As Provost, Prof. James holds one of the university’s most senior positions. That made it all the more troubling to see how weak a grasp she has on the concept of free speech, something universities are required to uphold in the Education and Training Act.  

Prof. James’ piece is a series of reflections on Victoria’s panel discussion on free speech, which was held last year. ‘This event,’ she correctly says, ‘stirred strong feelings.’ But she then goes on to describe the event and the response to it in terms that can generously be described as misleading.  

Prof. James summarizes the response to Victoria’ free speech event as follows (to use her punctuation):  

What surfaced, from one direction, was genuine anxiety about amplifying views that might cause harm.  What this provoked from the other direction was, at best, a mischievous and provocative misinterpretation of the word “postponed” (swapping it for that most charged of words; “cancelled”).  At worst it was vitriolic petulance, best summed up in the quote, by one of the parties; “Good news, kids. It’s OK; words aren’t violence.”  

How Prof. James knows how genuine the anxiety about certain people’s views was is not clear. It is worth noticing, though, that many of the claims that student activists made about how worried people were about speech strained credulity.   

A few students, for example, were described as ‘freaking out’ over ‘right-wing voices,’ those voices apparently belonging to Free Speech Union director Jonathan Ayling and one of us (Michael), neither of whom are especially right-wing. VUWSA President Marcail Parkinson, for her part, said she was concerned that students would not have been able to ‘avoid that area’ – that is, the Kelburn campus’ central ‘Hub’ – ‘if they didn’t feel comfortable being around the debate.’   

But it seems hard to believe that anyone would be seriously discomfited by Ayling or Michael’s speech. Ayling spent three years at Vic, and Michael spent a decade there, both fairly recently. In neither case have there been reports of serious trauma being caused by their speech.   

Prof. James asserts that this ‘genuine anxiety’ provoked ‘at best, a mischievous and provocative misinterpretation of the word “postponed” (swapping it for that most charged of words; “cancelled”).’   

‘Postponed,’ of course, usually implies that the event is question has remained basically the same, but has simply been shifted to a different date. That is obviously not what happened in the case of Victoria University’s ‘free speech’ event. The original event was going to feature four speakers and be held in the Hub, a public area at the heart of Victoria’s Kelburn campus. The event that actually took place featured eight speakers and was held in a lecture theatre. It also had a changed format that ensured there was no exchange of arguments among the panellists. Most reasonable people would agree that saying that the original event was ‘cancelled’ would be perfectly fair.   

It is also not true to describe the response to the cancellation of the first event as ‘at best…mischievous and provocative.’ Sean Plunket invited VUWSA President Marcail Parkinson onto The Platform to discuss the cancellation. Jonathan Ayling was able to remind VUW leadership via the The Post that universities have an obligation to ‘allow for ideas to be thoroughly tested and for robust debate to occur.’ And Michael was able to make a number of important points about Victoria University, free speech and diversity, both in The Post and in an episode of our Free Kiwis! podcast.  

Finally, Prof. James describes a social media post by the Free Speech Union stating that ‘words aren’t violence’ as ‘vitriolic petulance.’ If the Provost of Victoria University views a simple statement of fact as ‘vitriolic petulance,’ what does that suggest about the climate for free speech there? At the very least, Prof. James’ reaction should remind us that what New Zealand academics describe as ‘harmful’ or ‘violent’ speech is often simply speech that they disagree with.

Prof. James goes on in her piece to reflect on the way ‘the internet has provided incredible ease of connection, and simultaneously created communication cul-de-sacs, that trap people in isolated cliques and sycophantic claques.’ She notes that free speech is protected in the UN Declaration of Human Rights alongside freedom of thought, and interestingly takes from this an ‘encouragement to pause before we express our opinions.’ And she reflects on how her ‘privilege is being in the white majority’ and in ‘revelling in robust argument,’ something she somewhat unexpectedly characterizes as ‘my approach to debate.’  

Prof. James ends her article with ‘a last word on words’ that deserves to be quoted in full:  

when I was walking to work a few mornings ago a pile of leaves was swirling down the curb and my mind said, “there is the wind”. The wind, though, was all around, strong and invisible and shaping the way I leaned into is as I walked.  We choose to notice some words, the lively, swirling ones; or the ones that blow stinging dust into our eyes.  We need to remember to notice all the other words; that have shaped our environment, our thoughts, and twisted some of us into beautiful, windswept oddities.  

This kind of lyricism is obviously something that recipients of Oko are free to spend some portion of their mornings on if they feel so inclined. But there are at least two things about James’ ‘thing about words’ that we found quite disturbing.  

The first is that this is an article sent to all academic staff by a very senior administrator (i.e. boss) at one of our leading universities. It is on the freedom of speech, the keystone principle of both liberalism and democracy, and a topic on which there is (understandably) an enormous literature in fields such as political theory, the philosophy of law, and intellectual history. Obviously, a full panoply of footnotes and scholarly references wouldn’t have been appropriate in an op-ed in a staff newsletter. But some indication that James wasn’t thinking about this most important of topics for the first time might have been reassuring.  

This is especially the case in view of the fact that we have been having a debate about free speech and academic freedom across the English-speaking world for at least a decade now (though admittedly this debate has tended to be more lively outside the academy than inside it, for obvious reasons).   

We have tried to contribute to this debate ourselves, most substantively in the report we released with the New Zealand Initiative last year. In it, we presented a number of surveys of academics and students, a selection of anonymous testimonies from academics, and a catalogue of incidents involving academic freedom that have taken place on our campuses over the past decade.   

Prof. James doesn’t have to cite our work. But the fact that she seems to feel no need to even mention any of the now overwhelming evidence that we have a problem with free speech at New Zealand universities is interesting, to say the least. ‘Can the modern University be the place where robust, relevant debate can happen?’ she asks, before immediately answering her own question, astonishingly blithely, ‘We already are!’   

It is of course true that a lot of ‘robust, relevant’ debate does take place at our universities. But it is also true (as several different surveys have now shown) that substantial numbers of academics and students feel uncomfortable discussing a few crucial topics, including the Treaty of Waitangi and the nature of sex and gender.   

Prof. James’ column appeared at just the right time, as the government was preparing its revisions to the Education and Training Act, revisions that will include enhanced protections for academic freedom. Draft legislation has now been released.   

What Prof. James’ column shows, yet again, is that New Zealand universities cannot be trusted to uphold their statutory or ethical obligations to academic freedom and the freedom of speech. Senior administrators either do not understand free speech, actively dislike it, or are not willing to openly defend it, and the same can be said for a good proportion of New Zealand’s academics. As Prof. James’ piece reminds us, they are often not even willing to educate themselves on the issue or to engage with the now plentiful evidence that academic freedom in under threat in an honest way.  

