Should We Be Ashamed of Our History？ - Nigel Biggar
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 10 minutes
Words per Minute
140.59016
Summary
Nigel Bigger is a moral and Pastoral Theological professor at the University of Oxford, and a writer for The Times. In this episode, he tells us about his journey through life that led him to a chair at Oxford, how he got there, and the moment that changed his life.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin.
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And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
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Our brilliant and fantastic guest today is a Regis Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology,
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Nigel Bigger. Welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks very much.
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It's so great to have you. We're here at Oxford University. It's a pleasure to be here and
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speaking with you, which is, of course, where you work. Before we get into a very interesting
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background and story, just tell everybody a little bit about who are you, how are you,
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where you are, what has been your journey through life that leads you to this very strange place
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sitting in this chair on YouTube? Okay, well, I wasn't born in Oxford. I was born in Scotland,
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but my Scottish accent got drained from me when I came south to Scotland at the age of 13,
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except when I'm slightly drunk or when I'm in the pulpit, I can get quite Scottish.
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otherwise not. So I've developed an academic career. I spent about seven years in Canada
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and the States, collected my wife there, brought her back about 30 years ago, and have taught
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here in Oxford in Leeds, in Dublin, and then for the last 11 years have taught back here
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in Oxford. And my field, I have this rather bizarre title, Professor of Moral and Pastoral
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theology. What's that? Basically, it's ethics, but it's ethics done from a religious Christian
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point of view. So I teach that, and I've done research on, I've written on things like the
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ethics of euthanasia, published a book on the ethics of war. I also do peace. I've done stuff
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on making peace and doing justice after civil conflict,
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Northern Ireland, South Africa, and just about to bring out a book on rights.
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So it's fair to say, in summary, that you've had a distinguished academic career,
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but I think people who will be aware of you, us included,
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I'm sure you do see it into the memory, no doubt.
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When you wrote a piece for The Times, which was entitled Don't Feel Guilty About Our Colonial Past, which was a defense of your colleague Bruce Gilley, who'd written something about, you know, the empire and colonialism not being all bad.
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So tell us briefly about that and what happened and how that went.
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okay so um you you've described the article appeared in the times in late november 2017
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and by the way um as you'll know when people write for newspapers um they don't have control
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over the of the title what i said my article was we brits we have reason uh for pride as well as
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shame over the imperial past so our imperial past is mixed there were awful things and there
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were some great things. All I was saying was both, which is a pretty, I thought was a pretty
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unobjectionable, moderate position that no one really could disagree with. More fool me.
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So the title was a bit misrepresentative, but that was published in late November.
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And then about a week later, I got round after six months delay publishing online
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a description of a research project that I had launched in July of 2017 called Ethics and Empire.
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And this brings together a group of ethicists and historians to survey empire from ancient China
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to the modern period and consider the ways in which contemporaries thought about the empires
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And, you know, as you do, I just had to check my email one last time before getting in the plane.
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And there was an email from the public relations people here in Oxford informing me that a group of students calling themselves Common Ground had published an online denunciation of my Ethics in Empire project.
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so that I've never experienced that before but that that was told me and the good news was that
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the the university said that it was entirely behind my right to run such a thing so I didn't
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think any more of it but that was on a Thursday on on the Sunday I got news from my main historical
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collaborator that he was resigning for the project, and in the next four days, there
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were two more online denunciations, these last two by academics of this project that
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So all of that together in that week was a bit of a shock, and I'd really not been expecting
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Is this sort of thing, just to interrupt very briefly,
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is this sort of thing standard practice in academia
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where people take exception to a particular topic of research
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and then there's a student campaign and then academics resign
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Certainly, we're all aware of cases in the last three or four years
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And, of course, social media enables that kind of thing.
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and then send it round to all their mates all over the world.
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you may have collected several hundred signatures,
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um um i mean in in in the months in the weeks and months that i i spent trying to come to terms with
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what was going on uh i did come to the view that this was not an appropriate way for
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academic colleagues to behave um because uh when i complained about these online denunciations from
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in one case 58 Oxford colleagues and then in the third protest there were I think about 200
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academics worldwide I mean they said oh we were simply trying to stimulate a conversation I said
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well you know if you if you want a conversation I mean some of the people who signed these letters
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two of them work across the road from me they know my door is in fact two of them were in the
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same college as me in this college they know my door is they could have come and spoken to me
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they didn't and they haven't since um and so so the notion this was a kind of invitation to
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conversation uh is complete baloney i can only interpret it as of course it's an aggressive
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thing to do, but it was designed perhaps to intimidate me or also to persuade university
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authorities to act against me in some way by pulling funding or some other kind of sanction.
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And why do you think this is happening more and more, that we have this emboldened minority
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Do you feel that they have the right not to criticise,
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because it is absolutely their right to criticise your work
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but they feel that they have the right to cancel something?
