<&>Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English Version One <&>Copyright 1998 School of Linguistics & Applied Language Studies <&>Victoria University of Wellington <&>side one <&>0:52 very <.>trad er middle class kiwi fellow er who <,> tut wanted <,> to do all the right things and was expected by family to do the right things the right things were er <,> doing er reasonably well at school tut this was expected er coughs playing every game in sight tut <,> but particularly getting into the first fifteen er but also playing cricket boxing running swimming the lot and <,> being praised for the achievement and reinforced in doing those things and this was only <,> tut this was only what was expected of people of my age in the middle and late thirties er it that was how most of the people i knew behaved boys <,> it was rather different for girls looking back tut <&>2:00 um and one also had the fairly traditional views tut <,> er they were of our relationship with um tut what my mother referred to as home that was england tut though she had been born in australia tut and had no direct connections with england for goodness knows how long back <,> er that at school we sang regularly songs like land of hope and glory and er tut <,> the the imperial songs tut um tut we were fed a diet of <,> imperial history tut of er tut the royal family <,> of loyalty to the crown <,> <.>th this was taken for granted this was what we breathed <,> now <,,> we were also taught to be kind to animals i suppose and do our tut our social duties coughs tut um tut <&>3:00 that we owed things to society <,> although how general that was i don't know <,> and then came the war and tut suddenly the world was really a very different place tut one of the powerful influences was being on a merchant ship sailing from liverpool down to southern africa around the african coast and and back up so you had a LONG time at sea <,> tut and there was a a very sharp minded radio operator on the ship and he and i <,> gradually got into the habit of talking now at this stage i might have been er tut <,> twenty two perhaps it was a year or two on <,> and he probed me he was older than i was by some years tut but he probed me what i believed in and i'd say goofy things looking back like er ah to be back in england <&>4:00 in the spring and so on you see i had a girlfriend there which partly explained it um tut and he LOOKED at me one day and he said coughs tut do you know what you're talking about and <,> then he proceeded to let me have it <,> he said you want to get back there you think it's a great place it is the WORST SNOB class ridden society the world has ever seen it's full of GROSS injustice and he proceeded to go on and tell me all about this this was a total revelation <,,> suddenly i was seeing the world through somebody else's eyes i don't know whether he was a marxist coughs tut he was certainly a radical thinker <.>i i imagine that he had been influenced by the <,> left wing book club kind of thinking of the prewar days er tut which helped people to see the their own country and themselves in a different light and he laid it on me <,> tut and after that <,> i <&>5:00 progressively saw things in a different light but as the war went on <,> i had <,> increasing doubts <,> about that as a way of settling international problems er and particularly when it got right to the end <,> and the sting had gone out of it and we were just waiting sitting and waiting and talking amongst ourselves <,> i can remember being in the red sea one night with a a friend and there was <.>a a plane i suspect an italian spotter plane buzzing around away up there somewhere in the dark and <,> a friend of mine saying what the hell's he think he doing and then he after a while he said and i wonder what he's thinking about and suddenly it was a person there you see and here we were <&>6:00 he he might have been going to drop something on us who knows but here we were human beings strangers tut thrust into a situation where we were going to do each other harm and what for <,> and that doubt kept niggling and niggling and niggling until when i came home tut i really had made up my mind pretty well that i wouldn't have anything to do with any more <,> i didn't know whether i'd have the guts to stand out when it came to the point and particularly when <.>i i joined a theatre group unity theatre in wellington tut and it had er a number of people who had been conscientious objectors during the war and we used to talk i became very friendly with one of them in particular <,> and we used to talk about it and he said well after what i've gone through if there's another one i think i might have a look at it and i said nat i'm quite the reverse but i don't know whether i'd have the guts that YOU had if it came to the point <,> tut it's not a question now of course at my <&>7:00 age but it bothered me for years um tut so how did i come back <,,> i really was no longer a fan of the royal family or the imperial tradition <,> er i thought of myself as uneQUIvocally as a new zealander <,> er if anyone had said referred to england as home i would've snorted at them <,> um i think i was just part of a whole generation of new zealanders who a hundred years later <,> tut fully accepted themselves without qualification as new zealanders <.>this this was er our place this was our turangawaewae and we were it for better or worse <,> um that the <,> the kind of religious beliefs traditional religious beliefs <&>8:00 i'd <,> grown up with and practised seriously they'd just been blown away like like dust they just didn't <,> seem to be relevant to me any longer tut er what were those traditional beliefs <{><[>you had <[>i was anglican coughs i was brought up as an anglican sang in the choir <,> taught sunday school <,> was confirmed and i practised it very seriously i can remember at my confirmation er concentrating my mind totally into this this experience but even THEN i think in retrospect wondering um tut <,> why it wasn't er a more illuminating experience why i didn't feel um joyful or transported by it and i think looking back again that one of the reasons that i went on doing it tut and all my friends male and female did er was that that's what you DID at <&>9:00 that time so you you just all did it together er it was part of the tradition <,> i don't KNOW if that's the tradition with young people now i suspect not nearly so much but in our village and khandallah was a village then that's all of us who were er anglicans all went off and so we did these things together just as we went to er dances together and so forth er and the the religion was part of it a kind of a background to it but if you took it at all seriously <.