So make no mistake: senior administrators at our universities have neither the wit nor the wherewithal to restore genuine academic freedom themselves. It is vital not only the academic freedom legislation that is currently before the house passes, but also that it has teeth, and doesn’t naively trust our largely anti-free speech university managers to police themselves.

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To any neutral observer, though, the event will have made clear quite how far our universities have strayed from being the politically disinterested, open institutions we pay them to be, and how urgently government intervention is now needed to make them fit for purpose again.

The first sign of that was the set-up. Smith had originally invited two speakers willing to defend free speech as traditionally conceived: Jonathan Ayling of the Free Speech Union, and my New Zealand Initiative colleague Michael Johnston. 

When a few students said they were ‘freaking out’ over these ‘right-wing voices,’ though, Smith re-organized the event with Ayling, Johnston, and eight other speakers, none of whom would describe themselves as right-of-centre. He also moved the event from VUW’s central, open ‘Hub’ to a closed lecture theatre, apparently in response to VUWSA President Marcail Parkinson’s concerns that students wouldn’t have been able to ‘avoid that area…if they didn’t feel comfortable being around the debate.’

Most of the speakers at the event also seemed worried about the harm speech could cause. Anjum Rahman of the Inclusive Aotearoa Collective stressed that students should feel ‘uncomfortable’ during discussions at universities, but not ‘unsafe,’ which she left tantalizingly undefined. Khylee Quince, the Dean of AUT’s law school, felt sure that some on campus ‘pose a threat to’ the ‘safety and well-being’ of others, though she, too, declined to precisely define these terms. 

Queensland University of Technology’s John Byron also seemed unsure about speech, which, he said, could ‘shut down other people’s speech,’ something that was exemplified at Victoria only a couple months ago, when top US diplomat Bonnie Jenkins was shouted down by protestors. 

Byron, though, didn’t mention that incident, and didn’t seem to be confining his remarks to the kind of heckling that literally prevents someone from being heard, and that has long been recognized as falling outside the protection of the First Amendment in the United States. What he had in mind was ‘intimidation’ and ‘humiliation’– two more terms that seemed to cry out for further definition.

Speakers for the most part failed to engage with the evidence that New Zealand universities have a problem with free speech. Several speakers dismissed the Free Speech Union’s 2023 survey of academics for its methodological weaknesses, but failed to mention other surveys without those weaknesses that came to similar conclusions, such as the 2022 FSU survey of academics, the 2022 Heterodox New Zealand survey of undergraduates, and the University of Auckland’s internal survey, all of which showed that substantial numbers of people were fearful of voicing their views. 

Anjum Rahman seemed particularly keen to explore important philosophical questions such as whether incitement to violence could be considered free speech, but didn’t bring up more concrete cases such as Massey’s deplatforming of Don Brash in 2019 or AUT’s deplatforming of Daphna Whitmore in 2022. 

Some speakers did, however, think that academic freedom faced some threats at our universities. University of Auckland Professor Emerita Jane Kelsey said that in her forty-year experience of the university, ‘those who’ve been shut down have not been those [on the right] – it’s been because the donors could potentially be upset, or “We can’t have the Uyghur woman speaking because the Chinese are going to be upset.”’

In the report on academic freedom that I am currently preparing for the New Zealand Initiative, we have found a number of lines of evidence which suggest that over-powerful managers, the idea of universities as businesses, and the Chinese Communist Party do indeed pose a threat to academic freedom in this country. A considerable body of evidence, though, also points to a threat from the left within universities, and this was something that only Victoria University of Wellington’s Nicole Moreham even acknowledged, though she also took clear to qualify this ‘pressure from the left’ on free speech as ‘well-meaning’ and only ‘slightly overzealous.’

Most of the speakers were also keen to dismiss the idea that new legislation was needed to protect academic freedom, either in the form of a requirement that universities have academic freedom policies (mentioned in the coalition agreement), or of a New Zealand equivalent of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill that has just received royal assent in the UK, which would allow students or academics whose free speech rights have been violated to seek redress through the courts.

For Nicole Moreham, this would undermine universities’ autonomy, though it is not clear how it would have any effect on academics’ freedom over their own research and teaching (other than to protect it against bullying administrators and colleagues). Several speakers seemed to see government intervention on this front as hypocritical, as if everyone calling for the change was a cartoon libertarian, and as if left-wing academics suddenly opposing government intervention couldn’t equally be accused of hypocrisy. After the event, Nic Smith told journalists that there was ‘an inherent irony’ in ‘legislating for free speech,’ but didn’t say whether he would be calling for the repeal of existing legislation for free speech such as the New Zealand Bill of Rights. 

My own experience as a lecturer at VUW over the past decade has long convinced me that the universities cannot be reformed without outside intervention. Those opposing the restoration of free speech and political neutrality within our universities are simply too numerous, too powerful, and too shameless. Nic Smith’s ‘free speech’ event has only confirmed me in this view. 

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This is our reply to Nic Smith:

In a column that appeared in The Post on 23 February, Victoria University of Wellington Vice-Chancellor Nic Smith criticizes the coalition’s commitment to have universities adopt a free speech policy.  

Smith notes that ACT Party leader David Seymour ‘has previously criticised universities for declining to host certain speakers and argued the institutions should lose funding if they don’t “protect free speech.”’ The vice-chancellor then states that ‘one inference of all this is that anyone who wants to speak on campus should be able to do so.’  

But it wouldn’t actually be valid to infer from Seymour’s criticisms of recent deplatformings at New Zealand universities that he thinks that ‘anyone who wants to speak on campus should be able to do so.’  

You can, of course, think that Vice-Chancellor Jan Thomas was wrong to prevent Don Brash from speaking to a student politics club in August 2018 (for example) and at the same time recognize that random people can’t simply turn up at a university without an invitation and expect to get a hearing.

Smith has set up a classic straw man. Unfortunately for him, it’s a straw man that he addresses the rest of his column to. ‘While it may seem antithetical to some,’ he declares, ‘I do not agree that universities platforming all-comers will help.’ But it’s not clear who exactly has been proposing this.

The vice-chancellor goes on, though, warning that ‘an all-comers approach will actually reduce our capacity to expose relevant truths and understand the world in new ways,’ and that ‘everybody having a platform will diminish our capacity for people to talk respectfully together about difficult topics and discuss conflicting ideas.’

It might well be the case that allowing absolutely anyone to speak on campus would make debating ideas on campus more difficult – even if the vice-chancellor doesn’t advance any actual arguments for that proposition.  

But again, we haven’t heard anyone insisting on an ‘all-comers approach’ to academic freedom in this country over the past few years.

What we are aware of is anger over episodes such as the de-platforming of Brash, the cancellation of the Feminism 2020 event (also at Massey), and the deplatforming of gender-critical feminist Daphna Whitmore at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) in 2022.  

