Authority and the New Zealander

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 947, 4 October 1957, Page 4

Authority and the New Zealander

This is the text of a talk.on "The

Family," by

HAROLD

BOURNE

lecturer in Psychiatry at the University of Otago Medical School, and one of a series broadcast by the YC stations under the general title, "New Zealand Attitudes"

THE most depressing thing about New Zealand, so it. seemed to me as a newcomer, was its resemblance to England. Certainly one agreeable novelty was the easy amiability of its people. Another unexpected feature was that if appearances were anything to go by-posters, shop windows, the urban panorama-they could outdo the British in Victorian insensitivity to ugliness . which, in ‘my insular way before, I had never thought possible. Otherwise, at first, there were no differences at all. Then, after a week or so of dazed disappointment with this, small unfamiliarities began to impress themselves upon me. At the start, they were disconnected. There was, for example, the strange spectacle in a crowded bus of a baby in arms being briskly slapped -to nobody’s surprise, evidently, except its own and mine; there was the discovery that to overtake the New Zealander in his car often provoked an irritable spurt of neck and neck driving; there was the gloomy assurance from all sides that I would think the schools horrifyingly slack and there was the curious public obsession with juvenile and sexual lawlessness; then, as an incongruous contrast with this, there was the well-drilled deference of school children in uniform, and the shopkeepers’ habit of serving adults first, however much earlier any child joined the queue. But soon enough, I came to detect a coherence about these isolated oddities and now I can make out distinct patterns into which they fall. Since two of these patterns, particularly, throw a good deal of light on my subject, the New Zealand family, I will ask you to ponder over them. They are the New Zealander’s behaviour towards authority, and the attitudes he conventionally expresses towards the young. N his dealings with authority, I would say, the New Zealander knows only two manoeuvres-fiat disregard when unseen, and passive compliance otherwise. Typically, he seldom questions authority, and he never opposes it head on, but if its back be turned, he follows his own inclinations. His passivity can readily be demonstrated-just suggest challenging a decision from Wellington! The dictates of officialdom, which, in England, would be met by a furious letter to one’s M.P. and a phone call to a newspaper, don’t even arouse indignation here. The innocent objector -is told, "Oh! But that comes from Wellington," and ultimately he gathers that "Wellington" is no more to be shifted than the sun. As for evading authority when concealed, this is done as a simple matter of course. There is a 50 miles per hour’ speed limit, but the country roads can’t be closely patrolled so many ignore it; after-hours trading is illegal, but inspectors can’t be everywhere, so the grocer will oblige; it is an offence to feed dogs raw offal, buf no one can ever be caught, and so hydatid disease is as prevalent as before the regulation. In short, the New Zealander is both a tame conformist and an habitual: lawbreaker, but the third course, changing the decree, seldom occurs to him-he is not a reformer and he is not a

* radical. If the early settlers brought ; any of the English radical tradition with them in their baggage, there is little sign of it that I can see now. ;-VEN if these opinions’ of mine heve | ~ not exhausted your goodwill yet, you must be wondering impatiently what bearing all this has on the topic of the family, and so I had better turn to indicate that, I shafl come back afterwards to the other peculiarity in the New Zealand fabric that I singled out a moment ago, the attitudes voiced about the young. It is a commonplace in psychology, nowadays, that adult personality and the beliefs, customs, and manners which characterise the social order are largely the outcome of childhood experience. If the New Zealander reacts to authority quite differently from the Frenchman, we may expect corresponding differences in the tone of the child’s first encounters with adult authority in the family. Assuming my generalisation to be fairly true, that the New Zealander either evades authority surreptitiously when possible, or complies with singular lack of protest otherwise, then probably as a child he found that grown-ups were heavy, arbitrary, and immovable, to be obeyed or to be out+ witted, but not to be influenced by opposition. Is discipline within the New Zealand family heavy, arbitrary, and immovable? As an outsider, and with the unusual opportunities a psychiatrist has for observing these matters and comparing, I have no doubt that it is. In fact, when I talked just now about "discipline in the family,’ I was selfconsciously choosing a phrase with a New Zealand flavour about it. Now, when I look into myself, I am straightaway puzzled why this should be soafter all, coming from England, there is nothing new for me in the autocratic parent and the child-beating teacher, even if they aren't so standard there. My bewilderment would be more understandable, I suppose, had I arrived from the United States. Nevertheless, I am sure I have heard the word "discipline" more often in my relatively brief span here, than in all the rest of my life. Whereas the London mother says guiltily, "I oughtn’t. to hit him, doctor, I know ... but I lose my temper," the New Zealand mother says, "I ought to thump him much more .. . I know it’s bad I’m so soft." Whereas the English social worker reports approvingly, "The family is well knit and secure,’ the equivalent approval in New Zealand is, "Discipline in the home is good." T was some time before I could explain to myself why discipline in the families I worked with loomed so much more conspicuously into awareness here, when in reality, I had come

across the tyrannical father and the inflexible mother very many times before. Simply, it was this! In England, I would expect the father who is an absolute monarch, whose word is law, who never touches the washing-up bowl, and whois somewhat feared by his children, to be an unsophisticated --working-man, acting his role in the family without thinking,- and possessed of no ‘theories of «child-rearing with which to justify his behaviour. I would not-emphatic-ally I would not-expect him to be a school-teacher or a lawyer, nor would I associate him with a large car, an allelectric home, a son at university, and a middle-class standard of living. Yet in New Zealand it’s this sort of anomaly that one so often finds. To see it leads to uncovering a confusion in the New Zealand family’s structure and standards of conduct-on the one hand, its economic aspirations and ideology are prosperously middle class, while on the other, the emotional relationships within it are the unreflective, unsubtle ones of an industrial working-class, inherited from the pioneers bred in the urban bleakness of 19th century. England. Incidentally, many of the idiosyncrasies of the social scene here, such as the deplorable tendency for men and women at any gathering to go into separate clusters, are, I think, nothing mofe than features, now fast dying out, of work-ing-class society in England. HE conflict of middle-class and proletarian -values in the family has several consequences. Here I will dwell on one. There is some practical need’ for a sha distinction of individual roles in a working-class householdfather has the muscles to work long hours for his wage, and he needs food and quiet at night; mother must organise the home so that he gets them, also