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That's a really good question, and I continue to puzzle over it.
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People have always had strong political opinions within universities.
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There have been people on the far left and the further right,
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I can only speculate that the kind of people who think they have that right
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are people who have spent a long time talking to people of their own kind.
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And so it really appears to them as if there is only one view of these things.
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The other possibility is that not only are they convinced
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that a certain view of the world is right, and they have it,
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but that the contrary view of the world is absolutely unacceptable.
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I mean, the word fascist is thrown out all over the place.
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If you utter a conservative right-wing opinion, you're fascist.
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So it's not just, as it were, people operating in a kind of intellectual bubble
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and they're constantly confirming what they and their mates think.
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It's also that there's a tendency somehow to demonize the opposition
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Although, to be honest, I mean, I see a lot of it
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There was a time, I will confess, when I think in the 90s
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does at the moment seem to come from certain parts of the left.
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And we were talking about academia, what happened to you.
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Do you think there's a problem with free speech on campus?
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Again, if you read The Guardian, you'll find a number of people
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our concern about freedom of speech is really a fabrication
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who are alarmed at having our accustomed authority
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and so we're upset, and so we complain about our freedom of speech being suppressed.
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and I know it partly from my own direct experience
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It wasn't clear to me in December 2017, but I'm secure.
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So did you think at the time that you were likely to lose your job?
00:13:01.520
I had no idea, but I lost night's sleep over it.
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yes because at least initially i felt alone um um one of my oldest friends
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who I still respect and love actually told me to abandon my project straight away because he said
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it's just too toxic toxic and then the fact that my my senior collaborator in the project resigned
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within four days giving an implausible explanation for his abrupt resignation and then
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And yes, from colleagues here, on the whole, silence.
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So you do, you know, I did begin to wonder, you know, am I crazy?
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And although the university had indicated from the beginning
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um yes i i guess i i did feel quite vulnerable and not quite sure where this was going to go
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um fortunately you you survived let's say yeah but your concern is that you know you are in a
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prestigious position as you say coming towards the end of your career a younger colleague
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yeah absolutely so that's that's that's the concern um and i have plenty of experience of
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younger colleagues who are conservative in their views, who have said to me,
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no, really pleased that you are saying what you're saying, Nigel. I just couldn't dare to say it
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myself. And I've actually said to them, in fact, they've said, you know, I feel guilty that I'm not
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saying the same thing. And I said to them, well, nor should you at this point, you need to wait
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until you get tenure and then then you can start to say what you think when you're secure but right
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now you need to play the long game um but there was one one um one instance of a very junior
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academic a junior research fellow who's an academic who hasn't got a permanent job yet
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he's got the he had his phd he's got a kind of three-year research post and then has to look
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for a permanent job. So it's quite insecure. And in, in May 2018, you're talking about Noah
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Kyle? No, I'm not. No, no. He will, this guy must remain nameless for reasons that will come
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clear. No, this, this was, this was an historian. And I, you mentioned Bruce Gilley, who published
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this provocative, but in my view, intelligent article called The Case for Colonialism.
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I had Gilly come here in May 2018, and we held in this room a small conference with
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some historians, Paul Collier, the development economist, Tutankha Roy, the historian of
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colonial economics in India and others, because I wanted to generate a kind of intelligent,
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reflective discussion about what Gilly was saying about colonialism. But because I didn't want to
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invite heckling, and also because, frankly, small gatherings are much better in terms of
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conversation than large ones and we can only fit 30 people in this room i didn't advertise it i just
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invited people i thought would be good to have part of the conversation and one of them was this
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young uh junior research fellow whom i i i we'd had a clandestine conversation uh um in a distant
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part of the university where he he revealed that he actually liked what i had to say um
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i kid you not we actually had to find a place where he didn't think he'd be recognized
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um and he said yes i'd love to come but but in two conditions um my name must not appear in the
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list of participants and if you're taking photographs my face must not appear because
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he said um i i work in the same office as two senior colleagues uh two of whom sign one of
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the letters against you if they find out that um i've been associated with you i fear for my
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point perhaps for people who haven't been to Oxford who haven't been in the in the in this
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place it is you know Francis lives in London I live just outside coming here there there is a
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sense of history to this place there is a sense that this is one of the great places of learning
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in human history and as you walk around in these buildings in these holes that feeling that this
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is a place of learning is very strong here and to hear that sort of attitude being spread in in this
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place is alarming at a very different level than if it was happening at Oxbrook's.
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Yeah, well, I don't want to say anything about Oxbrook's.
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But yes, I mean, Oxford and Cambridge are, according to world rankings, regularly in
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as you say, Constantine, it has a long history of serious, perhaps not terribly exciting,
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but serious scholarship, careful, fastidious. Yeah, so the fact that a colleague here fears
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for his career because he might be known to be associated with such as me is really alarming,
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actually. Now, let me be clear. I'm not saying that political censorship in Oxford is widespread.
