New Zealand: A Nation of the Enlightenment

 

 “It is sometimes forgotten that New Zealand, as a neo-European society, is a securely post-Enlightenment society…. a very particular example of post- Enlightenment experimental practice…. The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment … [argued] that men were governed by interest if not reason and that those interests could be orchestrated for beneficent purposes….

    “[W]e still live in a world first codified then, a world seen as 'a unified and self-sufficient Nature, governed by orderly laws, and including man within itself as part of Nature'….

    “Such a view underwrote 'the autonomy and sovereignty of knowledge'…. Thereafter the world was to be located and constituted through knowledge….

    “By the last quarter of the nineteenth century economic and moral progress would be widely considered fruits of knowledge. The myth of the Garden of Eden, where knowledge brings the Fall, had been stood on its head.”

~ Erik Olssen^[1]

By the late-1600s, centuries of Scholasticism inquiring into how many angels could dance on the head of a pin finally gave way under the weight of logical argument and experimental observation to a new world of reason, and all the accumulated rubbish of centuries were cleared away. The relentless force of Aristotelian logic, unleashed by Thomas Aquinas, had levered open the dungeon doors and let in the fresh air that swept away the dank miasma of the Dark Ages in which Europe had been enveloped[2], and the sweet breath of a New Age blew across Europe. 

The apostles of this New Age pushed back against the Edenic Myth of man as a fallen being fated only to grief and suffering in this world of crosses and graves, and saw instead a world guided by reason in which human life here on earth was perfectible.

A hard-won victory, it became the Age of Enlightenment, out of which New Zealand was born. It was no accident that the Age of Enlightenment became known more familiarly as The Age of Reason.

"The Enlightenment developed those features of the modern world that many now take largely for granted—liberal politics and free markets, scientific progress and technological innovation. All four of those institutions depend upon confidence in the power of reason. 

"Political and economic liberalism depend upon confidence that individuals can run their own lives. One gives political power and economic freedom to individuals only to the extent one thinks they are capable of using it wisely. That confidence in individuals is fundamentally a confidence in the power of reason—reason being the means by which individuals can come to know their world, plan their lives, and interact socially the way that reasonable people do—by trade, discussion, and the force of argument. 

 "Science and technology more obviously depend upon confidence in the power of reason. Scientific method is an increasingly refined application of reason to understanding nature. Trusting science’s results cognitively is an act of confidence in reason, as is trusting one’s life to its technological products. 

"Institutionalising confidence in the power of reason is the most outstanding achievement of the Enlightenment. 

"One indication of this is that of the thousands of brilliant and hardworking individuals who made the Enlightenment happen, the three men, all of them English, most often identified as being most influential in making the Enlightenment possible are: Francis Bacon, for his work on empiricism and scientific method; Isaac Newton, for his work on physics; and John Locke, for his work on reason, empiricism, and liberal politics. Confidence in the power of reason underlay all of their achievements. Their analyses and arguments carried the day, and it was the framework that they developed that provided the intellectual basis for every major development in the eighteenth century.[3]

Francis Bacon who, in the seventeenth century, was the prime author of the reversal of the Edenic myth, has been described as “the patron saint of New Zealand intellectuals in the nineteenth century.”[4] If the United States was born as the ‘The Nation of the Enlightenment,’[5] as philosopher Leonard Peikoff argues in his chapter of that title, then, New Zealand can lay claim to being at least a Nation of the Enlightenment. 

Where Galileo had faced the Inquisition for daring to put the evidence of his own eyes above the fantasies of the Roman Church, writers, essayists and “natural philosophers” across Europe were now listening to the hard sense of philosophers like John Locke, who argued that nothing comes into the mind at all except by way of the senses.[6]  

“The mind of a newborn infant was like an ‘empty cabinet,’ a tabula rasa, or a piece of ‘white paper,’ and knowledge was acquired only by experience, that is to say through the five senses… Through exercise of judgement and habitual association of ideas, complex ideas could be built up, such as those of order, beauty or liberty. The idea of freedom thus arose from the fact that a person felt able to act or desist from acting when he chose.”[7]

This was an emancipation of the mind, and of life on this earth: where, before, philosophers and theologians directed their thoughts and inquiries toward life after death, scientists and philosophers now directed their inquiries —rationally—towards the phenomena of this earth, and to making life on this earth better. 

For the first time since the Romans, knowledge now supplanted faith. And for the first time since the Greeks, knowledge would be directed towards human flourishing. “Lockean empiricism pointed the way to advances in scientific investigation.”[8] And in a short time scientific investigation and the resulting technological revolution began to make human flourishing possible.

“The development from Aquinas through Locke and Newton represents more than four hundred years of stumbling, tortuous, prodigious effort to secularise the Western mind, i.e., to liberate man from the medieval shackles. It was the build-up toward a climax: the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. For the first time in modern history, an authentic respect for reason became the mark of an entire culture; the trend that had been implicit in the centuries-long crusade of a handful of innovators now swept the West explicitly, reaching and inspiring educated men in every field. Reason, for so long the wave of the future, had become the animating force of the present…

    “Confidence in the power of man replaced dependence on the grace of God—and that rare intellectual orientation emerged, the key to the Enlightenment approach in every branch of philosophy: secularism without skepticism.