Smith doesn’t mention any of these cases though. Perhaps that’s because they make clear that the problem we have isn’t with ‘all-comers’ making debate on campus impossible. It’s with people with widely held views being prevented from debating certain issues.  

It is true, of course, that certain types of speech aren’t usually covered even by the strongest free speech laws. In US First Amendment law, for example, drowning out a speaker with heckling is usually considered a violation of the speaker’s rights.

So have the likes of Brash and gender-critical feminists been drowning out speakers at our universities with heckling?  If so, Smith might have some evidence for his fears about on-campus debate being limited by invited speakers.  

In fact, of course, it is the likes of Brash who tend to be heckled. When the former National Party leader was eventually allowed to speak at the University of Auckland in September 2018, NewsHub reported that the event ‘was marred by ugly scenes…with protesters immediately heckling him over a megaphone as he attempted to take part in the debate.’

When British gender-critical women’s activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull tried to speak in Auckland last year, she was surrounded by a crowd that jeered and shoved her, had tomato juice poured on her head, and eventually had to escape from the area with a police escort. That event wasn’t on a university campus, but it’s hard to imagine things would have gone differently if it had been.

And when seven Auckland academics sent a letter to The Listener magazine in 2021 politely expressing doubts about inserting mātauranga Māori in the science curriculum, two faced an investigation by the Royal Society, one was forced to resign from his administrative position, and another was temporarily removed from teaching.

It should come as no surprise that when Heterodox New Zealand (a group of dissident academics) and the Free Speech Union have conducted surveys of undergraduates and academics over the past couple of years, they found that substantial numbers of responding academics didn’t feel comfortable discussing hot-button topics like the Treaty of Waitangi and gender.  

Why doesn’t Smith address any of this? It probably isn’t because Smith (who made his academic reputation making computer models of the heart) simply doesn’t understand the issues. Could it be that the vice-chancellor, like a lot of people at universities these days, feels intimidated?

You might think that the vice-chancellor, who was paid $368,750 by the taxpayer-funded institution last year, should simply bite the bullet and risk offending a small number of bolshie students and staff. The Education Act does, after all, require universities to uphold academic freedom, and Smith is effectively Vic’s CEO. That even Smith doesn’t dare address the real problem speaks volumes about the situation that our universities now find themselves in.

It also speaks to the need for the kind of legislation that the coalition aims to introduce – and, in fact, for more robust measures as well.

 Just as in medieval universities, plenty of good work gets done, and most university workers aren’t particularly zealous. But there are limits on what you can and can’t discuss, and over time this has significantly distorted the university’s core purpose.

If this government stops at simply asking universities to commit to a free speech policy and leaves them to police themselves, managers like Smith will simply carry on posing as defenders of free speech while caving in to zealots at every turn. With few left on campus who are willing to oppose the zealots, why wouldn’t the managers act in this way?

What we need, in addition, is an academic freedom bill of the sort that has been successfully introduced in the UK. This enables staff and students whose rights have been breached to seek legal redress. It also sets up a ‘free speech czar’ (currently Dr. Arif Ahmed) who can make sure that universities are doing the job that they are paid to do – providing a genuinely open space for learning and investigation.

Cover photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

The post The problem with the vice-chancellor’s ‘free speech’ column appeared first on Open Inquiry.

The new logo is a rather elegant O crowned with that great friend of all Polynesian, Greek, and Japanese philologists, the macron. It replaces the old university crest with its stars and its cross of St. Andrew, who had the unpleasant distinction of being crucified on diagonal poles. 

What caught my attention, though, was the loss of the two words that were written on a rather angular banner beneath the old University of Otago crest: sapere aude. The words come originally from one of Horace’s odes, but they were famously taken up by Kant in his 1784 essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ 

For Kant, these two words expressed the very essence of the Enlightenment. Dare to know, they exhort us, unblinkingly.

Unsurprisingly, the words have proven popular with educational institutions, many of whom have adopted it as their motto. These include Manchester Grammar School; Wesley College, Melbourne; the University of New Brunswick; and the University of Otago – at least, until recently.

There’s a whole essay that could be written on what the cheerful jettisoning of these two Latin words from the University of Otago’s blazon might tell us about how today’s university leaders have largely gone cold on the Enlightenment and the values it represents: rationalism, objectivity, and fearless inquiry, contemporary pieties be damned. 

This is not that essay. This is an essay about languages: not only the ones we speak and understand, but also the ones that we don’t understand very well at all, and that only very few of us can speak.

Allow me to explain. When I first started working at Victoria University, I couldn’t help notice how often Māori terms were used. Committees had names like Te Maruako Aronui. The university’s ‘Strategic Plan’ trumpeted values like whanaungatanga and kaitiakitanga (engagement and equity, if you’re interested). Higher-ups had alternative titles like Tumu Whakarae (Vice-Chancellor) and Iho Tūroa (Assistant Vice-Chancellor, Sustainability).

As a longstanding language nerd, I found all this deeply pleasing. Here I was being exposed to something rare and precious – and indigenous language that was still, against all odds, holding on to life. I was also picking up a few words in a Polynesian language, a language-group that I knew held the keys to the South Pacific, a region I’ve always been fascinated with.

The only doubt I had was that, even for a language nerd like me, all these Māori terms could sometimes be a bit confusing. Recent immigrants understandably seemed to find them particularly bewildering. A Mexican friend in a new job told me she’d received an email ending with ‘Ngā mihi’ and had insouciantly replied ‘Dear Ngā…’

All this seemed especially odd as I realized how few New Zealanders actually spoke (or even understood) Māori – only a couple of people I knew at the university (one of whom taught the language in Te Kawa a Māui or Māori Studies), and, according to the 2018 census, only 4% of the broader population.

That’s when the strange use of this modern Pacific language started to remind me of something – that ancient Mediterranean language that used to be emblazed beneath the University of Otago’s crest. 

Latin, of course, was the language of the Romans. After the fall of the Roman Empire, it gradually devolved into today’s Romance languages: Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, and Romansch (now spoken pretty much exclusively in the Swiss canton of Graubünden). 

But for centuries Latin itself lived on. It lived on in the Catholic church, where services were mostly held in Latin until the 1960s. It lived on in schools and universities, where it was the main language of instruction throughout the Middle Ages. It also lived on as the main language of science, with Vesalius, Harvey, Newton, Linnaeus and Bernoulli all publishing their most important works in Latin.

Even in the 20^th century, Latin retained a certain place in our culture, both within Europe and in its offshoots in North America and Australasia. This was especially the case in education. Schools and universities continued to love time-honoured Latin mottos, and not only because of the language’s pithiness (it lacks articles like the and a). Top students were given Latin labels like valedictorian (the person who says goodbye) and dux (leader). 

