When Elon Musk, the first to respond to Richard Dawkins’s tweet on this country’s “ridiculous science education policy” and who knows a little science himself, said simply: “This is insane”, we should ask ourselves if the outspoken blokes have a point to make. If criticism is coming from two rather well-respected gentlemen, one an evolutionary biologist, the other a master of physics, living continents apart but a world removed from the current New Zealand embrace of the irrational, then perhaps we should listen:
Our modern insane is a compound word from Latin’s in sanus – literally meaning not healthy – and is entirely appropriate in the context or our bending over backwards to kiss the Blarney Stone of cultural equivalency. Just by saying ‘Maori science’ equals ‘Western science’, whatever those terms are meant to mean, doesn’t make it so, any more than mooching a slab of carboniferous limestone set in castle wall will endow the kisser with rare and unusual eloquence, or the “gift-of-the-gab” in the more vulgar vernacular: it’s a statement of faith, of folklore, but it’s not fact.
I hesitated to comment when Dawkins first issued his challenge, “The Times picked it up but my NZ friends are betting local media won’t dare”, to give the drongos a fair go at formulating a response, which happily, indeed heroically, arrived via the Herald yesterday: “Elon Musk, Richard Dawkins’ criticism of matauranga Maori in schools faces backlash from Kiwi researcher”, which clearly is not a good start, even for an entry-level drongo. Backlash being “a strong negative reaction by a large number of people”, a single researcher not being a large number – quite the contrary in fact – and neither does our single backlasher research Kiwi: ‘Glass ceilings in New Zealand universities’ being more her thing. (Presumably Aotearoan universities have poor-cousin pinex panel ceilings in yet another inequitable overhang of colonialism, but which provide much better access to both higher honours and hydroponics.)
Nevertheless, I struggled onwards and downwards, wading through backlasher’s many and various revulsions in which she performed the inculcation of ‘racism’ an impressive five times in her mere hundred-odd words, capped by a standout allegation of breath-taking originality in a phrase so powerful it should only be uttered, or perhaps whispered, in its prototypical Nong-tongue: whitus supremiosus. But the seeker of intelligent rebuttal will find only disappointment among the sharp rocks of backlasher’s extensive landscape of learnings.
Dawkins generously thanked the inventor of the “ludicrous policy, spawned by Chris Hipkins’s Ministry of Education before he became prime minister” in his somewhat taut testimonial to stupidity, while backlasher urged Dawkins to learn himself gooder about “what is and isn’t science and read a book”. Mr Dawkins in fact tried, but found himself frustrated “because every third word of the relevant documents is in Maori”. Which, in fairness to Mr D, is a language whose written form is comprehended by just 0.0001014 per cent of the planet’s population, although that is expected to increase to 0.0001019 per cent within mere centuries.
“Science is the poetry of reality. It belongs to all humanity. Kia ora!” – Richard Dawkins. “Why I’m sticking up for science”, March 3, 2023.
