Dialogue: Time to lift the veil on Maori view of genetics

By JOHN ROUGHAN

There has been a discreet silence about the Maori objection to genetic modification. Even this week, as Maori dissent proved more troublesome than the Greens, we were not told much about it.

Helen Clark, explaining last-minute concessions to Labour's Maori caucus, said there was a "world view" held by many Maori but not all. She did not subscribe to it, but it had to be respected.

She did not elaborate. Had she tried, right there on television, she would have sounded ridiculous. It is a world view outlined sympathetically in the report of the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification and now it is going to be given some institutional force in national economic decisions. We need to know about it.

The royal commission warns that Maori will not normally discuss it except "in the deep hours of night, on empty stomachs away from food, in suitable settings, by worthy proponents suitably warded by karakia (prayers)".

But when a Bioethics Council is set up soon to apply this world view to decisions on agricultural and medical investment, I dare say it will do so in daylight, on paper, after breakfast. So I feel entitled to talk about it here.

So far this essay is keeping faith with the Maori mode of thinking as described to the royal commission. The world view, it heard, "brings with it an intellectual curiosity and willingness to explore all issues".

It begins by asking: "Why do we need to know?" Which sounds like the antithesis of intellectual curiosity to my mind. Not much pure science is prompted by that question.

No matter, we have a reason and a right to discuss the subject out of its spiritual surroundings now. It remains only to show a worthy intention.

I am not insensitive, I hope, to spirituality. I like it. I like the mystery, the poetry, the compulsion to find larger truths of life. It is not other-worldly, it is intensely human.

I have known liturgies that lift the spirit and leave a sense of wonder and well-being. I love the particular warmth and ancestral resonance of Maori occasions.

I pity people who rail against religion because they plainly do not know what they are talking about. I envy the certain. I think spirituality has its place.

The essence of the Maori objection to genetic modification seems to be a belief that all things, living or not, sentient or not, share a universal life-force, energy, or soul called "mauri". I am sure this loses a lot in translation, but the Bioethics Council is going to have to speak English, too.

According to the royal commission, "Even inanimate objects like cliffs, stones and, especially, water are invested with mauri".

The idea leads its adherents to a sense of kinship with all living things. Many times in marae welcomes or speeches introducing submissions, the commission says it heard recitations of genealogy that included indigenous plants and animals.

Among living creatures, some are valued higher than others, though the preferences vary from iwi to iwi, hapu to hapu, and they are not necessarily the "higher mammals" such as whales and dolphins that attract almost universal human sentiment.

"At our Dunedin hui, a lone fantail came into the meeting, sat above the commission on the rafters and sang very loudly. This was interpreted differently by Maori and Pakeha participants."

I don't know what all of this means for experiments in genetic modification and nor does the commission. It concludes, lamely, that it has "identified a number of ethical and cultural distinctions and categories that any decision-making body would need to weigh up".

The body responsible for approving genetic experiments, the Environmental Risk Management Authority, already has to take account of Maori culture, traditions, valued flora and fauna and so on, - including treaty rights - as part of its brief under the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act.

Erma does not know how to do it either.

It asked the commission to propose a higher authority for the task, which the commission did, and this week Government agreed to set up the Bioethics Council.

Under pressure from its Maori members, the Government also undertook to reword the treaty obligation in a way that looks capable of consigning all transgenic applications to death by litigation.

The mistake Maori are making, I think, is using their spiritual values for a purpose no religion can safely serve. This has been likened to the way of the Taleban and though the comparison is odious, it is not entirely absurd.

Those who rail against religion usually seize on its periodic perversions for purposes of national or ethnic power. Very few religious people, in my observation, are sufficiently dogmatic to want to impose their spiritual creed on decisions of state.

I suspect there are many more adherents to the sanctity of life than demonstrate outside abortion clinics or really want to see a tougher law on the subject.

The splendour of spirituality is that the reach of human understanding exceeds its grasp. It is a quality expressed more easily in the government of arts, heritage and conservation than in science and its economic and social applications.

One of the tragedies of colonisation seems to be that dispossessed people cling to cultural elements they would otherwise have adapted to world developments and kept in their proper place.

Maori should keep their world view where it can be venerated. If it is forced into the equations of science, I think it will be the loser.