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I have no idea. I'm sure that many colleagues don't censor, don't apply political criteria
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when they're making appointments or when they're writing references for junior scholars.
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So it may only be a minority who are so politically convinced of their own views
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that they will penalize a colleague, a junior colleague, a vulnerable junior colleague,
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by writing them a poor reference because of his political views.
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Even if it's only 1 in 10, or even 1 in 20, if you know some people do that, the effect
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on the general, once that becomes known, the effect on the general atmosphere is to make
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everyone look over their shoulders and just wonder, who's listening to me?
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And Nigel, don't you think it's an abdication of responsibility on behalf of the universities?
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Because they should absolutely crack down on this type of behavior and say that it is
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Yeah, I do. I do. So here's one point. In this university, our Vice-Chancellor, Louise Richardson, has been consistent in affirming free speech within universities and its importance.
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And that is important because the leader of an institution does set the tone, and that just reminds people that this is an important value.
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But what that doesn't do is change the behavior of my junior colleagues, senior colleagues in their office.
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It doesn't change the, as it were, undercover operation of political criteria.
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um and so um something does need to be done about that now what could universities do about that
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uh basically i think the university has to recognize that it is a problem and i've i've
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i've i've written about this in in the press over the last three years there's a an in-house
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Now, it's difficult to talk about, because we all have political views.
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The issue is being aware of when you are unfairly applying political criteria
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So in the same way that we all now need to be careful, if we weren't careful before,
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to make sure that prejudices about social class or race don't influence unfairly the judgments we make.
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And that's utterly, that's entirely acceptable and important.
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We now need to do the same with political views.
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And at the moment, that's just not an issue that has risen up the agenda.
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And I think university leaders need to start doing that.
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i mean maybe the government could problem maybe the office for students can start
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rattling their cages and saying folks you need to take this seriously and that i think that may
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happen um but it'd be good to see universities take the initiative rather than being pushed by
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government when we interviewed douglas murray for our first interview he was of the opinion that if
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a university did not support free speech on campus that uh they should be defunded which is
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quite an extreme position i think would you be in agreement with you know the government taking a
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stronger hand and actually saying to universities if you don't do your job in supporting different
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viewpoints then there are going to be some sanctions put in place yes i do i do i i think
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um um government does need to remind universities of their commitment to academic freedom most
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universities have formal commitments to free speech uh although there's a distinction here
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it's one thing to um to guarantee free speech academic freedom is slightly different because
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it has to do with what professors can teach in their classes what books they can assign to their
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students what research they do and i i think free speech is better protected than academic freedom
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So academic freedom also needs to be protected.
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And I think government should communicate to university leaders
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that it regards this matter as a really serious one.
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If I can just, I want to come back to that point,
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and I might lose it, so bring me back in a moment.
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But just on that, I think there's a really important point to be made
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um to some extent what's at stake is is um the right of minorities in this case political
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minorities and conservatives are reckoned to be i don't know about 15 percent of the university
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professoriate um the right of political minorities to be able to speak freely without fear of
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sanction. Now, that's important. But what to take is even more important is this. In
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universities, we are forming future citizens. Our graduates, particularly in this university,
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with their prestigious university degree, will go on to run companies, run the BBC,
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And we are training them in ways of dealing with points of view
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how to handle a debate or a discussion or a controversy
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We can train them only to see one point of view.
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We can train them to, instead of treating what an alternative point of view has to say
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and considering what reasons it might have, you can train them instead to say,
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well, because he's a conservative, because he's a capitalist, because he speaks up for empire,
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if they start behaving that way the whole of public discourse is going to be infected
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by polarization aggression a refusal to hear and that's just one step away from bloodshed
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because when people are no longer trying to argue they're fighting and fierce verbal fighting is
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only a step away from the real stuff so what's at stake really is not just the protection of
00:28:31.040
minority opinions. It's really the public good of a citizenry who know how to restrain
00:28:39.480
themselves when they hear things they don't like, feel obliged to do justice to what other
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people say. So when someone says something you don't like, you don't then distort it
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before you address it. You take it as it stands. And then to give credit where credit
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is due then to come up with the reasons you think this is bloody wrong.
00:29:03.700
Now, that's a responsible, rational way to conduct
00:29:17.260
And we need citizens and journalists and editors
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and institutional leaders who know how to do that and model it,
00:29:27.760
is going to become much more fractious, polarized, as we see it has done in the USA.
00:29:34.120
Well, and increasingly here, too, I think it's fair to say.
00:29:37.140
And I think you make that point very well, Nigel.
00:29:39.680
But speaking about some of the issues on which it's very difficult to have these conversations,
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now, it's the one we started with, which is, of course, empire and colonialism.
00:29:50.960
The conversation around that has become with a very particular worldview, let's say.
