Baroness Fox reviews Lord Biggar’s ‘The New Dark Age’

Conservative peer Lord Biggar | Image by: Jeff Gilbert / Alamy

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In The New Dark Age, Nigel Biggar poses a startling question. Is his book really necessary given that “the ground of the culture wars is already well-trodden”?

In short, yes. Because he’s personally been engaged in the “colonial front of the culture wars” (a polite description of the vicious way he endured a decade of being cancelled, traduced and hounded), his ‘lived experience’ has given rise to reflections and insights “that are not… common”. Moreover, his unique observations offer solutions, not just complaints.

Describing the visceral way that ‘cancel culture’ works in practice is a public service. It sends a particular shiver to read, “my book was cancelled – and I was, so my wife tells me, devastated”.

It’s a riposte to sneering accusations that culture wars are phoney, artificially created by ‘victims’ for bad faith political ends. Shooting down these straw men can be exhausting. Reading the shocking details of how uninvited and poisonous the two main ‘cancel Biggar’ campaigns were should be a lesson for all who imagine that they won’t ever become targets.

A brief study of Biggar’s résumé might suggest he’s an unusual recipient of vitriolic political hate, more donnish than activist. Today he’s well-known as a Conservative peer, an internationally renowned heterodox academic, described by one reviewer as “a sort of British Jordan Peterson in less interesting suits”. But actually, he voted Labour for 13 years, remain in 2016 and, until recently, was a Guardian subscriber. He is an avowed liberal, carefully dissecting the differing way that word is used, and settling on John Stuart Mill’s idea “that a free marketplace of ideas is the best way of testing and correcting prevailing orthodoxies”.

Some of the book’s vigour is undoubtedly driven by personal retribution against each of the academic critics he puts “in the dock”, whose intellectual dishonesty about his work he dissects remorselessly, even if he refers to himself in third person during chapter five “not to defend myself but rather to display the symptoms of academic corruption”. But mainly the book is a call to arms to create “liberal citizens who have the strength of character – the virtues – that make them capable of responding to alien viewpoints thoughtfully and civilly”. One of the barriers to that are institutions so in thrall to progressivism that they have created a culture which prefers to compel the iteration of dogma than encourage the discovery of “the truth of things”.

The imposition of policies that discourage and penalise those who dare to express “reasonable doubts” – let alone speak “unfashionable truths” – creates a chilling climate in which “most would-be dissenters will tie their tongues and move into internal exile”, rather than risk their career and their reputation. This is catastrophic for freedom of speech; but he goes further to argue that “what we dare not stay out loud becomes, over time, too burdensome to carry on thinking”.

Understandably, the book focuses on universities as he’s most familiar with their practices – but also because these institutions “form the minds of graduates, who, now more than ever, go on to lead and manage the rest of society”.

The book made me think, even when I argued with it

However, the book demonstrates that institutional rot runs far beyond university campuses, citing similar corrosion in publishing, journalism, book reviewing (!), museums and the NHS gender services.

It would be good to cut and paste his solution into the political realm: “Developing a custom of appointing to positions of authority not just managers but leaders… people who are not just preoccupied with keeping their show on the road but who also have a firm grasp of why the show deserves to be kept there at all”.

The book’s soul is about the current lack of, and need for, courage. Even when staff know of an egregious institutional betrayal of values, they surmise it “will cost less to pay lip service or work around the latest bureaucratic requirement than fight it”. They fear going public. The reaction of Cambridge academics in 2020 to the university’s censorious proposal to insist that they “respect” each other was largely silence, beyond a brave few. Yet in a secret ballot, the proposal was defeated 1,378 to 208, suggesting “a small and vociferous minority had cowed a liberal but risk-averse majority out of speaking its mind”.

Biggar’s tale, of having his scholarship misrepresented while being unjustly labelled a racist bigot, is all too familiar. But what makes for disturbing reading is the insidious and cowardly ways that victims of cancel culture are treated by colleagues. Even friends look the other way, “passively mute” in the face of injustice. Biggar himself says of his experience: “It was as if I had become diseased, and they were terrified of contagion”. Even those who were supportive did so furtively, rendezvousing in “deserted cafes… at tables behind screens where no-one could see”.

I usually disapprove of comparisons with the Nazi era, but Biggar effectively uses the analogy – with evidence – when it comes to academic cowardice in 1930s Germany: the “fear of contagion by association” led most ‘Aryans’ to shun and isolate ‘discredited professors’, leftists and Jews. He notes: “I am not saying that academics today tend to be Nazi. I am saying that many Nazi Party members were not in fact convinced Nazis; they simply wanted to get on with their lives and careers, undisturbed. Just like academics today.”

The book made me think, even when I argued with it.

If you want to know more about contested truth claims around colonial history, this is a great taster. I may not be persuaded by all of Biggar’s evidenced claims about ‘Empire’. I’m more sympathetic to much of Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary anti-imperialism (as distinct from many of today’s post-colonial charlatans). But where we agree is on the dangers of using history for activist ends rather than presenting “the past on its own terms”.

I may not share his “monotheistic conviction” but I loved his moral clarity in detailing the virtues we should teach new generations. Finally, I’m keener on passionate discourse than Biggar, who lists it as a vice. But this work with its call to reinvigorate a liberal conviction in Enlightenment reason – now freshly under assault from as many on the right as the leftist cultural theorists this book skewers – is indispensable.

Baroness Fox of Buckley is a non-affiliated peer

The New Dark Age: Why Liberals Must Win the Culture Wars

By: Nigel Biggar

Publisher: Polity