bring up the boys and girls to play equally distirict parts in life later on. But in the more leisured setting of middle-class existence, the basis for any so very clearly defined male and female roles disappears. The father will now spend much more time with his family, he will have much less need for rest when he does, and inevitably, his share in the upbringing of the children will increase. In this situation his functions must include what used in the past--the working-class past--to be only appropriate to the. female. And yet the New Zealand husband and father, unlike his wife, has by no means caught up with the situation, and his idea of masculinity is anachronistic, It still threatens his masculinity, and makes him anxious, to bath the baby, to tolerate the children’s answering back and their noise going on for long (and his weekends now are long), to join in feminine conversations, although he commonly does all these things nowadays. Actually, in other societies, this has been the normal masculine pattern for a long time, of course, Fortunately, while there is this troublesome leisure; he does have an escape in painting the roof of his house or in relaying the drains, for which in other countries, he would pay a tradesman. But should any stress arise in his marriage, these anxieties light up at once-he becomes frantically "masculine," retreats to premarital pursuits out with the boys, drinks brashly, drives his car competitively, and seeks to be masterful with his wife and children. Since 10 per cent of marriages end in divorce, we may calculate reasonably that an even larger proportion of New Zealand families suffer something of this sort in the atmosphere. f The rule of thumb methods devised in the hard-pressed working-class home

for licking the youngsters into suitable shape for a harsh world, have wndergone a deceptive transformation. They are no longer improvised and unthinking; they have been verbalised and polished until they shine with rationale and with lofty intention. Whereas, in England, the kind of educated middleclass people who are articulate about child rearing, usually. entertain liberal ideas on the subject, here the reverse is true. The arbitrariness and the unambiguously black and white regulations of the proletarian household are dished up by the pundits as a charac-ter-building discipline. It is no accident that the Truby King system of mothercraft captured the field here-it wildly over-simplifies the relation of mother and baby and governs them in fact by a clock and a book of rules. ()NLY a few years ago, in 1954, the Government actually gave its seal to the over-emphasis on discipline by the extraordinary step, costing £12,800, of circularising every household in the land with the opinions of the Mazengarb committee on juvenile sexual delinquency, To me, the alarmist nature of this report and its naive preoccupation with poor discipline as:a cause of precocious sexual activity, is more dis- , quieting than the social problems to which it refers. Compared to elsewhere, these problems are not really very. grave here, but the effect of the pronouncements in the report itself are most unhealthy. Children always have. experimented with sex and doubtless always will, and parents should know this. Now the occasional parent who finds out, believes he is bringing up a milkbar cowboy and emotionally is thrown quite out of balance.

And here I can come back to the other peculiarity I remarked on earlier -the New Zealander’s pet notions about _ the young. He nurses a fantasy-I can only call it a fantasy since I am at a loss to unearth any substance in itthat children are no longer controlled or instructed in the classroom as they once were in, his day, that youth is pampered, delinquent and licentious to a degree unknown in the past, and that while he himself is inured to all this, it must> strike the newcomer with | appalling force. This view is, I sometimes imagine, a national superstition, since I hear it from the earnest student just out of school as well as the newspaper editor, And yet there is a flagrant discrepancy between what one hears and what one sees-the politeness of children, the seriousness of students, the rigorousness of authority in the classroom, Now, how is this mass delusion to be explained? The clue, I think, is the note of jealousy in these complaints about the laxity and pleasure seeking of the rising generation-"It’s not what I was allowed." "We could never get off with that," "They don’t have to work at all at school now." I suspect the young are being condemned for what their parents had every urge to doto throw off the traces and break away, There is a pervading fear of this urge in the children even though they are only slightly less restrained now than. they once were. "Why does the New Zealand parent have an excessive anxiety that his children will break away morally and

an extreme alertness to quell such moves? Isn't it because he himself or his father or grandfather literally broke away from his forebears in England? In fact, if there were no dangerously strong drive. to break away in the inheritance of every New Zealand family, none of us would be here. Now such a heritage is just as well to be found in every American family, and we may wonder why it is treated so very differently there. If we are to believe Geoffrey Gorer, the model American child is the very one who succeeds in breaking away and in leaving his father a great distance behind him socially and economically. Father, in the American family, is a person to be surpassed, not a person to be emulated. As a consequence, youth and newness are the favourite American virtues, and authority and tradition are the least valued. And so,

while Americans have become unlike Europeans, New Zealanders ~ have scarcely changed, possessing little, as yet, in the way of a vocabulary, songs, and culture of their own, and this implies fewer deep roots in the territory of these islands than they themselves realise, so I imagine, The problem I am dissecting out is why the immigrant American accepted that his children must grow up foreign both to him and to the old country he came from himself, and why the immigrant New Zealander could not accept it-why, on the contrary, he tried to make an England or Scotland here and to discourage deviation in his children. , Somewhere, an answer would reveal fundamental New Zealand attitudes to the family. Several possibilities spring to my mind , . . but you have suffered enough of my opinions and assertions. I must leave you te supply a solution of your own.