Social Comment

When the New Zealander Comes   view in   Documents or  click Macalays New Zealand.docx

We Kiwi’s were famous, even before our nation had begun to function under the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. At some future date, the prediction was that a visiting “New Zealander”, most likely a Maori, would travel to London, sit on the ruins of London Bridge and sketch the remnants of a once proud culture in bemusement at why an apocalyptic desolation had occurred to what was once the beacon of Democracy, Free Thought, Civil Rights, and Environmental Activism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Babington_Macaulay,_1st_Baron_Macaulay

''And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.''

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1840) Essay, On Ranck's ''History of the Popes".

The influence, to the contrary or otherwise, of contemporaneous thinkers of Macaulay, such as Jeremy Bentham, David Hume, Emanuel Kant, and his role in Colonial Politics and Law making coupled  with his Judeo-Christian heritage defined his bleak outcome juxtaposed with his optimistic and reformatory modernist ideals.

These names and dates seem remote to us now, but they constructed the framework and attitudes of a “New Zeal” as we were taught in school, to do things better than before, to define a country that would behave in a “moral manner”, of which the Treaty of Waitangi was held as an example, even though some 150 years passed before we as a Nation acknowledged its legacy and principals.

Doré, Gustave and Blanchard Jerrold (1872) London. A Pilgrimage. London, Grant & co. Alexander Turnbull Library.

The Psychological Womb view in Documents or click  The Psychological Womb.docx 

Macaulay’s New Zealander, the harbinger of doom, was of course a Male, and most likely a Maori, rather than an expatriate European, or perhaps an amalgam of the two as is much of New Zealand today. The point is that he was male. Macaulay’s view on the future disintegration of society was based on his classical studies if the fall of Greece and Rome and the history of the Papal Legacy.

"I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one's decency, can be called clothes… Wretched flocks of maids labour so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife's body”. c. 3 BCE–CE 65, Declamations Vol. I - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger

Pliny the Elder wrote about the large value of the trade between Rome and Eastern countries:[3]:"By the lowest reckoning, India, China ("Seres") and the Arabian peninsula take from our Empire 100 millions of sesterces every year: that is how much our luxuries and women cost us." Natural History 12.84. A sesterces is about $2 in modern currency.

"The budget should be balanced,  

the Treasury should be refilled, 

 public debt should be reduced, 

the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled,  

and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed,  

lest Rome become bankrupt. 

People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance."

      - Cicero , 55 BC

So, evidently we've learned nothing in the past 2,067 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero

Science and our view of who we are with Dame Anne Salmond and Kim Hill

http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/lecturesandforums/talkingheads/20120722