As Latin survived, it also changed. Sometime in the Dark Ages, it stopped being a language spoken by ordinary people. It became, instead, a language spoken almost exclusively by an elite, an elite that included clergy but also doctors, lawyers, and so on. In the 11th century fresco from the church of St. Clement in Rome below, the bad guys who are trying to abduct Clement speak an early version of Italian, while the Saint speaks Latin. A couple hundred years later, Latin was what marked you out as one of a tiny number of people who had spent time at a university. By the 17th century (the age of Newton), Latin was the language of new, international scientific elite. 

By the 20^th century, even as Latin retained a presence in education and in the Catholic church, the number of people who had even a working knowledge of the language was tiny. No doubt many of the dwindling number of expert Latinists at schools and universities continued to believe in its utility for imparting grammar, its suppleness as a literary language, and in its importance as a key to the cultural past. For most people, though, even among the educational elite, it was useful mainly as a way of signifying prestige – or, to use another word, class.

All of which brings us back to Māori (or te reo, as I would say if I really wanted to make clear I was in the know). Māori in 2023 seems to be used chiefly by two groups. One is the set of people, overwhelmingly Māori or part-Māori by descent, who use Māori in everyday life. In the East Cape, over 30% of the Māori population seem to be in this group, although numbers are lower elsewhere. 

The other set of people who use Māori today are upper-middle class urbanites, often in government and university jobs. Rob Campbell’s poneketanga makes up the lion’s share of them, but they aren’t restricted to Wellington. These Māori users tend to be white or Pākehā New Zealanders who are keen to work on their language skills, help revitalize a struggling indigenous language, and make New Zealand a more genuinely bicultural place.

All of these motives are highly creditable, even if learning a Polynesian language isn’t always easy. (I should probably admit here that I’m one of the people for whom Scotty Morrison’s Māori Made Easy didn’t quite live up to its title). 

Still, for most of this second set of Māori-speakers, Māori is something they employ in one-off words or phrases, or at most in a mihi. It can be used to lend grandeur to a formal introduction of visiting lecture, or further solemnity to a serious event. There’s nothing wrong with any of these uses, and they will certainly aid in the valuable work of keeping the language alive. 

In these contexts, though, Māori today often fulfils the role that Latin would have played for our Pākehā forefathers. It is, in short, a ceremonial language. And, perhaps, a way of signalling class. 

I will almost certainly renew my attempts to learn Māori properly. For now, YouTube videos will have to do. I’ll continue to enjoy the exposure to new words and phrases that living in Wellington affords me. And I’ll continue to nerd out over similar Niuean and Cook Islands Māori words when I go on holiday.

For those in academia or the civil service, though, it may just be worth remembering that however cool and interesting they may be, languages can also erect something of a barrier for people outside an educational elite, making universities and government less accessible than they might be. And that’s something that anyone who values whanaungatanga and kaitiakitanga might want to bear in mind.

The post Why Māori is like Latin appeared first on Open Inquiry.

Over the past few years, a cartoon has been doing the rounds on social media. It depicts the philosopher Karl Popper laying out his ‘paradox of tolerance.’ The cartoon is based on a long endnote in Popper’s great work The Open Society and its Enemies (which was written in New Zealand), and on this paragraph in particular:

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal (OS I, 265).

For the most part the text of the cartoon simply paraphrases sections of this paragraph (Popper’s ‘we should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law’ becomes ‘any movement that preaches intolerance and persecution must be outside the law,’ for example). But it also leaves out two sentences (running from ‘In this formulation’ to ‘fists or pistols’), which suggest that the intolerant should be suppressed only when they resort to violence rather than argument. Though this has been widely pointed out, Popper continues to be cited (including in this country) in support of the view that we should clamp down on intolerance even when it stops short of violence. 

Popper’s cartoon has taken on something of a life of its own on the internet, with counter-cartoons replacing Nazis with Islamists, anti-capitalists, or even Chinese communists. But the many blog posts and think-pieces that purport to show what Popper really thought about tolerance and intolerance rarely look beyond the paragraph we’ve quoted above, and almost never venture beyond the first volume of The Open Society and its Enemies. 

In this piece, we draw on a wider range of Popper’s writings, including personal letters, to shed more light on what the philosopher’s views on toleration actually were. As we shall see, Popper’s views on this topic hardly constitute a fully thought-out theory. Where exactly we should set the limits of toleration in speech and action is still very much a question that citizens of contemporary societies will have to answer for themselves. At the same time, Popper’s thinking about tolerance does offer some guidance about where we should draw the lines around toleration. 

What did Popper actually say about tolerance?

Much of what Popper had to say about tolerance was written simply in support of toleration in general, as a feature of the ‘open societies’ he wished to promote. On the most general level, Popper saw tolerance as a necessary condition for the kind of pluralism that any liberal society would have to accommodate. As he put it in a 1945 letter to the Australian neurophysiologist John Eccles, ‘We must build a world in which different creeds, different religious and different moral creeds, must be able to live together in peace’; to this end, ‘a common denominator’ was needed ‘such as tolerance of everybody who is prepared to tolerate’. ‘Democracy will tolerate everyone except the intolerant,’ the University of Canterbury student magazine CANTA reported ‘Dr. Popper’ as saying, as ‘the right to be different is of fundamental importance.’ By the same token, open societies should ‘avoid imposing any particular social philosophy on people’ and ‘give people a chance to choose’ between different values.

Popper sometimes saw tolerance as something that flowed naturally from a recognition of our fallibility as human beings. Popper was fond of quoting the first line of Voltaire’s entry on tolerance in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764), which runs (to use Popper’s own translation), ‘What is tolerance? It is a necessary consequence of our humanity. We are all fallible, and prone to error. Let us then pardon each other’s follies’ (CR, 8; ATOS, 314).

Unsurprisingly, Popper often linked this general human quality of fallibility with his more specific theory of fallibilism, which emphasized the uncertainty of even our best knowledge and the importance of being open to different views – while also leaving all views open to criticism. Rationalism, he writes in the second volume of The Open Society, ‘is bound up with the idea that everybody is liable to make mistakes’ and therefore ‘with the idea that the other fellow has a right to be heard’; it thus implies ‘the recognition of the claim to tolerance, at least of all those who are not intolerant themselves’ (OS II, 238). A more concise formulation of this view can be found in a 1973 letter: ‘This fallibilism’ (that is, scientific or rational fallibilism) ‘has important moral consequences; tolerance is one of them’.

If toleration, for Popper, goes hand in hand with a scientific mindset, it is also an enemy to (and perhaps an antidote for) any notion that one’s ideas are specially favoured, either by the ‘historical inevitability’ of a particular worldview; or, indeed, by divine sanction. Popper warned against simply dismissing certain views as ‘outdated,’ a term that, as he told the humanist Paul Kurtz in a 1973 letter, he viewed as itself outdated. And in a 1981 letter to a Professor Stubbins he condemned Luther’s 1525 On the Bondage of the Will as ‘essentially directed against toleration, against non-violence and peace, and for the implied thesis that he is God’s instrument – that his words are The Word of God.’

This kind of millenarian certainty aside, Popper saw religious views as entitled to a certain level of toleration. ‘We must be tolerant,’ as he put it in a 1971 letter to the French biochemist Jacques Monod, ‘even towards what we regard as a basically dangerous lie.’ ‘And we should be seriously tolerant,’ he added in a 1980 letter to Kurtz, ‘of anyone who honestly expresses religious views.’ Indeed, he had written to Kurtz in his earlier letter, ‘we should not only declare but show our own tolerance towards tolerant religion and tolerant ideologies.’ 

Popper stressed that critical rationalists in particular should try to practice this kind of religious tolerance. He agreed with Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson’s second Humanist Manifesto (1973), he wrote them, that ‘we must not become dogmatic and churchlike ourselves.’ In a 1946 essay he wrote that, ‘a tolerant society must tolerate…irrationalism, as long as it is not an aggressively intolerant brand of irrationalism’ (ATOS, 136). And in another essay written two years later, Popper reasoned that while a ‘strongly emotional intolerance’ seemed to be ‘characteristic of all traditionalism,’ what critical rationalists should seek to do was to ‘replace the intolerance of the traditionalists with a new tradition – the tradition of tolerance’ (CR, 132).

Can democracy tolerate the intolerant?

What did Popper mean by ‘democracy will tolerate everyone except the intolerant’ and other variations on the ‘paradox of tolerance’? One clue is provided in a sentence we’ve just quoted, where Popper states that we should tolerate all irrationalism that isn’t ‘aggressively intolerant’ (our emphasis).  In a 1963 lecture on ‘The Open Society and the Democratic State,’ Popper spoke about people ‘who preach intolerance and who, at the same time, accuse the tolerant of hypocrisy, because they’ – the tolerant – ‘are not prepared to tolerate every aggressive form of intolerance’ (ATOS, 240).  Note the importance of aggression, something that Popper underlined in his 1973 letter to Kurtz: ‘we must not behave aggressively towards views and towards people who have other views than we have,’ he wrote, ‘provided that they are not aggressive.’

It’s not completely clear what Popper means by ‘aggression’ here – does the ‘they’ in that last phrase refer to people or to views? – but the fact Popper says that we must not behave aggressively makes it likely that what he had in mind wasn’t simply an aggressive argument or tone of voice, but aggressive actions – that is, something close to, or even identical with, coercion or violence. 

Other evidence points towards the conclusion that Popper’s main worry was coercive violence. Popper often said something to the effect that we should recognize ‘the claim to tolerance, at least of all those who are not intolerant themselves’. There’s an appeal to reciprocity here, an appeal that Popper occasionally made more explicit. ‘Voltaire saw very clearly,’ Popper wrote in his 1981 essay ‘On Toleration,’ that ‘toleration must be mutual: that it is based on reciprocity’ (ATOS, 314).  In his 1963 lecture ‘The Open Society and the Democratic State,’ Popper reiterated that ‘there can be no obligation upon the tolerant to tolerate the intolerant,’ and added that he had in mind ‘those who do not reciprocate’ (ATOS, 239).  

But what did not reciprocating tolerance look like exactly? In ‘On Toleration,’ Popper spoke of minorities ‘who are unwilling to reciprocate the tolerance offered to them by the majority: minorities who accept a principle of intolerance; who accept a theory of the necessity of violence and who may even act violently.’ Later in the same essay he wrote that ‘toleration can only exist on a basis of mutuality,’ and that ‘our duty to tolerate such a minority ends when the minority begins to act violently’ (ATOS, 315).  In ‘The Open Society and the Democratic State,’ he argued that ‘though we should guarantee freedom of opinion to all those who are prepared to reciprocate, we must not include in this guarantee those who seriously propagate intolerance or violence’ – and here ‘or violence’ seems less to present an alternative than to explain what he means by ‘intolerance.’ Something similar seems to be going on in ‘On Toleration’ when he speaks of ‘intolerant ideologies: ideologies that entail the principle that all who dissent from them must be suppressed by force’ (ATOS, 313). 

In ‘On Toleration’ Popper does also write that ‘our exaggerated fear that we who are for toleration might ourselves become intolerant has led to the mistaken and dangerous attitude that we must tolerate everything, perhaps even acts of violence; but certainly anything that falls short of an act of violence’ (ATOS, 314). Does this imply some skepticism about the idea that everything short of violence should be tolerated? 

In our view, Popper probably means that movements that make very credible threats of violence might also be criminalized, even if they have not yet committed ‘an act of violence’ (and here we might recall of his mention, in ‘On Toleration,’ of minorities ‘who may even act violently,’ and his warning that our duty to tolerance ends ‘when the minority begins to actviolently’ – our emphasis; ATOS, 315). Later on in ‘On Toleration,’ Popper says that ‘we need not tolerate even the threat of intolerance; and we must not tolerate it if the threat is getting serious’ (ATOS, 315) – by which he seems to mean intolerance that has become violent, or clearly threatens to.

This focus on violence as the key criterion for reciprocal intolerance on the part of the state is something that Popper reiterates on a number of occasions, especially in his paper on the open society and the democratic state. He reiterates the point with some lively examples, starting with a story about tigers. ‘I once read a touching story of a community which lived in the Indian jungle, and which disappeared because of its belief in the holiness of life, including that of tigers,’ he told the essay’s original audience in Delhi. ‘Unfortunately the tigers did not reciprocate.’

Popper’s other example in this lecture was a more serious one: ‘the German republic before 1933 – the so-called Weimar Republic – tolerated Hitler; but Hitler did not reciprocate’ (ATOS, 239). If the cartoon we began this piece with gets one thing right, it was that Popper’s thinking about intolerance was profoundly marked by his experience as someone of Jewish origin (although raised as Lutheran) who escaped the looming shadow of Hitler in 1937.  

At the same time, Popper’s Open Society would be an excoriation of – and a warning against – both the great totalitarianisms of the twentieth century: Fascism and Communism. In a crucial passage in ‘On Toleration,’ Popper described the impact of both these movements on his thinking from his brief period as a young socialist on:

I shall never forget how often I heard it asserted, especially in 1918 and 1919, that ‘capitalism’ claims more victims of its violence on every single day than the whole social revolution will ever claim. And I shall never forget that I actually believed this myth for a number or weeks before I was 17 years old, and before I had seen some of the victims of the social revolution. This was an experience which made me for ever highly critical of all such claims, and of all excuses for using violence, from whatever side. I changed my mind somewhat when Goering, after the Nazis had come to power by a majority vote, declared that he would personally back any stormtrooper who was using violence against anybody even if he made a little mistake and got the wrong person. Then came the famous ‘Night of the Long Knives’ — which is what the Nazis called it in advance. This was the night when they used their long knives and their pistols and their rifles…After these events in Germany, I gave up my absolute commitment to non-violence: I realized that there was a limit to toleration (ATOS, 316).