    “In metaphysics, this meant a fundamental change in emphasis: from God to this world, the world of particulars in which men live, the realm of nature . . . . Men’s operative conviction was that nature is an autonomous realm—solid, eternal, real in its own right. For centuries, nature had been regarded as a realm of miracles manipulated by a personal deity, a realm whose significance lay in the clues it offered to the purposes of its author. Now the operative conviction was that nature is a realm governed by scientific laws, which permit no miracles and which are intelligible without reference to the supernatural.” [9]

Common Sense

The New Zealander prides himself on his common sense—that “settled truth can be attained by observation”[10] and are “knowable and graspable by our own experience.”[11]

For the most part this is held so assuredly that “to reason against the [evidence of sense and memory] is absurd”; these are held as “first principles, and as such fall not within the province of reason, but of common sense.” [12]

This was the argument of the enlightened Scotsman Thomas Reid, whose “last phrase stuck” and came to New Zealand with Scottish settlers. “It helped to produce a cultural type that some consider typically American, but which is just as much Scottish” and equally applies here: “an independent intellect combined with an assertive self-respect, and grounded by a strong sense of moral purpose.”[13]

“The teachings of these Scots became known as the philosophy of Common Sense: it was the real basis of the Scottish Enlightenment,”[14] and probably our own. The basis too for Scots-American Thomas Jefferson’s idea of “self-evident truths” in his Declaration of Independence.[15]

Freedom, Revolution + Rights

If Locke’s 1690 Essay liberated thought and made a philosophical revolution possible, it was his involvement in a 1688 revolution that made political freedom possible. In 1688 a monarchical coup deposed a Scottish king and replaced him with an Anglo-Dutch husband and wife team. It would have been just another sordid game of thrones if not for the political document the coup-leaders imposed on the new monarchs. A Bill of Rights.

Rights themselves were a new invention. For centuries it was an idea that was struggling to be born; that to be human being, and to live and flourish as a human, required the right to carry out the necessary actions to sustain that human life. This dawning realisation came itself as a quiet revolution. Arriving with a thud, as part of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, was the crowning idea that rulers did not grant these rights – that the job of these rulers (and their only legitimate job) was to recognise these natural rights and to use their power to protect them. Anything beyond that, said John Locke in his great written justification for that Revolution that have rung down through the centuries, “is power beyond right”:

"As usurpation is the exercise of power which another hath a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to….

"It is a mistake to think this fault is proper only to monarchies. Other forms of government are liable to it as well…

"Wherever law ends, tyranny begins, if the law be transgressed to another’s harm.

Even in the Parliament that this Glorious Revolution set up in the name of this new pollical freedom, even when only a handful of prosperous adult Englishman were legally entitled to vote, the deliberations were still “conducted in Lockean terms. Politicians of all persuasions found that they could hardly speak without using the great words that Locke had given them: property, right, legitimacy and revolution.”[16] This was the true birth of political liberalism that would flower in the nineteenth century.

Property and the State of Nature

Recognising that property existed, John Locke hypothesised an origin story for how property rights emerged. His original condition is a hypothetical “state of nature,’ from which land and other resources are extracted from the common pool by the original owner, who removes it from the State that Nature provided it, mixes his labour with it, and joins it to something already owned.[17] We thereby make it property, he says. 

“For this Labour being the unquestionable Property of the Labourer, no Man but he can have a right to what that is once joyned to, at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others.”[18]

Remembering of course that “‘labour’ in this context means production”: specifically creating valuable products from bare matter, and turning worthless land into real estate.[19]

And also remembering that recognising property rights “creates the conditions by which men can rise above subsistence-level living in the state of nature and thereby transcend the ‘enough and as good’ proviso on original acquisition, (noting that ‘he who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen but increase the common stock of mankind’).”[20]

The account is not of course a full defence of property rights. That would have to wait too long. But it begins an account of how we might think about property rights, how law should best protect these rights, why property rights matter, and several of their blessings —of which we might list five.

The primary blessing of private property 

"is that people can benefit from their own industry and insulate themselves from the negative effects of others' actions. It is like a set of invisible mirrors that surround individuals, households or firms, reflecting back on them the consequences of their acts. The industrious will reap the benefits of their industry; the frugal the consequences of their frugality; the improvident and the profligate likewise. They receive their due, which is to say they experience justice as a matter of routine."[21]

This great blessing of independence comes from the first four “that cannot easily be realised in a society that lacks the secure, decentralised, private ownership of goods. These are: liberty, justice, peace and prosperity. … [P]rivate property is a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition for these highly desirable social outcomes.”[22]

 

It was the ability to transform worthless land into valuable property by dramatically increasing production that began setting the world ablaze in the eighteenth century. Thinkers like Adam Smith were drawn to explain it; while feudal landowners from the lowlands of England to the Highlands of Scotland sought to exploit it.

