Make Laws, not Haka

Oh, oh don't do that.

Call me a haka squish, but I always thought it was kind of cool when the New Zealand rugby team did it on the pitch before a game. It’s a primitive war dance, and sports is where we take our primitive war customs in modern civilized society. Sports—not parliament. Parliament is what we do instead of primitive war dances. Which is why, when Maōri lawmakers broke into whoops and stomps in the New Zealand House of Representatives this week, even I—a noted Haka squish—had some questions.

Most pressingly, is this just what we’re all doing now? Tacitus reports that among the ancient Germanic tribes, “Young men [made] a pastime of dancing naked through drawn swords and spears at risk of injury.” Is that a custom the House of Commons should adopt in floor debates to honor Britain’s Anglo-Saxon heritage? Or how about the practice of resolving disputes while drunk so it’s harder to lie? I just want to know what the rules are.

After all, every culture has some form of martial art in its distant past. It’s the most natural thing in the world. The primal spirits of battle inspire a kind of manic ecstasy that’s bound to find expression one way or another. Marcus Aurelius trained in the “leaping” dances of his native Rome, decked with ancestral shield and dagger. There are etchings of something similar on a helmet from Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk. And so on.

But the inheritors of these particular ancient cultures are by and large “white-coded” in modernity, which means we would probably not recognize it as indigenous if a faction in the German Bundestag went starkers to their desks amid glittering rows of naked steel. A spectacle like that would probably be received not as an inspiring show of native solidarity but as a vaguely fascist intimidation tactic.

And in this one hypothetical instance, I don’t actually think the epithet would be entirely misplaced. Because intimidation is exactly what war dances are designed to achieve. They are meant to be construed as threats of physical violence. The only reason no one reacts accordingly when a button-nosed pixie from New Zealand starts up is because absolutely no one credits the threat. This is not a noble savage holdout against the roman legions. This is a domesticated temper tantrum for want of cogent argumentation.

It doesn’t actually matter what was being debated. In the West we have agreed across the board to settle matters of politics with orderly deliberation, precisely so they don’t devolve into spear-measuring contests between incommensurate kinship groups. This way of doing things is so capacious and inclusive that it’s possible, if you’ve never read anything, to joke that Westerners “don’t have culture.” It would be more accurate to say that representative legislation is our culture, and everyone gets to join.

Reasoned debate is the one thing that everyone from everywhere can participate in without anyone getting killed, which is why Parliament is what we’ve settled on to do instead of haka—or spear dances, or the Pyrrhichē, or whatever. As New Zealand’s House Speaker Gerry Brownlee said when the stunt began: “oh, oh don’t do that.” Do lawmaking instead.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer