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WELCOME TO ARTS 17 March 2014 Ko te wai e hora nei, te marae e takoto nei, koutou nga tohunga ahurewa kua pae nei,

tena koutou, tena koutou. Ka nui aku mihi aroha ki a koutou katoa.

Weve gathered today to celebrate the arts and the humanities, and to remind ourselves

why our disciplines truly matter. If we feel beleaguered, we can at least console

ourselves by reflecting that this is nothing new. Listen, for instance, to John of Garland,

a humanities scholar in 1241:

If you are a true scholar, you will be thrust out into the cold. The lucrative arts, such as law and medicine, are now in vogue, and only those things are pursued which have a cash value.

In their musings on knowledge, languages, literature and the arts, and the compelling

questions of human existence, scholars in the arts cast up new visions and insights,

warn of dangers and point to new possibilities in our ways of being. As the literary

theorist Geoffrey Harpham puts it,

In humanistic study, we confront not just our ancestors but also our own capacity for determining who our ancestors were, and thus for determining who we are and might become. This capacity should be treated like fire, with great respect for its power to create and to destroy.

It is true that this power can rage like fire, changing the cosmos. Look for instance at

the definition of humanity in the 1990 edition of the Oxford Concise Dictionary

learning or literature concerned with human culture, especially the study of Latin and

Greek literature and philosophy. Who can read this now without noticing its casual

exclusion of the literatures and philosophies of Asia, the Middle East, India, Africa, the

Americas and the Pacific?

Since Edward Said and other post-modern thinkers, the intellectual globe has shifted on

its axis, destabilising a Euro-centred conception of the human that had ruled since the

Enlightenment. At the same time the feminist revolution has carved out a place in the

world for women; and deconstructive projects have sought to demystify the mirages

projected by different kinds of power. Just 20 years after the Oxford Dictionary

definition was crafted, it is now largely taken for granted at least theoretically - that

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humanity includes women as well as men, the disenfranchised as well as the

powerful, and people outside of Europe.

At the same time, almost without noticing it, we still inhabit a thought-world that is

centred upon and commanded by human beings. This one-world ontology, as it has

been recently called, provides the hidden scaffolding for our notions of humanity and

the humanities. It is not until you become at home with a different set of

presuppositions about reality Maori philosophy, for example that you notice its

more curious features.

In the West, at least, this anthropo-centred cosmos traces back at least as far as the

Genesis account of creation, and the Great Chain of Being. In Genesis, God created

the world, making man and woman in his own image and admonishing them to be

fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of

the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the

earth. This notion that people should subdue the earth, which exists to serve their

purposes, remains ubiquitous in contemporary economic and political theory,

underpinning assumptions about the virtue of extractive industries and talk of

resource management and ecosystem services, for example.

Equally, as scholars including A.O. Lovejoy and Margaret Hodgen have demonstrated,

the thought-world of the Great Chain of Being remains resilient and pervasive. Tracing

back to Aristotle and Plato, the scala naturae models a hierarchical cosmos in which

God sits at the apex, followed by archangels, angels, seraphim and cherubim; a divine

monarch; the ranks of aristocrats and commoners, with men above women, adults

above children and free men above slaves; civilized people over barbarians and

savages; with human beings above the sentient animals, non-sentient animals and

insects; and plants and minerals at the bottom of the scale.

All those on the upper steps of the Great Chain rule by divine right over those further

down, and all those at the lower levels are bound to offer up tribute, deference and

obedience to those higher up the scale. Here one can see the underpinnings of the

command and control structures seen in contemporary bureaucracies and corporates

even Universities; commonplace assumptions about the proper roles of men, women

and children; unexamined notions about the capabilities of Maori and Pacific students;

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and trickle down economics, to cite a few examples. These ideas are so deeply

embedded in our legal, political, literary, educational, economic, ritual and even

architectural and town planning structures that they are often difficult to discern, let

alone to challenge.

Add to these myth models Cartesian dualism, with its fundamental division between res

cogitans and res extensa - mind and matter, subject and object, culture and nature,

people and the environment, and thus the humanities and social sciences vs the natural

sciences - and you have a thought world at once ubiquitous and fantastic, radically

contradicted by the findings of contemporary science. In the environmental sciences,

for instance, youll find no support for the idea of a cosmos ruled by human beings; or

in quantum physics for a fundamental division between subject and object; or in the

brain sciences for a radical split between mind and matter. Yet these habits of mind,

mythical though they may be, structure our intellectual topography and are a major

source of mischief.