Property and some nonsense called ‘Great Chain of Being’

Seeking to understand and explain how property had come to achieve its blessings, Adam Smith used “state of nature theory” in the same way John Locke did. He recognised that human development has happened, hypothesising therefrom an original condition from which it must have progressed. Smith and other Enlightenment thinkers recognised the blessings of property to be one of the primary drivers of human development—so included its development as a crucial part of their four-stage hypothesis.

Smith, Hume and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers especially were trying to make sense of Scotland’s own rapid progress from clan-ridden barbarism and poverty to the relative wealth and ease developing over the eighteenth century as Scotland won its place as the Enlightenment centre of Europe.[23] Broadly speaking, it’s the progress from goats to sheep, and from collectivism towards individualism. 

In the rude state of nature, humans hunt and gather together, as a tribe or clan group. Goats, or animals like them, then begin to hunt and gather on behalf of individual owners, foraging widely over a nominal commons. The next phase sees individuals beginning to apply conceptual thinking to what they previously gathered, beginning to understand species and seasonal patterns, settling down to plant and to plan ahead.  This brings an agricultural revolution. Smith’s final phase is the stage of “truck and barter,” the age of commerce and the full flowering of the division of labour.[24] Some might call this civilisation.

Some historians describe this hypothesis as “stadial” thinking—either reifying the helpful idea of progress into something allowing condemnation of societies whose cultural development has yet to pass through the necessary stages, or else confusing the hypothesised stages with a formal description. In these hands, “by the later nineteenth century social-Darwinist ideas 'scientifically' classifying humanity into racial groups with fixed traits, and positing a fundamental 'struggle for existence' among these distinct groups, were to eclipse this earlier history.”[25]

Worse, there are historians who cite the idea as just another example of the notion of a “great chain of being”—a fully hierarchical structure of all matter and life, thought by medieval Christianity to have been decreed by God. 

Some contemporary historians claim Darwin’s Origin of the Species and Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” as an updated basis for this primeval idea, “which ordered species on an evolutionary ladder from the most simple organism to the most complex.” On this foundation, it’s claimed for example that during early Australian colonisation “Australian Aborigines were commonly seen as the lowest people on the Great Chain, and hence as the people most poorly equipped to climb the evolutionary ladder.”[26] Similarly fatuous claims have been made about colonists’ views on Māori here.[27]  

But this is both confusion and simple anachronism. 

First of all, Darwin came to New Zealand in its early days, but it would be years before he published his famous book; and Spencer’s dog-eat-dog idea of development is both too late to have influenced colonists who arrived four decades before, and utterly unlike any model of development based on division of labour.[28] Rather than Darwin and Spencer, “if colonists’ description … reflected any philosopher’s ideas, they could have reflected Hobbes’s or Locke’s or Rousseau’s … as well as any other, as their works were well known during the colonial period.”[29]

Further confusion attends on the over-literal interpretation of Smith’s “four stages,” which is clearly Smith’s attempt “to make sense of Scotland’s political, economic and social transformations in the 18^th century”[30] which focussed on exchanging feudal land-grubbing for pastoral sheep-farming. But these historians are also confused about the ontological status of these stages. For Smith, Hume and Ferguson, they “are simply a pedagogical heuristic, a classification of different kinds of society, and in a sense not dissimilar from Aristotle’s (1877) classification of hunting, pastoral, and agricultural societies in Book I of Politics”:

“The four stages are a taxonomy of different relations between means of production and social, moral, political, and legal institutions, not a model of development from one stage to another. It may not be an accident that Smith tends to use ‘state of society’ rather than ‘stage of society,’ where ‘stage’ is a point, period, or step in a process or development, while ‘state’ refers to the particular condition that someone or something is in at a specific time.”[31]

And what of calling some of these states “primitive,” simple,’ or “savage”? It’s fatuous to suggest these cultures were called primitive simply because they were “othered.”[32] As Thomas Sowell explains, culture is a machinery for advancing our lives, and like all working machinery it should be judged, and evaluated, by how well it works for those within it.[33] If the cultural machinery is working poorly, is primitive, then one should say so. That’s how technology changes and improves.