>you <,> i think you had to examine it <,> tut and i did examine it i suppose and just found that it really didn't offer me anything any longer and again of course being in the services with um tut er fairly fundamental and raucous attitudes to all sorts of things around you er you know a STRONG and healthy <&>10:00 scepticism of men in war um about everything they don't <,> they're not easily convinced and so er being very young amidst older people you're influenced by this tut and i think that helps you to look at things afresh and change your mind and decide where you stand on things tut i came back i suppose a humanist <,> tut and i'm certainly er that's what i am now <.>i i just have no doubt that <,> everything that happens here and eventually perhaps in the universe um tut is our responsibility that there's nobody else to carry the can <,> and whether people choose to believe in something outside of that tut er <,> <.>a <.>w as a kind of lode star well <.>tha that's fine i'm very happy for them <,> um <,> i don't i can't be persuaded that there is anything else there <,> i am persuaded by <,> tut oh and this is one of the the real influences in my life was reading um <,> <&>11:00 tut taia de shanan the great jesuit philosopher <,> er <,> who argued that <,> the basic force in the universe is <,> an evolutionary one that is everything is in a process of change tut and that through that force <,> life appeared and developed and produced us and he says that by some accident we have a central nervous system which allows us to be er tut introspective <,> to be able to observe ourselves and everything else and that this <,> places on us the responsibility to see that future evolution future change tut is guided by some moral or ethical basis and the only source of that is us and that's just our central nervous <&>12:00 system and <.>th <.>th that's our burden and er <,> i remember reading <,> a lot of french philosophy at one stage when they were <,> tut the french were arguing furiously about this and all saying the same thing that one of the the tragedies of modern man tut is the loss of the medieval church the medieval faith because that explained everything <,> and since then we've been wrestling with how we accept the responsibility tut that was formerly carried by that church and that we haven't really come to it but we HAVE to i mean it's whatever happens is our is on US um the world is a reflection of US <,> and everything in it and there's no cop out <,> the buck really DOES stop here <,> now all of those things a long answer to er what was the influence of the war i think <&>13:00 it had i stayed here and had there been no war <,> er my guess is that i would have um been influenced by <,> tut going to university as people were then into some sort of radicalism but i'm not sure if the change would have been er quite as dramatic <,> not just on me but on er most of my friends and acquaintances and generation does what does your humanism have to say about um tut survival of the fittest i think some i'm i'm sure <.>th that there is um a great deal IN THIS but it is NOT an absolute this is one of the mistakes i think that that people er assumed as a result of darwinian philosophy that er the only way in which we survived er really was by tooth and claw by competition and by the toughest who would survive in fact biology no longer believes that <&>14:00 <,> um that we survive and creatures other than humans survive er at least as much by their capacity to cooperate as by their capacity to compete tut and if anything <,> i think my inclination is to see the that the the capacity to cooperate <,> is greater than the capacity to compete and um tut i think that humanists would hold this position very strongly not only if you accept yourself as a humanist there is a responsibility on you to recognise that what happens in the world is <,> at least partly to do with you tut and that your responsibility yeah sure that's your responsibility and that you you should have a go at trying to change it i mean if the coughs tut if we're tearing <&>15:00 the world apart because <.>we're <,> we're failing to recognise the environmental imperatives then we ought to try and do something about it ourselves in our OWN lives it isn't necessary to go to the street and wave banners it isn't necessary to take petitions to parliament or to join societies <,> what is necessary is to do something about it in your life that is um you don't throw bottles away or paper away you you recycle them if you can things of that kind um <,> tut you try not to foul the environment er <,> if you smoke you you try and stop smoking because that's an environmental hazard that's harming other people tut er <,> i think <.>it's it's if you go on and join societies and become an activist <,> in your society so much the better but that that's what a humanist would say now all that requires cooperation not just acceptance of responsibility but the acceptance of the need to cooperate with other people <&>16:00 at this present time politically in new zealand there seems to be a tremendous credibility gap between the people and the politicians <.>and <.>and and this is a market oriented economy or society so we're told i mean where does cooperation come in there oh cooperation comes into it VERY powerfully er a at our social level in the market economy er we're really at a fairly crude level i think in it the way we are organising it for the competition <,> sooner or later there there's going to have to be some social intervention <,> um to safeguard against the worst effects of that tut so that we don't get ripped off inevitably if um if private competition is <&>17:00 allowed to run then people get ripped off so that then in the home of of private enterprise the united states of america there are very stringent social controls on what private enterprise may and may not DO um tut how far they may be able to develop in eating up the other competition for instance so they accept this but withIN the way in which private enterprise works <,> the evidence indicates that in the big corporations of the united states little industries and so forth the ones which are successful are those <,> which cooperate with their employees there was a huge study done by a woman called rosabeth kanter on behalf of the u s chamber of commerce took three years very expensive very big <&>17:52