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Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The institutionalised had few friends and no respite from the abuse that persisted, unreported and unpunished. Behind the barbed wire and inside the locked wards, the hunger of those who feed on pain and violence continued to be sated.

LET IT BE KNOWN that appalling behaviour will not be prevented, or punished, by the authorities, and watch it flourish.

To confirm this grim assertion, one has only to consider the example of the former Yugoslavia. Families who had lived next to one another for decades, whose children had played together, grown together, married one another, suddenly found themselves sucked into a maelstrom of horrific communal violence. Overnight, a murderous, state-sanctioned nationalism began portraying one’s neighbours as deadly enemies, whose destruction, far from being punished, would be rewarded. How quickly former friends became rapists, torturers and murderers was chilling.

The same terrifying spectacle unfolded in Rwanda.

That these examples point to a terrible hunger for pain and violence lodged deep in the human psyche is profoundly confronting.

That these destructive urges do not tear our society to pieces cannot be wholly explained by the ordinary citizen’s fear of retribution. From an early age we are schooled in the virtues of kindness and consideration. These, we are assured, are the default-settings of humankind, and those who behave otherwise are portrayed as dangerous deviations from the norm.

That unkind, often brutal, treatment is meted out to our fellow citizens by persons we regard as perfectly normal, is explained by the recipients’ actual or alleged propensity to harm the communities in which they live. Convince people that any given individual, or group, constitutes an existential threat to their wellbeing, and you can do pretty-much anything you want to them – and not be punished for it.

The multiple reports of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care reveal in excruciating detail how this stigmatising of individuals and groups played out in New Zealand between 1950 and 1999. Our empathy for the victims of the policies and practices of that half-century is so strong that it has left us curiously uninterested in identifying what it was that permitted so much pain and violence to be inflicted on so many mostly young New Zealanders for so long.

The brutally straightforward explanation for those 50 years of abuse is that, for at least the 50 years that preceded 1950, persons categorised as: “alcoholics, imbeciles, illegitimate children (and their mothers), prostitutes, criminals, the feeble-minded, lunatics, epileptics, deaf-mutes, the unemployable, the tubercular, the immoral (e.g. homosexuals), anyone from another race” were branded by credible authority figures – senior public servants, academic experts, medical professionals, political leaders – as threats to the moral, social and racial “hygiene” of the nation.

To safeguard the nation’s genetic health, argued the promoters of the new “science” of Eugenics, “unfit” and/or “defective” individuals must be isolated from the rest of the population in closed institutions. The most extreme eugenicists went further. Those declared “unfit” in the United States and Sweden were subjected to forced sterilisation. In 1928, New Zealand eugenicists were poised to do the same, but, to their eternal credit, the parliamentarians of the time refused to oblige them.

Nowhere did the eugenic ideology take firmer hold than in Nazi Germany, where tens-of-thousands of “useless mouths” were murdered with the blessing of the state and its professional servants.

The horrors perpetrated in the name of social and racial “hygiene” by the Nazis turned Eugenics into a dirty word, but the ideas at its core – that the different were dangerous – lingered on in the state institutions erected in its name.

And it wasn’t just the medical superintendents and senior bureaucrats who continued to treat the different as dangerous, the overwhelming majority of “normal” New Zealanders concurred. Out of sight and out of mind, the institutionalised had few friends and no respite from the abuse that persisted, unreported and unpunished. Behind the barbed wire and inside the locked wards, the hunger of those who feed on pain and violence continued to be sated.

It is estimated that upwards of 200,000 young New Zealanders were abused in institutional settings during the second half of the twentieth century. Such massive and prolonged mistreatment cannot be perpetrated, or successfully hidden, unless its victims are first reduced to something less-than-human.

In Yugoslavia and Rwanda that dehumanisation was achieved by making them enemies of the nation, of the tribe. In New Zealand, by presenting them as a challenge to our tragically narrow definition of “normality”.

Leaving us with just two questions: What appalling behaviour goes unpunished today? And against whom?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 August 2024.

The Why And The How Of Abuse In Care.

