The Passionless People?
17th November 2007


Thirty years ago the New Zealand journalist and broadcaster Gordon McLauchlan wrote a book called The Passionless People in which, with surgical precision, he laid bare our shortcomings and rubbed salt into them.

‘The outstanding characteristics of the New Zealander,’ McLauchlan spat, ‘are his drab sameness and his emotional numbness, his inability to relate one to another with warmth, and his fear, even horror, of change.’ Don’t feel smug, girls, he meant you too.

McLauchlan castigated us for having no moral or social philosophy and no dreams beyond a slavish devotion to materialism. Our society was wholly divided among factional pressure groups ‘which exert their power almost exclusively for selfish needs without any sense of a total community.’

To read his book today is a slap in the eye for aging liberals like me who hark back to pre-Rogernomics New Zealand as a place of social justice and equal opportunities. ‘It all went wrong in the dreadful 80s,’ we whine, ‘when we sold our souls to the market place and pawned our ideals for the quick fix of consumerism.’ To believe McLauchlan we were as venal and self-centred thirty years ago as we are today.

McLauchlan’s writings from the 70s, and my own misgivings about the state of society today, may be nothing more than the lurch as one hits the downdraft of middle age. I notice in myself how thinning hair and narrowing prospects slide easily into cynicism.

But I’m intrigued by the word ‘passion.’ Are we a passionless people? In my memory the 70s brimmed with passion, usually in the back seats of cars. There we casually flipped the noun into a verb. We pashed.

Today we claim passion in all things. I have attended three secondary school prize-givings in the past week where speaker after speaker has exhorted our school leavers to embrace life with passion.

The message is getting through. The CVs I’ve been reading from beginning teachers ooze passion at every pore. These brave young people are passionate about all sorts of things: netball, snowboarding, various educational theorists, their cats, children and, mercifully, teaching.

This is commendable but I don’t think it’s what McLauchlan meant. He would say we have become too glib with the word, harnessing it to serve ego and ambition. In his mind the passion we lack as a people is not the passion of individual pursuits but of engaging with others at a level that transforms relationships and, eventually, society. According to McLauchlan we need to become ‘people-orientated’ and ‘express our emotions.’

McLauchlan is not the first or most recent person to chide kiwis for lacking strong emotions. But while we are not usually comfortable with those among us who lay their feelings bare, as Tame Iti would vouch, I find it hard to accept that we do not possess strong emotions nor find ways to express these to the common good.

Here’s a case in point. I visited the Christchurch A&P Show on Thursday and found myself, as usual, absorbed by the wood-chopping. As a spectator sport wood-chopping has remained unchanged since my youth, except that the singlets are now blue where once they were black. It is everything McLauchlan complained about: pragmatic, physical and monosyllabic – an emotion-free zone. The focus is firmly on log and axe, human interaction is minimal, victory is largely unremarked.

But for me wood-chopping oozes passion; you just have to look carefully for the signs. There is passion in the total focus on the task and the close camaraderie of a common purpose. Above all, there is passion in the relationship between man, axe and log. These large, rough men handle their axes with gentleness and reverence. They treat the logs with the respect accorded to a worthy adversary. When the whistle blows and the call is made to ‘step to your logs’ they lay the edge of the axe to the wood so tenderly. Then the count, heft and swing; the arc of the blade through the air and the first bite into the grain.

In a different culture these axemen would be bullfighters. They would wear tight, sequinned bolero jackets and small pointy shoes. They would pirouette and twirl their red capes, every movement perfectly balanced and crackling with emotion.

Gordon McLauchlan yearned for immigrants from rich and self-confident cultures whose influence would presumably arouse some passion in us and make us better than we are. Thirty years later his solution seems naïve. We look out at a world where even the oldest and most self-assured cultures are just as capable as ourselves at messing things up. Often those societies that seem most passionate are also the most destructive.

As a society we may continually struggle to express ourselves. We may seem dull compared to more flamboyant communities. But to say we are passionless is to confuse decoration with substance.