Violence matters

Note again the focus on violence, with the Nazis’ ‘long knives and pistols and rifles’ here expanding on the ‘fists or pistols’ of the endnote in The Open Society. It is violence that finally made the young Popper recognize that there are limits to tolerance: not hurtful speech, not the rabid antisemitism of 1930s Vienna, and not even the overthrow of German (and Austrian) democracy. 

And in fact, even when Popper’s focus was primarily on democracy, it is still arguably violence that is, in the final analysis, his real concern. Earlier in the same essay, Popper talked about ‘a party that conspires – perhaps partly openly, or quite secretly – to abolish democracy’; ‘to such a party,’ he says, ‘we must not submit, even if it has gained a majority.’ As in the passage above, the reference is to the German elections of July 1932, in which the National Socialists had won a simple majority; but here Popper makes clear that his over-riding fear is that ‘the abolition of democracy will lead…to arbitrary action, and to violence’ (ATOS, 315).

Such fears accord with Popper’s theory of democracy, according to which democracy is simply the type of government ‘of which we can get rid without bloodshed’ (OS II, 124). The main point of democracy, in other words, is simply to enable us to change our government without violence. Similarly, the main point of toleration for Popper seems to have been to allow individuals to pursue their own interests and live their own lives without coercive interference.

But if practising toleration is a reciprocal affair (we should tolerate others who are willing to tolerate us in turn), so is policing its boundaries. This is why Popper, in the crucial autobiographical passage quoted above, tells us, in the same breath, that the Nazis’ violence led him both to give up his ‘absolute commitment to non-violence’ and to realize that there was ‘a limit to toleration.’ To spell out the implications of this in full, what Popper is saying is that a liberal democratic state is justified in using coercion against those who threaten it, or its citizens, with violence.

In a 2019 piece in The Dominion Post, journalist Will Harvie revisited the crucial footnote in The Open Society that we began with to argue that Popper wasn’t, in fact, concerned solely with violence – with those that resorted to ‘fists or pistols’ in response to arguments. Harvie emphasized the endnote’s final sentence, in which Popper says that ‘we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.’ Harvie concludes that ‘it’s not just violence’ that Popper would have banned; ‘it’s incitement.’

Harvie is clearly correct that Popper advocates criminalizing incitement to violence. But we should note that the three types of violence Popper mentions in this connection – murder, kidnapping, and slavery – are rather egregious ones. And we should also notice, once again, what Popper stops short of recommending. He doesn’t recommend a ban on speech that is grossly offensive, ‘harmful,’ or even that might constitute ‘group libel’ (the New Zealand legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron’s conception of ‘hate speech’). 

In fact, everything we know suggests Popper would have been strongly against this narrower view of the limits of toleration. He himself, remember, privately conceded to more zealous rationalists that religion might well be ‘a dangerous lie,’ and yet he repeatedly argued not only that we should tolerate religious views, but even that we should accord them a certain measure of respect. This makes it extremely unlikely that he would have endorsed the idea that certain opinions should be censored or ‘de-platformed’ for causing ‘hurt,’ ‘dismay’ or ‘harm’ (to use some terms that have been in frequent use in recent debates about free speech in this country). 

In fact, Popper wrote in a 1980 letter to Kurtz that even ‘those aspects of religions and other institutions, which openly subscribe to intolerance, are, perhaps, best fought by a respect for and tolerance of those aspects, which are not intolerant, even though we may not agree with their views or sympathise with their practices’. In other words, whenever possible, we should try to counter even clearly intolerant views by tolerance and reason. Popper tried to make this clear in the endnote on the ‘paradox of tolerance’ that we began with, when he cautioned that ‘in this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.’ In ‘On Toleration,’ Popper reiterated the point, writing that as long as intolerant groups ‘discuss and publish their theories as rational proposals, we should let them do so freely,’ and that, when it comes to people who ‘try to justify the use of violence’ we should simply ‘refute’ their theories (ATOS, 315).

Besides setting a high bar for what counts as ‘intolerance,’ (essentially violence or direct incitement to violence), Popper also stressed that we should resort to coercive suppression of intolerant movements only as last resort. ‘We should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force’ (Popper’s emphasis) he says in the endnote on tolerance, ‘for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.’ This is what takes us to the famous declaration that ‘we should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.’

Reasoned deliberation when possible

In a 1978 letter to the Routledge editor Rosalind Hall, who was requesting permission to re-print some of the paragraph we began with, Popper insisted that he would ‘permit this quotation only if the whole paragraph is quoted, including the words: “Less well known is the paradox of tolerance.”’ The reason, Popper said, was that ‘I want it to be clear that this is proposed by me only incidentally and not as my main statement about tolerance.’

The best candidate for Popper’s ‘main statement’ on tolerance is undoubtedly his 1981 essay ‘On Toleration’; but though we have quoted liberally from it here, the essay soon strays from its purported topic. (A lecture on ‘Toleration and Intellectual Responsibility,’ first given in the same year, covers very similar ground: ISBW, 188-203). It is perhaps not surprising that his single, suggestive note on ‘the paradox of tolerance’ in The Open Society has attracted so much attention, debate, and attempts at co-optation. By surveying a broader range of Popper’s writings, we hope to have shed more light both on that all-important endnote and on Popper’s views about toleration more generally.

Popper thought the limits of tolerance lay where arguments give way to violence (that is, to ‘fists or pistols’). In cases where violence was offered, directly incited, or promised, Popper saw coercion by the liberal democratic state as a justified sort of reciprocity. State coercion, though, was something that should be considered only as a last resort, when violence was obvious or imminent; in all other cases, even when an ideology might strike us as intolerant, we should try to counter it with rational criticism and discussion. 

Reasoned deliberation is, in the final analysis, the antithesis of violence. As Popper put it in the second volume of The Open Society, ‘one does not kill a man when one adopts the attitude of first listening to his arguments’ (OS II, 238). This makes toleration key in the maintenance of modern, pluralistic societies, which will inevitably contain a variety of different beliefs and perspectives, some of them fervently opposed to each other. Toleration follows, besides, from a recognition that we are all fallible: our own chosen beliefs and enthusiasms may, after all, turn out to be wrong, so it would be wrong to try to impose them on others.

Popper would not have countenanced limiting the expression of different viewpoints on the ground of offence or even of ‘harm.’ He would almost certainly have argued strongly against the recent proposals by Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government to outlaw ‘incitement of hatred and discrimination’ against a series of different groups (including groups defined by religious beliefs, ethical beliefs, and political views). 

