We live in an age of stifling public orthodoxies. Those who dissent against them can expect to encounter all manner of ill-treatment. Question the merits of mass immigration, Net Zero, or transgender ideology, say, and you will soon find yourself tarred with the corresponding curse-word: “racist”, “climate-denier”, “transphobe”. It matters not a jot that these orthodoxies are deeply flawed. Outrage mobs, deplatforming, and the loss of jobs and career opportunities face all who criticise them. Many, chilled at the prospect of this social censure, will choose the easier option of self-censoring. The effect is to push dissenting views out of public debate.
Still, there are many voices today who are willing to challenge the deluded, damaging dogmas of our time – and it’s vital that they be heard. It’s one of the reasons I’m delighted to have joined the Daily Sceptic as an Associate Editor. I’m proud that as the host of our new podcast, the Sceptic, I’ll be giving our dissenting contributors a wider platform to disseminate their heretical views.
That’s also why earlier this year I, along with a friend of mine, Alex Regueiro, launched Modern Dissent. Modern Dissent is a London talk series for dissenting public intellectuals to challenge established ideas in contemporary politics, culture and society. We want our audiences to have the chance to hear free, bold thought, live and in person.
Modern Dissent kicked off back in February with Professor Eric Kaufmann, head of the Faculty of Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham, the first of its kind. In a fascinating, hour-long lecture, Prof. Kaufmann gave us an exclusive first look at his new book, Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution, setting out his weighty, incisive thesis on what is driving wokeness today and what can be done about it. We were delighted to offer Prof. Kaufmann a chance to do so free of the petulant heckling he has had to encounter on our increasingly intolerant and ideologically captured university campuses. Though of course, in the spirit of free inquiry, he did then field probing questions from our audience. Modern Dissent, I should note, is proud to be supported by the Free Speech Union’s Ian Mactaggart Programme.
Today, I’m pleased to be able to invite Daily Sceptic readers to our second Modern Dissent lecture, which will take place on Thursday June 27th. From 7:30pm at the Art Workers’ Guild, Bloomsbury, Professor Nigel Biggar will speak for around an hour on the topic ‘Deconstructing Decolonisation’, before taking questions. Tearing down statues, changing school names and exorcising the allegedly baneful influence of ‘dead white males’ from the curriculum – in recent years, no one can have missed the intolerant, neo-Puritan outrages of the ‘decolonise’ movement. In his talk, Biggar will seek to explain what’s driving this dismal, paranoid crusade.
In a way, Biggar will be giving the ‘decolonise’ crowd a taste of their own medicine. Where the decolonisers seek to deconstruct our very culture, Prof. Biggar will deconstruct the decolonisers, exposing their cynical mindset and why it proves so resistant to rational argument.
It’s a mindset Biggar, after all, is more than familiar with. Back in 2017, the Oxford Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology turned his ethics scholarship to the conundrum of the British Empire, launching a five-year academic project titled ‘Ethics and Empire’. Britons, he argued, had reason to feel pride as well as shame about their imperial past, and he and other academics set out to dispassionately evaluate the moral record of British colonialism. Once word of this endeavour got out, however, Biggar and his project met with furious denunciations, first by students and soon by other academics, and a media storm ensued. “For more than a fortnight,” he writes, “my name was in the media every day.” Open letters were penned against him. And after Oxford’s Centre for Global History publicly distanced itself from ‘Ethics and Empire’, colleagues involved decided to quit the project.
Biggar has continued to feel the effect of this intolerance on his career. He was commissioned by Bloomsbury to write a book off the back of ‘Ethics and Empire’ in 2018. On handing in his manuscript, he was told by his commissioning editor that it was a “book of major importance” and would sell a handsome 15-20,000 copies. But this was early 2021, less than a year into the 2020 Black Lives Matter ‘racial reckoning’. Before long, Bloomsbury higher-ups had decided not to publish it on the grounds that “public feeling on the subject does not currently support [its] publication”. Bloomsbury never deigned to specify what the nature of that “public feeling” was, but to Biggar it was more than clear. Woke outrage mobs were being given a heckler’s veto over a dissenting work – one which Bloomsbury itself had described as being of “major importance’.
More fool Bloomsbury, though. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning is now a Sunday Times bestseller with William Collins, and it has been widely praised by historians for being “scrupulous”, “fair-minded”, “rigorous” and “compelling”. I have no doubt many of our readers will have bought and enjoyed a copy themselves. Attendees on Thursday can get theirs signed.
So do come along if you can on Thursday to hear this fascinating lecture from Professor Biggar and to support Modern Dissent. Tickets are just £7 and I hope to see many of you there. You can purchase your tickets here.
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