Please Explain: Victims of abuse in care are now, at last, receiving recognition, apologies and compensation, but have they been given a credible explanation as to why their suffering was inflicted, and how it was able to go on for so long?

READING THE ABUSE IN CARE REPORTS, two questions requiring clear and compelling answers remain unanswered: Why? and How? Why were so many children and young people abused in such awful ways? How was it possible for so much and such appalling abuse to continue unchecked for so long? Without satisfactory responses to these two critical questions, the chances of history repeating itself must remain unacceptably high. For some reason, however, the Why and How of Abuse in Care were not made the prime focus of the Royal Commission’s investigations. Its reports tell us the Who, When, Where and What of this horror story, but, those two key questions, Why? and How?, are not adequately addressed.

This failure is, in part, explained by the time period under examination – 1950-1999. Narrowing the Inquiry’s scope to the second half of the twentieth century made it possible for the dominant ideologies relating to physical and mental disability, social deviance, and race, the ideologies that drove official and institutional policy-making for most of the 100 years between 1850 and 1950, to escape the Royal Commission’s scrutiny.

At the heart of the world view that gripped the imaginations of Western intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century was Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution – summarised as the ‘survival of the fittest’. In an unlikely alliance, not unfamiliar to those living in the twenty-first century, captains of industry and “progressive” social-reformers, alike, observed the condition of contemporary humanity and arrived at strikingly similar conclusions. Evolution, it seemed, was in urgent need of a helping hand. It was Darwin’s half-cousin, Francis Galton, who founded what was very soon feted as “Eugenics” – the new “science” dedicated to the systematically improving the human species.

Anti-democratic, elitist and profoundly authoritarian, Eugenics proceeded from the assumption that humanistic civilisation was, paradoxically, undermining itself by defying Darwin’s immutable law of the survival of the fittest and allowing the physically and morally “defective” to survive and procreate. Left unchecked, the survival of this inferior human stock would very quickly overwhelm and dilute the effectiveness of the superior human material upon which all successful civilisations depend. In short: by being kind to “unfit” human individuals, soft-hearted humanists were being cruel to the collective human species.

The ease with which social reformers, generally, and socialists, in particular, succumbed to the eugenicists’ argument that a kind future requires a cruel present is disconcerting. Preventing the reproduction of the “unfit” may leave us appalled, but at the turn of the nineteenth century the old excuse about the end justifying the means came with a scientific seal of approval.

It is at this historical juncture that New Zealand enters the story. Since the election of the Liberal Government in 1890, this country had earned the reputation of being the “social laboratory of the world”. Reformers around the world thrilled to the spectacle of a society in which socialists and progressives seemed to be in charge. Entirely predictably, eugenic science was forcefully espoused by New Zealand institutions as diverse as Sir Truby King’s Plunket Society and the Women’s Division of the Farmers Union.

As Hilary Stace, writing for the New Zealand Catholic Bioethics Centre, puts it in her essay “Eugenics in New Zealand”:

“The ‘unfit’ encompassed a whole range of ‘other’ including the following groups described in the language of the time: alcoholics, imbeciles, illegitimate children (and their mothers), prostitutes, criminals, the feeble-minded, lunatics, epileptics, deaf-mutes, the unemployable, the tubercular, the immoral (e.g. homosexuals), anyone from another race, those with incurable diseases such as Syphilis or tuberculosis, and even ‘mouth-breathers’.”

In “God’s Own Country” these categories had very few defenders. Many hoped that the settlement of New Zealand would produce a race of “Better Britons”. In a new country, these settlers hoped to perfect a new kind of human-being. Sir Truby King introduced his celebrated child-rearing regimen by declaring that: “The destiny of the race is in the hands of the mothers.” He was not referring to people of colour!

Always, at the heart of every eugenics project, lay the call for a comprehensive winnowing-out of the species’ “unfit” breeding-stock. Debate raged about how this could best be accomplished. Mandatory sterilisation was favoured by many eugenicists, and widely practiced in the United States of the 1920s and 30s. The compulsory sterilisation of “unfit” New Zealanders was advanced forcefully in 1928, but Parliament balked at legislating it into existence. The politicians of social-democratic Sweden were not so squeamish. Their eugenics programme, launched in the 1930s, was only brought to a close in the 1970s.

