Why Dame Anne Salmond Misunderstands the Enlightenment

Every so often, a critic of “universal reason” appears who, in the course of denouncing it, inadvertently demonstrates why we need it. Newsroom currently has the NZ Free Speech Union (of which I am a board member) in its sights and, after a lacklustre expose, has now thrown Dame Anne Salmond at us. Bless. She’s no Jim Brown in The Running Man, though you’d think she were by the mania she whips up from her Salmonites. And yet, in her piece, she constructs another strawman based on a complete misunderstanding of what it is she thinks she’s critiquing. I’ll sum up her thesis (a familiar anthropology department catechism): Enlightenment rationality is a sort of cultural bulldozer, the imposition of a single worldview upon a delicate ecosystem of difference.

In her piece, she goes after a recent article in the Herald by former FSU Chief Executive Jonathan Ayling, in which he called for “an Enlightenment approach grounded in universal reason”. This is taken as proof that he wants all children to think in the same way, as though “universal reason” means a kind of intellectual North Korea, complete with a Ministry of Correct Thoughts. The author writes that universal reason “suggests there is only one right way to think.” The incessant quarrelling of Kant, Hume, and Voltaire surely makes a lie of that.

Universal reason, properly understood, means something so elementary it ought to be uncontroversial: that humans, regardless of tribe, tongue, or whakapapa, share the basic capacity to make and understand arguments. It is what allows a Māori scholar to critique a German philosopher, or vice versa. It is what allows any of us to read a book from another century, or to engage with the sciences, or to disagree at all. Without a universal reason, debate becomes a kind of cultural tourism in which we admire each other’s “ways of knowing” from a polite distance, like exhibits in an epistemic zoo.

The column insists that because language and culture shape thought, there can be no universal reason. This is like saying that because people wear different clothes, there can be no human body underneath. Yes, thought varies, but its very variability depends on a shared structure that allows us to recognise a difference as a difference. If there were no universals of cognition, no common tools of inference or logic, the entire academic industry of “cross-cultural workshops” - which the author curiously cites as evidence - would be impossible. One does not attend a conference on how minds differ unless one assumes the participants have minds capable of discussing it.

But relativism is the religion of our moment. It flatters everyone: it tells the majority that their history is oppressive, and minorities that they possess a philosophically unique essence accessible only through cultural osmosis. The column indulges in precisely this soft bigotry: the notion that Māori thought somehow doesn’t belong in the same arena of reason, scrutiny, and debate as Western thought - as though Māori must be protected from argument by keeping their ideas on a separate shelf labelled “Respect Only, Do Not Critique.” This does not dignify Māori. It infantilises them. Nothing says “colonial hangover” quite like the suggestion that a group’s ideas cannot be discussed using universal tools of reason because those tools are “European.”

The great irony is that universal reason is precisely the mechanism by which Enlightenment thinkers came to admire Indigenous cultures in the first place. The author claims the Enlightenment was sparked by travel — and she is right — but what made those encounters transformative was the assumption that Polynesian navigators, North American nations, and Asian empires were knowable and comparable. That is universal reason in action.

Then comes the moralising: that the Free Speech Union lacks “humility before truth,” that Māori voices are being “silenced,” that universal reason somehow implies a political programme in favour of ignorance. But the only position in the piece that actively suppresses inquiry is the author’s own. What is more antithetical to free thought than declaring whole categories of knowledge off-limits to criticism because they belong to the wrong culture (or, as Salmond frequently argues, are immeasurable by a universal standard)? What is more hostile to academic freedom than demanding that educational policy be bound not by rational argument but by obligations to particular groups, with “truth” distributed like government grants?

A liberal society cannot function on those terms. Universal reason is not a luxury - it is the shared operating system that prevents us from descending into a society of sealed epistemic tribes, each jealously guarding its “truths” from inspection. The alternative to universalism is not a warmer, more inclusive pluralism. It is intellectual balkanisation, where disputes cannot be resolved through argument because argument itself is deemed culturally contingent.

If this column proves anything, it is that the rhetorical worship of “difference” can end up strangling the very possibility of discourse. In the end, the author doesn’t refute Ayling’s argument. She simply asserts that reason itself is suspicious - which is a thesis worthy of a medieval mystic or a modern social media influencer.

To reject universal reason is to reject the one thing that allows us to disagree without killing each other. And if the author truly believes that applying the same standards of evidence to all claims - be they Māori or Pākehā - is an act of oppression, then yes, she has misunderstood the Enlightenment.

Spectacularly.