00:29:55.800
uh are people wrong to to be so uh critical of the of the our imperial history i mean some terrible
00:30:03.620
things were done during imperial times uh you know whether it's the invention of concentration
00:30:07.980
camps during the boer war by the british or many many other atrocities on the indian subcontinent
00:30:13.320
and around the world should we not be ashamed of our history my view as a as a someone who
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identifies himself strongly as British. I care about this country. I identify with its history.
00:30:27.720
And my view is if you love something, you are therefore capable of shame. And looking back at
00:30:33.500
my British history, yes, there are things I'm deeply ashamed about. And the classic case would
00:30:39.280
be slavery, which we engaged in for 200 years. So as I said at the beginning, pride is well a shame,
00:30:47.980
right? So certainly shame. But my view is that the British Empire, in that respect,
00:30:56.300
containing moments of awfulness, as well as moments of greatness, is no different from any
00:31:03.380
nation-state, and no different from any other empire. Any nation-state that's been around for
00:31:10.280
a long time, in the course of time, will get to do some awful things. Well, the Mongols committed
00:31:16.780
some seriously big microaggressions of the Genghis Khan, didn't they? But do you think
00:31:21.520
perhaps Britain, as someone, I'm not British, so while I feel, well, I say I'm not British,
00:31:27.200
I think at this point I sort of am. No, you're not. No, you're not. But you know what I mean,
00:31:33.040
I come from a different place, but I've integrated into this country, but I probably feel less of an
00:31:37.720
affinity with British history than you would. Do you think that Britain is essentially being
00:31:44.740
punished for its historical success. Because if it had been less successful, if it had been a Sweden
00:31:52.200
or a Norway or whatever, that engaged in some of these things on a much smaller scale or not at all,
00:31:58.020
simply by virtue of not being a powerful player in the world stage, then we wouldn't be having
00:32:03.740
this conversation. Now, you're exactly right. So you would have noticed that no one is interested
00:32:09.260
in beating up the French Empire or the Russian or the Chinese or the Zulu or the Comanche Empire
00:32:18.820
in the States. They're interested mainly in the British Empire. Why is that? It's because
00:32:25.420
the British Empire, even as it declined, it morphed into the American Empire, or at least
00:32:33.200
morphed into American global power. And the British Empire was supportive of a lot of the
00:32:43.160
post-Second World War, post-1945 international institutions. So the kind of international order
00:32:50.160
we have, the kind of international order against which China is presently chafing, and Russia,
00:32:57.180
uh that liberal international order um uh owes it was a lot to the british empire and and and
00:33:05.800
subsequent american power so you're absolutely right the reason that the british empire is
00:33:11.620
getting beaten up on is not the it's not about the past at all it's about the present it's about
00:33:45.640
now and it shapes the decisions we make in the future. So one of the things that stimulated
00:33:54.720
me to get stuck into British Empire is Scottish nationalism. Now I'm, as I said, I'm Scottish
00:34:02.700
born, my mother's English, I'm Anglo-Scot, I'm a Brit. I belong to a multi, a multinational
00:34:09.040
state. And I really value that. And so I'm strongly against Scottish separation. But
00:34:21.840
there's a story being told by some Scottish nationalists, which is, if I can distill it,
00:34:28.740
Britain equals empire equals evil, and therefore to break up Britain, to separate Scotland from
00:34:38.240
the rest of the UK is an act of national self-purification yeah now you know if Britain
00:34:48.960
you know if Britain equaled Nazism equal evil separation I'm quite a good idea but but I happen
00:34:56.860
to know enough about the British Empire to know it just wasn't of that kind at all and
00:35:01.960
And I don't think that the British Empire was radically, at its heart, at its root, racist.
00:35:12.040
I don't think it was radically, at its heart, exploitative.
00:35:16.700
It included moments of racism and moments of exploitation.
00:35:21.400
But when you, we were talking earlier about what school kids do and don't know about slavery,
00:35:28.480
And you were saying that, you know, in your experience as a teacher, school kids do know about slavery.
00:35:35.460
I suspect they probably know less about the more than a century that the British spent suppressing slavery,
00:35:45.560
the slave trade across the Atlantic, the slave trade across the Indian Ocean, in Africa, in India, in the Middle East,
00:35:52.540
for about, well, from 1807 onwards until the end of the empire.
00:35:57.260
one of the main preoccupations of the empire was the suppression of slavery.
00:36:04.960
Francis, let me just follow up on one thing, if you don't mind.