But Popper’s basic position – that we should tolerate all views and movements that stop short of violence or direct incitement to violence – is not itself a party-political one. The idea that we should not tolerate violence applies equally to any movement that exchanges words for blows. By the same token, Popper’s recommendation that we should tolerate all ideas and life-choices that fall short of violence challenges us to be tolerant of movements across the whole broad spectrum of modern political discourse – if they eschew violence.

In the final analysis, Popper’s proposal that we should tolerate each other up to the point of violence doesn’t constitute an exhaustive account of where we might have to set limits on speech or expression. As the Victoria University legal scholar Eddie Clarke has noted, in a few situations our current laws do enforce some penalties against speech even in the absence of violence (in cases of perjury, say). 

Nevertheless, Popper’s writings on toleration, including his famous ‘paradox of toleration,’ remind us that coercion is as good a place as any to set a hard limit for toleration. Setting the bar as high as coercion leaves citizens space to develop their own ideas and life-paths freely. We should therefore approach any limits to expression below this high bar with some scepticism.  

This emphasis on violence as the line we must not cross puts Popper firmly in the main stream of liberal political thought running through Max Weber (with his emphasis on the state as the possessor of a monopoly on force) as well as John Stuart Mill (who similarly insisted that citizens should be free to develop their ideas uncoerced by others). This tradition of thinking about tolerance is one that has played a large part in the success and development of liberal democracy as a governmental system and a way of life; and it is one that we in today’s New Zealand might take more account of as we continue to debate the nature and limits of toleration. 

ATOS = J. Shearmur and P.N. Turner (eds.), After the Open Society: Selected Social and Political Writings (London: Routledge, 2008)

CR = K.R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1963)

ISBW = K.R. Popper, In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years (London: Routledge, 1984) 

OS = K.R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (2 vols., London: Routledge, 1945)

Unpublished material derives almost entirely from the Karl Popper Archive at the University of  Klagenfurt, Austria. It is used with the full permission of the University of Klagenfurt/the Karl Popper Archives. The letter to Eccles comes from the Eccles archive in the Institut für Geschichte, Theorie und Ethik der Medizin, Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf. All rights reserved. 

Header image: The widely-circulated cartoon about Popper’s ‘paradox of tolerance.’ Source: Pictoline.com

The post The Limits of Toleration appeared first on Open Inquiry.

A few months ago, with the sky lanes around New Zealand finally opening up again, I decided to book a trip to Niue. In preparation for my visit, I started to look around online for information about the remote Polynesian island, including its history.

One of the stories I kept seeing was that Captain Cook had given the island the name ‘Savage Island’ because he had seen some natives with a red substance on their teeth and assumed that it was blood (and probably human blood). In fact, it was a local variety of red banana (often referred to as the hulahula or fe’i banana).

Cook’s account

When I tried to chase the story up in the relevant section of Cook’s journals, though, I couldn’t find it. What I found instead in the entry in Cook’s entry for Thursday, June 16^th, 1774, was an account of two attempts to land on the island. (Cook’s party also surveyed the island from a cliff in between the two main landing attempts.) Cook’s account of the first landing attempts is as follows:

We landed with ease in a small creek, and took post on a high rock to prevent surprise. Here we displayed our colours, and Mr. Forster and his party began to collect plants, &c. The coast was so overrun with woods, bushes, plants, stones, &c. that we could not see forty yards round us. I took two men, and with them entered a kind of chasm, which opened a way into the woods. We had not gone far before we heard the natives approaching; upon which I called to Mr. Forster to retire to the party, as I did likewise. We had no soon joined, than the islanders appeared at the entrance of a chasm not a stone’s-throw from us. We began to speak, and make all the friendly signs we could think of, to them, which they answered by menaces; and one of two men, who were advanced before the rest, threw a stone, which struck Mr. Spearman on the arm. Upon this two musquets were fired, without order, which made then all retire under cover of the woods; and we saw them no more.

‘After waiting some little time,’ Cook decided to carry on along the shore ‘in hopes of meeting with better success in another place.’ Eventually he and his party ‘came before a small beach, on which lay four canoes,’ where they landed ‘with a view,’ Cook says, ‘of just looking at the canoes, and to leave some medals, nails, &c., in them; for not a soul was to be seen.’ Things soon changed, however. Cook’s account continues:

We had been there but a few minutes, before the natives, I cannot say how many, rushed down the chasm out of the wood upon us. The endeavours we used to bring them to a parley, were to no purpose; for they came with the ferocity of wild boars, and threw their darts. Two or three musquets, discharged in the air, did not hinder one of them from advancing still further, and throwing another dart, or rather a spear, which passed close over my shoulder. His courage would have cost him his life, had not my musquet missed fire; for I was not five paces from him, when he threw his spear, and had resolved to shoot him to save myself. I was glad afterwards that it happened as it did. At this instant, our men on the rock began to fire at others who appeared on the heights, which abated the ardour of the party we were engaged with, and gave us time to join our people, when I caused the firing to cease. The last discharge sent all the islanders to the woods, from when they did not return so long as we remained. We did not know that any were hurt.

In Cook’s telling, then, he and his party made two attempts to land on Niue. On both occasions they had peaceable intentions, something they tried to make clear on the first landing attempt by ‘making all the friendly signs we could think of.’ On both occasions they were attacked; on the second attempt Cook himself narrowly avoided being hit by a spear. Finally, on both occasions the British fired their muskets, though Cook stresses that he didn’t order anyone to fire during the first attempt; that he ordered his men to stop firing at a certain point during the second attempt; and that he was happy, in retrospect, that his own musket had failed to fire.

For our purposes, though, the most interesting aspect of Cook’s account is he explicitly tells us, soon after the end of the last passage above, that it was ‘the conduct and aspect of these islanders’ on the two landing-attempts he describes that ‘occasioned my naming it Savage Island.’ By ‘conduct,’ he seems to mean their attacks on him and his men; and his mention to their ‘aspect’ apparently refers to their fierceness during these attacks, though later he says that the Niueans ‘seemed to be stout well made men, were naked, except round the waists, and some of them had their faces, breast, and thighs painted black.’ Nowhere is there any reference to red teeth, mouths smeared with blood, or any inferences about the Niueans being cannibals.

     The site of Cook’s second landing at Opaahi, Niue. Source: niuepocketguide.com

The origins of the banana story

The lack of any mention of red teeth in Cook’s journals raises an obvious question: where does the story about the red bananas come from? The Wikipedia entry on Niue states that Cook ‘named the island “Savage Island” because, as legend has it, the natives who “greeted” him were painted in what appeared to be blood. The substance on their teeth was hulahula, a native red fe’i banana.’

