The Post: To overcome our divisions, we must first learn to see each other

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Some years back, academics discovered that well-off Kiwis don’t support the redistribution of wealth. Surprise, surprise, you might say. Someone give those boffins an IgNobel award for research into the bleeding obvious.

The reason for this wealthy reluctance, though, was telling. In socially segregated New Zealand, the rich live surrounded by the equally rich and, assessing the nation’s health by gazing over the back fence, fail to grasp how poor the other half are and how much help they need.

Recent polls, in which three-quarters of New Zealanders say the country is becoming more divided, have been interpreted as a backlash against vaccine mandates or co-governance. But they may also reflect our sharp rise in economic disparities three decades ago, which continues to reverberate long past its origin.

Clearly, at any rate, some New Zealanders can barely see each other, in a moral or social sense – except perhaps as an enemy or a distant “other”. Nor should we expect this to change any time soon.

Major crises can catalyse solidarity: a century ago, two world wars – plus an influenza epidemic and a prostrating economic depression – generated a sense of shared suffering that paved the way for the welfare state’s creation.

But because modern governments are far better at emergency management than their predecessors, the social and economic shocks from our own crises – the GFC and the pandemic – have been blessedly shallow, in historical terms.

Absent that unified suffering, some face instead the slow, isolating grind of a cost-of-living crisis. Many families have hunkered down, too focused on survival to worry much about others. And the economy’s poor outlook augurs no quick change to this dynamic.

How, then, do we stop the drift into discord and dysfunction? One urgent task is to repair and renew the social safety net.

Economic insecurity turns people inward, and renders them defensive and suspicious of others. Overseas research shows a clear link between insecurity and reactionary populism.

Imagine, conversely, a world in which we manage big shocks collectively, providing beautiful public housing at scale, social insurance for the newly laid-off, and protection against precarious work. Schemes for emissions reduction and managed retreat could counteract the insecurity that climate change creates.

Support for such measures, though, will be sustained only if people of different status see each other as inherently deserving. For it is this mutual recognition that, although strained by disparities, preserves our social fabric.

On my regular late-evening walks around town, I am struck by how clearly I can see the lights of far-off houses, despite the dark suburbs of distance between us. Equally miraculous, in political terms, is the existence of the welfare state, which relies on people in Bluff paying taxes to support beneficiaries in Kaitaia whom they will never, in the ordinary course of events, get to meet.

Like pin-points of light in the dark, the lives of others remain visible to us, if only just. And we can enhance this visibility by creating sites – and sights – of social encounter.

In practical terms, that requires, among other things, a continued pushback against the schools who redraw their zones to hive off the richer suburbs. Social mixing at an early age, such as I experienced, is vital. But we also need to better fund, and reform, the poorer schools, so that no parent resents having to send their kids there.

We should also consider more unorthodox measures. Wealthier kids have always done gap years offshore, to see more of the world. What about a kind of internal gap year scheme, in which young adults are funded to spend at least a few months working in communities different to their own? I know of young doctors whose privileged worldviews were transformed by a short placement in Porirua East.

And because the lives of those who struggle can be invisible to those who do not, we may need a concerted effort to better tell the stories of poverty, in compelling images, video and prose.

Some may doubt that exposure to such stories would shift the opinions of the well-off. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” the writer Upton Sinclair once commented, “when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

I favour, though, the less cynical view of the Victorian art critic, social reformer and all-round genius John Ruskin, a passionate advocate of the power of sight. Teaching people to read, speak or think was, he believed, of little use if they didn’t know what they were reading, saying or thinking.

The foundation of understanding – its raw material, if you will – was gained by seeing the world around us, with full clarity, observing the bad alongside the good and paying attention to the things we might rather ignore. “To be taught to see,” Ruskin argued, “is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.”