Dialogue: Try pushing that line in the pub

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

The only thing I miss about the pub culture that dominated the lives of so many male New Zealanders in the years to the mid-70s was the encouragement it gave to robust argument.

In the public bar of journalists' pubs throughout New Zealand you would find watersiders and other trade unionists, lawyers and other professional people, and even a few cons, on Thursday and particularly Friday nights, all ready and willing for verbal wrestling on any issue of the day.

Your opinions were likely to be assailed by any one of them, vigorously and in your face, and you could survive either by keeping quiet or trying to give as good as you got. Plenty of nonsense was talked by all of us, but you couldn't keep coming if you took it personally.

Not any more. I'm continually taken aback by how people get hurt or unhealthily aggressive when their views are challenged or their beliefs questioned.

This soft, floppy niceness, this phoney respect, this cultural sensitivity that pervades New Zealand intellectual life is underpinned by a post-modern theory that everyone is not only entitled to an opinion without having to support it with reason but, worse, that everyone is right.

As a consequence, some subjects are considered off the debating agenda by believers who state their truths and try to browbeat you to accept them or respect them and shut up.

Some Maori talk condescendingly of rights and spirituality as though they are truths so sublime they are beyond discussion, as do hardline feminists, some libertarian businessmen, some leftists, and, in my experience, all members of religious sects.

I started to argue with a Pakeha colleague that the millions to be poured into Maori television seemed a waste. Would it not have been better to use the money to help create a public service television channel, supporting Maori programmes within that?

We didn't argue because he simply dismissed me as a redneck and spoke of an obligation under the Treaty of Waitangi, as though invoking the word of God.

Also, when Ian Fraser was interviewed on his new job by Paul Holmes, he faced the inevitable questions about quality programming. They were proper questions for Holmes to ask, but you could feel Fraser's discomfort at having to answer them.

Quality, you see, is another word for intellectual snobbery or elite in the view of ratings-driven programmers, and elite is a word reserved for athletes or soldiers, not for anything to do with literature and the arts.

The programmers, who make huge money with the most banal programmes, are dismissive and even sneering when the subject is raised, because quality requires time and space to explain. Fraser is astute enough to know that and wisely skirted the question, but it is something he's going to have to face up to sooner rather than later and I don't like his chances.

I'm reminded by the venue of the Winter Olympics in Utah that religion is considered off the agenda, and how the University of Waikato failed to support adequately senior history lecturer Raymond Richards four years ago when he told students that Mormonism was founded by a liar and a cheat (not exactly in those words).

The university management caved in to objections from local Mormons, not because of what he said - the historical facts are not in dispute - but because he said it at all. The university betrayed the principle of academic freedom.

Americans are less squeamish. The New Yorker, also inspired by the Winter Olympics, told the story of Mormon founding saint Joseph Smith, and pointed out how and where he lied.

It also discussed the Mormon moral labyrinth posed by polygamy and chastity, their historical racism and anti-feminism, and the excommunication that's used to stop academic freedom among their own scholars.

No one is entitled to deny Mormons the right to believe what they want and to live how they choose, but everyone has the right to question the facts they may proclaim and to examine the intellectual underpinning of their theology. Indeed, historians and philosophers have an obligation to do so.

Western culture from the time of the Ancient Greeks has developed around a recurring, questioning scepticism which has sometimes been suppressed but never extinguished. Throughout the past 3000 or more years, the most valuable members of societies have been those who have had the courage to question everything - robustly, but without malice or prejudice.

Nowadays, happily, such people aren't burnt at the stake, but they are subjected to quite severe social pressure at the hands of politicians and all the smug, conventionally minded people who don't want the boat rocked.

Note on a bad week: Ole Ms Thin Lips, Nanny of the Nation, decided that Justice Fisher should have thin skin too, and resign for watching porn. He should remain aloof and unworldly in a society awash with sex.

I, too, am apparently a pervert, because, to know what's going on in the world, I've tried three or four times in the past couple of years to get into a porn site. What stopped me was not the thought of the Ole Ms Thin Lips of the world, but that the site managers wanted a credit card number and an e-mail address. I'm not that stupid.