We may of course “order” societies on any basis that we please. But they must reflect reality. “Darwin or no Darwin, we are all descended from black Eve,” argues historian Peter Munz, “and every single culture which has ever existed is a departure from the culture of black Eve, whoever she was.”[34] Munz uses the notion 'black Eve’ “metaphorically”[35] to indicate that of us “are descended or transmuted from a common stock,” as Enlightenment thinkers were coming to understand.[36][37]

"There is uncertainty and there is controversy as to the mechanisms of these departures. According to Marx they are powered by the contradictions internal to every society and according to others, they are driven by natural selection, and according to nineteenth-century historians, they result from the developmental law of the progressive stages of evolution: savagery-barbarism-civilization; magic-religion-science; nomadism-pastoralism-agriculture-commerce. Whichever way evolution is propelled, it recognizes cultural diversities, explains them and why they are not final, and provides a legitimate way of ranking them according to their distance from the points of the origin —which must have been in all cases the earliest hominids. All known cultures as well as all unknown ones can be located on this evolutionary scale and their differences can be accounted for in terms of their distance from black Eve. The links between changes in culture and the passage of time are not random. It goes against the entire record of archaeological evidence as well as against all reason to think otherwise and to make out that the world consists of so many cultures which encounter each other on equal terms. Some cultures are farther from black Eve than others; and cultures which have become so thin as to generate universally valid science rather than parochially legitimizing and self-representing chants, are the farthest removed ones.”[38]

 "Whether these initial, early conditions are seen as the conditions of the Garden of Eden or just hunter-gatherer habits can remain a moot point. Some have moved further than others and some, as is well known in Australia, have hardly moved in that direction at all. At any time, some are further removed from those early conditions than others. One can even avoid the word 'advanced' and look upon the whole process entirely in terms of a departure from an initial condition.

“I would suggest, in passing, that one can rank the distance of societies from black Eve according to their exclusiveness. The earliest societies were totally exclusive and would not admit people other than those who belonged to their descent group. Next came societies which would admit people through marriage; and at the other end of the scale, farthest removed from black Eve, there are societies which potentially include anybody who wants to be included. Ranking in these terms is completely neutral and value-free. All it says is that while one cannot 'become' a Maori, one can 'become' a New Zealander, and that, for that reason, there is a structural difference between these two kinds of societies, and that that difference defines the distance of these societies from black Eve and that the actually exclusive structures are earlier than the potentially inclusive structures. Since this criterion is neutral, there can be no question of 'progress', only of progression. If one wants to link such progression to moral considerations, it would probably be more correct to call it a regress than a progress. But whatever criteria one likes to choose, the distances from black Eve can be ascertained because evolution, including cultural evolution, is a reality of life.”[39]

The importance here however of Smith’s hypothetical states is that colonists and Colonial Office theorists used their identification of the state of Māori development (as much or as little as they knew about it) to conjecture over the property rights that should (or shouldn't) be recognised in any new colony there,[40] and to estimate on this basis the area of “waste lands” that might therefore be available for colonial development. Yet while “property in the savage state was deemed to be extremely limited in extent,”[41] this is precisely the opposite of the case, as Smith had already pointed out—the more the call is for hunting and gathering, the wider the field needed to explore. Whereas the more agricultural projects are undertaken, the more concentrated the land required.

The later confusion on this point was as important as it was tragic.

Property Rights are entrepreneurial recognition

    “The relevance of all this to the defence of property rights is straightforward.  If objects’ value is the result of individual efforts, them objects are valuable only because particular individuals have worked in constructive ways to make things serve some ends.  When this realisation is teamed with the egoistic premise that a person is entitled to live for her own benefit, it becomes clear that the value a person creates should be hers to keep and control.  
    “Since human effort creates the value that any object possesses—since individuals are responsible for all of a thing’s value—it is appropriate to recognise property rights belonging to the individuals who generate the relevant value.  If a person is entitled to act to promote her own eudaimonia and through her actions creates something that is valuable to her, we have no grounds for denying her right to that product.”
~ Tara Smith[42]

It was too early yet in history for the insight that it is not “mixing one’s labour” that makes it property, it is adding value.[43] The source of that which is created is ultimately within us.[44] We create new goods, or we add new value to existing land. These goods derive their character as goods, and property as property, by virtue of the ability of these things to benefit human beings. It is not the labour that is recognised as a property right in this new value, whether “mixed” or otherwise, it is the judgement.   

"According to the entrepreneurial model, it is the judgement—no small matter in human affairs where instincts play hardly any role—that fixes something as possessing (potential) value (to oneself or others); and therefore the making of this judgment and acting on it—the alertness and attentiveness of it all—is what earns oneself the status of a property holder. The rational process of forming a judgment is neither automatic nor passive; neither does the process involve more than a minimum overt physical effort, but it is an act of labour nonetheless. What gives the judgment its moral significance is that it is a freely made, initiated choice involving the unique human capacity to reason things out, applied to some aspect of reality and its relationship to one’s purposes and life goals. One exerts the effort to choose to identify something as having potential or actual value. This imparts to it a practical dimension, something to guide one’s actions in life. Whether one is correct or not in any given instance remains to be seen, but in either case the judgment brings the item under one’s jurisdiction on something like a 'first come, first served' basis."[45]

---

[1] Erik Olssen, ‘Mr Wakefield and New Zealand as an Experiment,’ NZJH (Vol. 31, No. 2, October 1997), pp198-200

[2] Burgess Laughlin, The Aristotelian Adventure: A Guide to the Greek, Arabic, & Latin Scholars Who Transmitted Aristotle's Logic to the Renaissance, Albert Hale Publishers, 1995; Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1995; Andrew Bernstein, ‘The Tragedy of Theology: How Religion Caused and Extended the Dark Ages,’ Objective Standard, Winter 2006-7, Vol.1 No. 4. 

