The Mysterious Ethics of Singing Sheep and Feet Pointing Backwards

Moana Jackson

There has been a deluge of articles, discussions, and even poetry written about genetic modification in recent years. The earnest if sometimes overly lawyerised words of the Royal Commission report have jostled with obtuse scientific articles and trendy T-shirt slogans or political posturing. Big business interests have collided with the concerns of parents, and organic farmers and environmentalists have fretted about the dangers it might pose to New Zealand's clean green image. At times the public must have felt rather like the Shakespearean character who struggled for understanding but was increasingly confused as he was "bethump'd with words".

However, for Māori people the debate has been more frustrating than confusing. At one level, as so often happens, Māori views and analyses have been regularly misrepresented as little more than a vaguely spiritual and quaint sub-text. Consultation on the issue has merely led to a feeling that the Māori 'perspective' being sought was only a cultural explanation of something in which normality and truth had already been determined. Hohua Tutengaehe once noted that "Every time Māori are asked to give a 'perspective' we are ... responding to something that's been decided or ... the main ideas are already set in concrete." [H. Tutengaehe, 'Submission to DSW Committee of Enquiry', Rehua Marae, September 1988.] In the whole genetic modification discourse the parameters seem predetermined by non-Māori economic, scientific and political interests. In this context the serious concerns that Māori have been raising have sometimes been acknowledged but then consigned to an addendum of cultural side issues, or diverted in a dubious consent process that has taken a terrible toll in terms of resources, time and damage done to deeply held and reasoned perceptions. Indeed, the costs exacted on the people of Tauranga and Pouakani by the now bankrupted transgenic experiments of PPL Pharmaceuticals and the ongoing struggle of Ngāti Wairere with the work of AgResearch on cows have been both unfair and unreasonable.

However, they also point to another more profound level at which Māori are frustrated by the whole genetic modification discourse, because it has extended beyond the science involved to a more fundamental diminution of Māori values. The Mohawk jurist Patricia Monture-Angus once stated that the Pākehā idea of an indigenous 'perspective' has always had this effect because it reduces complex cosmogonies and intellectual traditions to "something that is lesser," a mythology or a method of enquiry that is neither rigorous nor rational. Indeed the very idea of a perspective actually "diminishes and disappears the fact that each Aboriginal nation always had systems of knowledge and understanding, law and government" [P. Monture-Angus, Speech to the Annual Conference of the Māori Law Society, Te Hunga Roia, Waikato University Law School, 1998.]. It denies the validity of other ways of seeing the world and effectively privileges the Western gaze above all others.

Such a stance has not necessarily been preordained by a particular bias in, say, the work of the Royal Commission, or even the too-often witnessed arrogance of individual scientists. Rather, it has been determined by a set of deeper social and cultural assumptions that have consistently denied or tried to minimise the validity of Māori philosophical and scientific constructs. They indicate a stubbornly held certainty about the nature and history of the Western scientific method and an unwillingness to accept that like every other way of researching, testing and analysing facts or assertions it is culture bound. Like the English common law, which claims an inherent impartiality born of a unique tradition of customary and canon teachings blessed by the characters of God, or the idea of immutable market forces driven by an 'invisible hand', Western science is a product of a distinct cultural history. It was thought into being but has assumed unto itself a new kind of divinity.

In that sense the genetics debate, and the question of its ethics, has been and remains a contested cultural one in which science has been isolated from its own beginnings and accepted as simply the reality. However, as Irihapeti Ramsden once reminded us:

Experience teaches the wary observer that ideas of truth ... are human in origin. Shaped to suit the times. Questions must therefore be asked. How have we arrived at these truths? Whose interests do they serve? What is real? [I. Ramsden, Speech to Hui Whakapumau, Māori Development Conference, Massey University, August 1994.]

As we live in a post-moratorium New Zealand it is therefore necessary to seek answers to these questions and to pose new ones that more adequately recognise a different tradition, a different philosophical stance.

The light of Isaac Newton and whare wananga

Most historians agree that modern Western science developed out of the ferment of the European Enlightenment. Inspired partly by the knowledge of earlier intellectual traditions and a discomfort with the restrictive teachings of the Christian church, it sought to know the world in a new way. It was in a sense a revolution against the centuries during which thinking had been an act of religious observance and there was no real distinction drawn between religion, ethics and science, since each contributed to the understanding of God's creation. The ability to be scientific or even philosophical depended upon the need to 'think God', because everything was determined by God's will.

Such a mind-set led to the notion of Christian dualism, which Ingrid Washinawatok has likened to a divinely inspired distinction between the man who had "dominion over ... every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth," and the creeping things themselves. It was a closed system of enquiry in which:

... the universe was divided into distinct parts - the body and soul, good and evil, heaven and hell, reason and passion, civilised and uncivilised, Christian and heathen - and hierarchies were invented where everything that was different was also subordinate. [I. Washinawatok, paper presented to the Indigenous Peoples' Caucus on Science and Sustainable Development, Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, 1992. ]

In a sense, Europe thought itself into a sort of intellectual dualling opposites.

