Jim Hopkins: Lest we forget life before the social engineers took charge

The taxi driver and I were talking about a murder that had happened in the city overnight.

Apparently, some poor bloke who was already the worse for wear had tried to get into a club for a last hurrah. When he was barred at the door, there was a scuffle: pushing, shoving, fists, a standard Saturday night brawl. Except this one ended with the bloke on the ground, being kicked in the head. And one of those kicks killed him.

The cabbie, let's call him Mike 32, was disgusted. "There's no need for that," he said. "No need at all."

We agreed, as we drove through a bright, sunny morning the dead man would never see, that it all seemed completely unnecessary. And, worse still, cowardly.

That was what Mike couldn't stomach. The idea of attacking somebody when they were defenceless. It wasn't right. "Look," he said, "when I was younger, we had our share of scraps. A few round-arm punches. Most of them missed. But if somebody was on the ground, you left them alone."

It was the code. Not always honoured, admittedly, but more so then than now, we thought. Neither of us were comfortable with what the world had become.

The tyres hummed across the gravel chip and the yachts rocked gently in the calm marina. It occurred to me that when there's no place for honour, there can be no shame in cowardice. Having tipped out courage with the rest of the patriarchal bathwater, it's opposite is nothing more than cause for ACC counselling.

Mike was obviously thinking similar thoughts. "We've put the wrong restrictions on," he said after a while, "and we've taken the wrong restrictions off."

It was an assessment that succinctly captured the essence of that murky sense of unease you find away from the corridors of policy and power. Then Mike added something more startling.

"I think about the things we did and the freedoms we had," he said, "and I sometimes think I've known New Zealand when it was as good as it's ever been ... or ever going to be."

It was a sad verdict rather than an angry one, and the quiet melancholy in his voice made the conclusion even more troubling. As did the fact that it came just a week before Anzac Day. Such irreversible pessimism is not what you'll hear from those who command the lecterns on Monday.

They will speak of the future with great optimism, in part because we've seen the light and won't repeat the old mistakes.

They will speak of futility and horror, turning war into a martial metaphor for capitalism, in which the noble and long-suffering infantry are continually betrayed by a bungling officer class. It will be war through a post-Marxist lens, and there's truth in the view but it is by no means the whole story.

Yet that is what we will hear on Monday. And also, if not explicitly then certainly by implication, that those same bumbling, bullying officers represent the old way of doing things. The male way; a way that is most definitely out of favour now.

At least with those who write the curriculums and teach the curriculums and draft the laws and fan the flames of the Treaty-based war we're now fighting with each other. For theirs is a new army on a new campaign and it won't rest until it's conquered the last outposts of the old empire. There's nothing surprising about that. Every age has its establishment and every establishment has its ideology and ours is no less dogmatic than that of our Imperial forebears.

What is surprising is that the rest of us, the cabbies and the passengers and the people on the yachts and the bar staff and the patrons, too, have allowed this army to march unchecked.

We've allowed our heroes to be melted into victims. We've allowed honour and courage and character to languish. We've allowed rights to reign and responsibilities to be ignored. We've allowed the contemptible to be tolerated and the despicable exonerated on the basis of some socio-cultural matrix that makes everything nobody's fault. And so people get kicked in the head when they're lying on the pavement.

In 1916, halfway through World War I, and halfway round the world, as well, Frank Harris, best known as the author of the long-banned My Life and Loves, published a biography of Oscar Wilde in which he talked about a group of acolytes who were "for the most part ... 'sexual inverts'." This group, said Harris, had helped boost Wilde's career, largely because their influence in London's "smart set" gave them "an importance out of all proportion to their number".

He concluded that it was extremely curious how "a masculine rude people like the English, who love nothing so much as adventures and warlike achievements, should allow themselves to be steered in ordinary times by epicene aesthetes".

Well, it will offend the new order, undoubtedly, but we, too, are "a masculine rude people", whether you like it or not, "who love nothing so much as adventures and warlike achievements", and, a century after Harris, it is equally curious how we have allowed ourselves "to be steered in ordinary times" not so much by aesthetes as by social engineers.

On Monday, if you're going to remember them, you might also ponder that. And how it is that we have surrendered so meekly the spirit we salute.