[3] Hicks, Stephen R. C.. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition) (Kindle Locations 912-937). Ockham's Razor. Kindle Edition.

^[4] Erik Olssen, ‘Mr Wakefield and New Zealand as an Experiment,’ NZJH (Vol. 31, No. 2, October 1997), p200, Olssen recounts that it was Francis Bacon, in the seventeenth century, who was the prime author of the reversal of the Edenic myth. Otago history academic John Stenhouse, in personal communication with Olssen, thus describes Bacon as “the patron saint of New Zealand intellectuals in the nineteenth century.”

^[5] Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels:The End of Freedom in America, Stein & Day, New York, 1982, 101-118.

[6] (Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690). 

[7] (Porter, 2000/2001), 63-4

^[8] (Porter, 2000/2001), p. 67

^[9] (Peikoff, 1983), pp. 100-106 passim

[10] (McCosh, 1875), 194

[11] (Herman, 2001), 262

[12] (Reid, 1823),28; (Herman, 2001), 262

[13] (Herman, 2001) 263-4

[14] (Fry, 2025)

[15] (Herman, 2001), 263; (Thompson, 2006), 77 passim

[16] (Van Doren, 1991), p. 222-3

[17] Compare this to Carl Menger’s insightful explanation of how a thing acquires “goods-character” in his ‘General Theory of the Good’ (Menger, 1870 (2004))51-55

[18] (Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 1689), s27, at 287

[19] (Mossoff, 2002) 14

[20]  (Mossoff, 2002) quoting (Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 1689), s37, at 294

[21]  (Bethell, 1999) 162

[22] (Bethell, 1999) 9

[23] See for example (Herman, 2001)

[24] (Smith, (1776) 2003) Book V. More formally the four unique stages of development through which every society must pass are from primitive hunter gathers through sheep herding, to agriculture, to an advanced division of labour. On this see also Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence, ([1762–63] 1982), Indianapolis: Liberty Fund—published only after Smith’s death.

[25] (Moloney, 2001) 153

[26] Shayne Breen, Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Black Inc. Agenda (Australia, 2003) p.140

[27] See for example James Belich, ‘European ideas about Māori,’ Te Ara, (undated) https://teara.govt.nz/en/european-ideas-about-maori/print[accessed 22 Aug 2025]

[28] “As [economist Ludwig] von Mises has shown, the economic competition that takes place under capitalism is radically different than the biological competition that prevails in the animal kingdom. In fact, its character is diametrically opposite. … 

“Totally unlike lions in the jungle, who must compete for a limited supply of animals such as zebras and gazelles, by means of the power of their senses and limbs, producers under capitalism are in competition for a limited supply of dollars in the hands of consumers, which they compete for by means of offering the best and most economical products their minds can devise. Since such competition is a competition in the positive creation of new and additional wealth, there are no genuine long-run losers as the result of it. There are only winners. 

    “The competition of farmers and farm-equipment manufacturers enables the hungry and weak to eat and grow strong; that of pharmaceutical manufacturers enables the sick to recover their health; that of eye-glass and hearing-aid manufacturers enables many who otherwise could not see or hear, to do so. So far from being a competition whose outcome is “the survival of the fittest,” the competition of capitalism is more accurately described as a competition whose outcome is the survival of all, or at least of more and more, for longer and longer and ever better. The only sense in which only the “fittest” survive is that it is the fittest products and fittest methods of production that survive, until replaced by still fitter products and methods of production, with the effects on human survival just described.” [George Reisman, ’13 Examples of the Benevolence of Capitalism,’ Mises Institute blog, 20 Nov. 2028 https://mises.org/mises-daily/13-examples-benevolence-capitalism (accessed 22 Aug 2025)]

[29] John Dawson, Washout: On the Academic Response to the Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Macleay Press (Sydney, 2004) 93-94

[30] John Burrow, ‘Adam Smith and Stadial Theory,’ Adam Smith Works, Jan 19 2020, https://www.adamsmithworks.org/speakings/adam-smith-and-stadial-theory [accessed 22 Aug 2025]

[31] Maria Pia Pagnelli, ‘Adam Smith And Economic Development In Theory And Practice: A Rejection Of The Stadial Model?’ Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Volume 44, Number 1, March 2022, p. 97

[32] See for example (Moloney, 2001) 154

[33] (Sowell, Conquests and Cultures: An International History, 1998) ix

[34] Peter Munz, ‘The Two Worlds of Anne Salmond in Postmodern Fancy-Dress,’ New Zealand Journal of History, Volume 28, Number 1, April 1994, p. 71

[35] Munz here notes W.H. Durham, Coevolution, Stanford, 1991, p. vii. “To speak literally,” he notes, “while it is still uncertain whether there was one single point of origin or more than one (see A.C. Wilson and R.L. Cann, 'The Recent African Genesis of Humans', Scientific American, 266 (1992), pp.22-27 and A.G. Thorne and M.H. Wolpoff, 'The Multiregional Evolution of Humans', ibid., pp.28-33), 'the genetic evidence now seems to favour the monogenesis view': Colin Renfrew, 'Archaeology, Genetics and Linguistic Diversity', Man, 27 (1992), p.449.