However, thought never develops in a vacuum and by the seventeenth century the political power of the church was declining and even many devout Christians were questioning whether the mysteries of the universe might be beyond the sight of heaven. It seemed instead that the world was knowable through the human contesting of ideas rather than just God's will. As a result there was a move away from the old thinking of the Church to a new scientific method. Religion and ethics were redefined as values-laden disciplines best suited to moral questions that were distinct from the observation, experimentation and neutrality needed to reach an ostensibly values-free conclusion. The need to think God was replaced with a man-centred reason in which the mind could listen to the reason within itself and produce a new objectivity that eventually replaced the old catch-cry of 'God said' with the aphorism 'I think, therefore I am'.

Yet science was assumed to be inherently objective in much the same way that the old God-willed reason had produced divine emanations and its conclusions were defined as "a truth from nowhere [that] claimed to be true for everywhere" [H. Waitere-Ang and P. Johnston, 'If all inclusion means in research is the addition of researchers that look different, have you really included me at all?', paper presented at the AARE-NZRE conference, The Challenge for Educational Research, Melbourne, 1999.]. It was "unbiased, and therefore applicable to all" because it was culturally constructed to be so, and it became an act of faith as certain as anything the Church had previously decreed. Alexander Pope even compared it to a new crusade in his tribute to Isaac Newton:

Nature, and Nature's Laws lay hid from sight:
God said, 'Let Newton be!' and all was light.

The 'reasonable man' was firmly European and he set the new universal standards by preserving the belief that he could know everything and had a right to do so. The scientific method itself became part of the dualling opposites, and although it would often admit to mistakes it was transformed into an acultural construct that could drag truth not just from faith but from error.

In other places and cultures knowledge and truth were sought through different methods that were equally bound by unique traditions and assumptions. Te Rarawa Kohere has described the Māori intellectual tradition as being based in a "tūrangawaewae of thought" [Te R. Kohere, 'Tawakewake - the realisation of well-being implies the existence of sustainable development', extract from PhD thesis presented at the Conference on Māori Evaluation, Mihiroa Marae, September 2002.] that has shaped and been shaped by a particular sense of place, and a whakapapa of learning which is rigorous in its application and imaginative in its approach to the meaning of life. It is also rooted firmly in a non-dualistic world that sees interrelationships rather than hierarchy, and positions the thinker as someone who is part of the world and not merely an elevated observer of it. It also contextualises spirituality and faith as parts of the same continuum of human experience as reason and logic. Indeed, to exclude the idea of a human longing for the mysteries of faith (as distinct from the strictures of an organised religion) or to compartmentalise ethics as something distinct from the scientific process would be regarded as both unreasonable and unreasoning.

This tradition nurtured a way of knowing that was tested against observation and experimentation and measured in philosophies that navigated esoteric and complex questions as easily as the ancestors navigated the Pacific Ocean. It was also debated in the realities of life as well as at whare wānanga that allowed each iwi and hapū to explore the many shared but different facets of what it was to be tangata whenua. At the site of one ancient whare wānanga, puna or springs of fresh water sometimes bubble to the surface and small vents of natural gas used to be lit whenever students were in class. Tohara Mohi once said that the lights burning there indicated not only:

... the maramatanga of knowledge being imparted but the light of learning itself and the realisation that there is power in knowledge ... it must be treated with respect not because it is unchallengeable but because it has a whakapapa ... an interconnectedness with everything and everyone that shines a light on who we are and how we relate with the universe. It is a search for what is tika. [Mohi, Tohara, personal communication, August 2, 1992.]

In that context tikanga was fundamental to the knowing, but it was never just a vocabulary of discrete rituals or marae theatre as it is often regarded today, but part of the intellectual baseline from which important questions were raised and possible answers contemplated. On the island, knowledge and its pursuit was thus a process of enlightenment too, but it was one forged in a cultural tradition that saw no need to claim a universality of purpose nor impose a particular way of seeking knowledge because the universe like the spring water was always flowing in a state of constant flux.

The Māori intellectual tradition therefore did not begin with an assumption that humans could know everything, but rather the certainty that to know anything one first had to ask 'Why do we need to know?' The question was never intended as a barrier to knowledge and enquiry. Rather it was a recognition that the ethics or potential risks in knowing had to be assessed before a task was undertaken. And in some cases there would simply be no need for any greater knowledge beyond the certainty that time and human existence have a cyclical reality that links the living with the dead and the mokopuna yet to be born. There is a continuity of whakapapa that is ever changing yet constant, a sense that while knowledge may shift in new circumstances the values that underpin its quest are like a mountain that does not move.

