Our postmodernist ears are firmly glued shut, writes Peter Matheson.
A striking feature of New Zealand today is our tolerance of the intolerable: 1 % of the world's population commanding 50% of its resources, manic housing prices, child poverty at extreme levels.
We shrug it off, like water off a duck's back.
It doesn't engage us any more. Have we become a culture of denial?We've slipped quietly into purdah, it seems: ''seeing, they see not, and hearing they hear not , neither do they understand'', as the incomparable King James version put it.
Our postmodernist ears are firmly glued shut.
This is a new secularist fundamentalism. Minds, hearts, and wills are rigorously patrolled.
The Berlin Wall was porous by comparison.
Nothing that would disturb our velvet cage is admitted.
American tea-party Republicanism is a prime example.
Litanies of high-minded self-righteousness mask a total unwillingness to listen to anything or anybody outside the comfort zone.
Here in Aotearoa we are spared the gun lobbies or Fox News, but the way middle New Zealand shrugs off, and trivialises the ecological crisis signals the severity of the glued-shut-ears epidemic.
Neither reason nor rhetoric, not even the rhetoric of drought, bushfires, acidic oceans can unblock our ears.
There is no paucity of prophets: scientists, the Greens, religious voices, but no-one is listening. (Who does carry mana in our contemporary culture?) Labour is still licking its wounds.
National can't get beyond tactical manoeuvres.
I watched yet another gruesome video about the Third Reich the other night.
It hammered home the message that when we don't act before it's too late, the paper-thin veneer of civilization is ripped open, brutalisation and the holocaust of the innocent become the norm.
We have this brief window of respite before the full force of ecological meltdown hits us.
But who wants to know?
There are marvellous exceptions: I have the good fortune to know groups of the young, and the not so young, who swallow boatloads of unpalatable facts and figures before breakfast, are committed to the hilt, see the vision of alternative futures dancing before them, nut out imaginative plans for street theatre, divestment, transition towns.
Recently, they were marginalised and patronised and dismissed by our Santa Claus Parade organisers under the mantra: Hands off our dream-world. (Next they'll be banning Jesus from Christmas, that other disturbing figure, someone muttered at a recent meeting.)
I walked the beach the other day with the 15-year-old daughter of a friend, whose ears were wide open to science, nature, people, sport, her enthusiastic teachers.
A tonic to share an hour with her! Yes, there are exceptions.
But compared to a couple of generations ago, we seem as a society to have become cynical, mean-spirited, fixated on immediate gratification.
Or is it just a sense of disheartenment, of feeling disempowered?
Is the ostrich mentality a desperate defence against the incessant clamour of the social and anti-social media, the stridency of buy-now, rush-along-today consumerism?
Whatever happened to the Kiwi rebellious streak?
Nothing is ever so menacing as hope.
It nudges us to face our agoraphobia, to come out of purdah.
Down the ages the mystics and prophets have warned that doubt and despair has to be faced and traversed before anything like illumination, a fresh vision can emerge.
Dystopia before utopia. Bruce Munro talked of this dark side in a recent ODT feature.
But where is that larger vision, the courage to face imminent apocalypse to come from?
I am surprised into wondering if we have somehow mislaid along the way what one might call innocence, that vital drive to simplicity, to unclutteredness, to commitment.
Have we become too smart for our own good?
At another tipping point in cultural history, the great Renaissance humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam, managed to combine a new tolerance and sophistication with a passionate embrace of innocence, of ''the dreaming''.
Back to the sources, he urged, ad fontes.
Too much to hope for today?
The Rev Dr Peter Matheson is a church historian.