[36] Munz, ibid. p. 71, n. 27

[37] Erik Olssen, The Origins of an Experimental Society: New Zealand, 1769–1860, Auckland University Press, 2025, Chapter 1, especially from “Human nature had become a field of inquiry during the previous two centuries…”

[38] Peter Munz, ‘The Two Worlds of Anne Salmond in Postmodern Fancy-Dress,’ New Zealand Journal of History, Volume 28, Number 1, April 1994, p. 71-2

[39] Peter Munz, ‘The Two Worlds of Anne Salmond in Postmodern Fancy-Dress,’ New Zealand Journal of History, Volume 28, Number 1, April 1994, p. 74-75

[40] Smith’s Wealth of Nations for example allows that flocks and crops indicate the “central institution of private property” and “law and order” are in action in some form, whereas “there is scarce any property” recognised for the hunter-gather.

[41] (Moloney, 2001) 155

[42] (Smith T. , 1995)

[43] (Cresswell, Getting property rights right: Mixing my labour?, 2015), (Smith T. , 1995)

[44] (Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, 1996, 1990) 41

[45] (Machan, 2002) 15-16

"'[K]upapa alliances became a significant part of the new Maori politics of the later 1860s."

"In 2014 calls came from some Mãori and Pakeha commentators for commemoration of those lost in the New Zealand Wars, at the same level as occurs for New Zealand's overseas wars. Those calls sought equal status with Anzac Day for a national day of remembrance for those lost in the New Zealand Wars. This is a well-merited suggestion. However, those making such calls must face up to a hard reality from history that is commonly not addressed, probably because of the difficulty it raises.

"The difficulty is that for such commemorations to be accurate and inclusive would require an informed and frank recognition of the differing Mãori positions throughout the New Zealand Wars. In turn that would require a recognition that casualties in battles involving Mãori-on-Maori conflicts in the earlier and later wars were often as heavy, or heavier, than in the battles involving Pakeha Imperial or colonial armies and Mãori. As this book shows, the list of such clashes between Mãori covers all the periods of war in New Zealand from 1845 to 1872. Casualties were suffered on many occasions by both Maori sides, solely at Mãori hands. ...

"'[K]upapa alliances became a significant part of the new Maori politics of the later 1860s. Their decisions and actions would always be their own, based on intricate calculations of the balance of power between the tribes, and on the best means to protect the land and its resources.' [Anderson, Binney, Harris (2014)] ...

"What is mostly lacking, [however], in the various forms of publication, is detailed analyses of why many Mäori throughout the whole course of the New Zealand Wars aligned with the Crown or settler Government in fighting against other Mãori. A voluminous post-1996 body of literature explores in more detail some motivating reasons specific to particular areas, iwi or periods of time, but there is no one detailed narrative as to the military endeavours of Mãori aligned on the side of the Crown or settler Government, or their motivations. ...

"Judith Binney['s] ... 'Redemption Songs: A Life of Te Kooti Arkirangi Te Turuki' ... [for example] rarely recognised the depth of resentment that Te Kooti's repeated attacks caused among other Mäori, and their extended whanaunga (blood relatives); and she did not seem to identify this as the major reason why he faced so many vengeful pursuers. ... The reaction of other Mãori to the threat Te Kooti posed demands recognition as a major motivating factor in the widespread Maori opposition in the field to him.

"Dr Monty Soutar's doctoral thesis on Rapata Wahawaha, published in 2000 ... [shows] the other side of the particular coin relating to Wahawaha - one of the pre-eminent figures of the last seven years of the wars. ...

"James Belich posed the issue well as long ago as 1996 in 'Making Peoples': 'In a kind of mirror of Pakeha evasions, the role of kupapa is also downplayed in Maori memories. 'Might-have-been history is a dangerous game, but it is very hard to see how the later wars could have been won without kupapa help...' ...

"For any commemoration of the losses in the New Zealand Wars to be historically accurate, then, the reality that the wars were not simply a two-sided Crown-Mãori conflict would need to be acknowledged. The wars involved three groupings - dissident Mãori; Pakeha forces (either British Imperial Army or, later on, settler Government military forces); and Maori who aligned with the Crown or the settler Government for a complex range of reasons. All three groupings suffered large losses fighting for their different beliefs.

"If the call for commemoration is for the purpose of unification of our nation, rather than to perpetuate past conflicts, then all who lost their lives in the New Zealand Wars are deserving of respect and commemoration."

~ Ron Crosby from his 2015 book Kupapa

"This pathetic and muddled belief in the power of credit to cure all economic ills is perennial in New Zealand"

"Still belief  persisted in the magic of credit to achieve all economic objectives. ... This pathetic and muddled belief in the power of credit to cure all economic ills is perennial in New Zealand ... 

