Geoff Kemp: Peters' core argument a slippery proposition

Opinion

There was something fishy about Winston Peters' latest intervention in New Zealand race relations, his End of Tolerance speech. The title's meaning was slippery as an eel, given that the speech was in effect a call for intolerance in the name of tolerance towards the allegedly intolerant.

But there was also the whiff of a red herring about its claim that New Zealand's Muslim community has a militant "underbelly" posing a terrorist threat.

The media took the bait - hook, line and sinker. But proving the presence or absence of violently radical Islamists would make little difference to Peters' case.

His core argument was this: a country which stands in a European democratic tradition of valuing tolerance and freedom of speech cannot admit those people who come from traditions which do not endorse these values in the same way because they cannot be trusted to uphold, rather than undermine, democracy.

This is altogether broader than acting against terrorism. Its message is that if you are a present or prospective migrant from a non-Western country you are unlikely to be as tolerant as we are, so we don't have to tolerate you.

So when New Zealand First's leader insists that migrants must "affirm their commitment to our values and standards", and then says Islamic "alien values" are inimical to those standards, it is hard to avoid hearing him say that New Zealand cannot tolerate Muslims at all, particularly when he added that the moderate and the militant fit hand-in-glove "everywhere they exist".

This looks more like the curtailment than fulfilment of a tradition of tolerance and seems to confirm what American academic Stanley Fish labels "the trouble with principle". Fish argues that appeals to tolerance and freedom of expression are routinely used in liberal democracies as rhetorical ploys to serve a substantive political agenda and that "the game of neutral principles is really a political game - the object of which is to package your agenda in a vocabulary everyone, or almost everyone, honours".

The provocative title of Fish's best-known book, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and a Good Thing Too, aimed to convey the view that when people claim there is a single "thing" called free speech or tolerance they are generally trying to shortcircuit the exacting work of resolving the dilemmas involved in human co-existence.

Peters' agenda is to question the "quality of immigration into New Zealand" and avoid being marginalised as racist.

Using the irreproachably liberal language of tolerance and freedom to separate a mass of undesired immigrants on an ostensibly neutral - and colour-blind - basis must have looked an inviting strategy, but its limitations are apparent.

If the European tradition of tolerance has any meaning at all, it cannot mean that only those who share all its beliefs and commitments are to be tolerated. On any account, this does not constitute toleration.

The retort to the Peters viewpoint often tends to be that Muslims are really "just like us". Tayyaba Khan is a "typical Kiwi chick" who happens to wear a headscarf, as a Herald article put it last week.

This response has considerable force - Kiwi Muslims, like other Kiwis, don't engage in terrorism - but it also concedes ground to the view that tolerance means endorsing sameness rather than working with difference: if New Zealand already has the tolerance "thing", done and dusted, it is for others to work to make themselves more tolerable.

But if this is our position, can we claim to have the "thing" at all? We can respect but not rest our laurels on the thing Peters vaunts, the "deep-rooted traditions of freedom of speech and tolerance going back to Shakespeare and Voltaire".

Its own potential for hydra-headedness is clear when we compare a quotation attributed to Voltaire - "I may hate what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - with Peters' variant: radical Muslims cannot be "free to spread their literature".

We might be mad to allow the preaching of hatred, if such it is, but then we might have cause to restrict speech that undermines people's status and well-being on grounds of religious belief.

Either way, the outcome could be guided but not preordained by the varying strands of thought, action and accident making up a historical tradition of tolerance.

Peters argues that Muslim groups "are like the mythical hydra - a serpent underbelly with multiple heads capable of striking at any time and in any direction", taking advantage of tolerance to preach a "hate-filled message".

An earlier writer put it this way: "Mark how the Serpent creeps, and every where leaves a filthy slime behind him; hitherto they never pretended more than a tolleration, now they will have a patent under the broad Seal for publike vent of their false wayes."

His target in 1647 was the activists Auckland politics professor Andrew Sharp identifies as Europe's first liberal democrats, the English Levellers. Sometimes you just never know how a tradition will turn out, or which tradition you might be in.

* Dr Geoff Kemp teaches on toleration and censorship in the Department of Political Studies, University of Auckland.