00:36:08.160
This is a really interesting point you made about that it's about the present,
00:36:13.720
And if I'm understanding you correctly, what you're saying is
00:36:16.820
there is an agenda to undermine the American liberal capitalism of the world
00:36:24.340
anti-west agreed completely certainly i see that and the british empire is like the founding
00:36:30.340
cornerstone of that so if you can pull that out you can make the whole pyramid fall yeah and you
00:36:35.460
and so what you do is you you undermine by undermining the record the historical record
00:36:39.880
you undermine as it were the moral authority of the whole thing yeah go ahead francis and the
00:36:45.280
question i wanted to ask was we do learn about the british empire at schools but we don't learn
00:37:17.040
uh let me save yourself um that's absolutely right so so one of the really interesting things
00:37:26.580
that we've discovered in in this ethics and empire project which as i said
00:37:31.020
is looking at empires from into china to the modern period so far we've got up to about 1600
00:37:36.700
and uh um when i was asking around uh colleagues who know about let's say arab empires or islamic
00:37:46.720
empire, saying, you know, can you find me a contemporary critic? And they said, well,
00:37:53.480
no, not really. And it turns out that, and the same happened in the case of ancient Chinese
00:38:01.760
empire. And the conclusion I've drawn is that at those times in those places, empire was
00:38:11.840
a fact of life uh um you might you might not like particular emperors you may not like particular
00:38:18.020
governments the way in which the empire was governed but empire as such was completely
00:38:22.560
unremarkable and um um the fact is that most of the world has been has been ruled by empires
00:38:58.960
as what went on in the sugar plantations of the West Indies
00:39:14.900
to European traders and taken off to the Caribbean,
00:39:27.480
or being buried alive to join their master on his heavenly journey.
00:39:32.540
There are reports of up to 1,500 slaves being sacrificed
00:39:40.760
by being buried alive to mark the funerals of African princes in 1790.
00:39:50.200
um so you know slavery and long before before african kings started selling their uh their
00:40:01.900
slaves and the slaves were normally would have been uh prisoners of war um captured from other
00:40:07.740
tribes before they sold them to europeans they were selling to the arabs for centuries so yeah
00:40:13.840
I mean, this doesn't excuse the cruelty of a lot of slavery in the West Indies,
00:40:26.980
which the British were involved in, but it does put it in context.
00:40:31.280
So if we sinned, there were lots of other sinners too,
00:40:44.340
And the thing that it seems to me is that what we have nowadays are narratives.
00:40:48.760
Like you talked about, you know, the British being evil,
00:40:51.780
and then certain white supremacy would no doubt be thrown in as well.
00:40:55.400
And if you contravene that narrative, even if you've got facts
00:40:59.900
and, you know, you can make a cogent argument, it doesn't matter.
00:41:08.100
But I've become more confident and more heartened
00:41:14.820
because when I first suffered grief in December 2017,
00:41:25.120
I'd only begun to work on making moral sense of British Empire,
00:41:34.960
And the thing I'm most struck about is how the people who behave in that way don't know what they're talking about.
00:41:44.100
They really don't know what they're talking about.
00:41:45.680
And there are some academics who behave that way, and they just don't know what they're talking about.
00:41:52.260
And my sense is, well, it's my hope, but my sense is that the more this kind of behavior gets exposed and contradicted,
00:42:01.560
the great british public out there become more and more appalled uh and that's my hope um and i and
00:42:10.520
and uh i also think and i've certainly seen here how um really self-persuaded self-convinced
00:42:22.240
zealous minorities of students or even of professors uh can have can acquire a kind of
00:42:30.520
dominance over a more uncertain majority who don't particularly want to get involved in this
00:42:38.300
fight. So my sense is out there, and even within universities, a majority of people
00:42:45.960
are not very impressed by the kind of behavior you've described. And the more people who speak
00:42:54.040
up and out against it, and the more outrageous this behaviour becomes, I think there's reason
00:43:00.960
to hope that the stronger a reaction will be. So I'm not gloomy about this at all.
00:43:08.360
It's a good point that you make, that you're not gloomy about it, and there seems to be
00:43:11.820
a strong reaction. I think things came to a head a great deal during the Black Lives
00:43:15.960
Matter demonstrations, riots, whatever you want to call them, the tearing down of the
00:43:21.400
statues. Where do you stand on that? You have the famous example is Edward Colston, the slave
00:43:26.540
trader, and then it got torn down. Do you agree with that? Or do you think that we actually should
00:43:31.700
have those statues in a permanent place? I didn't agree with it being torn down that way. So first
00:43:40.380
of all, there's an issue of process. And for a mob, however passionate they are, to take it upon
00:43:51.600
the left can do that, the right can start doing it
00:44:16.080
Adolf Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, Paul Pott, you name them, Genghis Khan, unless my reading
00:44:24.660
of Genghis Khan is a lot different from most people's.
00:44:30.400
But if we start to choose to those kind of people, you know, take them down, because
00:44:39.200
there's nothing really positive to be said about them.
00:44:42.620
The residents of Ulaanbaatar are not going to be happy.
00:44:54.420
But then surely it isn't a counterpoint to this, Nigel,
00:44:58.040
So, for instance, Cromwell we have in front of Parliament.
00:45:02.920
and they would get very upset at the thought of Cromwell being celebrated.