"It was a factor in the Labour Party's seeping victory in 1935 ... It was potent throughout the Labour Party's tenure of office and never more potent than in the post-war years when it was least applicable."

~ JB Condliffe writing after the WWII) of the New Zealander's enthusiasm for cheap money, in his 1959 book The Welfare State in New Zealand

Were Maori environmentalists? [updated]

A friend who wrote a thesis several years ago on common law solutions to environmentalism asked me this question a few weeks ago, and I've only recently got around to answering (I've paraphrased the question just a little):

Q: How did Maori activists [he asks] attain the apparent status they now possess in the environmental movement? In other words, why do NZ environmentalists bow to Maori prejudices? When I wrote my thesis this absurdity was not evident as it is now. Please can anybody shed some light on this?

So here's my rather belated answer.

On the facts of pre-European Maori environmental stewardship , the best I've read is a shortish piece by M.S. McGlone et al: 'An Ecological Approach to the Polynesian Settlement of New Zealand' published in The Origins of the First New Zealanders [Auckland University Press, 1994.] Unfortunately, it's not online (although I do quote from it briefly in this article), but it does rather give the lie to the idea of Maori as sound environmental stewards.

Take bird life for example. 

"James et al estimate that untouched Oceania may have had more than 9000 bird species -- more than the total of surviving species on Earth today. Most of this incredibly rich fauna was eliminated by the direct or indirect effect of [pre-European] settlement... The amount of accessible fat and protein per square kilometre on a Pacific island may have been unequalled anywhere in the world...  

Direct evidence exists for this superabundance of bird and marine resources on unexploited islands... In the initial settlement period [of New Zealand], the early abundance of bird bone must have represented a truly incredible exploitation rate... [Yet] NZ midden evidence shows that the consistent exploitation of birds in the late prehisoric results in few bird-bone remains...

The extinction of birds other than moa and of reptiles, and the shrinking of the range of many other species are well-attested (Cassels 1984)... the absence of these species in natural deposits such as caves, swamps and sand dunes after about 1,000 years ago strongly suggests early and vigorous depletion...

In summary: the birds were being killed and eaten in great numbers, in complete disregard it seems of any long-term consequences.

The case is the same for New Zealand flora. Slash and burn agriculture "rapidly destroyed much of the forest cover... By 600 years [Before Present] many animals had been driven to extinction or close to it, and very large areas of country, even in remote inland South Island valleys, were being burnt regularly... A degree of burning may been beneficial, for a [short] time at least."

However, over the longer term: "Extensive burning of inland valleys and ridges offered no obvious advantages in terms of food production..." The result of indigenous environmental stewardship over the longer term? Population grew rapidly in the North Island of NZ from 800 years BP, before slowing down about 400 years BP (following the major forest clearance phase) and plateauing about 200 years BP at about 100,000 when resources began diminishing (see graph at right).

After the initial settlement phase, New Zealand moved directly into a subsistence mode which characterised other island populations only during famine or when pushed into highly marginal lands... By the end of the prehistoric period New Zealand was no longer resource-rich, and the very scarcity of resources and reliance on hard-won wild foods had created a situation from which no larger political entities could easily arise.

So the idea of Maori as sound environmental stewards is not supported by the archaeological evidence. As 'sustainable' environmentalists they just weren't. So how to explain then the apparent status they now possess in the environmental movement? The reason is more widespread than is contained in environmentalism alone.

I think there's perhaps three legs in answer to the question, all related.

1. The Noble Savage

The first is the notion, first given currency by Rousseau, of the 'Noble Savage' -- the romantic idea of wild, untamed human creatures 'uncorrupted' by civilisation. It might be noted that this creation of 'romantic primitivism' was postulated entirely without evidence.

As Roger Sandall amongst others has noted, "A 'savage,'' untouched by civilization, would be akin to an animal, and neither noble nor a good role model for a society. By viewing civilization as something that corrupts or taints a person's pure or natural state, 'new tribalists' are succumbing, like Rousseau, to the romantic idea that the natural state of a human being, without the moderating effect of civilization, is somehow better. To the critics this notion is easily refutable, either by comparing human quality of life before civilization, or as humorist P.J. O'Rourke pointed out, by considering the natural state of children."

In Sandall's view, [summarises Wikipedia] romantic primitivism places far too high a value on cultures that were often characterised by, among other aspects, limited human rights, religious intolerance, disease and poverty. Other negative aspects he discusses include domestic oppression (usually of women and children), violence, clan/tribal warfare, poor care of the environment and considerable restriction on artistic freedom of expression.