Examine the recent 2014 Global Risks Report to the World Economic Forum in Davos,

for example an apocalyptic document - youll see a list of wicked problems ranked

in the style of the Great Chain of Being, from radical inequalities, ranked as the No.1

risk to global prosperity and stability, to climate change at No.2, water crises at No.3,

and so on. It doesnt take great ingenuity to see that given a hierarchical cosmic order

(including ideas of First, Second and Third Worlds, centres and peripheries, and

trickle-down economics), radical inequality in the distribution of wealth and life

chances will inevitably follow.

Equally, given the idea of an inexhaustible environment created to serve human beings,

who have the power to fix up any damage that they do, since they control the cosmos,

outcomes such as climate change, biodiversity losses, waterways degradation, the

acidification of oceans and resource constraints are predictable. Add to this scientific

models that split people from the environment, and which model the intricate and

intimate entanglements between human activities and biophysical systems as

anthropogenic impacts - billiard balls that crudely bounce between nature and

society - its no wonder that scientific efforts to change the relational interactions

between people and the places they inhabit in more adaptive directions have been

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largely ineffectual. And yet, as many scientific reports indicate, these cosmic ideas are

driving towards a world that is increasingly uninhabitable by human beings.

Some radically new ways of thinking are required, and this is where the disciplines in

the Arts are so vital. Through history, philosophy and deep inquiry into other

languages and ways of being, we have the ability to detect deeply embedded

cosmological assumptions and habits of mind, even those that underpin our own styles

of reflection, and those of the natural sciences. In the process, perhaps, we may help

to cast up new alternatives. As Geoffrey Harpham put it, in the humanities we can

confront not just our ancestors but also our own capacity for determining who our

ancestors were, and thus for determining who we are and might become.

In confronting our ancestors, in my own work on European voyaging in the Pacific Ive

often examined those eighteenth century natural philosophers with their unbounded,

outward-facing forms of curiosity, ranging far beyond the anthropos; and their

passionate, optimistic commitment to exploring the possibilities for freedom, forged at

a time when the experimental sciences, the arts and the humanities were still intimately

entangled.

They shaped the beginnings of our shared society in New Zealand. In 1768 when the

Royal Society and the Admiralty despatched Captain Cook to the Pacific to observe the

Transit of Venus, the Endeavour was a travelling sideshow of the Enlightenment, with

its scientists, artists, library and lavish array of scientific equipment.

Its very easy to over-simplify the Enlightenment, however. In many ways, the

Endeavour carried a cargo of distinct, even colliding cosmologies. On the one hand, at

precisely this time in Europe, a focus on detached objectivity was emerging, associated

with experimentation, quantification, and the classification of reality into gridded arrays

of entities of various kinds. In this Order of Things, as Foucault has called it,

hierarchical arrays such as Linnaean taxonomy and the Great Chain of Being were

linked with triumphalist stories about how civilised people could use science to

master reality, and the rest of mankind.

As a member of the landed gentry and a Linnaean acolyte, Joseph Banks, the wealthy

young leader of the Royal Society party on board the Endeavour, found its gridded

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models congenial. Like Linnaeus, the great Swedish naturalist, he invoked the Great

Chain of Being, and did not doubt that he and his fellow Europeans (especially the

gentry) occupied a higher place on the cosmic ladder than the people he met in the

Pacific.

On Maori cannibalism, for instance, he remarked that Nature recoils at the thought

any species preying upon itself, and added, No conclusion in favour of such a practise

can be drawn from the actions of a race of beings placd so infinitely below us in the

order of Nature.

Although Banks was fascinated by Tupaia, the high priest navigator who had joined the

expedition in Tahiti, enjoying his company and learning a great deal from him, he saw

no contradiction in comparing the high priest with the lions and tigers displayed by his

aristocratic friends in their zoological parks back in England. A keen botanist and

scientific farmer, he was also quick to identify plants, resources and places that he

thought might serve Britains economic interests.

Equally, during Cooks second expedition to New Zealand, the young German

naturalist Georg Forster mused in Dusky Bay:

In the course of a few days, a small part of us had cleared away the wood from a surface of more than an acre, which fifty New Zealanders, with their tools of stone, could not have performed in three months. An observatory arose in the centre of our works, filled with the most accurate instruments, where the astronomer contemplated the motions of the celestial bodies. The plants which clothed the ground, and the wonders of the animal creation likewise attracted the attention of philosophers, whose time was devoted to mark their differences and uses. In a word, all around us we perceived the rise of arts, and the dawn of science, in a country which had hitherto lain plunged in one long night of ignorance and barbarism!