00:45:08.660
So my point was, at the extremes, you've got these nasty guys.
00:45:15.980
So, yeah, for the Irish, Cromwell means drochardet,
00:45:21.440
But that's not why he's in front of Parliament.
00:45:23.640
He's in front of Parliament because he stood up to an absolutist king.
00:45:30.660
And I mean, Cromwell is a complicated character.
00:45:39.740
He represents, he's standing there because he represents successful opposition to unaccountable absolutist monarchy, right?
00:45:54.440
And there's another interesting point about British public statuary.
00:46:01.860
Apparently, you've got Cromwell outside of the House of Commons.
00:47:05.400
around time um the problem was the problem was where the trains were going yes well well put
00:47:12.820
but i i think the point you're really making is the tapestry of an individual's history and our
00:47:19.420
human history is never woven just from one fiber from one color it's always multifaceted and
00:47:25.140
multicolored and to pretend otherwise is very naive and i think we're going through a bit of
00:47:29.620
period where there's a sort of puritanism about everything. Yeah, there is. I find that
00:47:38.020
the phenomenon of this puritanism really strange, the extremity of it.
00:47:46.780
I mean, I'm a religious person. I'm a Christian. So I do believe in good and evil.
00:47:51.260
um but um part of my world view is that um good and evil the dividing line isn't here
00:48:02.540
i'm good and you're bad the dividing line is here it's here
00:48:06.020
right so so that you know knowing knowing constantine that you're you know you're you're
00:48:15.060
you you may be wicked but you're not that wicked besides i'm wicked too it means that
00:48:20.840
But even if I dislike what you're saying, there's a certain kind of self-restraint.
00:48:31.440
And so I find the extremism of this, it's almost, and I've said this before,
00:48:38.680
it's as if the social justice warriors, the woke folk,
00:48:43.860
you know they've got the the um the ire of the biblical prophets who are railing against various
00:48:51.560
forms of injustice what they don't have um is the notion of of the wickedness that is within
00:48:59.620
and requires forgiveness so it's kind of lopsided biblical religion and the the certainty of it
00:49:06.360
the extremity of it does give it a kind of religious a kind of scary religious quality
00:49:15.600
But doesn't it also reflect a lack of humility?
00:49:18.260
And the realisation that we're all flawed, we're all broken,
00:49:26.240
and fling them up on the metaphorical pyre is...
00:49:36.600
It's not just other people who have to ask for forgiveness.
00:49:42.040
And quite how we got there, I do find, although I've read a bit about, what is it, I've forgotten the source now,
00:49:58.740
But there is this attitude, or this view that, I guess it's a Marxist view, that points of
00:50:11.560
view, particularly points of view held by bourgeois people, these are not to be taken
00:50:19.500
at face value, these are just rationalizations for unjust interests.
00:50:24.460
And therefore, you don't take the ideas seriously.
00:50:55.020
it's not why is it just their view that is is rooted in illegitimate economic interests
00:51:01.760
how about your own views that don't you have interest too that you're rationalizing whatever
00:51:06.760
uh actually i think in the case of blm i think yes there are interests here i mean it's victimhood
00:51:15.400
is a political tool now it wins you power so there's everyone who can has an interest in
00:51:24.340
playing victim big time uh because um particularly because of the way in which uh well-meaning
00:51:32.000
um sensitive liberal people react which is normally to say yes we're guilty
00:51:38.340
it gives you a lot of power so i think the the the the kind of um marxist analysis can be turned
00:51:47.100
back onto them to say well what are the interests that are driving you so that you simply can't
00:51:51.960
listen what why and and do you see that as a more prevalent attitude amongst uh the students that
00:51:58.920
you see here well none of my my students uh you know they know who i am they come to me for a
00:52:07.660
reason um uh but but i'm i have asked that i have asked my students about their peers
00:52:13.580
and yes the kind of uh the kind of puritan extreme uncompromising attitudes
00:52:23.220
yes it seemed to be quite prevalent among their peers
00:52:27.920
Nigel there's one other topic i want to cover before we wrap up but just on that point are we
00:52:32.760
not three crusty old men that are just reminiscing about the good i mean we're not quite uh old but
00:52:39.760
But crusty enough, who are lamenting the loss of our ease with which we could spew our white supremacist beliefs unchecked, uncontrolled, unquestioned.
00:52:53.700
And now we're, as you pointed out earlier in the interview, we're very upset about the loss of this former tyrannical oppression and power over others.
00:53:02.020
Are we not troubled by the fact that there are some brown faces at Oxford now?
00:53:07.600
uh yeah so right so that's that's what they say um that's what they say so the answer is
00:53:13.480
no um because i first speak for myself i guess others will have to judge this but uh speaking
00:53:21.340
for myself it's not it's not criticism that bothers me it's not contrary views that bothers
00:53:27.700
me. It's not the presence of brown skins that bother me. It is the refusal to engage rationally
00:53:44.140
with what I say. It's the tendency instead to attack my person. And let's be clear here.