'The Four Stages of Noble Savagery: The Moral Transiguration of the Tribal World' is the Appendix to Sandall's book, 'The Culture Cult,' and is highly readable on this question. He concludes by discussing the 'Disneyfication' of the 'Noble Savage':

Sentimentalism begets puerility. The ruthless scalpers of yesterday become Loving Persons. One-time ferocious fighters are discovered to be Artists at Heart. Hollywood becomes interested...  
Combined with this a suffocating religiosity now descends on public discussion, enforced by priests and judges, journalists and teachers, poets and politicians, all of whom claim that native culture possesses a “spirituality” found nowhere else. Soon the primitive is elevated above the civilized. In the words of one observer in New Zealand it is said that the whites “have lost the appreciation for magic and the capacity for wonder” while white culture, besides being “out of step with nature. . . pollutes the environment and lacks a close tie with the land.”

Few are unkind enough to note that “the imagined ancestors with whom the Pacific is being repopulated”—Wise Ecologists, Mystical Sages, and Pacifist Saints—“are in many ways creations of Western imagination.”

Just like Pocohantas. Or Chief Seattle.

2. 'The National Question'

The second leg is specifically political, the idea that Lenin called 'The National Question' -- a specific strategy adopted by Marxist-Leninists to help destabilise a colonised country by use of the grievances, real or otherwise, of indigenous populations.

This movement came to attention in NZ in the late seventies (made most visible with the 'Treaty is a Fraud' movement), and you might say that reached its apogee under Neville Bolger's appeasing stewardship (when it suddenly transmogrified into an'Honour the Treaty' movement).

When mainstream Marxism collapsed following the collapse of the Berlin Wall -- and with it any claim that Marxist societies would ever be able to produce (or be good environmental stewards) -- rather than give up their authoritarianism, the custodians of 'The National Question' stampeded into local and overseas environmental movements. Consequently, the numbers of 'National Question' adherents and other fellow-travellers (the gullible type whom Lenin called Useful Idiots) who call themselves 'green' but are still red on the inside would seem to be quite large.

3. Multiculturalism

The third leg, related to and in some sense underpinning both, is the notion of 'multiculturalism' -- the idea that all cultures are equal (apart, that is, from the cultures of the west). 'Multi-culti is one of the many foolish notions of postmodernism, (encompassing both moral relativism and political correctness) that captured the academies in recent years.

Naturally when the least are made equal to the best, the least win out. If all cultures are asserted (without evidence) to be equal, then one is disarmed from finding evidence that would disprove such an assertion. To find and assert such evidence would, according to the multiculturalist, be 'racist.'

The consequence is this: If one is disarmed from judging a culture -- which is one of the goals of moral relativism -- then the worst cultures are left free from moral judgement, and moral judgement itself becomes bereft of any evidential-base: the only immorality to a multiculturalist is to challenge the assertions of multiculturalism. That too would be racist.

But as Thomas Sowell points out, you can judge cultures, and in fact if human life is our standard then morality demands that we should judge them.

Cultures [he insists] are not museum-pieces. They are the working machinery of everyday life. Unlike objects of aesthetic contemplation, working machinery is judged by how well it works, compared to the alternatives. The judgment that matters is not the judgment of observers and theorists, but the judgment implicit in millions of individual decisions to retain or abandon particular cultural practices, decisions made by those who personally benefit or who personally pay the price of inefficiency and obsolescence."

Anyway, on this last point you might want to have a good look at:

• My own Multiculturalism archives.
• Thomas Sowell's book Conquest and Cultures.
• George Reisman's superb pamphlet 'Education and the Racist Road to Barbarism,' which pretty much explains and explodes the process and the arguments behind multiculturalism.
• 'Multiculturalism: The New Racism,' a special issue of the Ayn Rand Institute's 'Impact' magazine.' [Cover story here]
• And for a background to how they get away with it philosophically, you might take a good look also at Stephen Hicks's superb book Explaining Postmodernism [free PDF here] - you can read a summary of the book's thesis here in an interview with Hicks.

REFERENCES CITED ABOVE IN McGLONE et al:
- Cassells, R., 1984: 'The role of prehistoric man in the faunal extinctions of New Zealand and other Pacific Islands,' in Martin et al Quaternary Extinctions, Uni of Arizona Press.
- James et al, 1987: 'Radiocarbon dates on bones of extinct birds from Hawaii,' Proceedings of the Nat. Academy of Sciences of the USA, 84.
- Leach, H.M., 1980: 'Incompatible land use patterns in Maori food production,' New Zealand Archaeological Ass. Newsletter, v.23.

UPDATE: Matua Kahurangi takes a look at a current example of non-kaitiakitanga where bureaucratic management, bad incentives and pisspoor efforts at conservation combine in the worst of all worlds ....

For years, the Ureweras have been celebrated as a showcase of iwi stewardship and environmental guardianship. But the reality is far bleaker. Tūhoe leadership is presiding over mismanagement, neglect, and a shocking lack of accountability, turning what should be a model of co-governance into a cautionary tale of waste and incompetence. ... huts and infrastructure deliberately left to rot or burned down, sensitive areas mismanaged, and allegations of intimidation or threats towards white Kiwis attempting to access the land. These are not isolated incidents - they are a pattern.