Forward to the past

The 80s saw a revival of traditionalism in the Pacific. Western values came under attack from Right and Left alike. In the lead article of our Pacific feature, Rowan Callick argues that the new traditionalism is a dead end street. The Pacific has to find a political response to the inevitability of change. ■ he French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville, who arrived in Tahiti in the 18th century, wrote, "I felt as though I had been transported to the Garden of Eden. Everywhere we found hospitality, peace, innocent joy and every ap­ pearance of happiness. What a country! What a people!" French Polynesia has already hosted its fifth nuclear test this year. And the island named after Bougainville himself continues to suffer from the nastiest violence witnessed in the South Pacific since 1945. Is this indeed Paradise Lost—as the introduction to the recent stimulating Four Comers TV program on Bougain­ ville claimed, using the first and ultimate South Pacific dich£? The very notion of the Noble Savage, which Jean-Jacques Rousseau had freshly stated ("Man in his natural state followed the impulses of an instinct which remained sure because it had not yet degenerated into reason. Men were meant to remain in this state, which was the true youth of the world") was seen to be confirmed by what the early European explorers discerned in Polynesia. These is­ landers were Adams and Eves before the Fall. Original Sin had met its match! And revolutions followed. English Poet Laureate Henry James Pye wrote, "Amid the wild expanse of southern seas/Where the blest isles inhale the genial breeze/The happiest native in the fragrant grove/Woo* the soft powers of Indolence and Love," Such seductive notions of 'free love' appeared confirmed by the later joumeyings of Europea n d rop-outs such as the