00:53:57.700
And you say it might be the case that I'm just bothered by the fact that there are more women and more people of non-white skin who inhabit these cloisters, these colleges, our universities.
00:54:21.780
A lot of people of non-white skin agree with me.
00:54:25.240
So I couldn't care less what skin color people have.
00:54:32.580
All I care about is whether they can behave and argue
00:55:05.140
But Nigel, you brought up a point which I think is fundamental to the current cultural moment.
00:55:11.600
It's something I've been thinking about for some time and it's been worrying me for some time.
00:55:16.540
And what I'm talking about is the fact that all of these things that we are alluding to and talking about throughout this interview are fundamentally anti-West.
00:55:26.180
It's about the tearing down of the liberal, the kind of the traditional world order, the capitalist liberal in our time, American world order.
00:55:42.920
Why do we have to remove or think about removing Rue Britannia from the last night of the proms?
00:55:51.420
Why have we come to this point where a healthy self-criticism has turned into a sort of self-loathing?
00:55:59.860
Another excellent question which needs a lot of thinking about.
00:56:17.840
A lot of those who feel instinctively embarrassed about Britain's past
00:56:29.180
What they do know is, and they've learned this from other people,
00:56:35.560
they know that talking up empire doesn't win you friends.
00:56:42.920
So so they picked up that the notion that to talk positively about
00:56:53.800
Empire but colonialism is as my my very old friend said toxic and
00:57:01.600
Unless you want to fight unless you want to risk losing friends and colleagues
00:57:34.100
because it's almost as if you said something really rude.
00:58:32.460
and the Telegraph and I imagine the Sun isn't terribly
00:58:37.940
doesn't make sense. So when you talk about how do we get to this position, well, who are we here?
00:58:47.140
And I think we are talking about the elite, people who run our institutions, people educated in
00:58:52.420
universities in this place. But we are, as over Brexit, we're discovering that what the elite
00:59:01.020
assumes and what the rest of the population thinks are not the same thing. So again, I'm
00:59:07.220
quite hopeful that that um you know the bbc has suddenly discovered that not everyone is happy
00:59:12.640
with this policy and it's it's offered some explanations that uh i think don't make much
00:59:18.240
good sense and i think it's true that the bbc caved in to uh the um the movement to decolonize
00:59:26.820
um and now it's having to think again because people have spoken up
00:59:31.220
um so so it it's to be hoped that um we in the elite i'm part of it um having been confronted
00:59:43.420
with country views we'll start to think again um and i'll certainly do my part to help that happen
00:59:49.920
fantastic we've got time for one last question yeah and the question that we always end with
00:59:56.520
is what is the one thing that we're not talking about
01:00:01.920
I'm so glad you warned me about it at the beginning.
01:00:04.320
Don't give away the secrets of the show, Nigel.
01:00:09.680
if you just pretended that your no-doubt forthcoming
01:00:12.580
brilliant answer came to you just in the moment.
01:00:20.960
Yeah, straight away, I would have said, and I will say, virtue is what we don't talk about.
01:00:35.620
We don't talk about virtue, and I've talked about it in answer to your questions.
01:00:39.980
because I talked about the importance of universities forming students
01:00:47.080
so that they can manage a discussion of controversial topics in a civil fashion
01:00:53.520
so they can do justice to what other people are saying.
01:00:57.640
Doing justice is a virtue. It's a habit. You do or you don't.
01:00:59.940
I could have also said treating alien points of view with charity,
01:01:05.920
meaning you know if you hear someone saying something you don't like well an easy thing
01:01:13.200
to do is to caricature it and knock it down a more courageous generous charitable thing to do
01:01:21.560
is okay give it its best construction now what's the best thing that can be said in favor of this
01:01:26.940
ridiculous point of view then take it down that means two things it means first of all you've
01:01:32.700
been generous to the other side they might actually listen to what you forgot to say because
01:01:35.420
you've been generous. The other thing is that when you take it down, it's all the stronger,
01:01:39.980
because you have taken its best construction and taken it apart. And there's, of course,
01:01:43.960
a third possibility, which is you might, by giving it that charitable interpretation,
01:01:48.320
recognize the truth in some of it. Absolutely right. Good. Back to my point.
01:01:55.820
So the disposition to do justice and to be charitable, these are not technical skills,
01:02:02.920
the virtues and that they're taught by i think mainly by example so professors and ceos um can
01:02:13.000
can teach their people this is the way we behave um but these are virtues we don't talk about
01:02:19.860
virtues we only talk about rights and we need to learn to talk about virtues do we have time can i
01:02:55.040
And this is because Charlie Hebdo had published cartoons of Prophet Muhammad.
01:03:02.700
And I think one of them had, you know, had Muhammad with a turban and a bomb in it.
