’s messages with a straight face. The idea that the changes envisaged would be universally accepted as self-evidently beneficial is naïve in the extreme. It’s as if the bitter arguments about te Tiriti and co-governance offer no hint of the massive resistance such a revolutionary programme would inevitably inspire.

Which is not to say that the narrative device of explaining retrospectively how your Utopia came into existence is a bad one. Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887, written by Edward Bellamy and published in 1888, has the distinction of being one of the most influential political books ever written. Only the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more copies in its first year.

So compelling was Bellamy’s vision of a socialist United States that it boosted the growth of the socialist movement in America dramatically. And not just in America. When news that a consignment of Bellamy’s book would soon be arriving at Port Chalmers, hundreds of Dunedinites gathered on the wharf to snap-up a copy.

As the historian Dougal McNeill notes in his essay on speculative political fiction in New Zealand:

“There were at least three local editions, and enormous interest and sales. The Dunedin Evening Star ran a report from Braithwaite’s Book Arcade on 17 April 1890: ‘I have sold 5,000 copies of this marvellous socialistic book since I reviewed it in the Star about six months ago’; similar accounts appear in newspapers across the country.”

When Socialism Was A Best-Seller: Edward Bellamy's phenomenally successful Looking Backward sold thousands of copies in New Zealand and around the world.

A key factor in the success of Bellamy’s book was his detailed explanations of how the socialistic America of the future operated. (Detail is necessarily sparse in A Message From 2040 since the video is only six minutes long!) Bellamy also contrived to weave a great deal of speculative science into his fiction. Impressively, he predicted both the Internet and the debit-card. Not bad for someone writing in the late 1880s!

Even so, Bellamy was no Jack London (1876-1916). Absent from his fiction is London’s understanding that the fight for socialism will be cruel and bloody – as anyone who has read his novella The Iron Heel will attest!

And that’s the niggle, both in A Message From 2040 and in the document it complements so uncannily, He Puapua. All these good things, all this transformative constitutional, economic and cultural change, descends like the Ten Commandments from Yahweh’s mountaintop. Except, in both works, it isn’t God, but the Crown, delivering Aotearoa’s new moral order. What we’re looking at here is our old friend, Revolution From Above.

But revolutions are not made above us, and delivered to us wrapped in a bright red bow. They are made by us – or, at least by the citizens who prevail over those who don’t want a revolution at all.

The African-American abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, put it best when he said:

Those who profess to favour freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground ….. [The] struggle may be moral; or it may be physical; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.

The pink lemonade comes later.


This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 May 2023.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would like to know who decided on Aotearoa's new social order? Was it the Maori King (who is very good friends with Jacinda Ardern apparently)? Was it Christopher Finlayson, who laid much of the groundwork over the last 25 years? How does the He Puapua agenda help the average Maori whose supposed victimhood suggests they need more help than anyone?
There is a large piece of the puzzle missing.
And how do our politicians and academics think they can bulldoze us into this?
The resistance will be fierce when people wake up and shake off their apathetic torpor.
Most people are on the treadmill of life and trust that their basics, i.e. democracy will never be compromised by our government. It's traitorous.
Our media organisations have abandoned us via the journalism contract and will not tell us what is happening. The binding of them is in the application for the funding in which they make an agreement in order to get the funding via the contract.
Chris, I saw the words struggle and revolution.
MC

Archduke Piccolo said...

Struggle... or fight? When revolutions turn into fights with violence, they have a way of subverting - even perverting - themselves into something they didn't intend to be. That might be due to the nature of the counter-revolutionary forces, and hence the nature of the fight; or it may be due to having to make accommodations and compromises to achieve anything at all.

What goes around comes around - hence the appellation: revolution. I wouldn't put much faith in revolutions. Now, how about evolution...?
Cheers,
Ion A. Dowman

David George said...

The glaring disconnect between this hopeful, caring, inclusive vision and it's current crop of hateful, divisive promoters is impossible to ignore or reconcile. I have zero faith in those people.

“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”
― George Orwell, 1984

John Hurley said...

That's exactly what Robbie Nichol is saying here
NZ is "A society built by years of oppression and colonisation"
He refers to the possibility of a "preferable alternate world where colonisation didn’t happen" but the best he can do is allude to what might be: "our job as people in the media is to amplify these stories"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqAfQd4w_Xk

sumsuch said...

2040, Chris, for me is Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road'.

Your unwillingness to address climate change is strange. Since the Left is rational and so for the people.

sumsuch said...

Tried to comment here priorly and am sorry it might not have got through from the strange response.

Anonymous said...

ActionStation - look at who funds it. That's all you need to know.

David George said...

Chris: "it isn’t God, but the Crown, delivering Aotearoa’s new moral order. What we’re looking at here is our old friend, Revolution From Above."

Haven't we seen this movie before? TPTB seem to believe that the people are fools, deplorables in need of their superior wisdom, their vision. They've nothing but contempt for those calling out they're mad plan.

“We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth...We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.”
-- Vladimir Lenin.

Guerilla Surgeon said...

"They've nothing but contempt for those calling out they're mad plan."

As opposed to those who have nothing but contempt for those they consider beneath them? We know best seems to fit the right better than the left.

“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels.

David George said...

What (and who) are the drivers for " Aotearoa’s new moral order"? We think we're pretty unique but, strangely, the same things are happening elsewhere. The big picture is, well, big but sometimes it is brilliantly captured.

Excerpts: "Strauss foresaw in the 1950s what many conservative critics of the universities in the 1980s and 1990s did not. It was not that liberal democratic political correctness would drown the humanities, only to splash in vain against the impregnable walls of the hard ­sciences. The ideology would change the definitions of the hard sciences to correspond to its tenets, then weaponize the epistemic authority of the sciences to advance its agenda. Liberal democracy thus repurposes the life sciences in order to engineer a new condition for humanity, one in which natural differences among men (and differences between men and women) do not exist."

"Older liberals such as Fukuyama are unsettled by the [woke - FWOABW] regime that results. Yet they are unwilling to grapple with the philosophical and theological problems the new regime poses. Their solution is to turn “liberalism” into an ersatz centrism that gently regrets the excesses of the left while policing the right with great vigor. So, as the transhumanist machine accelerates, liberal centrists like Fukuyama are reduced to pious celebrations of creativity, innovation, and technological progress. They collaborate in the construction of the dystopia their younger selves feared would come to pass. That’s what American liberalism has become. It presides over the abolition of man."

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2023/06/fukuyama-v-fukuyama

John Hurley said...

National Populism isn't going anywhere. [Warning: Dangerous Speech]
https://mattgoodwin.substack.com/p/national-populism-is-going-nowhere