
An orange and a pear.
These two are different. They are both very juicy and delicious. But they have different smells, different tastes and different textures. Good things do not have to be the same.
Science and other ways of knowing.
There is a strong move to call mātauranga Māori “Māori Science”, and to have it treated as equal with Western Science. They are both necessary; yet, if they are identified and used indiscriminately, they will both be denied their true value.
The desire to rediscover mātauranga Māori is commendable, but why, in this age, would one want to identify it with “Science”? Science has dominated the previous century[1], yet at the same time has come to be criticised and even despised.
A large number of New Zealanders are highly suspicious of science, so much so that, as Brian Tamaki has demonstrated, if you want to pack your church, try an all-out assault on science. Or consider America, the leading country in the world for fundamental scientific research, for applied science, for technological advancement – is also the leading country in the world for anti-science supported and propagated by politicians and clergy, dominated by President Donald Trump, whose latest proposal is to remove “climate change satellites” as, obviously for him, climate change is a hoax.
The case for science is clearly stated by Bill Gates[2]. “In the early nineteenth century, with the establishment of science as a new discipline, the growth of knowledge increased as also did the range of practical applications. Until about 1700, there was basically no development. Almost everybody was poor, many were sick. One of every four children died. Average life expectancy was about 40 years, and 99 percent of people were illiterate. But then science came along and we started inventing—electricity, the steam engine, antibiotics, sanitation, vaccines, microprocessors, genetic medicine. Science is the great giver—and we’re just at the beginning of what it can give.”
The problem is that science has overpromised and underperformed. A major effect of modern medicine is that people live longer, only to die more slowly of degenerative diseases. We still have mass starvation, catastrophic natural disasters and viral pandemics, and the affluent countries have rising rates of suicide of people who cannot bear to endure our “Decadent Society”.[3]
We also have a rampant cynicism about science. Lee Smolin[4] (an expert on the theory of multi-dimensional membranes as the basic constituents of quarks, which are the basic constituents of sub-atomic particles) complains that even his Physics students don’t really like Physics – they find it too divorced from “that which really matters”.
If mātauranga Māori has value today, it will be because it is distinct from a science that is beginning to go out of favour. It must neither duplicate nor replace science but rather add some precious quality that has been eroded and eliminated from our society. We need a new vision, a new way of understanding our world, that complements our scientific view.
Three ways of relating to the world
Much misunderstanding between Māori and Pākehā is due to the fundamentally different ways in which they view their relationship with the world. We can distinguish between these by using Harold Turner’s[5] picturesque way of describing three different world views: Ocean, Net and Marbles.
Ocean. When you watch the sea from the deck of a ship, you can focus your eyes on a particular wave. But as you watch it, it soon disappears, and new waves form. The Ocean world view looks upon individuals as waves on the sea: they temporarily have a distinct identity, but in reality, they are just a part of the greater ocean. Individual existence, at least for humans, is less important than the reality of being a part of the ecological and spiritual whole. This thinking underlies the Eastern religions with their emphasis on the cycle of rebirth.
Net. If you look at the knots in a fishing net, each one is distinct, but it is interconnected and joined to every other knot in the net. The Net worldview sees each person as having value only within the community to which they belong. This is the Māori concept, where relationships within the whānau are much more significant than individuality. It is common to all tribal communities, First Nations, and primal religions. It also underlies traditional Christian teaching about responsibility for others.
Marbles. The Marbles worldview sees individuals as distinct, discrete, separate entities, as unrelated to each other as a small child’s marbles. This view underlies Western industrial society with its emphasis on individual rights. ‘I am me’ – nothing must infringe upon me finding myself, enjoying my rights; others must stand on their own feet.
No description of human thought and behaviour can be exact; many will flip between Oceans and Marbles worldviews. The Marbles view is the natural, dominant understanding in European and Western culture, although sports groups require a strong Net view, and the Net view comes naturally to Māori and Pacifica, and to all tribal or indigenous peoples.
It was only late in life that I came into close relationships with Māori, and the first thing that struck me was the constant sense of involvement, even with those I had previously never met. It is also noticeable with students: Pākehā students generally study alone, while Māori and Pacifica (and Asian) students spontaneously form small clusters in which they support each other. Neither is good. Neither is bad. But they are different. That is why meetings of Māori and Pākehā often have people talking past each other; they don’t often appreciate the very different fundamental ways in which we view the world, and how we function in it.