01:03:07.160
So, you know, Islam equals terrorism, that kind of thing.
01:03:17.800
And in the aftermath of that, you know, a lot of people were talking up, you know, freedom of speech.
01:03:22.100
I mean, Charlie Hebdo should have been allowed to do whatever they damn well please.
01:03:26.240
And if they want to publish stuff that Muslims find offensive, then let them do it.
01:03:34.260
And my reaction was, well, yes, but my view is that it's never right to say something or do something just to be offensive.
01:04:13.940
what did Charlie Hebdo think it was going to achieve
01:04:20.400
Now, Charlie Hebdo is read by people of the left
01:04:24.060
who like iconograsm, particularly if it's anti-religious,
01:04:31.040
But in terms of what's it going to achieve that's worthwhile,
01:04:36.000
it wasn't clear to me there was anything to be achieved,
01:04:39.000
particularly in the context where you know you're going to get Muslims upset.
01:04:47.380
Having the legal freedom to say something is one thing, and that's important.
01:04:52.860
The question of whether you should use that freedom or not is another question.
01:04:58.740
And to use that freedom responsibly, you have to have certain qualities of self-restraint.
01:05:07.380
You have to have certain qualities of intention.
01:05:20.640
just to push in the other person's sensitive spot
01:05:31.740
but we need citizens who are capable of self-restraint
01:05:41.000
We need institutions and heroes and parents who train us in those virtues.
01:05:49.780
So I'd say, in response to your question, we need to talk about virtue more.
01:05:54.640
I think all the qualities I've mentioned, I don't need to explain to them what they are or why they're good.
01:06:02.960
So we all recognize these qualities are important, but we don't name them.
01:06:10.820
And I think the fact we don't talk about them means that we're not as self-conscious about cultivating them.
01:06:17.280
So it's not as if they're absent, but we're kind of tongue-tied.
01:06:21.300
And we need to stop being tongue-tied about virtue, I think.
01:06:23.660
So it sounds to me, Nigel, what you're really talking about there is morality, as is your job and your want to talk about.
01:06:31.580
And essentially what I'm hearing is for a healthy society, it's not enough for us just to have laws and to prosecute our rights under those laws.
01:06:39.480
we have to have a sense of what is the appropriate thing to do as well as what is the legal thing to
01:06:45.320
do yeah yeah yeah noticed notice that you use the word appropriate not right and again that's
01:06:52.940
something we we tend to talk about things being appropriate rather than or inappropriate rather
01:06:56.580
than right or wrong so that's that's part of the symptom of our kind of nervousness about talking
01:07:00.860
about moral things or virtues or duties but but just to get to your to your point um yeah the the
01:07:09.760
problem with depending more and more on law to keep us in order and i do think we're doing this
01:07:23.600
if the police are going to keep us in in in order then they have to become ever more intrusive
01:07:31.460
um and that means that our failure to discipline ourselves our need for the law to discipline us
01:07:38.440
means an ever growing state intrusiveness which is not a good idea at all um so i do think that
01:07:46.260
And civil society fostering moral virtues of self-restraint, of justice, of charity, humility, is enormously important.
01:08:02.180
I mean, maybe it can through national curricula or whatever.
01:08:06.100
But in the end, these things are taught not by books or in classrooms.
01:08:12.940
maybe they are taught in classrooms by the example of the teacher but it's the example
01:08:17.700
that is is attractive an honest courageous just charitable person is attractive and and kids and
01:08:27.300
employees see that and i think respond to it so we need to be be uh doing that more deliberately
01:08:34.900
and in order to be more deliberate about it we need to be willing to talk about it but at the
01:08:39.800
moment whereas we we talk very freely about rights we find it very difficult to talk about
01:08:44.540
virtues uh for reasons and i think historically we could find reasons for that uh and and as i
01:08:52.340
may have said earlier um you know we we think that because we're a plural society
01:08:58.320
we've got you know we've got conservatives and and and left-wingers we've got muslims and jews
01:09:06.140
and Christians, we've got atheists, because we're a plural society, we can't agree on
01:09:10.000
moral things. My view on that is, you know, we may not agree about abortion or about going
01:09:18.300
to war in Iraq, lots of things we don't agree about, but there are many things we do agree
01:09:22.560
about, and we all recognize what's necessary for comfortable, peaceful, non-conflictual
01:09:33.240
social life. And when I talk about these virtues to you, you don't need me to explain what they
01:09:40.200
are or why they're valuable. So I think, in fact, we agree with a whole lot more. We just think we
01:09:44.720
don't. So we just don't talk about it. And I think we do need to talk about it. So let's talk more
01:09:50.600
about virtue. Sounds great, Nigel. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate
01:09:55.500
it. I've enjoyed it. And I hope you've enjoyed it at home as well. And we'll see you very soon
01:09:59.760
with another brilliant episode or a live stream which are always at 7 p.m uk time thank you very
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