Things I like about New Zealand, Part 2b

My running collection of things I like about New Zealand has been a comparative endeavor--they're mostly things I think NZ does better than the US. In my last entry, I mentioned that I thought that NZ's progressive politics is CFAAB (clearly far and away better) than what we have in the US. For folks like me, it's simply crazy that some of my fellow citizens want a pluralistic state run under a religious banner, or that intelligent design would be taught as a rival to the biological theory of evolution.*

As I remarked in the last entry on this topic, I really like that such nonsense goes nowhere here. Lately I've been trying to do some armchair psychology to explain the difference. Sadly, I was moved to think further about this because of the disaster in New Orleans. There are a lot of things that need to be, and are being, analyzed about how it got so bad. But two things stood out to me when I wondered if something similar could happen here in New Zealand. My guess is that it wouldn't, on (at least) two levels.

First, the desperately poor are almost nonexistent here. There are very few homeless people, because there is a wide safety net. Nicholas Kristof's column, "The Larger Shame," in today's NY Times nicely hammered home how bad America is in terms of poverty. In an era in which it's sometimes hard to justify being a Democrat (that is, not on principle, but on how poorly organized and inarticulate we are), Kristof makes the case nicely: Republicans want tax cuts, except for military funding, while Democrats are willing to swallow lower paychecks for the sake of poverty relief. Poverty is perhaps the primary, humanly controllable culprit behind the staggering suffering and death in New Orleans. We left behind the people who couldn't get out on their own, so we left them behind twice: first, when we didn't give them enough resources to leave on their own, and then again, when we didn't give them the means to evacuate before Katrina hit. As far as I can tell, that sort of thing simply wouldn't happen here. If a hurricane was clearly heading towards a NZ city, everyone would likely have a chance to get out, simply because people care more here about other people. They're willing to have smaller paychecks, fewer profits (there's an incredibly high minimum wage here, and even that isn't enough, probably) so that everyone can live decently.

Second, given the colossal failures of organization and urgency on the federal level in dealing with Katrina's devastation, it's absolutely amazing to me that people aren't being fired right away. I was stunned to watch live on CNN International as Mike Brown, head of FEMA, announced he wasn't aware of the stories of murder, rape, and beatings in the anarchic Convention Center until well after I was, just from watching CNN, literally a world away. That total incompetence is inexcusable, but our President tells him he's doing a good job. Now there's plenty of political nonsense down here in NZ, but that sort of obvious failure tends to get laughed out of the room. For example, when a prominent Australian politician recently made an ethnically insensitive comment about his rival's wife (while drunk at a party), he immediately resigned his leadership post (contrast that with Trent Lott's defiance after his Strom Thurmond debacle, and more broadly with Karl Rove's racist tactics against Senator McCain in the 2000 primary--in the US, politicians win elections by being racist). Sadly, the Australian politician was so ashamed that he then attempted suicide. Obviously, that's not the right result. But it's worth observing that people still have something like honor here--if politicians screw up, they're called out on it, and held to account (and the media don't get over such a critical story in one news cycle). In the US, if politicians screw up, they get defended in the name of loyalty, and more people die.

So what does all this have to do with the progressive politics from the earlier post? My armchair psychology is simply that people are more reasonable here than in the US. I mean "reasonable" in the literal sense of "willing to listen to, accept, and require good reasons for important claims." Patently ridiculous, socially-relevant behavior, such as wanting to use state influence to get everyone to believe in God, teaching intelligent design and undermining our most advanced science, letting people slide into miserable and deadly poverty, and excusing negligence that leads to homicide are not practiced by reasonable people. I like that so many New Zealanders are reasonable in these ways. I hate that so many Americans are unreasonable in these ways.

*(Defense-of-Profession aside: intelligent design is, roughly, the theory that this world must have had been designed by an architect with an intelligence, since that's the only way of explaining its complexity, beauty, order, etc. This is not a rival to a biological theory, because it is not itself a biological theory. Intelligent design is consistent with evolution, despite the protestations of ID's adherents: it may be that god designed a world that changes via evolution. No, ID is a philosophical theory, a philosophy of religion--under another name, I used to teach it in my Intro to Philosophy courses. By my lights, it's a pretty bad theory. But the point is just that if ID'ers want it taught in the schools, that's fine by me. Let's give high school teachers some philosophy training, and they can do a few weeks on the philosophy of religion. That would do our society wonders, I'd think. At least the flaws of ID would be exposed, but I guess that's why its advocates are trying to smuggle it into biology textbooks.)