Four ways of knowing
I intend to differentiate between the four ways of knowing.
First, mātauranga Māori. This is “Māori knowledge complete with its values and attitudes,” [6] including also the Māori way of knowing. This is the accumulated wisdom of hundreds of years of Māori living and thriving in New Zealand. In a society with no form of writing, it was dependent on oral transmission, but oral transmission is highly conservative of details [7]and is largely preserved in stories about people, making it more interesting and much easier to remember. Such stories include facts, tikanga (rules of behaviour), and explanation. The stories are normally referred to as ‘myths’, but that title does not imply inaccuracy, and myths are a reliable and accurate source of history and natural history.[7] In myth, explanations of the world are given with natural forces personified as gods whose activities are responsible for the way the world is, a pattern that differs from the scientific world, where natural forces are impersonal.
Secondly, consider the knowledge, skills and traditions of the European colonists. This is the traditional wisdom of their countries of origin, primarily from Britain but also from Western Europe; I shall follow Haare Williams[8] and call this “mātauranga Pākehā”. This includes the massive number of written sources and the stories we have heard from grandparents or from workmates. Don’t disparage storytelling. Author Salman Rushdie reminds us, “We are the only creature that does this unusual thing of telling each other stories to try and understand the kind of creature that we are…The first thing a child will ask for when safe and loved is ‘Tell me a story’ ”[9]. Mātauranga Pākehā has its foundation in the Greek and Roman worlds, with inputs from a rich tapestry of stories from every community, including Māori, that the West has interacted with throughout the last two thousand years.
Thirdly, in 1962, Thomas Kuhn came up with a novel perspective on the occurrence of major scientific revolutions that have shifted the way we understand the world[10]. Galileo’s idea that the Earth moved while the sun stood still was one such revolution; Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was another. Kuhn’s ideas, now generally accepted, created a huge debate at the time. Fifty years later, looking back on that debate[11], Kuhn suggested there were, and are, two very different “sciences”. There is “Textbook science”, where “..science is knowledge, a body of laws and of techniques assembled in texts and transmitted from one scientific generation to another”[10]; an accumulated body of knowledge that I shall call “mātauranga Scientifica”.
The fourth category is “Science”. This, for Kuhn, “… is conceived as an activity, as the thing which the scientist does.”[10] Cosmologist Carl Sagan agrees “…science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking; a way of sceptically interrogating the universe [12]….”
This is a new way of thinking, recent in human history, and very different from the older Natural Philosophy. The ‘Listener 7’ don’t acknowledge this second kind of science. Galileo and Newton had given us a new understanding of the world (i.e. mātauranga Scientifica as described above), building on the work of the Medieval philosophers, but “Science”, in the sense that I will use it, is something quite different as outlined below.
In November 1660, the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge (generally just called “The Royal Society) was formed, with Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren amongst its founding members. Later in York, in September 1831, the Yorkshire Philosophical Society organised a meeting of more than two hundred Natural Philosophers who were unhappy with the way the Royal Society was functioning, seeking “an alternative to the aristocratic torpor of the degenerate Royal Society”.[13] They inaugurated the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) to transform science from a self-funded endeavour of the wealthy into a professional activity at the centre of social and economic development. The word ‘scientist’ was not coined until 1833, because only then did people realise it was needed. Science emerged as an autonomous subject that was completely separate from philosophy and religion[13]. Before c1830, there was European “Natural Philosophy”, or traditional knowledge; it constituted a wonderfully useful collection of facts, skills and advice, but it was not science. The BAAS produced a new word for what they considered a novel activity, a new way of thinking.
Consequently, Peter Watson considers that “Science” has changed how we think; it has revolutionised the rules by which the intellect operates[1]. “Science” is not a body of knowledge but the process of challenging every form of knowledge and demanding observational evidence to support it. Hence, mātauranga Pākehā and mātauranga Scientifica remain useful as foundations of so much of our daily activity, but they are not Science.
Science, therefore, is not a mātauranga to be compared with those of Māori or Pākehā, but a method of challenging every facet of all mātauranga.
How we differ
Mātauranga Māori is holistic, uniting people with the natural and spiritual worlds. The core beliefs of Primal communities have not changed since before the Holocene, when hunter-gatherers settled in villages and took up agriculture and animal husbandry.