At the same time, this hierarchical cosmic order with its ideas of progress up the scale

of nature was not the only strand of Enlightenment thinking. As Peter Hans Reill has

recently noted, during this period thinkers including Erasmus Darwin and many of

those involved in the Scottish Enlightenment; Benjamin Franklin in America; the

Humboldt brothers in Germany; and Buffon & Diderot in France were describing the

cosmos in terms of dynamic networks of relations, generated by complementary

pairings (rather than binary oppositions) between different elements, each necessary for

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survival a thought world strangely resonant with whakapapa, and Maori and Pacific

cosmological ideas.

In this Order of Relations, as we might call it, the characteristic motif is the web, the

net or the rhizome, and indeed, the World Wide Web is an iconic exple of this kind of

order. Here, exchanges in the middle ground between complementary pairs are the

stuff of life, driving an ever-changing cosmos, working towards equilibrium or balance.

These thinkers were the precursors to evolutionary biology, the earth sciences,

medicine, much contemporary cosmology and ecology, and indeed, the science of

complex networks and self-organising systems.

At the same time in Europe, thinkers including the philosophes in France, Tom Paine in

The Rights of Man and William Blake in his visionary poetry (Jerusalem, for example,

railed against hierarchical models of the cosmos as self-serving, promoted by uncaring

elites who were presiding over the destruction of the natural world, and the poverty,

incarceration and suffering of the vast majority of their fellows.

In social theory, their ideas led to the emancipation of slaves and women, the

American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence and the US constitution,

followed by the French Revolution and the fall of the Bastille historical events that

coincided with the early European exploration and settlement of New Zealand.

These ideas were also present on board the Endeavour. Before Cook sailed from

Britain, for instance, the Earl of Morton, a Scottish astronomer and then the President of

the Royal Society, gave him a set of Hints about how he should treat the peoples he

might meet during their travels, and these are worth quoting:

To check the petulance of the Sailors, and restrain the wanton use of Fire Arms. To have it still in view that sheding the blood of those people is a crime of the highest nature:- They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit. No European Nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent. They may naturally and justly attempt to repell intruders, whom they may apprehend are come to disturb them in the quiet possession of their country, whether that apprehension be well or ill founded.

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Therefore should they in a hostile manner oppose a landing, and kill some men in the attempt, even this would hardly justify firing among them, till every other gentle method had been tried.

In the Earls injunctions with their sense of justice and human rights, one can see a

foreshadowing of the Treaty of Waitangi; the Waitangi Tribunal and the Treaty

settlements.

Indeed, James Cook himself had served his apprenticeship at sea with Captain John

Walker, a Quaker ship owner in Whitby who became his lifelong guide and mentor.

The Society of Friends was at the radical edge of relational thinking in Britain, with

beliefs in spiritual equality for all (including women), freedom for slaves and fair

treatment for indigenous peoples.

Unlike Banks, Cook regarded Maori cannibalism as an ancestral custom rather than a

marker of a lower position in the cosmic scale. At the same time, he was perturbed by

the impacts of venereal diseases and European goods on islanders that he witnessed in

the Pacific. As he later remarked of his encounters in New Zealand:

What is still more to our shame as civilized Christians, we debauch their morals and introduce among them wants and perhaps disease which they never before knew, and which serve only to disturb that happy tranquility which they and their forefathers enjoyed. If anyone denies the truth of this assertion let him tell me what the natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans.

In studying this and other early scientific voyages to the Pacific French, Spanish,

Russian and German, as well as British, with their parties of scientists, artists and

literati, its been fascinating to trace these contradictory habits of mind, and to see how

intimately during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the arts, humanities

and sciences were tangled together.

Since that time, as C.P. Snow famously lamented in his lecture The Two Cultures, the

paradoxical legacy of the Enlightenment has unravelled in various ways. The

disciplines and their languages have diverged and become increasingly specialised,

with the mathematical languages and experimental sciences on the one hand and

natural languages and the humanities on the other. Indeed, as we have seen, a third

culture has sprung from those same Enlightenment beginnings that of economic

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rationality with its justifications of progress and improvement, and its language of

cost benefit calculation.