Those who think that selective human breeding and the compulsory “euthanasia” of “useless mouths” were crimes against humanity committed exclusively by Germany’s National-Socialist regime during the 1930s and 40s, should think again. The Nazi’s drew much of their inspiration, and received much helpful advice, from the eugenicists of Britain and the United States. The extremity of the German “solutions” may have been unique, but the deadly implications of eugenics were conceived in English.

Though eugenics may have been implemented with varying degrees of severity across the globe, on one strategy all those concerned with the “social hygiene” of their respective nations were agreed: the unfit must be separated from the “healthy” population – hidden away in institutions from which release, let alone escape, was to be made as difficult as possible.

Although the famous words from Dante’s “Inferno” – “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” were not inscribed above the entrances to these terrible places, the findings of the Royal Commission indicate unequivocally that they should have been.

Significantly, it wasn’t just the state that found its institutions and resources given over to the high-minded advocates of eugenic perfectionism. Before there were secular progressives determined to populate a flawless paradise on earth, there were religious institutions determined to make Hell’s spawn fit for Heaven. State and Church, alike, believed their lofty goals were best pursued away from the prying eyes of those who struggled to grasp both the importance and the difficulty of their scientific/spiritual work.

It was this perceived need for secrecy that sealed the fate of so many (one in four) of the young New Zealanders who fell into these institutions’ clutches. There is a distressingly large number of predatory human-beings for whom the information that places exist in which abuse can be carried out without significant risk of retribution will always be irresistible.

Installed within New Zealand’s “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” mental hospitals, orphanages and boys’ homes, with their patterns of abuse well established, these predatory sadists were kept safe by the sheer enormity of their offending. The bureaucrats and medical staff ostensibly in charge of these institutions were in thrall to the idea that, when it comes to the “unfit”, the “fit” population would rather not to know what is happening behind the barbed-wire fences and inside the locked wards. Aware of how disturbing it would be for ordinary citizens to be confronted with the unceasing and unpunished abuse of vulnerable and friendless youngsters, the state said and did nothing – for decades.

This is the Why and the How of the abuse that took place under the auspices of administrators, psychiatrists, doctors, nurses, orderlies, priests and pastors. It is crushing to discover that the number of children and young people victimised between 1950 and 1999 is officially estimated at 200,000. God alone knows how many suffered between 1900 and 1949!

Yes, a fraction of those victims are now, at last, receiving recognition, apologies and compensation, but have they been given a credible explanation as to why their suffering was inflicted, and how it was able to go on for so long?

In the end, it took a generational changing of the guard to finally bury the eugenicist impulses of the New Zealand officials who, even after the horrors of Nazism’s social and racial “hygiene” were made known in 1945, continued to oversee their closed world of incarcerating and coercive pseudo-medicine.

The idea that difference equals danger is embedded deep in the human brain, and the differences that make human-beings feel uncomfortable, even fearful, are all-too-easily transformed into suitable cases for treatment. Perhaps only those who had made a fetish out of their own differences with the generations that had come before them were sufficiently deprogrammed, ideologically, to see the “unfit” as people like themselves – imperfect but still precious vessels deserving of freedom and respect.

Sadly, and in spite of the Royal Commission’s best efforts, there is no happy ending to this story. Though the mental hospitals and boys’ homes are now derelict and empty of all but the ghosts of the unrecorded dead, New Zealanders are still unwilling to embrace the “other” as a fellow person and citizen. Those whom the eugenicists once condemned as “unfit” are now dismissed as “undeserving”. With a Social Darwinist sangfroid that would put last century’s eugenicists to shame, New Zealanders have learned to look through and walk around the homeless and jobless, the hopeless and friendless.

This country no longer needs to hide what it has taught itself not to see.

A version of this essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 29 July 2024.

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.