The caveat that this is ‘as legend has it’ is appropriate, though bloggers are not always scrupulous in reproducing it. But Wikipedia also adds a reference at the end of this sentence that can help us get closer to the bottom of the story about red bananas.

The reference is to Tony Horowitz’s Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, a 2002 book in which the US journalist re-traces some of Cook’s journeys while reading and reflecting on his journals. In the relevant section of Horowitz’s book, he stumbles upon the name ‘Savage Island’ on an old map, and turns to ‘the index of Cook’s journal’ for an explanation. After a very brief summary of Cook’s account, Horowitz adds: ‘A footnote said that the warriors’ mouths were smeared red, as if with blood.’

Did Cook’s journals have an index and footnotes? I didn’t think so, but when I consulted the standard edition of Cook’s journals by J.C. Beaglehole in the library at Victoria University (where Beaglehole once taught), things started to make more sense. Beaglehole as editor added a number of footnotes to this passage, the most relevant of which begins as follows:

The modern Niueans, a cheerful industrious people, give a rather pained consideration to the name which Cook bestowed upon their island, and explain the whole matter as one of mistaken intentions.

Beaglehole then reports a local claim that the Niueans that Cook says attacked his men ‘were simply going through the ritual of the “challenge,” an essential though alarming part of any ceremony of welcome’ (a ritual Beaglehole compares to the Māori haka). Beaglehole adds that the modern Niueans also held that ‘the challengers had adorned their lips with a scarlet dye, the juice of the hulahula banana, and Cook flew to the conclusion that they were cannibals, dripping with the blood of their victims.’

Beaglehole himself thinks this story is ‘rather too obviously made-up,’ and that the tale of the red banana-juice, in particular, ‘is of course a bit of native mythology, “rationalization,” to make the story more persuasive.’ It’s also fair to note that that the local story does nothing to explain Cook’s report (supported, as Beaglehole notes, by the accounts of some of his crew) that his party had various missiles thrown at them.

One thing, in any case, should now be clear. The story about the red bananas is a local tradition that seems to have grown up in Niue in the generations after Cook’s visit. But Cook did not give Niue the name ‘Savage Island’ because he inferred that its people were cannibals from a red substance in their teeth. He gave the island the name ‘Savage Island,’ as he himself indicates, because its natives attacked him and his men in an energetic manner on both of the occasions that he tried to establish a foothold on the island.

Final thoughts

Given how clear Cook is about his reasons for calling Niue ‘Savage Island,’ and how easily his journals can now be checked online, what explains the continuing circulation of the story about the red bananas?

One important factor is clearly the story’s presence on Wikipedia, one of the most-viewed websites in the world and almost certainly the first port of call for travel bloggers keen to write up that short post on Niue. Tony Horowitz’s referencing slip in his book (mistaking Beaglehole’s note for one written by Cook) has also played a key role in the survival of the tale.

We might also wonder, though, why so many writers have apparently been so happy to pass on this particular story about Cook without putting in the tiny amount of work that would be required to check it.

If Beaglehole is right, the story about the red bananas emerged from modern, Christianized Niueans’ embarrassment at the idea that they would have attacked Cook’s crew so violently, even as they tried to make clear that they meant the natives no harm. From a broad anthropological perspective, that the Niueans attacked these strange-looking newcomers shouldn’t really come as that much of a shock. Whether traditional tribes have a tendency to attack any outsiders who stray into their territory as a default policy is the subject of some controversy; but violent attacks on newcomers certainly aren’t unknown, as the recent case of the American missionary who was killed after attempting to land on North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean reminds us. Even so, most people nowadays, including both residents of Niue and visitors to the island, would probably prefer to believe a less violent story than the one Cook records in his journal.

But would they – would we – also prefer to believe a story that shows Cook in a more negative light? The banana story has Cook leaping to the conclusion that the Niueans were cannibals based on what seems like a rather basic misunderstanding of local conditions (or, at least, of native plant species). It also gives an origin story for the name ‘Savage Island’ that makes Cook’s choice of this pejorative label very hard to justify. All the Niueans did is eat some local bananas, the story tells us – and this celebrated European voyager and scientist decided this meant they were cannibals and savages!

Of course, nobody would now argue that Cook was right to give the island this frankly insulting name, whatever his reception. At the same time, the full account in his journals at least makes his choice of that name a bit more understandable. Cook might well have been killed had that spear passed slightly lower, and that will surely have had an impact on his state of mind when he wrote up the episode in his journal.

That episode is only one of the many fascinating episodes of first contact between Europeans and Polynesians that took place during the 17^th and 18^th centuries. The whole set of these episodes make up a complex tapestry of interaction, one that includes both positive aspects (the beginnings of trade and other forms of collaboration, not excluding genuine love affairs) and negative ones (colonization, dispossession, and the introduction of novel pathogens).

It’s certainly not the burden of this short piece to argue that European colonialists never leapt to racist and incorrect conclusions about natives, nor even that Cook never did this himself (even if works like Gananath Obeyesekere’s 2005 Cannibal Talk surely go too far in seeing cannibalism as more or less entirely a product of Western discourses). What the truth about the story about the red bananas may remind us of, though – besides the perennial benefits of checking sources – is that the history of European attitudes to the Pacific isn’t always quite as unrelievedly dark as it might now seem. 

Postscript: How red are red bananas?

Niue Tourism board at Opaahi featuring a version of the banana story

The picture at the head of this article was taken in the village of Mutalau on Niue. A local guide told me that this was the type of banana that had been smeared on the natives’ teeth when Cook spotted them (according to the story). As you can see from the photograph, the outer peel of these bananas has a reddish tinge.

But is the fruit of red bananas really red? Though I’m no banana specialist, the more I’ve looked into this question, the more my doubts have grown. The fruit of the fe’i banana (which is usually said to be what the Niueans had been eating in 1774) seems to be yellow. This obviously makes the version of the story in which the natives had just been eating a local banana variety even harder to credit.

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that Beaglehole in his note speaks of ‘the juice’ of the banana. This may refer to the juice of the chewed-up fruit, or it may be consistent with another variation on the story (present on the official tourist information board pictured above) in which the islanders deliberately smeared their teeth with red sap from the banana tree in order to scare Cook and his men off. And the fe’i banana does seem to have a vermilion sap.

This story makes a little more sense, but is still completely at odds with the accounts of Cook and his men in a way that would need to be explained. In any case, it still seems clear that Cook did not call Niue ‘Savage Island’ because he had seen anyone with red (or vermilion) teeth. Readers with more experience of red banana species are welcome to get in touch – especially if that experience is more than skin-deep.

Cover photo: Author’s photo of some bananas with a reddish tinge to their peels, taken in Mutalau, Niue

The post Was Captain Cook Afraid of Red Bananas? appeared first on Open Inquiry.