Over recent years this way of thinking has become increasingly dominant, taking over

Government, research funding agencies, research institutes and the Universities

themselves. As they talk of consumers who must pay for the goods that they consume;

of inputs, outputs, transparency and accountability, the sciences and humanities alike

are being transformed. And as each of these cultures works out its own logic, carving

out its own institutions and domains, the reflexive tradition of our disciplines has been

marginalised, and its values have come under fire.

And yet it is the arts and the humanities that persistently ask the great questions of

existence about what life is about, and for; about truth and knowledge; justice;

freedom; happiness and ethical conduct, with all the caveats we put upon these ideas;

alongside their task of celebrating and renewing the legacies of the past and different

ways of being. Now more than ever, such deep thinking is required.

As we contemplate the most urgent challenges of our time - accelerating gaps between

rich and poor in a globalising world; the loss of biodiversity and climate change;

genetic engineering and other human interventions that are shifting the very boundaries

between life forms; the losses of linguistic and cultural diversity; and recent

fundamental failures in the global economy, the costs of disconnection between

humanistic inquiry and the workings of science and the free market are increasingly

obvious.

Where there are calamities, these are often due to narrowly utilitarian perspectives, and

consequent failures in the kinds of relationships that people have forged with each

other; with plants and other animals; and with the wider biosphere. A great part of the

difficulty is the crude, bifurcated way in which the academy itself, along with many of

its disciplines are arrayed, mirroring a taken-for-granted but imaginary gulf between

people and nature, and thus the humanities and the natural sciences.

As people bear down upon the limits of the world, the horizons of our disciplines are

expanding as they must. If the humanities are to serve their proper purpose they

cannot be narrowly anthropocentric; or parochial, cocooned within the Western

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tradition. The old ideas of progress and the earth as an inexhaustible resource for the

generation of wealth have run dry; and new ways of thinking about the relationships

between humanity and the wider world are urgently needed. As for the relationships

among people, even our new, more universalised conceptions of humanity with their

ideas of one world many cultures - have their dangers. They can lead to narcissism,

as in some post-modern studies, lovingly obsessed with their own interpretive

dilemmas; or tokenism, making rhetorical gestures towards the diversity of cultural

heritages while trivialising the intellectual riches they have to offer.

There is also the risk of self-indulgence, remaining insulated and aloof from local and

global realities of dispossession and suffering. As wealthy institutions and elites emerge

from world-wide networks of communication, multi-national and flexible in their

operations and identities (including many universities and academics), there is a

widening chasm between the globalised, mobile rich and the local, immobilised poor

in many countries - including New Zealand.

We have seen this in discussions about entry to our universities, for example, with

scholars talking about chopping off the tail of educational underachievement while

ignoring the undeniable links that exist between privilege and secondary school

performance in this country, and the likelihood that their decisions will close the door

on bright young people whose only fault it is to have been born poor, or brown. It is

easy to see how economic rationality coupled with multi-cultural conceptions of

humanity serves the interests of such elites as they move around the world, leaving

behind them communities ravaged by poverty, internal violence and balkanised

identities born of suffering and resentment.

Perhaps because of these dangers, rigorous reflection about justice, truth, reliable

knowledge, and good ways of living has never been more imperative. This kind of

critical questioning amounts to a search for wisdom, transforming societies and

opening up new pathways, while celebrating the diverse artistic and intellectual

legacies of the past.

The disciplines in the Arts are pivotal and vital in this respect, but we cant be

complacent about our own prejudices, those unexamined habits of mind. If we are to

help in tackling the wicked problems of our time climate change, losses of

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biodiversity, degradation of waterways and a deepening divide between rich and poor

in access to the planets resources, for example, it is likely to require new ways of

working, across different ways of being and different disciplines, including the natural

sciences. And this will demand humility, and a willingness to acknowledge that

human insight is always fallible and limited.

To quote Albert Einstein Only the one who does not question is safe from making a

mistake. Or, as Golda Meir once said, Dont be humble youre not that great!

Or as they say in Maori, Ki te tuohu koe, me maunga teitei if you bow your head, let

it be to a high mountain.

For me, that lofty peak is the tradition of the university itself, with its array of disciplines

- a community of scholars dedicated to asking questions, trying to discern the complex

patterns of the worlds that we inhabit and debating what we think we see. As a new

academic year begins, Id like to pay tribute to you all, my colleagues, and wish you

inspiration and pleasure in your studies. Ill end with a blessing in Maori:

Kia hora ai te marino

Kia papapounamutia te moana

Kia tere ai te karohirohi

May calm be widespread

The sea like greenstone

And may the shimmer of summer dance across your pathway.