Primal communities in most of the world remained untouched while Bronze Age civilisations emerged, flourished, and abruptly collapsed[14]. From about 3000 BC eight major entities, Hittites, Egyptians, Mitannians, Kassites/Babylonians, Assyrians, Cypriots, Canaanites, Minoans, and Mycenaeans all thrived in the Mediterranean and Near East, all joined together in a complex commercial, political and cultural network that catastrophically collapsed in just a few years, beginning around 1177 BC. Each of these eight civilisations had large, sophisticated cities, monumental buildings of which some are still standing, metallurgy, literature, sophisticated political systems and culture. All this disappeared almost overnight, and about 1000 years passed before new civilisations appeared.
Existing First Nations, including Māori, have never experienced the size and sophistication of those Bronze Age civilisations, nor the trauma generated by their spectacular collapses.
Confronted with European traders and missionaries from the late 18th Century, Māori quickly formed dynamic and indigenous responses, which will be described later. But to describe mātauranga Māori before the late 18th century as dynamic is naïve. Nothing in Māori history comes anywhere near the intellectual and physical disruption brought by the collapse of the Bronze Age[14], nor the transformation of the Axial Age[15] (the rise of the Indian, Chinese, Persian and Arab civilisations), nor the more recent rise of Western Civilisation[16]. In Europe, tribal communities grew and developed and became a “civilisation”.
Some Auckland University academics hit back at the statement by Rangi Matamua, “Mātauranga Māori does not change”. They claimed that mātauranga Māori was also dynamic, constantly adapting. They find some support from Hirini Kaa,[17] who claims that most commentators allow for dynamism in matāuranga Māori, with constant enhancement, enrichment, expansion and broadening, but with the core remaining constant. However, this is true of Māori from their first contact with Europeans in the 18th Century, but naïve if applied to the centuries of isolated tribal life, isolated from the various civilisations that came and went.
Kenneth Clark, recording the rise of our Western culture within the post-Bronze Age vacuum, admits that he can’t describe civilisation except to contrast it with barbarism.[16] But a third pattern for human communities is tribalism, lacking the size and sophistication of the hordes that destroyed the Roman Empire, and also possibly lacking the barbarian mindset that required the destruction of anything different. Māori and other indigenes are tribal communities. They have never been civilisations and few have been barbarians, and that is not a moral or ethical judgement, it is purely descriptive.
Soon to be posted §4 The Rise of the West
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References
1. Watson, P., A Terrible Beauty; A History of the People and Ideas that shaped the Modern World. 2000, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
2. Gates, B. 2016: Linkedin.
3. Douthat, R., The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. 2020, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, New Delhi: Avid Reader Press.
4. Smolin, L., The Life of the Cosmos. 1997, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
5. Turner, H., The Roots of Science: an investigative journey through the World’s religions. 1998, Auckland: The DeepSight Trust.
6. Mead, H.M., Understanding Mātauranga Māori, in Conversations on Mātauranga Māori, T. Black, et al., Editors. 2012, NZQA: Wellilngton.
7. Gerhardsson, B., Memory and Manuscript. 1998, Grand Rapids, MIchigan: W B Eerdmans & Dove.
8. Ihimaera, W., ed. Haare Williams: Words of a Kaumātua. 2019, Auckland University Press: Auckland.
9. Rushdie, S., Adverising on Facebook for his online course on How to Write Stories. 2025.
10. Kuhn, T.S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, ed. O. Neurath. Vol. 2. 1962, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
11. Richards, R.J. and L. Daston, eds. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions at Fifty: Reflections on a Science Classic. 2016, University of Chicago Press: Chicago London.
12. Sagan, C. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3y4Asw9zZA. 30 April 2014.
13. Hannam, J., God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science. 2010, London: Icon Books.
14. Cline, E.H., 1177 B.C.; The Year Civilization Collapsed. 2014, Princeton and Oxford: Prineton University Press.
15. Bellah, R.N. and H. Joas, eds. The Axial Age and its Consequences. 2012, The Belknap Press of Harvard University: Cambridge, Massachsetts and London, England.
16. Clark, K., Civilsation: A Personal View. 1969: BBC Books and John Murray.
17. Kaa, H., Te Hahi Mihinari: The Māori Anglican Church. 2020, Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget William Books.
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