Diana Wichtel: History, change, Judith Collins, mātauranga Māori and Professor Michael Corballis

Hui presenter Mihingarangi Forbes. Photo / Supplied

The 60s. I remember skirmishes in the intergenerational wars of the times. We used to visit a potter friend in Pūhoi, who dressed in the style of day, as if raised by wolves. The local pub's notoriously cantankerous landlord didn't like it. Our small hippe contingent would slip into the public bar and attempt to down a beer before being thrown out.

Women at the teachers training college I briefly attended after leaving school, protested for the radical right to wear trousers. In 1972 visiting feminist Germaine Greer was arrested for saying "bulls***". We fought for women's lib on the beaches in our scandalous string bikinis and in the streets to legalise abortion. Whina Cooper led the 1975 land hīkoi to Parliament. It took until 1986 for sex between men to be decriminalised. The way forward back then was noisy and messy and full of mistakes – lethal car seats for babies, smoking on planes, salad in jelly … But out of the rubble of an exhausted conservative status quo emerged change that needed to happen.

So it's dispiriting to see too many boomers, who once fought that sort of thing, ossifying into versions of the grouchy Pūhoi Pub gatekeeper. Those who forget the history of how change happens are condemned to become Judith Collins fuming about the Greens moving Winston Churchill. Or to end up railing about a few apparently infuriating seconds of te reo on the news and the increasing popularity of the word Aotearoa. After Sir Ian Taylor posted a cartoon on social media suggesting New Zealand excelled in ocean sports because of "our ancestral DNA", Hurricanes board member Troy Bowker accused Taylor of "sucking up to the left Māori loving agenda". Dear oh dear.

There was the letter published in the Listener from seven University of Auckland professors bent on saving science from mātauranga Māori in response to an NCEA working group's proposed changes to the Māori school curriculum. Under patient interrogation from Mihingarangi Forbes on The Hui, emeritus professor of psychology, Michael Corballis, admitted he knew little about mātauranga Māori. "Wouldn't that be something you would go and consult and engage with before you would write a letter like that?" said Forbes, sighing. It was hard to find out anything, apparently. "I'm literally in the office next to you Michael," tweeted a colleague who might have helped.

I once interviewed brilliant theologian Lloyd Geering, famously tried for heresy, an ordained Presbyterian minister who thinks God is a human idea. He believes in the creativity of the universe. When we spoke, he cited Genesis - "And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep … " - as "one of the most succinct and imaginative documents of origins ever composed". He saw the gods humans created to explain natural phenomena as concepts of early science. Sometimes ideas, like people, aren't as fundamentally incompatible as they seem.

On The Hui, Forbes soon had Corballis agreeing that early Polynesian navigators and those who learned to ferment food, for example, were, in fact, scientists. As the interview went on, it seemed that the professors were responding not to a threat to science but to some scientists' unnecessarily rigid way of looking at it.

The letter rejected the notion that science can be driven by false beliefs that have caused damage. Doctors are taught via their Hippocratic Oath a version of "first, do no harm", an acknowledgement that, however rational and objective a discipline may seem, it isn't always, and harm can ensue. To teach the limitations and failures of science, along with its endless benefits, is just teaching science.

As I write, my phone alert has sounded like a trumpet of doom and we're in lockdown. Following the science can't magic away a pandemic of Covid proportions but it has served us well here, not least because – apart from some placard-waving conspiracy nuts and some commentators for whom being epically under-informed is a way of life - of the level of respect for science that exists in Aotearoa. A clutch of professors guarding the gate from new perspectives really isn't required.

Next week: Steve Braunias