Thus the Māori intellectual tradition has never been fussed with the idea of eternal youth and the strange fascination with botoxed beauty, nor with the fear of death that has led to the peculiar Western pseudo-science of cryogenics. Growing old and dying are simply part of whakapapa, and there is always a beauty in the wisdom of age that matches the vivacity of the young. People would ask how someone died, but the why of death was and is a question where the moral and ethical issues about needing to know have yet to be resolved. In some ways they even seem almost unnecessary because in the wisdom that can be gleaned from the whakapapa stories the wonderful dying of Maui between the thighs of Hine-nui-te-Po is explanation and lesson enough that some things are indeed immutable.

After 1840 the colonisers tried to destroy the ideas and values of that intellectual tradition with the same determination with which they sometimes destroyed the actual centres of learning. The possibility that Māori might possess a unique let alone valid philosophical system was inconsistent with the aims of colonisation. Mātauranga Māori was mocked or redefined in a deliberately imposed dumbing down, which included anthropologists filling Māori skulls with millet seed to prove that smaller brains meant less intelligence, and bureaucrats and jurists contending that we did not have the reason or the capacity to be really sovereign or to make treaties. We could not really be rational or scientific because in the hierarchy of Western knowledge we were deemed to be irrational by our very nature.

Many of the old suppositions upon which nineteenth century colonisation was based are now debunked, but they linger in much social discourse as well as in the institutional assumptions about who has the right to rule. In the debate about genetic modification they have surfaced in a frequently unthinking re-run of the old dualism that has not only misunderstood the Māori science of genetics but also the essentially colonising nature of the GM discourse itself.

A discourse based in the puna

When Māori began the most recent engagement with the issues of genetic modification, the debates were intense and people were often concerned and bemused at the rapidity with which the new technology was accepted as inevitable by many Pākehā. At the first hui held in Tauranga to consider the attempts by PPL to insert human genes in sheep, many of the young people admitted their confusion about the project and the questions it raised. However, they were at least clear that something seemed not quite right, as if ancient fires were being lit and puzzling questions were being asked about 'Why do we need to know this?' One young man summed up this sense with the comment that he didn't want to hear sheep singing waiata on his way to work.

His comment was greeted with quiet laughter, but also a general awareness that in many areas of Pākehā society the ethics of the issue were being raised after the work had started and that the sort of questions that would have been asked within a Māori intellectual framework about the rightness of mixing any genes and its impact on the totality of whakapapa were not being considered. Instead, GM was simply accepted as an unchallengeable given and risk was being debated as something to be managed after the fact, rather than predicted with aforethought as an essential step in deciding whether the particular line of enquiry should even have been contemplated. The technological feasibility of inserting human genes in another species was accepted as the starting point of the discourse rather than the more fundamental querying of whether feasibility necessarily equated with wisdom. Western science had in fact set the parameters of the research as well as the meaning of the discourse.

Much has changed since the early 1990s, but the basic non-Māori approach remains the same and bioethics has become a new and contradictory designer label that seeks to rationalise GM experimentation purely on the model of superior insight that evolved out of the Enlightenment. There is now even a hierarchy of genetic acceptability in which human genes are regarded as worthy of special consideration or regulation because they are somehow more valuable than those of other species. The genes of 'Man' have assumed dominion in a New Age dualism which sets them apart from all others. Even the oft-repeated question, 'He aha te mea nui, he tangata, he tangata?' has been redefined in a Biblical notion of human primacy instead of being read as part of a whakapapa of interrelationships with the Earth Mother.

In such a construct, ethics and moral restraint are narrowly defined concepts that seem to be too easily swayed by the hope of economic reward or the promise of medical breakthrough. The latter is understandable, especially for those suffering from diseases that currently seem incurable, but there are broader and more difficult questions that are not being addressed to do with whether in fact a cure might create something worse than the original illness in social, human and environmental terms. Instead the ethical issues are mere clip-ons, and GM itself is promoted with the same sort of confidence that once held that the people living on this side of the world had their feet turned backwards. They were the 'anti-podes', and sadly much of the GM discourse seems similarly misguided and back to front.

In quite profound ways the Māori intellectual tradition therefore remains a 'perspective', to be heard but not necessarily listened to, a Treaty partnership viewpoint for which space might be found in the predominant paradigm but not an independent critique that might bring a different sense of reason to the issue. A Māori tūrangawaewae of analysis would question the efficacy of GM as a given and would promote quite distinct ways of dealing with it that seek knowledge, not in the hope of profit or even a potential cure but with respect for its power. Technology would be the tool of reason and ethics, not the catalyst for their belated consideration or the driver for a self-aggrandising prophecy about the benefits and allure of what Kawaipuna Prejean once called the "merry mad dance of wayward genes". [P. Kawaipuna, personal communication, Hilo, Hawaii, 3 July 1990.]

There is a very real concern that Māori people have had neither the time nor the space to properly explore the GM issue in a way that is not constantly reacting to assumptions already made. It is entirely possible that a critique that is sourced within the intellectual tradition of iwi and hapū could bring valuable insights that are currently being excluded from the debate. The rejection or repositioning of that tradition is an ongoing colonisation that does not serve Māori or Pākehā well. At the very least, a non-colonised response would be for the Crown to have extended the moratorium so that such an exploration might occur.

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